End of the Century

by Chris Roberson

  Alice closed her eyes.

  She wasn't falling anymore.

  SHE LAY IN RED-LIDDED DARKNESS, but Alice was awake. She could feel the comforting weight of blankets over her legs, and when she shifted her head to one side ever so slightly, she could hear the soft rustle of hair on fabric.

  Her body felt strange. Small. Light. Smooth.

  She opened her eyes and tried to sit up. Her muscles moved oddly, their motions unfamiliar.

  Alice lurched to a sitting position and looked down.

  Beneath the off-white blanket was the outline of thin, short legs. A pea green, loose-fitting shirt covered her flat chest, leaving the thin, lithe arms bare. Her skin was darker than she remembered, almost the color of copper. She raised thin, almost elfin hands to her face and felt unfamiliar features beneath her fingers. Wide nose, prominent cheekbones.

  “What's the last thing you remember, love?”

  She started, her breath catching, and turned to look at the old man in the chair next to her. “D-Daddy?”

  Stillman Waters smiled fondly, ice-chip blue eyes twinkling, and shook his head. “I'm afraid not, Alice. Just a friend.” He reached out and took one of her tiny hands in his, dwarfing it. “Now, what do you remember?”

  “I…” Alice shook her head. She felt unconnected, disoriented. “Oh, I've had such a curious dream.” Her voice sounded high and piping in her ears, unfamiliar.

  “And what a long sleep you've had,” came a voice from the other side of the bed. Alice looked up to see a woman standing over her wearing a black jacket and slacks, her blonde hair in a bob that framed her thin face. She smiled down at her.

  “Roxanne,” Alice said, absurdly. She turned back to Stillman, beginning to collect herself. “I was in the Change Engine. That's the last thing I remember. Inside the Unworld. I'd just finished uploading the dead man's mind into the disk, and programmed it with the genetic biological imperative to survive and communicate my message in the future, and had the White upload a copy of my own mind and memories on the disk.”

  Alice paused, and looked around her, for the first time taking in her surroundings. She was in a hospital room, the light streaming through the open shutters. A TV mounted to the wall was on a twenty-four-hour news station, the sound muted. Alice didn't recognize the anchor or understand anything about what the crawl was saying. A war in Iraq? Another one?

  “I got your message, love,” Stillman said, not letting go of her hand. “It took me some time, but I worked it out.”

  “The Huntsman!” Alice laid her other hand on top of Stillman's, gripping it tightly.

  Stillman smiled. “Seconds after you disappeared, the gem vanished altogether. Just about then the Huntsman was about to take off my head, but as soon as the gem was gone he collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Lifeless and dead.”

  Alice nodded. That sounded about right.

  “Anyway,” Stillman said, “when I worked out what the ravens had been trying to tell me, I got the disk from the junk pile in the Tower of London Station, and with Iain Temple's help was able to reverse engineer it, work out a way of retrieving the data stored within.”

  “Temple survived?!” The last time Alice had seen him, he was being thrown out of a thirty-fifth-story window.

  “There's more to that guy than meets the eye,” Roxanne said.

  “That's putting it mildly.” Stillman nodded, and smiled. “At any rate, Temple agreed to help in exchange for exclusive rights to any technologies we derived from the disk for a period of one hundred years.” When he saw Alice's questioning look, he raised his hand. “Don't ask.”

  “I'll tell you later, if you want,” Roxanne said, chuckling.

  Alice looked from Stillman to Roxanne, confused. “You guys know each other? I don't…” She shook her head, still getting her bearings. What was it about this body?

  “See,” Stillman began, “your comment about the woman in the photograph got me thinking. I figured it had to be the same woman, though how could it be? I found the number your Roxanne had written in your notebook and tracked her down living in Bayswater. It was the same woman, but we hadn't met yet.”

  “But…” Alice began.

  “The meeting Stillman remembered in 1947 was in my subjective future,” Roxanne explained, “though in the objective past.” She tapped the silver bracelet on her wrist and smiled. “I can time travel. Didn't I mention that?”

  “It would have been useful if you'd told me that in the forties,” Stillman said, scowling playfully.

  “Even then, there was some question about your allegiances, and we couldn't be sure you wouldn't hand me over to Omega. But I hedged my bets and gave you my phone number, didn't I? If you'd only bothered to use it, you could have found out for yourself.”

  Alice was confused, and evidently it showed.

  “The silver chalice that my mentor gave me,” Stillman explained. “The number written on the side, in Old Norse. It's her phone number.”

  “What?!”

  Stillman smiled. “See, Temple's people had worked out how to record and store new minds on the disk. As near as they could determine, there was room for two more uploads on the disk. But they were still working out how to retrieve you, and had already worked out that the other mind stored within was too corrupted to be retrieved. Anyway, while they figured it out, I gave the disk to Roxanne.”

  “Why?” Alice raised an unfamiliar eyebrow.

  Roxanne took over. “I went back to 1947 and told our mutual friend what was coming, and what was waiting for him atop that volcano in Iceland. I gave him the silver chalice, which I'd picked up in Iceland in the Middle Ages, and had my twenty-first-century phone number inscribed on it. I told him to give it Stillman.”

  “Just to muck me about, I reckon,” Stillman said, crossing his arms over his chest. “You already knew I didn't find it.”

  Roxanne shrugged. “Call it insurance. At any rate, I recorded our friend's mind, just like Stillman had asked. And not just his, but another friend of ours, as well. Then I returned to the twenty-first century, and Stillman and I set about finding suitable bodies.”

  “What other friend?”

  Stillman stood from his chair and went to retrieve a small hand mirror on a side table. “It took us a few years, but in the end we found two grown men and one little girl, all in permanent vegetative states. The previous occupants had checked out, if you like. It took some doing, and a fair number of pulled strings, but we got all three transferred to a hospital ward here in the United States and went to work with the disk.”

  Stillman held the plastic mirror in front of Alice's face, and she saw a young Asian girl looking back at her.

  “Seven years old,” Stillman said. “Never had a broken bone in her life, not even a chipped tooth. The injury that took her mind was a horrible tragedy, but proved a blessing in disguise for us.”

  Alice reached up to touch her cheek, and watched the little girl in the mirror do the same. “It's…me.” She looked up at Stillman, at Roxanne, and then back at the mirror. “So it worked. The lifeboat worked.”

  “And carried more passengers than you realized,” came a voice from the door. British, by the sound of it. Or possibly gay.

  Alice turned to see the young white man standing in the doorway, a folded newspaper tucked under his arm. He was wearing a pastel blue linen suit over a yellow T-shirt, his hair and nails immaculate, sandals on his feet.

  Or maybe both, Alice thought.

  “This is my friend and mentor,” Stillman said, crossing the room to stand beside him. “Sandford Blank.”

  “Charmed, my dear,” Sandford said with a bow. “I've heard a great deal about you.”

  He entered the room, and behind him came another, a black man in his early thirties wearing pea green hospital pajamas like Alice's.

  Stillman put his arm around the young white man and motioned to the newcomer in the green pajamas. “And this is…” He raised his eyebrow. “What name are you us
ing now, anyway?”

  The black man smiled, his expression open, inviting. “I haven't quite decided, to be honest. I've had so many.” He began ticking them off on his fingers. “Johannes Lak. Jean Gilead. Giles Dulac. Jules Dulac. John Delamere.”

  Alice swung her legs over the side of the bed and, unsteady as a newborn foal, stood. She held her hand out to the black man, who towered over her though he couldn't have been taller than six feet.

  “Nice to meet you. I'm your granddaughter, Alice Fell.”

  The black man's eyes widened, as did Roxanne's and Sandford's. Stillman, though, hid a knowing smile.

  Alice was pleased. It was nice to know that she had a few surprises up her sleeve still. “Do you remember Naomi?”

  The black man held her hand a little tighter and smiled, fondly. “Like it was yesterday. Literally.” He leaned forward, expectantly. “Is she still…?”

  He trailed off when he saw the answer in her eyes.

  “Well. Even so.” He smiled down at her, looking for all the world like a proud father seeing his child for the first time. “It is very nice to meet you. Please, call me Galaad.”

  Alice held his hand for a moment longer, then released it. This would take some getting used to. “This feels…” She looked around the room, at old friends and new. “How odd. What a strange way for things to end, after all of this time.”

  “Oh,” Sandford said, arching an eyebrow, “this isn't the end, my dear. This is only the end of the beginning. Only the beginning of the end of the beginning.” He pulled the folded newspaper from under his arm and waved it like a torch, then pointed to the television bolted on the wall, the text crawling with news of wars and rumors of wars, of empires clashing, of individuals oppressed and freedoms denied. “I've been catching up on history a bit, and believe me, there is a lot of work for us to do.”

  “Us?” Alice raised an eyebrow.

  Sandford smiled, and put one arm around Stillman, the other around Roxanne. “And why not? How many of us are given a second chance at life, my dear? Should we waste such a precious gift?”

  “It would be good to make a difference,” said Galaad. “To help make a better world.”

  “Why not, indeed?” Stillman laughed. “It isn't as if I've got anything better to do.”

  “I've got some time on my hands,” Roxanne said. “Count me in.”

  Alice smiled. She would never be sure if this wasn't another dream, after all, another mad vision. But it didn't matter, not any more. After all, what was life but a dream? This would, at least, be a dream worth living.

  READERS OF MY PREVIOUS NOVELS may recall that I am the type of person who feels cheated when “The End” are the last words in a book and who never buys a DVD if the “Special Features” are nothing more than theatrical trailers. While I feel that stories should explain themselves, I nevertheless like a little extra material to explore when I finish the story itself, a bit of behind-the-scenes business that I can dig into after the credits roll.

  With that in mind, I offer the following notes:

  On the Origins of End of the Century

  As a student at the University of Texas at Austin, I chanced upon a reference in Alfred Douglas's The Tarot to parallels between the four suits of the Tarot, the Grail Hallows of Arthurian legend, and the Treasures of Ireland. The seeds of this book were planted that day, and in the years that followed I filled countless notebooks with little bits and pieces, started and subsequently abandoned the project several times, and only finally, nearly twenty years later, did the idea fully germinate in my overheated brain.

  I can only hope that, with the idea finally out of my head and onto paper, I can at last have those long-occupied parts of my brain back…

  On the Bonaventure Family

  The characters Roxanne Bonaventure and Peter R. Bonaventure (to say nothing of the infant Jules) all belong to a large extended family of explorers and adventurers, the Bonaventure-Carmody clan. Documented in the pages of Cybermancy Incorporated; Here, There & Everywhere; Paragaea: A Planetary Romance; and Set the Seas on Fire, in addition to Roxanne and Peter this family includes officer in Nelson's navy and time-lost adventurer Hieronymus Bonaventure, WWI-era aviator Jules Bonaventure, secret agent Diana Bonaventure, and research magician Jon Bonaventure Carmody.

  The Bonaventure-Carmody clan owes much to the von Bek/Beck/Begg stories of Michael Moorcock, to the Diogenes Club stories of Kim Newman, to the superhero comics of Alan Moore—for this and too many other reasons to mention the present work is dedicated to them—and especially to Philip José Farmer's Wold Newton stories—to whom the earliest Bonaventure-Carmdoy novel, Cybermancy Incorporated, was humbly dedicated. Any reader who enjoyed any aspect of the present volume is encouraged to seek out the work of all of these brilliant writers without delay.

  On Further Reading

  Though End of the Century is intended to stand alone and on its own merits, many of the characters in the novel have previously appeared in some of my other books. Readers curious to learn more about Roxanne Bonaventure, Sandford Blank, or even the later adventures of Peter R. Bonaventure's infant son Jules are recommended to sample Here, There & Everywhere. Those wishing to read more about the past adventures of “Jules Dulac” might be interested in Set the Seas on Fire, while Paragaea: A Planetary Romance explains the origins and strange nature of the being calling itself Iain Temple. The at-present out-of-print Voices of Thunder (tentatively scheduled for reissue as Book of Secrets in late 2009) is largely concerned with William Blake Taylor's extended family. And while the likewise out-of-print Cybermancy Incorporated features Aria Fox, hints as to what befell Lord Arthur Carmody when he relocated to the United States, and what really happened to his son thought lost in Africa (hint: he was raised by lions), those readers who are interested to learn the truth behind what befell Peter R. Bonaventure, Jules Dulac, and Mervyn Fawkes on the Floating Island are encouraged to visit my Web site, www.chrisroberson.net, where the relevant chapter of that novel, “Secret Histories: Peter R. Bonaventure, 1885,” is made freely available.

  On Sources

  To list all of the books, stories, comics, and films which inspired the present volume would tax the patience of even the most indulgent reader, but I would be remiss if I didn't point out a select number of works without which this book would not have been possible. These include, in no particular order: The Great Captains by Henry Treece, a portrait of Arthur as both man and king that was a significant influence on the development of Artor in these pages; The Mammoth Book of King Arthur by Mike Ashley, an invaluable road map to the history of the legend; Londinium: London in the Roman Empire by John Morris and London: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd, for helping set the scene; Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet and Pax Britannica by James Morris, for much needed detail about life in 1897 London, and about the Diamond Jubilee festivities in particular; A Dictionary of Irish Mythology and A Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, both by Peter Berresford Ellis; Aubrey Beardsley by Stephen Calloway and The Wilde Album by Merlin Holland, two biographies offering invaluable glimpses into London's fin de siècle culture; Seized by Eve La Plante, for much-needed insight into the fascinating world of temporal lobe epilepsy; and The Physics of Immortality by Frank J. Tipler, a book of fascinating ruminations on eschatology, physics, and information technology that inspired the creation of the lacunae and their master, Omega.

  Chris Roberson

  Austin, TX

  CHRIS ROBERSON’s novels include Here, There & Everywhere; The Voyage of Night Shining White; Paragaea: A Planetary Romance; X-Men: The Return; Set the Seas on Fire; The Dragon's Nine Sons; Iron Jaw and Hummingbird; and Three Unbroken. His short stories have appeared in such magazines as Asimov's, Interzone, Postscripts, and Subterranean, and in anthologies such as Live without a Net, FutureShocks, and Forbidden Planets. Along with his business partner and spouse, Allison Baker, he is the publisher of MonkeyBrain Books, an independent publishing house specializing in genre fiction and nonfictio
n genre studies, and he is the editor of the anthology Adventure Vol. 1. He has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award four times—twice for publishing and once each for writing and editing—twice a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and three times for the Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History Short Form (winning in 2004 with his story “O One”). Chris and Allison live in Austin, Texas, with their daughter, Georgia. Visit him online at www.chrisroberson.net.