I don’t pass out, exactly. Rather I flop back and let the pain settle into me along with its old friend ‘cold’. The roar of the falls almost masks the cry I let out. Almost. I close my eyes and let myself drift for a minute, drift gently away.
---=◈◆⬤◆??◆⬤◆◈=---
“Step. Avay,” he said, as emphatic in tone as he was indeterminate in accent.
He stood halfway between us. Delroy was a few steps away from the control panel now and I was on my knees. Rasputin was motioning to Deloux with the gun, trying to usher him away from the panel. He wasn’t moving.
I looked at him and my heart sank. Delroy’s face was ashen and serious, his eyes not focussed on the hologram, they sat in the nothing space between Rasputin and myself, his brows furrowed as if trying to solve an impossible equation. The control panel sat behind him. All of its keys tantalizingly close. I saw his hands begin to shake. So did the Monk.
“Step avay from ze console.”
“PRESS ANY KEY TO RESET,” reminded the computer
“Do not even sink about it.”
He wasn’t listening to either of them. Not at all. He was sinking about it.
I knew.
In that second where his eyes met mine I saw it all. It was almost a shrug of apology. Fear, anger, hate and petulant denial all evaporated from him in an instant, leaving behind only the tired and dogged look of a man setting out to do an unpleasant but necessary task. I nodded at him, as though I understood and he set his jaw.
Then we both moved.
Delroy’s face shifted into an implacable mask. I saw the change and so did Rasputin who immediately brought the gun to bear on him but Delroy was propelling himself forward toward the barrel of the gun and I was moving too, toward the control panel. I saw the flash go off and our shadows leaped high inside the room. The smell came with it just as soon; a tangy chemical burning smell I knew so well but if Delroy registered the shot he showed no sign of it. His heavy steps carried him toward Rasputin with dreadful sureness as mine took me toward the control panel. I threw myself out towards it with my hand outstretched. A new flash and another one and the shadows loomed over us again and I saw the back of Deloux’s uniform billow out and blacken as the bolts thudded into his body . Finally he fell nerveless atop the Monk. Hands gripped into the unreal hard light of Rasputin’s throat and he let himself fall on top of him, his weight carrying them both to the floor as a last plaintive sound escaped him. Flash after flash after flash lit the room as Rasputin clicked the trigger, the gun trapped between the two of them. I saw him go to roll Delroy off of himself, already bringing the muzzle around to search for me. His eyes widened as he saw where I was.
Slumped next to the control panel my hand lay mashed into the keyboard.
“Oh n-”
“RESETTING.”
The computerized voice carried with it, I thought, a hint of victory.
Rasputin’s eyes went wide and wild as the screens around the room flashed a brief cheerful green and played a major key chirp. His body shone bright around the edges as though erupting in flames and still his manic stare seized on me. His hand moved the gun around, wildly, desperate to get just one more shot off. He became an angelic halo of rupturing light with as gun somewhere in it. His eyes- those insane searching lamps- were the last things I could identify as the room turned into a supernova of light and
and
A dull thud was the only sound.
I lowered a hand I didn’t remember raising to shield my face and saw my blaster had fallen to the floor. Its trigger eased back as the pressure disappeared from around it Another quarter second, I thought, and I’d have been dead.
The silence was broken by a single word.
“Damn,” Deloux gasped.
He flopped over onto his back, nerveless and cold.
---=◈◆⬤◆??◆⬤◆◈=---
The cold mud on my face is a balm for only a small time. Then it’s just dirt again. I roll over in it and cool my swollen face as long as my dignity allows then I slowly regain my feet. I look out over the surface of the water and let the roar of the Reichenbach Falls swallow my thoughts. What was the point? Chase him through time over and over? He had the edge at every point. I was badly beaten and technically overpowered.
Then I looked out over the water and smiled.
I went over to where Tempus had left and tapped into his energy source again with my own trousers. It’s getting easier with time and I am able to open the portal now in around thirty seconds.
I smile as I let the tunnel swallow me again. Because I saw something he didn’t.
A splash at first, then unmistakably a figure. He breaks the surface of the water at the bottom of the Falls. He swims to the edge of the water. Ruffled, desperate, half-dead but still living I watch him gain his feet again. I watch him fish a battered deerstalker from the surface of the water and pound it against the rock. He perches it on his head and takes out a pipe. Even at this distance he looked preposterous.
And I knew that Tempus was wrong; there was hope.
Time, I decided, to show him.
---=◈◆⬤◆??◆⬤◆◈=---
The lights cut out for a half second before switching back on. Every system on the resort was resetting itself and the sea of chattering that was incessant background screaming of the skeletons had died away to silence. Distantly there were some human voices, four of them whooping in victory, approaching toward the command centre, shouting a name that was not mine.
The man who it belonged to was on the floor in front of me, with a chest that was more hole than flesh, living the last seconds of a life that had been stolen by a very hard to kill man from Siberia.
“Deloux,” I said, not knowing what else to say to the crater of a man. Could I console him? Promise him he’d be fine? It would be a blatant and unworthy lie.
“You’re going to be fine, just hang on,” I said.
Whatever air he had in his lungs he used to laugh at me.
“Doubt…..That…..” he gurgled.
It was a fair point. He’d been shot a half dozen times by a gun that I had had modified to shoot down aircraft. The fact that he was still a solid mass was a miracle.
“You’re a tough sonovabitch, Deloux. Stay stubborn just a minute longer.” The sound of the other survivors was drawing closer. I wanted them to see him before the end. “Just hang on.”
“Can’t….Order...Me…..Around, Cap’n…...Listen….”
He drew me in closer, ready to whisper his final words to me.
“Tell…..Them…….Whhhhsshhhhhhooooooooowww”
“Aaaalright,” I said. It seemed churlish to question his final words, even if they were a large, staticky inhuman wave noise.
“Wuuuuuaaaawwwooooowwwwaaaauuuoow,” he continued. One of the more odd valedictions I could think of, an ear-splitting warbling sound, but I shrugged and listened on, feeling a little faint myself.
“Kshhhhhhhhhhhhhhrrroooooooowwwwuuuhhhhh,” he continued, reverberating the sound my entire being, like the sound of the time vortex.
“I’ll tell them,” I said softly
“SHHHHHHHHHHHCHHHHHHHHKKKKK” But when I looked down at him his lips were moving, forming normal words. The wall of noise that was filling my ears was not from him. This other sound was coming from somewhere else. Oh hell.
“Come on, give me a minute, let me-” but mumbles filled my mouth and I lost my tongue. My own words filled in, springing from somewhere else. They were calling out to the other survivors over the crackling comms frequencies then they were lost in the sound too. The crashing time energy filled my ears and I could barely make them out. My vision dimming of this time, it seemed to swim with a spectrum of colours. I tried to squint and focus my ears on the younger me’s transmission. I had to wait for the others to arrive. How would I tell them what Delroy had done? My senses became like distant islands, though, and I could not make out anything coming from them. The time energy washed me away from myself. I was los
t in the sea of colourful energies once more.
The second challenge was done.
I had won, I thought.
But the feeling, like my own body felt distant.
Some part of me floated through the time energy, back to the present and toward the next challenge. And I came back to that first question of what, exactly, it was that was being flown back through time. I didn’t know.
I still wasn’t sure what part of me it was.
Interlude Three
ʘ
PhD Proposal Extract
‘The Falling Men’ and Their Importance to the History of Western Art
Gillian Tonkin (MA, BA Hons, PDF, BYOB, DTF MILF)
University of West Philadelphia (BAR)
Much like any mythic figures whose iconography repeats through different socio-economic and cultural prisms (one thinks of Jungian archetypal figures such as ‘the wise old man’, ‘the shadow’, ‘the trickster’ etc. which can be reconfigured in many contexts) the interesting thing about The Falling Men is their relative congruence of appearance through their different iterations.
The unique aspect of TFM’s recurrence is that they seldom seem to change significantly from one artist to the other. If one were to think of the figure of Christ, we know that he has been depicted in a myriad of guises through the history of art- as the fair-skinned desert mystic depicted by Pierro della Francesca or El Greco, as the terrifying hundred-foot tall stone giant as in the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio De Janiero or even in popular culture where he was symbolically depicted as a tough talking, aviophobia black mercenary when he was played by Mr. T in the popular ‘A-Team’ television series. All of those are very different depictions of Christ.
This can be said of most popular figures. The Falling men are unique in that they, unlike Jesus or Satan or Vishnu or Santa Claus, are always the same. The curious choice of the smaller man’s bulky golden trousers, his build and quirks in physiology, the larger man’s clothing, injuries, the halo of light that apparently emerges from his posterior- all of these aesthetic quirks are preserved through all of the different iterations.
To give a few famous examples of TFM, most people know that they can be found in Van Gogh’s ‘A Field of Tulips’ which show the two figures- unmistakeable in their garb shown high in the sky, falling toward the ground, seemingly trading blows. They appear in a very similar pose in an early draft of William Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun where the titular woman has instead been replaced by the two males punching each other while falling through the sky accompanied by a speech bubble reading “curse your time trousers!” (As critic Peter Mayhew noted, this early draft adds “a weight of pathos and confusion to the visage of the Dragon, who now seems baffled as opposed to malevolent”).
To give a few notable examples which I shall examine in further detail in this essay a few more well-known sightings of TFM find them:
-Splashing into the river behind the main figure in an early sketch of Edward Munsch’s ‘The Scream’. (critic George Michele argues that this early draft makes the screaming make “much more sense”)
-Throttling each other in the sky above Napoleon in Jacques-Louis David’s Napoleon Crossing the Alps (this early draft seems to indicate that they were what napoleon is pointing at)
- Biting each other viciously as the fall through the air in Caspar David Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’ (which, again has been argued to make the attention of the central figure more logical)
-Wrestling in the water in Claude Monet’s The Water Lillies
Though the continuity of their appearance has given plenty of material for the diverting and humorous field of conspiracy thought who claim that these two are some manner of time travelers or extra terrestrials or extra dimensional alien interlopers I shall be examining a far more credible angle- namely that two figures are a proto-marxist representation of the plight of the Native American, as viewed by a fifth wave pre-industrial, post-Enlightenment mid-fielder feminist.
After all, what does it mean that in 1765, the duo are seen gouging at each others’ eyes while in 1901 the duo are ripping wildly at the others’ trousers? Why do the Renaissance painters focus on them falling from a shimmerring circle of light while the post impressionists focus on them falling into these ‘rips’.
I shall be examining the paintings mentioned and also analyzing the examples of TFM in poetry and literature such as Ernest Hemingways ‘The Saddest Bull Fight I was Ever Drunk At’ , Italo Calvino’s ‘If on a Winter’s Night Two Men Fell on My Head’ Robert Kirkland’s ‘Shrieking Golden Breeches Rain ‘Pon Me’ and J.G Ballard’s experimental essay ‘Honestly, I saw Two Men Fall out of the Sky. This is Not a Story. WTF”.
I shall be electing to ignore some contemporary visual pieces which I believe take this art trope and attempt to make the figures into a believable prank. This includes the time that two unnamed people were seen to materialize and dematerialize while trading blows above the buildings in Dealey Plaza in Texas in and when two similar men clad in TFM’s garb seemed to appear from nowhere during President Trump’s inauguration in 2017, warn the audience of some kind of upcoming calamity and then disappearing in a convincing special effect of a portal. All of these have been debunked and deserve no more attention.
Part Two
ʘ
Section Three:
The Prisoner and the Lawman
Chapter Nineteen
The Prison’s New Guest/ Life in the West
* * *
First they came for the socialists
And I did not speak, for I am not a socialist
Then they came for the Unionists
And I did not speak for I am not a Unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out, because I am not a Jew.
Then they kinda stopped coming for people
and I was fine.
Turned out they didn’t want any Belgians
Being Belgian is great
Allison Cheynes
Ѻ
Stale water and recycled air. Or vice versa. Probably both. Or all three.
They hit my senses as I slid out of time and into my younger body with a sense of vertigo that was becoming all too familiar. But even though my physical self was once again younger and refreshed and marginally tighter in some key areas, the me inside my physical form (which I’m told is at least equally important) felt the opposite of tight. I felt used up, battered and beaten, like a cliff or a lighthouse or a cafeteria pork loin. Today had been nothing but a cavalcade of defeat that had already spanned about nine years and that’s a pretty bad day by anybody’s measure. From the moment that the first tambourine had collided with my cranium to the couple of seconds ago when Rasputin had murdered several hundred people before exploding, very little had gone my way. It had been a defeat. No, not even defeat; something worse than outright defeat- compromise.
Compromise was, if anything even harder to take. It was harder to spell and harder to explain than a defeat. A defeat can end with a fireball or a battlecruiser going supernova or even a suplex, but a compromise never ends that way. I’ve had stunning defeats before. I’ve lost fistfights and shootouts and had to run away from explosions down corridors and then leap away at the last second while going “nooooooooooooo” in what I imagine is slow motion. You can pick yourself up after a good defeat, admire the sexy scar it's given you and plan exactly how you’re going to come back from it with an even bigger fistfight/shootout/fireball of your own. But a compromise? Pah. I’ve never known a compromise to involve anything other than people talking around a table or worse; discussions of morality. Is there anything worse? ‘Yes, Captain, that was an incredible victory, but in a way, wasn’t the moral victory with the people you shot?’ What a strange notion it is.
It was worse, feeling compromised than defeated. It was, I supposed grudgingly, the genius of Tempus’ traps. Even if I made it out of my own past alive, my pa
st adventures would almost certainly be changed for the worse. Dented, scuffed up, they’d be, well, compromised. If I could only wrangle this to an honest defeat, I thought, I’d have won.
‘Damn,” I swore softly to myself. What a thought to catch intruding in one’s own mind palace! I can’t let myself get ground down like this. I screwed my eyes together tight and balled up my fists, eliminating that thought. Around me my new universe formed and I generously let it. I was in no mood to take in that bizarre light-show again so instead I let the fetid water hit me and told myself it was a baptism.
“Get a solid grip of yourself!” I muttered aloud, “you are young. You are beautiful. You are here. Take yourself in hand.”
This was the site of a victory- a great deed, something I look upon with pride.
I let my own inspiring words sink into my head, forced a smile, took a big gulp of the humid air and opened my eyes to see what would greet me.
The Time Trousers of Professor Tempus: A Captain Space Hardcore Adventure Page 23