City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis

by John C. Wright

  Then he stopped, his face thoughtful, intent.

  He was staring down at the corpse.

  Perhaps he realized at the last minute what was really happening. The body refused to evaporate. It stayed real. It stayed inevitable.

  He squinted in disbelief, staring even more intently. He started trembling then, and not from the cold.

  Jack, now the only Jack here, turned toward me. His eyes were haunted. “You said I went to some sort of trouble, more than I remembered, to set this up. But all I did was go to your office. Luciano recommended you. We talked about killing a man. What did you mean? What don't I remember?”

  “A lot, Mr. K. For starters, you don't remember who punched you in the eye. You don't remember entering my office, or what we talked about for the first twenty minutes. You don't remember what you had in your hands. The bowling bag, with a helmet inside.

  “We talked about killing a man,” I continued. “That part you remember. But you don't remember how many times I told you not to do it. You should have listened. It's too late now.”

  Maybe Jack was listening, or maybe not. He was staring in horror at his gun hand. Mist was trickling up from between his fingers. Of course that was where the paradox would spread out from. That was the epicenter.

  He dropped Aaron Burr's pistol clattering to the bloodstained floor and screamed, grabbing his left hand with his right. Now the flesh was boiling off his hand, turning into white and ghostly smoke, and the ghosts of his fingers, in every possible position his hand might have been in or could be in, surrounded the stump of his disintegrating arm like the branches of a swaying tree. The flesh of his face was already transparent when he screamed, and his eyes, rimmed with red muscles, were staring out, horror-stricken, from his bone-white skull. His other arm and his leg was also fading into mist, and the mists were rapidly dissipating.

  The sound of his pleading was the worst. It was not just his voice, begging me to save him, begging the girl, begging the dead guy, begging the Masters of Time, because a multitude of his voices were speaking all at once, saying all the possible things he might have said at this point, overlapping, interrupting.

  I understand temporal paradox is a painful way to go, since the nervous system, as it disintegrates, sends contradictory signals from all your dispersing versions into the pain center of your brain. He seemed like a brave man. I am sure at least some versions did not complain or beg, or maybe one version said a prayer, or something. But it was lost in the throng.

  Getting paradoxed to death is not pretty.

  Then he was gone, and the silence after the final shrieks was so silent it seemed like ringing in my ears. The girl had fallen quiet. She sat there on the bed with her hand over her mouth, struck dumb by the terrible sights and sounds.

  The old man was silent too, lying dead in a puddle of gore on the floor. I stepped over to him, reached down, put my foot on the walking stick, and yanked off the gold knob. Examining it, I could see the markings around the equator. The top hemisphere could turn independently of the bottom, like a dial.

  My foot went numb, which was not pleasant. There was a stunner built into the shaft of the walking stick. Why was it still on? Then I saw that the old man had been using it to numb the pain of being kicked when he was down. So he would die and not suffer. I did not see how to turn the damned thing off, so I drew my gun and set the stick on fire.

  I turned to the girl. “Helen!” I tossed the golden knob doohickey toward her. No, I was not trying to make her drop the silk bedsheet draping her nubile form when she raised her hands to catch the watch.

  She tore her eyes from the place in midair where Jack was no longer standing, and, now, never had been, and caught it instinctively. She must have had at least partly hardened memory, because she seemed to remember the scene, but the memory must have been hard for her to recall. She had that dreamy, confused look a woman just waking from sleep sometimes has.

  “That's not my real name,” she said. “It's a stage name.”

  “It'll do.”

  She held up the golden device. “Pretty. What is it?”

  “Consolation prize. You've been through a lot tonight, Missus, uh, Helen.”

  The silk bedsheet did slip about an inch while she held up the dingus and smiled at it. At a time like this, in the same room where she had been violated by a human bag of filth, I caught myself looking at her, thinking about her, the same way he had done. The same way Queequeg looks at people: as lunchmeat. Something you use for you.

  I turned my eyes away, which I probably should have done from the get-go. She was not dressed decently, and I was definitely not thinking decently. Does that idea seem old-fashioned? Not in my day, it wasn't. It was just coming into vogue. It was needed. The long party of the Roaring Twenties stopped roaring, choked up and sputtered into a world without work, with war in the air, with polio stalking the land. The good old days.

  So I missed the beginning of what she was saying.

  “…"… And it's Miss. He didn't marry me. I mean– I was a Missus. I've been married. A lot. Jim and Joe and Arthur, and then the Time Travelers came and got me, and then there was the problem with Menelaus and Paris. Theseus didn't count. Jack. And his brother, Bob. They don't count either.” She sighed. “Somehow it just never works out.”

  I nodded. “You might find that gizmo in your hand useful. It's for when you start to get wrinkles and gray hair. If you want to stay young and pretty, twist the dial counterclockwise to get younger. It adjusts the time tensions in your body, but you won't move through time, and your mind stays the same. It's only got a nine-inch range, though. You got to keep it on you, in your purse or your pocket.”

  She could use it and I couldn't. Guys in my line of work never get old enough to turn gray. I looked down at the almost-headless body, still as real and solid and inevitable as a hangover after a wild bender. Nature always takes revenge when you give in, doesn't she? But sometimes you can help her along.

  The hands which lay limp and lifeless on the floor were no longer thin and blue with protruding arteries, dark with liver spots. They were healthy and suntanned and strong.

  “Hey, Mister.”

  “What is it, doll?” I looked at her.

  “So, do I have to hire you to solve the mystery?” She pointed to Jack's dead, but younger hands. I caught myself staring at her again, and turned my eyes back toward the corpse.

  “What mystery is that?” I said a little gruffly.

  “What happened to the third guy? Why did he look young then old? Didn't the wrong body vanish? This time travel makes my head hurt.”

  The girl was brighter than she looked. She must have guessed at least part of what had happened here. I did not want to tell her the whole story. It would give her nightmares.

  I picked up Aaron Burr's pistol. I could feel the tingle of time-energy flowing through it. It was a museum piece from a famous duel. Some Time Warden had long ago made immune it to category-two paradoxes. That was why the pistol did not disappear even though everything else Jack had brought into the scene, his tie and jacket and coat and shoes, all vanished when he erased himself. And every shot the pistol fired still had been fired, even if in this version there was no cause-and-effect explanation for who shot whom or how the gun had gotten there in the first place.

  “Time Travel makes everyone's head hurt,” I grumbled. “It should be against the law. Makes people think they can get away with anything. Steal anything. Steal women. Use men. Treat everyone else like toys and trophies and furniture, like fashion accessories.”

  She said, "I know what that is like. It happens when you are famous. You cannot count on people.”

  “How's that?” I did not see what she was getting at.

  She sighed again, and for the first time I really looked at her face, and saw a sad and confused young woman caught up in something she did not understand any more than I understand the deeper mysteries of time travel.

  “People use you,” she said, “When y
ou are famous. Fame will go by, and, so long, I've had you, fame. If it goes by, I've always known it was fickle. So at least it's something I experienced, but that's not where I live.”

  “How do you stand it?” I said softly. “People – men like that–”

  She shrugged, and now she was wearing her professional face again, a smiling and empty-headed mask she held like a bleached-blonde shield between her and a hungry world. “What can you do? Scream? It only flips their switch, some of them. Fight? They only hit you harder, and if you are bruised you can't work the next day. Kill yourself? I've done it. Sleeping pills are painless, you know? It's just like falling into a fuzzy dark cloud, all warm and floaty. But then I wake up again. The Masters of Time wake me up. Because I'm famous, see? You can't get away from it, not here.”

  It was a very sad smile.

  If I had been any kind of man, I would have knelt down there, and then, like a knight from the Medieval Level of the Frankish tower, sworn to protect her with my life. I did not think she was acting, not just then. The girl truly needed help.

  Instead I knelt, picked up a corner of the bloody carpet, and heaved, and managed to throw a large triangular fold of the carpet over the face of the dead man. The inevitable dead man.

  “So what happened, Mister?” said the girl, wiping her gorgeous eyes and sniffing. “What really happened?”

  “Your boyfriend killed an old man who molested you. Justice was served. Happy ending.”

  She played with the knob in her hand, and suddenly looked five years younger, mid-twenties rather than mid-thirties. Right at the peak of her glamour. Made my eyes almost hurt to look at her.

  She said, “Is this a happy ending? How come neither of us feel happy?”

  “I dunno,” I was looking around to see where I had put my hat, so I could put it on and leave. Then I remembered it had gone flying over the side of the bridge. “All this just for two cartons of cigarettes. They better be there when I get back to my place.”

  She grinned briefly, then looked shy and hugged the sheet closer to her as if she were outside, cold and alone. The sinuous folds of the silk clung to her body and emphasized her curves. “I can't stay here. I've got no place of my own. Can I… stay with you?”

  Sure, I could take her back to my place. She needed help. She was scared. She was lovely. And she was still inching the knob down, creeping closer to an age that is not legal in some jurisdictions. She was just a kid.

  At first I would tell her to sleep on the floor, or maybe I would be the gentleman and take the floor and give her the couch. And then the next morning, I would tell her she had to be gone by that evening, and the next morning after that I would tell her the same thing and so on for a week until it became a joke between us. She would gaze into my eyes and smile and maybe kiss me on the nose and pour me a cup of coffee whenever I said it.

  And then, perhaps, when I was old, I would think back upon those days, and I would scour the city looking for an active crystal with the right time depth so I could go back and see her. And then…

  And then I would find myself in the same position as the man I'd just helped to kill. Hell, in this damned City, I might end up literally becoming him. I know how time travel works. It lures you in. It seduces you.

  It wasn't too hard to step over the corpse and turn my back on her. The smell of the corpse helped.

  “You can stay with my pal, Homer. He likes doughnuts and he'll like asking you questions about how the war in Troy turned out.”

  “It was bad. Everybody died,” she said, pouting and nibbling her lip. “Astyanax, they threw him from the roof. He was just a little boy. Then they burned the whole place down. Like I said, somehow it just never works out.”

  And Homer is blind, so maybe he can stand to be around you and survive. I did not say that part out loud, only to myself.

  Look, I don't blame the dame for using the tools Nature gave her any more than I blame a spider. But I'd seen one guy trapped in her web, and I'd heard all about the others. Even if it was a web she did not spin on purpose, she was a spider. Guys like Paris, guys like the Yankee Clipper, even guys like Jack lost their hearts over this girl, lost their minds, lost their good names. Sometimes they even lost their lives.

  I don't think she did anything on purpose, but maybe she was part of the cold justice in this cold world, the justice that took its revenge on the men who used her and hurt her.

  I waited outside while she was getting dressed, glad that without my hat it was so cold. It kept me from thinking bad thoughts.

  She chatted with me as we walked, me stomping and her swaying and bouncing, and slipped her hand very naturally through my elbow and clutched my arm, sending something like an electric shock up my spine, from groin to brain. I remember the way she smelled, the way she tucked a stray curl into her little Santa Claus hat with a delicate motion of her hand. I've never been that close to anyone so damned pretty in my life.

  She looked so lost, so woebegone, and yet so cheerful when she smiled, that I admired her inner strength, even as I grieved for the kind of life she was trapped in.

  I was glad at that moment I had done what I did, glad I had watched a man die in utmost pain as he dissolved into mist. I had helped with the world's cold justice. You see, hers was the face that was innocent and bewildered at the cruel hurts done to her. Hers was a face without hope. Without hope, yet with a bright smile. Without hope, yet soldiering on.

  But how can you have hope in this city? Hope comes when you have an unknown future waiting like a Christmas gift, shining in its pink-bowed wrapping paper, and every tomorrow is a new surprise to open.

  Hope is when you can change your future. But if the Time Wardens can step through a crystal into your tomorrow, and they can change your tomorrow, but you cannot, then all the gifts have already been opened and all the toys are theirs.

  When we got there, she said: “Thanks for everything!” and stood up on her tiptoes to kiss my cheek. But I drew back and put my hand up before those lips, those lips I had been surreptitiously staring at, and wondering about, could land.

  Maybe you remember the Kit Marlowe's line: 'Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss. But do you know the next one? I looked it up. 'Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!'

  You think maybe there is a version of the scene where she planted that kiss and my soul was sucked out, and I grabbed her and bent her over my arm and canoodled her something awful. And maybe the part she plays and hides behind would have kissed me back, but it would have killed the little girl inside. But I got hardened memory. I know there is no other version.

  “No charge, this time, Ma'am.” I said. If they give out awards for the most awkward line any man ever said, keep that one in mind.

  “It's still Miss,” she said, smiling. “You know. Miss. Because things never quite work out. I keep trying to hit a life. A normal life. I keep missing. Guess that is where that word comes from.”

  Her red mitten seemed very small and soft in my black glove. She did not shake hands, but merely put her fingertips in my palm, like girls from my day used to do.

  I did not want to let her go, not right away. So I said: “You don't like being Helen of Troy? All the famous poets sing about you, Miss.”

  “Fame is wonderful,” she said, with her cat-ate-the-canary smile, her eyes half-closed, speaking in that breathy way she had, as she turned from me and spoke over her shoulder, “But you can't curl up with it on a cold night.”

  I left her with Homer and I went home, and my arm, without a girl on it, without the girl on it, felt cold.

  I found the two cartons of cigarettes, as promised.

  So I sat in the dark, smoking, a point of fire held at my fingertips, letting the dark scent of the tobacco drive away the last traces of her lingering perfume.

  At least it was a happy ending for me.

  SECOND INTERMISSION

  There is one detail I don't want to forget to tell you.

  Earlier, back on day th
ree thousand twenty-eight, back in my office, watching Edward Teach give me a nasty smile over his shoulder as he swaggered away after his boss, I realized that what was bothering me was not the man's outrageous beard, which practically reached to his eyebrows. I was bothered by a continuity error in Jack's story, at least the part I had heard.

  I looked over at where the helmet still sat on the floor next to the couch, where he had let it slip through his dazed fingers as the effect took hold. I still did not want to touch the damned thing. But now I wished I had asked him one question I could no longer ask. What had happened from his point of view? The point of view that was just erased?

  Jack's memory was fairly hard, and so, to him, getting shot and then suddenly finding himself in the scene that never happened was no different from me getting killed and having the circuit in my gun retroactively erect a nimbus a moment in the past, and suddenly being never-killed half a hiccup in the direction of elsewhen.

  The helmet probably just erased the hardened parts of the memories, the anachronisms. It should be easy, given Time Warden technology, to turn into mist those memories in your head that, from the point of view of the time continuum, came from nowhere for no reason.

  But from the point of view of the non-dead Jack, his personal continuity, what happened? I assume the shooter and his gun disappeared into mist before the trigger was pulled. Which meant that the job he had hired me to do could not get done.

  Well, Hell. I was not going to let that happen, not if I could help it. I needed to find a gun that would not vanish into the discontinuity mists.

  A few minutes later, with the bowling bag and the accursed helmet under my arm, I found a newsboy at the corner of two bridges willing to swap me a paper for a half-empty carton of melted strawberry ice cream. He agreed. Some people are just desperate, I guess.

  Ben Franklin and William Howard Russell published the paper. Beneath words of wisdom from Poor Richard, was the Recurring Events section. There I found the announcement of the next duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton.