by Mark Jeffrey
“Sir. What is it?” Ragazzo asked carefully.
Giovanni massaged his forehead, as if trying to keep his mind from melting. “Vespasian was the Emperor of Rome from 69 to 79 AD.” Something impossible had happened. “These men – I believe that they are Roman Centurions. Everything about them is of the past. Their clothing, their weapons, their language … I have knowledge of this time, and the details are too perfect. I do not believe this to be a ruse. Through some way unknown to me, they have stepped from one era into another.
“Put plainly: this legion of men we see before us now are from one thousand, four hundred and thirty years ago.”
“How is that possible?” Ragazzo asked.
Giovanni shook his head. “I do not know.” But inwardly, he wondered whether Ragazzo knew more than he was letting on.
“Appius,” Giovanni said, returning now. “What I have to tell you will be impossible for you to believe, but it is true nonetheless. And I think what I have to say may be made both easier and harder if you will but come with me. All your questions will be answered, I promise you. Will you come?”
Appius nodded that he understood and then returned to his men. They held what appeared to be a short debate. Appius returned and said simply, “Lead.”
THE WESTERN EDGE of the town of Cyranus was where the tombs were.
Wordlessly, Giovanni led Appius and a few of his men down into the dank caverns. The stone walkways were worn down in the middle: they formed a C-shape. Amazing that such a thing could happen, Max thought. Bare feet, sandaled feet — over the course of a thousand years or more — but still, it was mere walking alone that had ground the stone down.
Aldo brought a torch to the head and lit the way.
They descended carefully down a worn ramp that ended in a long, deep catacomb. The air here reeked of rot and old incense. They were lucky they had not had a recent death in the town, Giovanni thought: the air would be much more rancid with a fresh corpse only now beginning its sour rot. As foul as it was, it was at least bearable.
On either side of the grim company were open compartments built into the wall, stacked three high. It almost looked like storage, carved out the bare rock. That, if not for the fact that in each lay the remains of one of the departed townsfolk of Cyranus.
Near the front of the catacomb many of the compartments had been empty, awaiting the inevitable mortality of their occupants. But now as they made their way further back, abruptly they had begun to see the most recently dead. As they progressed, the full shrouds became more twisted and irregular, until finally they reach an area where all that could be seen were human skeletons and scraps of long-rotted death shrouds.
There were markings on the wall to indicate who the departed were and when they had died. When they had reached a section very far back, Cyranus stopped.
“Appius,” Giovanni began reverently. “You left this village one thousand and four hundred years ago. Much time has passed since you were last here — I cannot explain how. But I assure you this is so. Here in the catacombs are the remains of the people of your time. Their names are written on the walls. You and your men will undoubtedly recognize some of them.
“I bring you here not to cause you pain, but to prove to you that I could not possibly be lying We have never met. I do not know the names of your wives, your sons, your daughters, your fathers, your mothers, or your friends. Yet they are here on these walls, if you will but look.”
When Ragazzo had finished translating, Appius stared at Giovanni with madness in his eyes. For a moment, Ragazzo thought he might slice Giovanni’s throat there and then. But he did not; it was the depth of his anguish that gripped him, and Giovanni stood there, generous and unarmed, with a regality that was not refusable.
Savagely, Appius grabbed the torch from Aldo. He scanned the walls, at first not seeing anything that he recognized. But then he saw a name and a howl came out of him like that of a wild beast. One his centurions came to his side and took the torch from Appius, madly scanning the names himself — as did the other centurion who had accompanied him.
One by one, they screamed names and other things, wailing with grief, touching the bones as though they could scarcely believe they were real.
“Appius has found his wife and his children,” Ragazzo said quietly.
“Come,” Giovanni replied. “Let us leave them to their mourning. We will wait for them outside. And when they are ready, we will make them welcome for as long as they care to stay.”
Four: Jane Willow
THE COMPANY lay around the pool of the Shell Hotel, soaking up the severe sunshine that blasted down on them and the roiling sea beyond. Sasha and Casey lay blissfully asleep on chaise lounges next to each other, slicked in suntan oil. Ian sat in a lawn chair, covering his pale body from the sun in a t-shirt, shorts with towel across his legs and a baseball cap. He hunched over several newspapers, trying to learn as much as he could about this world. Enki had chastised him for this several times: they were supposed to be resting, recuperating after their twin ordeals in Arturo Gyp and 1912 respectively. They weren’t supposed to be worrying about anything, not yet. But Ian insisted that reading was relaxation for him. When Enki had snatched his newspapers away, Ian grew visibly irritated and restless, so Enki had eventually — reluctantly — returned his reading materials.
Max could not get enough of the pool. Although it was packed with guests of the Shell, Max swam and jumped off the diving board and then swam some more, jostling people everywhere. Casey felt some relief at this: Max’s shell-shock seemed to be wearing off. He no longer wore the gloves or glasses.
He didn’t seem as pink and raw.
Casey winced inwardly at the memory. He had been so … fragile, when he’d first appeared. Of course Casey realized she couldn’t understand what had happened to him, not really.
All of his memories had come flooding back. Casey wondering what that must be like. Thousands of years of unremembered lives, suddenly bursting into your consciousness …
It must noisy, she thought. Confusing. Terrifying. Which one was the real you?
That was a disturbing thought. The Max Quick she knew was just a recently development in a long series of Max Quicks. How similar were they? How different? Was he essentially him with each successive life? Did he more or less have his usual personality?
Or was he a different person now? Or more accurately, had he always been a different person, with the recent Max Quick just a very thin facade covering them?
Enki floated around the pool in an inner tube, wearing a ridiculous one-piece black and white striped bathing suit that looked like something out of 1900.
Maurice sat next to Ian, murmuring to the wind — although even he seemed to have calmed down several notches from his usual jittery self: Enki’s forced relaxation was evidently doing him some good as well. Maurice wore torn jean shorts, a t-shirt and a tattered jean jacket. His long hair whipped around his face and sideburns and sunglasses, making him appear like a biker crossed with a mad prophet.
He was whistling ‘Penny Lane’ by the Beatles.
Ian looked up from his newspaper, startled.
“Hey! What’s that you’re singing?”
Maurice stopped. “What? Aw, I dunno man. Some song I heard somewhere.”
“That’s impossible!” Ian said. “You can’t know that tune!”
Maurice sniffed a laugh. “But I do. Do-wop-a-do, I do.”
“That’s so weird,” Ian mused. “And you don’t know what the song is. Do you?”
But Maurice wasn’t listening to him. Instead, he stared up at the sun.
“What is it?” Ian asked.
“The sun, man. You’re all looped by the song thing. I’m freaked out that the sun ain’t real.”
Ian raised an eyebrow. “You’ve said that before. Of course it’s real. You’re looking at it. It’s the sun. This timeline’s different but that’s the same sun as always.”
“The sun’s not real in the other timeline either, man. Th
at’s just another hoax.”
“A hoax?”
“Yeah. The sun and the moon are the exact same size. You notice that when there’s an eclipse, they fit over each other perfectly. And it’s not like even a little bit off, we’re talking perfect fit.”
“So?”
“So that’s weird, man.” Maurice’s eyes flitted around like they were a conspiracy of two. “You should pay attention more, get your head in the game. You think it’s a coincidence that the sun and moon are like that? You think the moon got made at random, with like, rocks spinning around in space, or whatever. And like in millions of years, gravity made them come together and made the moon. And the size of the moon and distance perspective of the much larger sun just happened to be a perfect fit.”
“Yeah. More or less,” Ian said, frowning.
“Well that’s dumb, man. And you seem like a pretty big pencil to me — you should know that’s dumb.”
“That’s what science says —“
“Science is a religion, man!” Maurice spat. “It’s no different. You believe the dogma you’re told because somebody important told you that.”
“No,” Ian protested, getting worked up now. “That is totally bogus. No. Science is real. Religion you have to take on faith, you can’t prove anything. But science is about experiments and hard data.”
Maurice banged his fists on his knees like a petulant child. “No, man! No. I mean, yes it’s about numbers. But even still, people like you just believe stuff because somebody showed you some numbers that add up all right. Pretty little numbers, dancing around. With religion, it’s stories. With science it’s little numbers. You got to expand your mind, man, widen your horizons. Or The Man is going to take all of you for a ride!”
“Science is based on observations, peer reviews and repeatable experiments,” Ian snapped. “The empirical method of —“
Maurice chuckled. “Aw man. You are drooping and big time. Listen. Okay. The sun. How do you know it’s there?”
Ian laughed. “How? I can see it! It’s right there!” He pointed at it.
“Something’s there,” Maurice agreed. “You think it’s a big fireball of hydrogen. And that it’s huge and far away — a lot farther than the moon. Right?” Ian nodded. “Okay. Here’s a good one for you. The sun is not only not far away: its surface is cold. You could walk on the sun, no problem. It’s not like molten lava at all! And it’s hollow. And sunspots are little holes that appear on it from time to time — when they do, you can see inside of it, and you can see that the sun’s inside is dark and hollow.”
Ian shook his head. “Maurice. You’re insane.” He almost went back to reading his paper. But then he added: “Okay. Listen. I’ve seen some pretty crazy things, things I never though were possible, since I started hanging around with Max. I’ll admit that. But there’s always eventually an explanation that makes sense — even scientific sense.
“I’ve seen stopped time — but there was Niburian tech that made that happen. We’ve all seen Sky Chambers; they fly, I’ve even piloted one once. But I can explain that: there was a neural interface of some kind that plugged my brain into the super advanced computer that made the Sky Chamber fly. And I know Max is from another planet, supposedly one in our own solar system, called Nibiru. It orbits way out in the Oort cloud at the edge of the solar system, which is why nobody knows about. Well, here in this world they do, but not where we come from. And how it stays warm out there that far from the sun, I don’t know. Maybe there’s planetary thermal heat — you know, bloody volcanoes — something like that. But there is an explanation.
“The point is this: Science always works. No matter what. You might not understand the science yet, but it’s always behind everything in some way. And when you do discover it, everything you couldn’t understand before makes perfect sense.”
“Have you ever been to the sun?” Maurice asked, folding his arms.
“What? No. Of course not.”
“So everything you know about it, you read in a book. Or somebody told you. And that somebody only knows what they know because they looked through a telescope or some other device. And they interpreted what they saw.”
Ian thought about this. “Yeah. I suppose that’s true. I suppose that’s fair.”
“And you think this makes you more right then someone who believes the sun is a god. Think about it!” Maurice snapped quickly. “That someone who worships the sun is going on second-hand information also. Someone told him it was a god, he said, Well, yeah, makes sense to me. The sun makes the crops grow, makes light and heat, pretty much powers everything — yeah, that seems pretty goddish.
“Then we have you. Ian Keating, The Smart Kid, only he’s not as smart as he thinks. Somebody told you, See that up there, man? A big ole fireball floating in space. We live on a round world orbiting it. And it’s a big furnace of hydrogen fusion. Then they showed you lots of numbers — the equations for fusion, or whatever. And you went, Yeah, those numbers all add up. They match the observed heat and light output or whatever. So now, based on all the second-hand information — a lot more of it, mind you, a lot more complex second hand information — you now go and do exactly what sun-worshipping guy does. You accept the dogma that the sun is a big round ball of burning hydrogen.
“Oh, it’s a lot more clinical and science-y of a dogma. It sounds more important, more authoritative, more reasoned out. But at its heart, it’s a dogma nonetheless. Anyone who tries to tell you anything different sounds crazy, right? Any scientist who says the sun is not a furnace, but an electrical converter of some kind, and that it’s hollow, and it’s surface is cold and by the way, you can’t even see it in space, it’s completely dark — you can only see the sun when it interacts with the atmosphere of the earth — anyone who says that is a loon. And by the way, that’s how Nibiru stays warm ‘even way out there’ — heat isn’t transmitted by the sun, so heat can’t decay with distance, instead heat is generated electrically by the interaction of the sun and a planetary atmosphere — so it doesn’t even matter how far away you are.
“You do see what I’m saying now, I think.”
Ian nodded, taking the point to heart at last. “But I’m still not buying it,” Ian said. “You are only giving me your own second hand information, you know.”
At that Maurice grinned. “That’s okay, man.” And then he muttered, “There’s another world beneath this one.”
“WHAT THE HELL is Max doing?” Casey asked.
“What?” Sasha woke drowsily. Casey was sitting bolt upright in her lounge chair. A sharp stab of sunlight spangled off her sunglasses, a seeming echo of her annoyance.
“Max!” Casey said. “Get up and look.”
Sasha rolled over and sat up, annoyed.
Max was standing at the edge of the pool. All around him people were running, diving, swimming, laughing … and he was oblivious to them all. Instead, he was angrily having a conversation with the air in front of him. He clenched his fist and stabbed a finger, berating phantoms.
“Where’s Enki?” Sasha asked, scanning the pool. Enki was nowhere to be seen.
“I don’t know,” Casey said with a groan. “I better go down there and see what this is.”
When she arrived, she found Max screaming in what sounded like Italian. His fists were on his hips, and his face was beet-red with rage. His mouth chewed curses and excoriations.
“Max!” Casey shouted at him. But he didn’t register her presence. His eyes were fixated on the air in front of him as if it were drenched with demons. Casey waved a hand in front of his eyes, but this changed nothing, his personal ghosts were more substantial to him.
Casey noted now that one his hands appeared misshapen; it seemed folded in two and the last two fingers and thumb were bent at odd angles, like it had been smashed by a boulder and had never healed properly. Also, a scar now reached from his cheek down his neck to the collarbone.
Oddly, the scar in his midriff, the place where Marvin Sparkle had
sliced his belly open, was gone.
Gone?
But how —?
“Max!” She shook him violently. He should have moved easily: Casey was no weakling, and he was not in a very balanced stance. But he was like a thing made of granite; he simply did not or could not be moved. She was insubstantial to him. “What did you do to your hand?” she shouted now directly in his ear.
People were staring now, Casey noted. It would not be good to attract attention in this place.
Then, there was a subtle shift. Max’s face altered. Instead of anger, there was now a solemnness and a sparkle of delight. His shoulders rolled back; he became more comfortable in his own body. In fact the entire physical change in that instant was startling, instantaneous.
His bent hand was now fine. He raised it with a grin. With a start, Casey saw that his cheek scar was also gone.
And now, without transition, he had short hair.
Egads! What was happening?
She replayed what had just transpired in her mind — it hadn’t been like a morph in a movie. It was like a slap-cut, but one which reached back into the movie and somehow altered past frames as well. If you had been looking directly at Max when the change happened, you’d swear he’d simply short hair the whole time: you had been mistaken about the longer hair.
But no, she girded herself. He did not, not, not have short hair when he’d arrived. Right? Right-o. But part of her wasn’t sure now. But she was also positive at the same time.
She shook head and blinked her eyes.
Now Max was speaking brightly in an older language. Egyptian? It sounded like, “Ba kah. Lemu tura nehili ptah vahk silim nekri mah …” He was greeting someone or a group of someones, phantoms all … He implored them to enter a home, have wine, a meal …
… As he stepped into his imaginary home, and before Casey realized where he was going, he walked into the pool. He vanished beneath the water with a splash, still talking and not bothering to swim.
He sank, oblivious to where he was. He fell to the bottom, gesturing and laughing out bubbles, his inner ghosts keeping him company even underwater.