The Time Roads

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by Beth Bernobich


  Hours later, exhausted, I returned to my chambers and sank into the nearest chair. Servants had left a tray of covered dishes on the table with bread and soup. A carafe held chilled water flavored with crushed mint. I poured a glass of water and drank it off. Though I had no appetite, I forced myself to eat. The day was not even close to ending.

  I drank more water, then cup after cup of hot tea, until my head cleared. Only then did I notice the bells ringing noon. Odd, surely it had to be almost sunset by now. But no, the sun hung high in the sky, a blurred disc behind a veil of clouds. Nothing had changed in this room—not the elegant furnishings, nor the scent of roses and autumn wildflowers—and yet, the taint of death had invaded here, as well.

  I wish Aidrean were here.

  But he was not. He was already in Awveline City, by my command, searching for Maeve Ní Cadhla’s murderer.

  My hand fumbled for the bell—I thought Breandan might spare an hour from his work, and I badly wanted his company. For once, his inattention to state matters would prove a relief. The movement dislodged an envelope left upon the table. I saw Breandan’s handwriting and my name. I snatched it up.

  Áine, my love. Do not be surprised by my seeming disappearance today. If all goes well with my experiment, you will see the firmest, finest proof of my long research within the week …

  I hardly comprehended the rest of his letter. Something about the roads of time, of braving the perils before all the other scientists. Of gratitude. Of love. I knew not what else, because I dropped the letter onto the floor and raced toward the windows. Only now did I remember his talking about the appearance of new time fractures between Awveline City and Osraighe, and the last fine day of the year.

  His balloon, I thought. It was large enough to carry his machine.

  “Breandan!”

  I flung open the windows. The golden towers and spires of Cill Cannig spread out before me, below a green garden bordered by summer roses. My gaze took that all in, then snapped upward to the skies. Yes, there, between the tallest towers was an expanse of gray clouds. And against that expanse, a bright red sphere, glorious and huge.

  Already the sphere was shrinking as the balloon climbed higher into the skies. I could not move, could hardly breathe. Higher. Higher. Now the sphere was little more than a dot, wreathed in clouds and nearly invisible, and yet I could not look away.

  Breandan, I hope—

  The dot vanished. A bright flare of fire burst out, smearing my vision. I blinked.

  The skies were empty. In the distance a plume of smoke rose up from the hills.

  * * *

  There is little to tell about the next few weeks—or rather, very little of those weeks remains true.

  That sounds mad, I know. Let me attempt to explain.

  It took several days to recover all the wreckage from Breandan’s balloon. The fall had shattered the carriage into pieces, which were strewn over the countryside. From what the Queen’s Constabulary could determine, the fire came first, then the explosion of the oxygen tanks. Nothing remained of Breandan’s golden octopus but a charred ruin. And of Breandan himself, nothing at all.

  The Constabulary and Garda searched for ten days; they found no sign of body or bones.

  That night I called for two bottles of wine and dismissed all my servants early. I drank until the fire burned low and cold nipped at my skin through the layers of my woolen robes. Once, around midnight, I nearly summoned my secretary, so that he might send a telegraph to Aidrean Ó Deághaidh. But that, I knew, would have been a terrible mistake. Aidrean would refuse to abandon his murder investigation simply to comfort me. He had his pride, and his sense of duty.

  As had I.

  And so I left off drinking and retreated to bed, where I fell into a restless slumber. My dreams consisted of scattered images of the past five years—of my first interview with Aidrean Ó Deághaidh, of the golden octopus and its leavings of iron dust, of Breandan’s face, illuminated with joy as he placed the miniature balloon into his new gigantic machine. Of Lord Ó Cadhla, as limp as a puppet, after hearing of his daughter’s brutal murder.

  I woke just before dawn to the rattle of wind against my windows. It was a cold gray October morning. The skies wept with rain. One of the maids had left a window partially open, and a current of air blew through the room, carrying with it the scent of moldering leaves. My head aching from the wine, I stumbled toward the window to shut it. I paused and blinked to clear my vision. Below me, Cill Cannig looked as it always did in autumn. Copper-brown leaves whirled about. The trees stood stark and black against the dull gray skies. All around, I had the sense of a world, dying, dying into winter.

  (Though all our gods and saints taught us that resurrection was our right.)

  Now. I have attempted to describe in writing the next moments several times over. None of them fit what I remember. Though “remember” itself is a tenuous concept.

  So. Let me just tell the story.

  It was a cold, wet October dawn. I was standing by the window, as I said. This early in the day, the world seemed empty of human life, except for a few curls of smoke rising from a nearby chimney. And I, I was wishing I could undo parts of the last few weeks. Or months. Or years.

  Then, of a sudden, a wrenching pain took me. My vision wavered and blurred. The wine, I thought confusedly, gripping the windowsill to keep my balance.

  But it was not the wine. By will alone, I stared until my stomach calmed and the landscape steadied before me. It was an ordinary dawn, with smudges of saffron and indigo against the dull dark sky, the thin scarlet line running across the horizon. Ordinary, but unsettled, as though an earthquake shook my perception. I stared harder. There, in the distance, the clouds roiled. Again my stomach lurched, as though I stood aboard a plunging airship. The clouds narrowed into a funnel that raced toward me.…

  Hours later, I came to, lying on the floor of my bedchamber. All I could remember was a terrible dream about the world tipping into chaos. A bruise over my left eye told me I’d fallen, but when my maid arrived, they could not remember anything of that eerie dawn. Indeed, they had difficulty pinning down memories of the previous day or even the week before.

  More strangeness followed. Lord Ó Cadhla appeared at midmorning to report a peculiar incident. Commander Aidrean Ó Deághaidh had collapsed in Awveline City in a fit of madness. Of course the Garda there had taken custody of the man, and had him sequestered at once in Aonach Sanitarium, but it was odd that neither I nor Lord Ó Cadhla could remember why I had sent him away from Court.

  If I had.

  Part of me remembered a terrible tragedy, but the details refused to come into focus. Another part remembered a different tragedy, but that one too eluded remembrance. As the days melted away, I stopped struggling to recall anything from the past six months. It was enough to ensure that Commander Ó Deághaidh received the best care, and to plan his eventual return to the Queen’s Constabulary. (Though, to be sure, the doctors at Aonach Sanitarium were not sanguine.)

  Those were the days of confusion, as I called them.

  Now to explain how I remembered what had never been.

  (Or rather it had been. Once. In a different world.)

  It was a bright, cold November day. For once, I had an hour of leisure from my duties. A restlessness overtook me, and so, trailed by my guards, I wandered far from my usual paths, away from the public galleries and audience halls, through a series of ever-narrower corridors into an unused wing of the palace, and to a pair of high metal doors, with a heavy bar across them. My curiosity piqued, I ordered my guards to remove the bar. Leaving them behind, I entered the vast chamber that lay beyond.

  Inside, it was dark and empty. A puff of stale air met my face, laden with the scent of something old and forgotten. Memory pricked at me.

  We had lately added electric illumination to the palace. I pressed the switch, and light flooded the room.

  It was empty—a cavern filled with dust and shadows. But my skin itched, a
nd I took another few steps forward. My first impression was not entirely correct. Off to one side, empty shelves stretched from floor to ceiling. And there, in the nearest corner, a few scraps of crumpled paper, also coated with dust, were scattered about, as though someone had tossed them aside years before. Ahead of me, however, the room stretched unimpeded by any obstacles. It was amazing, I thought, that such an enormous space could exist within Cill Cannig without me knowing it.…

  It was then I saw a pale square of light, as though someone had focused a lantern onto the tiled floor. I bent down to inspect it.

  The air shimmered. Startled, I plucked back my hand.

  And stopped.

  There, in the center of that patch of light, lay a miniature balloon and a pile of loose papers. The balloon had once been an exquisite work of art, I saw at once, constructed of gold and silver and set with tiny ruby and emerald jewels on the jet-black basket and over the perfect red sphere of the balloon itself. But the wires connecting the balloon to its basket were bent, and the carriage itself was misshapen, as though someone had set the object too close to a hot fire.

  I set the balloon aside and took up the papers, which were even stranger. They looked as though they had been sewn into a book, but the edges near the binding were torn, and the rest had turned brown, obscuring the rows and rows of neat handwriting. Curious, I picked up the top page.

  June 18th, 1900. Cill Cannig, Osraighe. To Áine Lasairíona Devereaux, Queen of Éire, and my patron and benefactress in these investigations into the nature of the future …

  An electric shock traveled through me. I snatched up another page. Here were formulas and schematics for a strange machine, one that resembled nothing I had ever seen before.

  Except I had.

  I read on, with each paragraph offering another of those electric shocks. The pages were from a journal, written by a scientist detailing his research. It was all fantastic, and yet, not entirely so. As I read about balloons and time travel, about batteries and energy sources based upon work from scientists in Mexica and the Dietsch Empire, I recognized terms from my father’s discourses about philosophy, about a certain young scientist with theories about time fractures and travel between the present and the future.…

  Time fractures.

  I released a long-held breath.

  And remembered.

  Breandan. Breandan, what have you done?

  Except I knew. Or thought I knew.

  My hands shook as I set aside the paper. I glanced upward to the darkened ceiling, half expecting a rain of papers to descend upon me, describing an unknown past and future. Memory pricked at my brain, reminding me of days and months I had forgotten.

  (Forgot. Or never lived.)

  I took up a second page from the middle of the set. Glanced over a description of a failed experiment. Once more the name Breandan Ó Cuilinn made my brain ache with half-remembered events. He had demonstrated a machine to my father. That much I was certain. But the rest … a balloon, a diary of experiments conducted here, at Cill Cannig?

  I took the balloon and the papers back to my private chambers. It was strange, but their presence gave me a stability I lacked and had longed for this past month. Over the next few weeks, I compared Breandan’s journals against papers from other nations and other universities concerning recent findings about time fractures. I also pored over newspapers, searching for more clues about inconsistencies in present times. The more I investigated, the more I remembered from that other time, that other past. Someone had closed the fractures over Osraighe and Awveline City. Murders were undone, the past rewritten. Because of that, Lord Ó Cadhla’s daughter lived, and Breandan had died.

  (Perhaps. Or if he lived, it was in a different time. In a different world from the Éire I knew.)

  And what if I could travel into the past, forbid Breandan to make his fateful journey? Would he listen to me, a stranger? Or would he nevertheless press onward, to be the first of all scientists to breach the walls of time?

  He would go. No matter what the risk.

  I knew that because he had done so already. He had launched himself forward to a future that had vanished. No, not vanished. According to the many treatises I had read, his future had jumped to a different path, severed from mine.

  Now I understood the choices my father had faced when my mother died. It was not merely an acceptance of death. It was the knowledge that our duties and our path lay with Éire, not with any other person who happened to share our lives.

  I picked up the miniature balloon and ran my fingers over its delicate tracery of wires, over the perfect sphere, now marred and blunted by its impossible passage through time. I would keep it, and its companion record of the vanished past. Ah, but that was all.

  Wherever you are, Breandan Ó Cuilinn, I thought. Wherever you travel. Fare thee well.

  A FLIGHT OF NUMBERS FANTASTIQUE STRANGE

  SEPTEMBER 1902

  Like every other visitation room in Aonach Sanitarium—and Síomón Madóc knew them all—this one was painfully bare. No chairs. No carpet. The plaster walls scrubbed clean of any character, their blank expanse interrupted only by a single metal door and a row of narrow windows. In spite of the brilliant sunlight, a rare thing this September day, the air felt chilled, as though the thick glass had leached away the sun’s vitality, and a faint astringent smell lingered, a hospital smell that Síomón associated with having his tonsils removed when he was twelve. He shivered and wished he had kept his frock coat with him.

  Across the room, his sister sat cross-legged on the floor, her gaze fixed upon a corner of the ceiling. “141955329,” she said. “Times two. Exponent 25267. Add one.”

  Gwen spoke slowly, enunciating each syllable with painful care. Even so, her voice sounded furry—a side effect of the drugs, Síomón knew.

  “1031980281. Times two. Exponent 25625. Subtract one.” She paused a heartbeat and her normally tense mouth relaxed, as if savoring the number, before she started the next.

  The bleating of a motorcar horn filtered through the windows from the avenues bordering the sanitarium grounds. Síomón rubbed his forehead, trying to massage away an incipient headache. When his sister had first begun these litanies, he had immediately recognized the numbers for simple primes. As the months and years passed, however, the numbers had swelled to fantastical lengths, surpassing all the known tables. Síomón could only guess, but he suspected these were primes as well.

  Gwen Madóc. Twenty-three. Her age too was a prime number, as was his.

  Sit quietly with her, the doctors had advised. Your presence serves to heal.

  He saw no sign of it, however. Four years had passed since Gwen first came to this sanitarium in Awveline City. Four years of weekly visits, in between his studies at the university. He could barely remember Gwen outside this whitewashed room, where even the floors were sanded to eliminate splinters. Formerly, they had allowed him a stool, but one day his sister had seized the stool and flung it at Síomón’s head.

  “1031980281. Times two exponent 25625 add one, Síomón. Add one.”

  Síomón snapped up his head. Had she really said his name?

  “353665707. Times two. 25814. Minus 1. 353665707*225814+1. 1958349*231415–1. 1958349*231415+1.”

  The numbers poured out so fast that Síomón could barely distinguish between them.

  “1958349 times two exponent—”

  Gwen broke off, her face stricken as she groped for the next number. A moment’s hush followed, so profound Síomón could almost hear the sunlight beating against the windows.

  “Gwen?” he whispered, hoping she might hear him today.

  His sister’s eyes went blank, and she began to rock back and forth, keening. That too fit the pattern of their visits—numbers, confusion, grief, then anger.

  Still keening, Gwen lifted her hands toward the barred windows, which cast blue shadows over the floor. In the sunlight, the silvery scars on her wrists and palms stood out against her pale skin. There wa
s a theory associating particular numbers with certain colors. So far there were no practical applications, but several recent papers from Lîvod University in Eastern Europe claimed to support the theory—

  Without warning, Gwen launched herself at Síomón. They crashed against the wall and rolled over, he grappling for her wrists while she tore at his face with her fingernails, shrieking, “Síomón Síomón Síomón Síomón.”

  The door banged open, and five attendants burst into the room. Four of them dragged Gwen away. The fifth helped Síomón to his feet, murmuring in concern, “You’ve taken a cut, sir.”

  He dabbed at Síomón’s forehead with a cloth, but Síomón pushed the man’s hand away. “It’s nothing. Just a scratch. No need to trouble yourself about me.”

  “It’s no trouble at all, sir.”

  Meanwhile, Gwen shrieked and cursed and sobbed as the other attendants wrestled her into submission. Her pale blonde hair fell in snarls over her face, ugly red blotches stained her cheeks, and her mouth looked swollen. Síomón could not tell if one of the attendants had struck her, or if she had injured herself in the fight.

  I was right here. I should have heard a slap.

  Before Síomón could say anything, the four attendants bundled Gwen out the door. The remaining man gave one last dab to Síomón’s forehead before he too departed. Síomón drew a long breath. He flexed his hands, which ached as though he’d been clenching them.

  “Mr. Madóc.”

  Doctor Loisg stood in the doorway. Unlike the other doctors, he wore a plain tweed suit and not the white jacket they so often favored. His placid gaze took in Síomón’s bleeding forehead and rumpled clothes. “A difficult session,” he observed. “But not unexpected.”

 

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