City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis

by John C. Wright

  I thought it would take a long time. But the bookshop was on the same side of town as the Guthrie warehouse. It was only a few hours later, nearly dawn, when I heard the Simulacrum's footsteps on the stairs coming down, coming towards me.

  I was sitting next to the icebox where the Simulacrum slept, on top of a drum of ammonium nitrate I had circled with blasting caps.

  On the other side of me was a pile of the books, fresh from the printer. I had opened the crates with a crowbar and piled all the copies of De Animus Occisor into the big pyramid next to me, then drenched the whole affair with gasoline. They were the books he had been planning to send out all over the country.

  Wires ran from the deadman switch in my hand to the dynamite placed along the building's structural supports. I had been careful to place the charges to make the building collapse inward. Fortunately, there were alley-spaces to every side, and not much risk of fire spreading.

  The air smelled of book-dust and gasoline.

  Overhead was a single dim bulb hanging from a fraying thread. The lower stairs were in the circle of the light it gave off. I saw the creature's feet and legs first as it clumped heavily down the steps. Then its body and arms, hidden in the wide trenchcoat. Then its head, hidden beneath the wide-brimmed hat.

  I do not know what its sense-perceptions were like. I don't think it knew who was sitting there until I flung the bucket of gasoline at its head. The throw was awkward and one-handed since the deadman switch was in my other hand, but the plastic bucket struck the thing, knocked off its sunglasses, and splashed gasoline all over its coat.

  I had been thinking of my wife, of how she had loved me, and daydreaming about what she might have said to me about what I was going to do. I don't think the Soul Slayer could see such thoughts.

  But when the Simulacrum straightened up, wiping gasoline off its face, I saw, in the eyeholes of its mask, little swimming points of light, as if many eager worms were shouldered each other aside to gaze out the eye-shaped windows at our world. The wet scarf had fallen to the floor. I could see clusters of spider legs curled around the jawline and earholes, holding the mask in place.

  Then I knew fear. And fear was something the Soul Slayer understood.

  It did not say: You are a fool. My body is a thousand miles away, buried far under the Earth's crust, in a cavern which still keeps a pocket of this world's long-vanished methane-ammonia atmosphere. What stands before you is a construct, a puppet, nothing more. You cannot burn me. I do not know death.

  It did not need to say anything. I felt its contempt as if it were self-contempt. Its hatred for me felt like self-loathing. And I knew it was far away, very far away.

  “I know you. There's nothing but hate and fear and more hate in you.” Although it was far away, it was also close. Our minds were in contact.

  I knew the Slayer's fear and malice because the only times I got really clear pictures from its brain were when I had been with the cab driver, or in the park; the times when I had been most afraid.

  And I knew what caused fear like that. I understood.

  “Your life was destroyed, wasn't it?”

  No answer.

  “You were utterly defeated. Wiped out, along with your world. Or did you guys do that to yourselves?”

  Our races are not so unlike. This present world will soon follow. (But was that my thought, or his?)

  Then the Soul Slayer spoke aloud. The little-girl voice radiated from the chest of the Simulacrum, not from its spidery throat. “We are far older than you can grasp. The cosmogenic convulsion you call the Big Bang was the discharge of an enemy weapon. The Unendurable Citadel of Yeth was destroyed by Time Wardens of Metachronopolis in order to establish organized and linear time. My masters, the Great Race that made me, lived in the pre-universal condition, when the relations of time and space and mind and distance were not as they are now. Certain elemental energies of the cosmos, under proper applications, can be twisted to recall their old configurations. Telepathy is one such consequence. Mind-absorption abrogates the self-other distinction, which is an innovation unique to this universe. You are telepathic only when you touch my mind. The more you use this power, the more of your thoughts become like mine. You will be absorbed.”

  “You do not frighten me,” I said.

  “And yet you are afraid. Our thoughts grow close.”

  “Only because I want to read your mind, this time. To find out if there was anyone else besides Mr. Hobbes.”

  I realized there couldn't be many people like him. Most people willing to help the Slayer, wouldn't have sufficient understanding of their fellow men to be of any use in spreading the mind-contamination. An intellectual like Hobbes, with all the books he'd read, knew a lot about people, knew enough to understand them. But, being a lonely and bookish man, he also hated them.

  There couldn't be many people like him. People who understand, and hate.

  It answered my thought. “There are many.”

  “Then why are you telling me this out loud? No, you're lying. This was your last attempt. Everything you've done has been rushed and desperate. Why else be so quick to attack me? Why not wait until I had made telepathic links with dozens of people, eh? Why attack Mr. Delvecchio within minutes after I linked to him? You must be starving.”

  And I tried to see in its thoughts if I had guessed correctly.

  It didn't give me the chance. When it was not trying to act like a human, the construct could move quickly. With fluid, snakelike speed, it flung itself forward as its leg-segments elongated in strange curves. I didn't even see it hit me, all I felt was the terrible cold, numbing sensation hammer my brain.

  Then the dead-man switch opened as my hand relaxed.

  The charge went off.

  I felt my legs blown off at the knee joints and felt the flame-soaked skin peel off my face and hands, ripped off by the force of the blast and sent swirling up into ash. I felt the fluid from my bursting eyes spray across my cheeks, and when I opened my mouth to scream, sending burnt and broken teeth-shards flying, I breathed flame into my lungs.

  I was burning. The fat cells in my flesh had ignited like candle wax.

  In its mind, it could feel the burning. It tried to turn its thought to something else; it tried to break the link.

  But it was too scared and I was too scared and I was not going to let go of it.

  There was no numbness, this time, only pain beyond what any man can feel. Pain enough to throw a body into shock. Pain enough to kill. It is the pain-signal, after all, that kills the body. I was going to feel what it was like to die; and it was going to feel death right along with me.

  I think that at the moment when the Simulacrum struck, Mr. Hobbes woke up. I hope he woke up.

  He found himself sitting in his own basement, holding a switch, on top of a barrel rigged with dynamite. He could feel my thoughts crawling around in his skull.

  And in that single moment, when he saw his master leaping at him to kill him, and he let go of the switch to raise his hands to ward off the blow, I think, or, at least I'd like to think, that he realized what was happening.

  Perhaps he realized that the man he set up to die had been the caller on the phone who had hung up on him. Perhaps he realized that I had made the necessary telepathic link with him, undetected and unnoticed. He had gone to sleep as usual, while I had simply done to him what the Soul Slayer did to me on the bus.

  A sleeping body doesn't have any thoughts to override the suggestions from an interloper possessing it, not even when the interloper attempts complex tasks like going to a warehouse and stealing demolition equipment.

  I thought I felt Mr. Hobbes thinking through all this in one single moment of flaming, all-destroying pain. Or maybe I was thinking it to him. I felt him scream and breathe in flame.

  As for the Soul Slayer, it was from some sort of race that didn't have sex and didn't reproduce. It said it did not know death and it programmed the Simulacrum to maim and lobotomize its victims in a numbing fas
hion which did not produce a pain-sensation.

  And I knew from my own experience that the book was not lying when it said telepathic thoughts and sensations, even if they come from outside, always seem like your own to you.

  So the Soul Slayer thought it was dying, it was introduced to the sensations of death. And it died.

  As for me, the pain knocked me out of my booth where I was slumped, eyes closed, at Dave's Diner. And yes, I felt what it was like to die, too. But I didn't die. I'm not sure why.

  But I know the pain I felt at that moment was not as bad as the pain I had felt when my wife had passed away. I had already lived through worse.

  The waitress came over as I was getting up from the floor. “Hey. Are you okay? You're not an epileptic or anything, are you?”

  I could have kissed her. “I'm just fine! We're all fine! Everyone is fine!”

  She backed up, alarmed.

  “When's the next bus back into town? I've got to find a job, I've got to find a place to stay.” I jumped to my feet.

  “There's nothing until about 6:15.”

  “Then maybe I'll go out and admire the sunrise. It's going to be a beautiful day!”

  She shook her head and half-smiled. “All ready to set the world on fire, yeah? You don't even got two shoes!”

  “Ma'am, compared to what I've just been through, everything is going to seem easy from now on.”

  “Mm hmm. Well, have a nice walk, mister. You can come back in and wait for the bus here, if you get too cold.”

  “Thank you… um…”

  “Is there something wrong?”

  “I had this little book in my coat pocket. At least, I thought I had it with me when I came in. Maybe I lost it on the bus. You haven't seen it, have you?”

  “Don't worry,” she said. “Someone will find it.”

  The Plural of Helen of Troy

  AFTERWORD

  When the last mist passed, I finally found myself in a strange place. I was home.

  I stared at the lunar crescent high in the night sky, hardly believing it, and saw the lights of distant cities there, shining between the horns of the Moon.

  And I saw then that all the dreams of the man who gave us the Moon were coming true. He promised we would walk there. A promise that turned out to come true, hard as it was to believe.

  He promised me something even harder to believe. As I sat in my chair in the vestry, I gazed through the wide-open windows. I looked up past the towers shining like emeralds with their own inner light, and breathed in the scent of the gardens and forest outside, stretching as far as the eye can see, and stared in wonder at that crescent moon rising above that green horizon. And I remembered him and his promise.

  Sometimes you have to help your memory.

  So I took up my pen and wrote myself a letter. Of course I started at the end before telling the middle and beginning. That is just easier for people like me. It's the way we do things.

  THE END

  It was the three thousand and twenty-ninth day of personal continuity, and it felt as cold as the midnight train out of Santa's Jolly Workshop in the Northerly parts of the Arctic. In the refrigerator car.

  It was it never supposed to get this cold in Metachronopolis, the City Beyond Time, not even at night, because we have no seasons here, no years. But I could see frost on the shining mirror-bright gold of the towers, icicles depending from the metal of the balcony rails and the high bridges that stretch over misty nothingness, and my breath was as pale as the smoke from the cigarette I craved so badly.

  I promised myself I would smoke the last and final cigarette from the pack of Old Golds I keep scotch-taped to the bottom of the bottom drawer in my desk back in the office. If I lived through the night.

  It was dark. The Moon is closer, three time larger than it should be, and sometimes, rarely, very rarely, after the mists passed before its face, lights would appear between the horns of the crescent, lights of the sort you might see looking down on Manhattan from a biplane. The sight always cheered me.

  It meant there was at least one version of history where we landed men there, unlikely as that was. I wondered at the breed of men who would ever dream of such a thing, or promise to make it happen. I'd like to meet such a man, the Lindbergh of the Moon. I'd like to shake his hand.

  But the Moon had not risen, and there was nothing cheerful lower down.

  Metachronopolis is supposed to be bright. Radiance is supposed to shine from every surface of the Towers of Time, gold and lovely as the Sun. But even here the surfaces were cracked, and long swathes of their facades were dim. Maybe the historical periods to which they were tuned were less likely, less real, than they should have been. And this is one of the better areas in the city.

  The balcony circling the tower at this level was wider than one of the new, two-lane interstate freeways from back in my day, and the corner where I stood was dark. In fact, the nearer two sides of this eight-sided tower were dark for about a half-mile above me, but the upper expanses above that were twice as bright. And there were heights beyond those heights, as vertical and shiny as a sword blade. The upper penthouses and museums and memorials, where no human being ever goes and no door ever opens, were so bright and so distant they could have been stars or moons.

  About twenty feet above me, and about as far as the pitcher's mound is from home plate, was a man-high, or, rather, a dame-high square panel where the tower wall had been turned semi-transparent and sound-permeable.

  Like an alabaster talkie screen framed in gold, the window held a beautiful girl, no, it held the beautiful girl, the most beautiful girl in history, the girl they called the Mistress of the Masters of Time. She was outlined in silhouette against the window for a moment, from head to toe, as she stepped out from her shower.

  When she lifted her arms above her head to wind a towel around her hair, the perfect outline of her figure was cast against the widow, and burned itself into my retinas and memory. Sure, I should have blinked or politely looked away, but I had never seen any dame like this. Nobody has.

  If I had been an educated man, maybe I would have said something like: Is this the face that launched a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of Illium? But I ain't that classy, so I just let out a long, low wolf whistle. And it wasn't just her face I was looking at.

  Don't worry. She didn't hear me. I had a polarized soundlessness field stretching out ten feet around me in each direction, a gizmo from my old job that the quartermaster never took back like he was supposed to. He never took it back because I stole it. The gizmo was from the Twenty-Fifth Century, a period when the Han, the People of the Heavenly River, were ruling the Northern Hemisphere, and whatever parts of the Southern that were not covered in glaciers. Don't even think to ask me how it worked. I am still a bit unclear on how jet planes fly without a prop. All I knew was that it glowed if you put your thumb in the right spot, that sound could come in but not go out, and that sliding your thumb to the right made the field bigger. I also knew it made me lazy, since I had gotten out of the habit of being as quiet as a Cigar Store Indian when I was on a job.

  Queequeg did not have a silence gizmo, and he was not out of the habit. He'd been on stakeouts with me before, and he was patient. Queequeg was standing at the far corner of the balcony, about as far from me as first base is from home. He was standing as silent as an angel in a graveyard, dark in his seaman's coat and silky black top hat, his figure as straight and tall as his harpoon. He did not have to wipe bootblack on his face like I did, and his face tattoos broke up his outline as nicely as camouflage paint. His harpoon was sharp enough: he shaved in the morning with the thing.

  Like me, he was mesmerized by the girl.

  You'd think he'd only like girls of the sort they fashion back in Rokovoko, in the Cannibal Islands, with their lip plugs and grass skirts or whatever. But this girl, there was something about her that went far beyond fashion.

  She had the kind of beauty that punched you in the solar plexus and f
ollowed it up with a haymaker to the jaw. It wasn't her curves that got you, even though they were as luscious as a woman's curves can be. It was her irrepressible sweetness. Made a man want to belt the guy who hurt her.

  Or worse.

  When I first heard tell about her, I assumed it was just desire, good old-fashioned lust, that launched those thousand ships. But that was before I saw her. I'm not saying she did not inspire desire. Just watching her sway in silhouette across the window was enough to launch a mortar in a man's knickers. But it was the sweet languid innocence that got you. She was the most beautiful of roses, without any thorns to defend herself. Inexpressibly lovely. Helpless. Vulnerable. I could see why men left their families and their nations and set off to war in her defense.

  Heck, if I'd had any ships, I would have launched 'em too.

  She had a certain something that made a man want to help her, protect her, devote his life to her. But the dark side of desire is that same something made other men want to take her, use her, possess her.

  And in this damned city, where there was no one really in charge, no governor, no police, no one to look out for the people the Wardens forgot, the strong did whatever they wanted. And the weak, they just suffered.

  You'd be surprised how many periods of history were run along those lines. You'd be surprised how many folk long dead in pagan days just thought unkind fate or careless gods meant life was supposed to be like this. Here you start living with men who think brutality is normal, rubbing elbows with them. And on the days when you can't see the Moon or the city lights between the horns of the moon, you find yourself wondering where you took a wrong turn, wishing you could backtrack, and turn around again, and get back to where you'd been right.

  I was sorry right away that I gave out a wolf whistle. She hadn't heard, but what was I, a steel worker? But then I quickly told myself she flaunted her talents for a living, so there was nothing wrong with my admiring her stock-in-trade, in eyeballing the merchandise. Nothing wrong at all, I told myself.