by Anthology
After the first few feet I had no use for the lamp. My eyes grew accustomed to the dark, and I saw that shafts and streaks of light broke through gaps in the ruin overhead. Presently I found a hard floor under my feet, and then I came out into a room which was like a wedge—the ceiling fallen in one mass which hung diagonally between the wall over my head and the floor about twenty feet before me. Sunlight seeped in through a crevice to the left, striking on the wall and filling the whole place with a kind of diffuse glow. In that glow I saw footprints in the thick dust which covered the floor, and the table to which they led.
They were his footprints, of course. On that table he had found the knife. I stepped out of the doorway where I had been standing, an odd feeling of familiarity growing in me. I crossed the floor to the table. It had been covered with heavy glass, which lay in shreds on the dusty bronze. I could see the marks of his fingers in the dust where he had moved the broken glass aside. And I could see the outline of the knife, as sharp in the unstirred dust as it was when he picked it up in his gnarled old fingers thirteen years—or was it thirteen minutes?—before.
The crack of light was widening as the sun moved; the place grew brighter. I brushed the dust away from the table top. It was heavy bronze; it told me nothing. And then, turning, I saw the opposite wall and the frieze in low relief which ran above the door—
I don’t like the impossible. I don’t like paradox. I sit here, toiling over my correlations—they have promised a machine by spring which will perform them for us more quickly and in far more detail than we have ever attempted—and when I grow tired I let my head slip down on my hands, and I dream of a day when I was a child. I dream of an old man and a knife—and murder.
I had had my chance. Others, more experienced and possibly more capable than I, followed me. The entire ruin was excavated, with the most meticulous attention to technique, down to bedrock. And I . . . I was sent back to my correlations and my trait tables, to work up the data which other men would presently send me. Because strive as they will, they can find no other explanation than the one which—to me—seems obvious. The answer which is no answer—
You can go into the Toynbee Museum now, today, and see the knife in a guarded case, in the anteroom of the main exhibit hall. In the course of three hundred years that case will have been replaced by a bronze table and a cover of heavy glass. Bombs will fall, the building will crumble in ruins, and the knife will still be there. Dust will cover the ruins, and one day a gnarled old man in shabby clothes will shovel it away and creep inside. He will find the knife and carry it away. Later a younger man will come—and then others—many others, men and women both. And all the while, on the granite lintel above the door to the room where the knife is kept, will be the inscription:
WALTER TOYNBEE
1962—2035
My grandfather brought the knife back from the future. He died. It was placed in the museum named for him. It lay there for three hundred years, while the human race went mad trying to solve its secret—while all civilization was turned upside down in the starch for something which never existed!
He found it in the museum where it had always been. He carried it back through time, and it was placed in that museum. It lay there until he came and found it, and carried it back through time—
It was a simple pattern—as simple as ever was. Must we think only in terms of a beginning and an end? Cannot a thing—even a person—exist in a closed cycle without beginning or end? Appearing to us now, at this level of our time thread, accompanying us down its extension into our future, then vanishing from our stream and circling back to the point where it appeared? Can’t you imagine that?
I thought I could. I thought it was a paradox—no more—as simple to explain as ever was. I was wrong, of course, and they are right.
The knife old Walter Toynbee brought back from the museum built in his honor, to house his knife, was perfect—worn, dirty, but perfect. A little notch was sawed in the back of its translucent blue blade—sawed with a diamond saw, to provide the chemist and the physicists with the samples they needed to test its properties. That notch is still in its blade as it lies out there in the museum case—it will be there for the next three hundred years, or until the raids come and the museum falls in ruins. Until an old man comes out of the past to find it—
The knife old Walter Toynbee will find there in our future will have that notch. The knife he brought back to me thirty years ago had no notch in it. Somewhere the circle must have a beginning. Somewhere it must have an end—but where, and how? How was this knife created, out of a strange blue metal, and a strange, black, indurated wood, when its existence has no beginning or end? How can the circle be broken? I wish I knew. I might not dream of murder then. I might find logic and purpose in the future instead of chaos—instead of impossible worlds that never were.
AS TIME GOES BY
Tanith Lee
We had half a crew in here two twenties ago, swore they passed the Napoleon, coming up into the Parameter. But you know what spacers are, particularly when they’re in a Static Zone. Two-thousand-plus time streams colliding in space, and a white ironex wheel, fragile as a leaf, spinning round at the center of it all. You’re bound to get time-ghosts, and superstitions of all sorts.
The wheel here at Tempi was the first way station ever created, in the first Parameter they ever hit when they finally figured how Time operates out in deep space. You’ll know most, if not all of it, of course. How every star system functions in a different time sphere, everything out of kilter with everything else, and that the universe is composed of a million strands of time, of which only two thousand have as yet been definitely charted and made navigable. And you know too that Tempi, and her sister Zones—what they jokingly call thewhite holes in space—are the safe houses where time is, forever and always, itself at a stop. And that, though wheelers reckon in twenty-hour units, and though, like anywhere else, we have a jargon of past, present and future—yestertwenty, today, tomorrow—temporal stasis actually obtains all around a wheel. We move all right, but over the face of a frozen clock, over the face of a clock without any hands at all. Which means that whatever ship blows in, out of whichever of those two-thousand-odd time continuums, can realign here, or in another of the white holes, docked against a white ironex wheel, having come back, as it were, to square one. It’s here they wipe the slate clean before flying out again into chaos. A tract of firm ground in the boiling seas. In scientific terms: a Parameter, one constant sphere in a differential Infinity. In common parlance, just another way of keeping sane.
But sanity, like time, is relative. As I say, Tempi has its share of “ghosts”; like the Lyran wildflowers that are sometimes supposed to manifest on the Sixth Level. Not that I ever saw those. I did see the Napoleon, once.
It was back in the twenties when they still had that bar here on the Third Level—Rouelle Etoile, Star Alley. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It owed quite a lot to early-twentieth-century celluloid, you know those old movies, like thin acidulous slices of lemon. The Rouelle had that square-shouldered furniture, and the glass chunk ashtrays. The walls had rose and black satin poured down them. And some of the women would get out of their coveralls, and come into the Rouelle with satin poured down them too, and those long, dark scarlet nails and those long earrings like chandeliers. There was also a chandelier in the roof. You should have seen it. Like ice on fire. And under the chandelier there was a real piano, and a real pianist, a Sirtian, blue as coal, with the face of a prince, and hands like sea waves. The sounds that came out of the piano were the shape and color of the blades of light snowing off the chandelier. You should have seen that chandelier.
But I was telling you about the time I saw the Napoleon.
I was up on the Fourth Walk, one level over the Rouelle Etoile, where you can watch the ship explode in out of nothing, leaving the Warp Lanes at zero 50. Space was blind-clear as a pool of ink, without stars obviously, since you never see stars inside a Parameter. Inco
ming traffic was listed as over for that twenty. When I saw this great bottlenose dolphin surging up out of nowhere, I started to run for the Alert panel. Then something made me look back when I was two thirds along the gantry. And the ship just wasn’t there anymore.
I’m not given to hallucinations, and besides, I have a pretty good Recall. I remember sitting down on the gantry, and putting that ship together again on the blackboard of my mind, and taking a hard long look at her. And I realized, inside a second, she couldn’t be any crate left on the listings. The numerals and date-codings, you see, were Cycles out—about nineteen years or more, by Confederation reckoning. With the time-tangle out here, every code gets changed once every Cycle. Naturally, there’s the occasional tin can comes careening out of Warp, with its dating markers legally a few points overdue. But they’re little ships, freelance dippers nobody makes much fuss over. This was a big ship, a cool, pale giant. She had the old-fashioned diesel-pod at her stern too, burning like a ruby. But there was something else. My Recall was showing me enough to know her markings weren’t just out of date, they were wrong. And she had a device. Anyone who’s ever heard of the Trade War knows about the pirate ships, and the blazons they used to carry. Quite a few people know what the device of the Napoleon was: an eagle over a sunburst. And that’s precisely what this ship had on her bow.
I didn’t report anything. Just hinted around, you know the kind of thing. Then I began to get comparison sightings, and there were quite a lot. To my knowledge, nobody’s ever come face to face with Day Curtis himself. Except, there is one story.
Curtis had a reputation all his own, something of a legend going for him, even before Napoleon disappeared with almost all hands. The Trade War had broken the Confederation in three neat pieces, and there were plenty of captains running through the guns on all three sides, taking cargo to wherever it was meant, or not meant, to go, for a suitable fee, and not averse to accumulating extra merchandise if they came across it in the Warp Lanes. Curtis was unique in that he’d hire out to any side at any time, and simultaneously commit acts of piracy against the very side he was running for. The reason he still got paid was he could make Napoleon play games with the time streams and the Warp that are technically impossible, even today. If you could outbid everyone else and buy him, he’d get whatever it was that had to be got to wherever it was it had to go. No matter what was in the way: Sonic barriers, radiation strips, a flotilla of fully armed attack vessels. More than once he split a fleet in two, led one half away through the Warps, now visible and now not, eventually bringing them back by the hand straight into the cannon of the second half who were still waiting for him. He would slip between like a coin through a slot, while they, reacting to pre-primed targets, inadvertently blasted hell out of each other. But you’ll have heard the stories about Curtis and his ship, everyone has.
Tempi Parameter was a truce zone then, because it had to be. There were only two wheels spinning in those days, and everybody needed them, whichever part of the Confederation owned you. There was every kind of craft passing in and out: patrol runners, battle cruisers, destroyers, merchantmen, smugglers and privateers. And the crews knew better than not to keep quiet when they met each other in the corridors, the diners and the bars. With ships diving in and out of time like fish through water, and only a couple of safe places to go between, you bowed to the rule and you left your gun at the entry port. Some of the most notorious desperadoes that ever took to space came through here, time and time again, on their way to and from mayhem. But even in that kind of company, Day Curtis stood out.
A slight dark man, with the somber pallor most spacers get, a type of moon-tan, and those thick-fringed Roman-Byzantine eyes you find in frescoes on Earth. You may have seen news-video of him. There was some, the Cycle Napoleon towed that shelled liner, the Aurigos, through her enemy lines into harbor on Lyra—for the bounty, of course. Or the occasion the entire three segments of the split Confederation each put a price on his head, and most of his brother pirates went out to get him and never got him. He was even finer-made than he looks in those old videos, but the expression was the same. He never joked, he never even smiled. It wasn’t any act, anything he’d lost or become. Whatever it is that smooths the edges of human isolation, that was the item he’d come into life without. His crew treated him like a stone king. They knew he could run the show, and with something extra, a sort of cold genius, and they trusted him to do it. But they hated him in about the same measure as they respected him, which was plenty. He had a tongue like a razor blade. You got cut once, and that was enough. Since he was handsome, women liked him all right, until they learned they couldn’t get anywhere with him. The ones that kept trying were usually sorry. All that being the case, the story, this last story I ever heard about Day Curtis, is probably apocryphal. The man who told it to me didn’t claim it wasn’t.
I heard that last story two years after I saw the Napoleon from the Fourth Walk. I heard it on the twenty that they closed up the Rouelle Etoile. It was the ninth Cycle, and the day after the tempest smashed those fifteen ships to tinder between Sirtis and the Dagon Strip. I can remember it very well, even without Recall. The bar despoiled, naked and hollow, seeming to echo, the way a dying venue does, with all the voices, the music, the colors that have ever existed in it. A team of men were portioning up that huge glissade of a chandelier, lifting it on to dollies, and carrying it away. The piano was long gone, but there were the dim sheer notes of a girl quietly sobbing to herself, somewhere nearby. I never knew the reason; someone on one of those ships, maybe, had belonged to her . . . The man and I were finishing the last flask of Noira brandy, at the counter in the midst of the suspiring desolation. And we grew warm and sad, and he told me the story.
And outside the oval ports, innocent and terrible, the field of space and timelessness hung on the rim of the vignette, a starless winter night.
The Rouelle Etoile was almost deserted, that twenty. There was some big action out at zero 98, and the ships had lifted off like vultures, to join in or to scavenge. The tall marble clock against the wall said nineteen fifteen, but the blue pianist was still rolling the tide of his hands up and down the keys. About four or five customers were sitting around chewing trouble, or playing Shot over on the indigo baize. And in one of the corner booths was Day Curtis. Napoleon was in dock, had come in two twenties before with a hole in her flank, and the crew were going all out to patch her over well enough to take her out into 98 and see what was left worth mopping up. But it didn’t look as if the repairs were going to make it in time, and at eighteen hundred Curtis had walked into the Rouelle with a look like dead lightning in the backs of his eyes. Curtis seldom showed when he was angry, but he could drink like dry sand, and that’s what he was doing, steadily and coldly draining the soul out of the bar, when the woman came in.
She looked late twenties, with hair black as the blackest thing you ever saw, which might be space, or an afterimage of some sun, cropped short across the crown, but growing out into one long free-slung black comma across her neck and shoulders. She had the spacer’s tawny paleness otherwise, and one of the poured dresses that went with the Rouelle, almost the same color as she was. She was off one of the ships that had stayed in dock, an artisan’s shuttle that had no quarrel with anyone in particular, but she walked in as if she’d come on a dare, ready to fight, or to run. She went straight to the bar counter and ordered one of the specialty cocktails, which she drank straight down, not looking at anyone or anything. Then she ordered another, and holding it poised in the long stems of her fingers, she turned and confronted the room. She moved like a dancer, and she had the unique magic which comes with a beauty that surpasses its name, a glamour that doesn’t fit in any niche or under any label. Four or five of the men in the bar were staring at her, but her gaze passed on over them with a raking indifference. She was obviously searching for something and, the impression was, hoping not to find it. Then her eyes reached the corner booth, and Curtis.
I
t’s possible he may have noticed her when she came in, or he may not. But implacable scrutiny, even in a truce zone, is frequently the prologue to trouble. After a second or so, he lifted his head slowly, and looked back at her. Her face didn’t change, but the glass dropped through her fingers and smashed on the polished floor.
For about a quarter of a minute she kept still, but there was a sort of electricity playing all around her, the invisible kind a wire exudes when there’s a storm working up in the stratosphere. Then, she kicked the broken glass lightly out of her way, and she walked very fast and direct, over to Curtis’ table. He’d kept on watching her, they all had, even the Sirtian pianist, though his hands never missed the up and down flow of the piano keys. The woman had the appearance of being capable of anything, up to and including the slinging of a fine-honed stiletto right across the bar into Curtis’ throat. Only a blind man would have ignored her. Maybe not even a blind man.
When she reached the table, the slim hand that had let go the glass flared out like a cobra and slashed Curtis across the face.
“Well,” she said, “you win the bet. What am I supposed to pay you?”
He’d had these one-sided scenes with women before, and supposedly assumed this was only another, one more girl he had forgotten. He said to her, matter-of-factly, “I’m sure you can find your own way out of here.”
“Yes,” she said, “I remember now. You warned me. Last time.”
“I probably warned you you were a fool, too. Either get out of the bar, or I will.”