City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis

by John C. Wright

  The old man tried to rise to his feet but he was too weak. He groped for his cane, with a hand that looked like a blind albino spider crawling, but it was out of reach. So the old man continued to kneel, the Tin Man's metal hands holding him up.

  His laugh was a cracked wheezing sound like an accordion with a hole in it. “But if you are friends with a Time Warden, then your memories are not out of your reach, are they? Why resist temptation, if the the powers that rule eternity give you your dearest, darkest heart's desire?”

  The girl shivered. The girl shivered. "That's his voice. He talked a lot in my ear. He's a talker. It's him. Why do I have to kill him? Why not you? What are men for? What good are you?”

  There were wisps of mist clinging to the corners of the chamber, now. Too many paradoxes, too many versions. There had already been at least half a dozen time splits here already.

  I said to her, “Just think of what it felt like when he attacked you, and how nothing seemed safe or normal or human to you afterward. Squeeze the trigger slowly. He'll get shot.”

  The time splits so far were not enough to account for this much mist. There had to be at least one more source of paradox here. I turned my eyes left and right, but did not see anything out of place. I took a step forward, picked up the Old Man's walking stick, and chucked it through the bathroom doorway. I did not hear it ring against the crystal panel of the shower stall door, nor clatter against the ceramic tile. Bingo. A polarized silence field, like my own. Sound could enter the bathroom, but not leave. A useful thing to bring to a place where there is a secret entrance, because no one will hear you as you arrive.

  The old man sneered wearily. “I won't. Be shot, I mean. An automaton from the Fortieth Century is my bodyguard. No bullet can hit me.”

  Without bothering to answer, I turned and pointed at the bathroom door. The Tin Man was stupid. Its master's only escape was not on its automatic defense list. I got the shot off before the old man could say another word. Another shape of momentary non-being flicked into non-existence, but I had tuned it to affect the shower door and nothing else. I did not break the mirror or smash the toilet or harm anyone hiding in the bathtub. The shower door-shaped square of nothing collapsed like a popped balloon, but thanks to the silence field, this time there was no imploding clap of thunder. The old man, from his position in the bedroom, probably did not even know that I had fired, or at what.

  None of my weapons could hurt a destiny crystal, of course. But the bathroom shower door, utterly unhurt, was now drifting somewhere in the mists between the time lines, beyond the reach of anyone.

  The mist closes off all destiny crystal. The crystal is just an anchor point for a conduit, like a miniature spacetime continuum, that the Wardens erect between two points up and down the time stream. Or, rather, the time delta, since there are many branching paths. When destiny crystal is adjusted for photons, you can see images. Crystal ball stuff. Open it a little more, you can get sounds and smells and maybe reach an arm through. Open all the way, and it is a door.

  But you cannot open them in the mist. The mist is what happens when you have too many low probability events, causeless effects or effectless causes, all piled up in one spot. Reality there is weak. There is nothing to to which the anchor point can be attached.

  With the glass door gone, I was no longer worried about the old man sending any later-time version of himself, or a dozen versions of Tin Man, once a year on his birthday to relive the happy moment when he saw my head chopped off. And now there was no escape for him.

  Experimentally, I pointed my pistol at the old man and pulled the trigger. My shot tore the black trenchcoat and bounced off the golden chestplate of the Tin Man, who blinked in the way as if he had always been standing there. Again, my neck and neck bones ached from the hardened memory of the decapitation that retroactively took place, and from the choking sensation of my nimbus retroactively blocking the blow.

  The old man said, “Mister Frontino, you do not survive the evening. I've looked ahead. I have seen you fall. I have already won. Game, set and match!” He smirked at me. “You are about to run. Leaving me alone with her.”

  I smirked right back. He was a good smirker, but I was better. “But did you watch after that?”

  He looked shocked. “What do you take me for? A voyeur?”

  Jack shouted at me, “What are you doing? Shoot him! He is not a Time Warden! He can die! Shoot him!”

  Much to his surprise, I pointed my pistol at Jack.

  “This is your last chance, Mr. K.! Give up the girl. Swear her off, now and forever and back through your past, and one of the three of you can walk out of here alive!”

  The old man burst out laughing. “You've got to be kidding,” he wheezed.

  He had a point. I mean, the girl was right here, the all-time winner of history's beauty contest. I could smell her fresh from the shower, and even with all that was going on, I could not get my mind off her. That was just from seeing her for a minute or so. I did not have years of her burned into my life and memory. Would I be willing to give up the girl with the face that launched a thousand ships if she had once been mine?

  The answer came with the next blur of mist. Another decision point. But the old man had not vanished. No one was giving up anything. Instead there was another remembered sensation of pain at my neck. That confirmed it for me. The old man was protecting Jack too.

  I pulled the trigger. The Tin Man blinked in between me and Jack, and the ricochet set the couch on fire. Then there was another blur, and in this version the Tin Man caught the ricochet in the cupped palm of its gauntlets as it rebounded from its chest armor. It could stop me from hurting anything, directly or indirectly.

  “Run, Jack,” I told him quietly. “Run to Babylon.”

  Jack turned and leaped through the hole in the wall where the door had been. The Tin Man was not programmed to stop him. But when I followed and shot Jack in the back, well, there had to be a version where Tin Man blinked in the way and deflected my bolt with his axe.

  The Tin Man and I were stalemated. It would not hurt me, and I could not hurt it, not with anything it recognized as a weapon. Tin Man could not stop me from shooting, but could stop me from killing Jack.

  A few minutes later the three of us were running across the darkened bridge toward the Babylon tower, I had dialed my hand weapon to a flamethrower and high-energy laser setting, so that deathrays and masses of flaming jellied gasoline were washing and rolling every which way. Tin Man was blinking through every version of the scene so quickly, and shattering the timestream into smaller and smaller fractions, that the mist under our feet grew thicker and angrier, and the cold got colder, and finally, it started to snow.

  Picture a bridge made of slippery golden crystal metal, too dark for human eyes to see, coated with frost and falling snow and new ice and pools of burning petrol melting a layer of water beneath the ice. And there were gaps in the surface underfoot which no Warden bothered to order repaired, even assuming anyone in this city knew how to repair this stuff. Or assuming anyone knew who built it. The Wardens say they built it, but you can't believe everything you are told.

  Normally a robot that can step backward through time cannot slip and fall. Nor can a man whom the robot can easily dodge tackle it. But a harpoonist with a steady hand and the best eye in the Pacific Ocean, a dark prince in a tall hat, who stands silently on a balcony overhead and watches like a hawk, well, he can throw his harpoon straight and true into the glass skull that is the monster's only weak spot.

  It did not kill the Tin Man. How could it? It was just a machine. The glass skull was merely a hood ornament. Something to scare its victims.

  But it had a collar and heavy clamps to hold its trophy skulls in place. The razor-sharp harpoon could not penetrate on the gold null-time substance of the armor. But the toggle barbs in the shaft could catch the protrusions inside the metal neckring of the machine, and lodge the harpoon fast as if it had been hammered in.

  The
Tin Man would have dodged a spear or a lance or a javelin, stepped back in time, and decapitated the spearman. But the circuits in my pistol did not recognize a whaler's harpoon as a weapon. I found that out the day I met Queequeg the first time. And whoever had programmed the Tin Man made the same mistake.

  Now, you may ask, why did Tin Man not simply step backward in time and step to one side of the predicted flightpath of the harpoon? You may have noticed how often I let the Tin Man hit me in the neck. You may have noticed that the damned thing did not learn. It was not programmed to update its programming. It kept trying to decapitate me because that was what it was ordered to do.

  There were no loopholes, no exceptions, no if's and's or but's. When the target (me) was holding a weapon that threatened its client (in this case, Jack) and was in the position to be struck in the neck by the Tin Man's axe, then, as predictably as loaded dice rolling a lucky seven, the Tin Man had to move to that position and take that swing.

  It was not programmed to watch its step and protect itself, because what could hurt it through its ultra-invulnerable time-null armor? And if it was hurt, so what? Just get the Warden to replay the scene and change the ending.

  So when I saw the harpoon enter the glass skull and lodge there, I realized what I had to do next (next from my point of view), to explain why the Tin Man would not in a moment from now (or, from its point of view, just a moment ago) retroactively dodge Queequeg's harpoon strike.

  I took my gun in my teeth with autogyroscopic aiming circuit turned on, so the barrel spun this way and that like the nose of a tapir, always keeping an aiming laser pointed at Jack. Then I rushed towards the Tin Man and tackled him.

  Queequeg heaved on the harpoon line with the strength a man gets from wrestling whales, and he yanked Tin Man off the slippery metal frost-coated bridge deck.

  Our trenchcoats flapped and fluttered, and my hat flew off, as over the side we went.

  It was programmed to keep decapitating the threat. As we fell, the Tin Man reversed its grip on the axe and made a motion like a man swatting a fly on his face. And then it did it again, and again, because Tin Man was not ordered to save itself from danger. It was programmed to hit me. And the only place it could hit me, if I were off the bridge, was likewise off the bridge.

  I hope you can follow this Celtic knot of cause and effect here. If I hadn't grabbed the machine that can dodge any grab, the machine would not have stood still and let itself get harpooned with the harpoon, because then my grab would have missed. And it permitted me to grab it, it could not do otherwise, because with my arms around it, it could hit me, and if it had dodged, it could not.

  We were in plunging towards the mists. With gun still clenched in my teeth like a pirate's cutlass, I seized the harpoon line with both hands and both legs and managed to snag it. Then, with one hand and two legs still clutching the line, I drew my switchblade with my free hand, flicked it open and reached for the loop between me and the Tin Man. Just then the line went taut, the wind was knocked out of me, and the switchblade went spiraling downward into the mists of oblivion.

  Dammit! The day Gavrilo Princip was hanged in the stairwell of the Royal Exile Diner, where Franz Ferdinand of Austria worked as a busboy, Franz wept for joy into his apron, but he had nothing to give me. So John X. Beidler, who ran the northwest Vigilance Committee, let me keep the assassin's switchblade knife. First my bat, now this. It was my day for losing things

  I put one hand on the line above the harpoon head, and had my feet kicking and slipping on the golden shoulders and ripped trenchcoat of the Tin Man.

  Above us, through the swimming blur of intervening mists, I saw Jack, staring over the side of the bridge in awe and fear.

  Jack's head jerked up and disappeared when the girl screamed again, and I also, very dimly, heard the timer I'd set in Aaron Burr's pistol go off. Had it been five minutes already? It felt more like five years.

  But no shot rang out. Some people are just too kind-hearted for their own good. Or too soft-headed.

  There was only one thing left to do. I put my head down so that the harpoon line was clamped between my chin and my breastbone. I felt the pain in my neck as the machine reached up and swung his axe at me, severing the line which was the only thing preventing his heavy and utterly invulnerable body from plummeting into the bottomless, smoky white nothingness below.

  Goodbye, Tin Man. I think I'll miss you least of all. I wish that its engineer would have programmed the damned thing with a voice circuit, so that I could have heard it go Aaaeeiiii! as it plunged into oblivion. Design flaw, if you ask me. Anyway, that was one pain in the neck gone.

  “Down, boy,” I muttered. And my gun magnetically walked down my chest into my holster, folded itself up, and slid inside for a nap.

  Getting back onto the bridge did not take as long as it seemed, because Queequeg was hauling me up even faster than I was climbing the line, so before I knew it, I was above the mist surface. Then a strong dark hand with thick calluses and grimy nails was reaching down and plucking me up as easily as I might have plucked up a kitten drowning in a toilet bowl.

  “You jump. What for? No life no more for you?” Queequeg squinted and hid a smile.

  “Nope. I wasn't committing suicide. The man we're hunting saw me in a destiny glass. A prophecy. But he did not say he saw me die. He only said he saw me fall. He could not see what happened after I fell into the mist, because destiny glasses can't see through the mist. That's why he thought the outcome was safe, so why he entered the scene.”

  Queequeg stepped over and carefully picked up his top hat, brushed it fastidiously, and placed in on his head, raising his chin with princely pride. “Enemy, he falls too. Not a good death. Nothing to eat.”

  “Which enemy?”

  “Talamaur.” He pointed toward the mist with a jerk of his chin.

  “You can't eat metal. You would have broken your teeth.”

  “Yojo, he eat spirit. No eat metal.” Queequeg looked at the severed end of his line in his hand where there hung the conspicuous absence of his best harpoon. He grimaced stoically, and began winding up the slack around his elbow in rapid, practiced motions. “Yojo, he says I save you enough for one day.”

  “Am I still in danger?”

  “Yojo smells death. Death soon comes. Man we hunt, you say he looks. Sees future. Sees what comes. He sees you fall down into mist. Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  He poked me in the chest with a thick, dark forefinger. His finger felt like an iron poker. “Then why it is he sees not you climb out of mist? He dies. He sees he dies, yes? But if he sees, how it is he dies?”

  He turned and walked away into the gloom.

  “Quickwig! What about the hunt? I said you would feast after we get him!”

  A hollow laugh answered me. “Eat flesh, not mist.”

  You are probably wondering why I was not rushing back to save the girl I'd left alone with the lecherous old man. But I'd lived too long in the city beyond Time to be in a hurry. You see, I figured it was a done deal. If I was not the dead man, then he must be the dead man. No matter what happened, the old man was not making it out of this scene alive. Sooner or later, this was the end for him.

  So I did not run, I strolled back up the ramp, through the hole in the wall, and into the room with the hole in the bathroom.

  The girl was there. She had draped the silk sheet from the bed around her body, making it look as if she was wearing a long flowing toga. She was sitting on the edge of the bed and slowly getting to her feet. Her eyes were half-lidded, as if she had just been hit with a stun ray. Or maybe that was just the natural cast of her features.

  And Jack was there, with Aaron Burr's cheater gun in his hand. The alarm was still ringing. Ding, ding, ding, ding. The girl was moaning, sobbing, which somehow she still managed to make sound alluring. And Jack was panting as if he had just run a race.

  The old man was on the ground at Jack's feet, gasping and unable to speak, trying to hold his thin an
d trembling hands over his face and stomach and groin all at the same time. He had the walking stick, but he was not using it to block the blows or strike back. In fact, he was curled around it as if trying to protect it.

  “Any last words?” said Jack. The old man was out of breath, and could not speak. He just whimpered.

  “It's not a good shoot, Mr. K.” I said. “He isn't placing anyone in immediate threat of life or limb now. This isn't self-defense.”

  Jack gave me a look of hatred. “You going to stop me, flatfoot?”

  “Hell, no. You went to a lot of trouble, more than you remember, to set up this scenario. I don't care about him and I sure as hell don't care about you. How old are you, Jack? You look about fifty. You were supposed to die at forty-six. Any time you lived here was extra time. And here you are, throwing it away.”

  “Mr. President, don't you understand what he's saying?” the girl said anxiously. “Don't shoot him! Please don't!”

  The old man had gotten his breath back, and he had a strangely calm look on his face. A look of resignation. Of defeat.

  But in his eyes there gleamed an eerie hate-filled look of victory.

  Jack pulled the trigger. The noise felt like a hammer driving a spike into my ear. The gun barrel was less then two feet from the old man's head, so his skull exploded like a watermelon, and the carpet was transformed into the floor of your local butcher shop, the one in the back room that no customer ever sees. The smell of blood and cordite did to my nose what the deafening report had done to my ears.

  Jack said something. I could not hear him, but from the way his mouth moved, from the look on his face, he was saying something about justice, or maybe vengeance.