by Anthology
I taxied the shuttle up to an unloading ramp before the airport’s terminal building and I killed the drive.
“Harry,” I said, “if it weren’t that their ships are so outlandishly stubby and their buildings so outflung, we might well be on Earth!”
“I agree, Captain. Strange, though, that they’re not mobbing us. They couldn’t take this delta-winged job for one of their ships!”
It was strange.
I looked up at the observation ramp’s occupants—people who except for their bizarre dress might well be of Earth—and saw no curiosity in the eyes that sometimes swept across our position.
“Be that as it may, Harry, we certainly should cause a stir in these pressure suits. Let’s go!”
We walked up to a dour-looking individual at a counter at the ramp’s end. Clearing my throat, I said rather inanely, “Hello!”—but what does one say to an extrasolarian?
I realized then that my voice seemed thunderous, that the only other sounds came from a distance: the city’s noise, the atmosphere ships’ engines on the horizon—
The Centaurian ignored us.
I looked at the atmosphere ships in the clear blue sky, at the Centaurians on the ramp who appeared to be conversing—and there was no sound from those planes, no sound from the people!
“It’s impossible,” Harry said. “The atmosphere’s nearly Earth-normal. It should be—well, damn it, it is as sound-conductive; we’re talking, aren’t we?”
I looked up at the Centaurians again. They were looking excitedly westward. Some turned to companions. Mouths opened and closed to form words we could not hear. Wide eyes lowered, following something I could not see. Sick inside, I turned to Albrecht and read confirmation in his drawn, blanched face.
“Captain,” he said, “I suspected that we might find something like this when we first came out of hyperspace and the big sleep. The recorders showed we’d exceeded light-speed in normal space-time just after the transition. Einstein theorized that time would not pass as swiftly to those approaching light-speed. We could safely exceed that speed in hyperspace but should never have done so in normal space-time. Beyond light-speed time must conversely accelerate!
“These people haven’t seen us yet. They certainly just observed our landing. As we suspected, they probably do have speech and radio—but we can’t pick up either. We’re seconds ahead of them in time and we can’t pick up from the past sounds of nearby origin or nearby signals radiated at light-speed. They’ll see and hear us soon, but we’ll never receive an answer from them! Our questions will come to them in their future but we can never pick answers from their past!”
“Let’s go, Harry,” I said quickly.
“Where?” he asked. “Where can we ever go that will be an improvement over this?” He was resigned.
“Back into space,” I said. “Back to circle this system at a near-light-speed. The computers should be able to determine how long and how slow we’ll have to fly to cancel this out. If not, we are truly and forever lost!”
LOVE AND GLASS
Michael Scott Bricker
The creature held The Time Traveler’s lungs as the incisions healed beneath the touch of the thing’s organic machines. Like this being, the Morlocks had been children of technology, but they had been fumbling, unsophisticated monsters, so unlike the graceful soul who shared his company at the end of the world. Curiosity had driven The Time Traveler forward, beyond England and the old wars, beyond the Morlocks and his dear, sweet Weena, beyond that desolate beach with its scuttling crabs, and he found himself here, teetering at the edge of human existence under a dying umber sun. It had been foolish to come so far, but his successes had coloured his judgment, such that he had never considered that the machine might cease to function within the confines of some distant future. This business of traveling within the fourth dimension had gifted The Time Traveler with a godlike power, but with it came the ease associated with omnipotence. In Weena’s world, his intelligence had been supreme. Now, in this alien land of ice and desolation, he was a prisoner, and his time machine lay frozen in the sand, cold and dead as the Earth itself.
He had watched from his machine as the days grew longer, and as the rotation of the planet slowed, complex life vanished in favour of that which suited a dying world. Those monstrous crabs had ruled the beach during the twilight years of Earth, when the fat and feeble sun crept across the sky in century-long arcs, but life feeds upon life, and when that sun could no longer support most of the lingering vegetation, the crabs succumbed, leaving only the dull lichen that clung to rocks along the seashore. Those rocks had grown smooth and mirrored from eons of pounding surf, but eventually even the sea lay still, disturbed only by a rare breeze; the final breaths of Earth against its ice-caked surface. It had snowed here before The Time Traveler moved on for the last time, and those delicate flakes had reminded him of home, and of how, so long before, this dim, dying land, had been the realm of Queen Victoria.
Without widespread vegetation, the oxygen started to go, yet The Time Traveler moved forward again, gasping for air as pinpoint stars blossomed through the eternal twilight above. Even as he adjusted the levers of the time machine, frantically attempting to reverse his journey as his breaths grew dangerously short, he admired the beach, and how a group of ice crystals had grown into towers and arches, like a city of glass; empty, silent, and alone. The Time Traveler wondered if he had lost his reason, but when the machine began to fail, all his thoughts were upon his beautiful monstrosity of glass and steel. The machine had become his child, and although he loathed technology, he realized that he was a product of the machine as surely as the machine had been a product of his own mind. The Morlocks were the offspring of the science harnessed here, by the man who might conceivably have fathered them all.
The Time Traveler climbed from the machine as it took its place in the dying Earth, and he kissed its cold surface, then said goodbye to the friend that had sealed his fate. He first saw the creature, then, scurrying along the beach with insect-like precision, and against the endless dusk, the thing glowed with a weird internal energy. Everything about the creature looked exaggerated, from its long triple jointed limbs to its colourless saucer eyes to the nose that dominated its placid face. It stopped, and they shared a moment of mutual wonderment. The Time Traveler’s memories grew fuzzy after that. There had been the electric touch of its spidery fingers, the cool injections, and those tiny machines, crawling over his body like a cloud of miniature crabs. He knew that his lungs would be insufficient in such a world, and just as he was pondering his death by suffocation, or by the hands of that improbable creature, he watched, numb and motionless, as his glistening lungs were pulled from the cavern of his chest. There had been no blood spilled, no pain; only vague nightmares come alive. Something warm and alive took the place of his lungs, and it crawled within him and nested at the base of his throat, where it offered him life in exchange for the shelter of his ruined body.
He named the creature “George” in honor of the old English kings, and like those men of the primitive world, he reigned supreme, like a god who embodied all living things. When he straightened those jointed limbs, George stood a full three meters tall and resembled a shimmering willow tree. That inner light of his had been more than the glow of life, The Time Traveler learned, and after those tiny mechanical crabs had coated his body with a new rubbery layer of skin, he glowed as well. That new flesh kept him warm even in a world that had been forsaken by an aged sun, and as the Earth plunged into a deeper slumber, the two of them glowed more brightly, and they shared not only a physical warmth, but a warmth of understanding.
The Time Traveler thought of himself as a pet, at first. George had kept him alive, he had no doubt of that, and the creature that had terrified him became his salvation. The yellow pills he swallowed kept him strong and freed him from hunger, and George had fashioned a cave of stone and ice for them with a machine that apparently reorganized matter with sound. Through all this, they communicated wit
h actions rather than words, and The Time Traveler wondered whether George could speak at all, and if there were more of its kind. If this world had been the creature’s kingdom, then his was an empty reign, and perhaps, The Time Traveler imagined, George had been the last intelligent being on Earth until the time machine had provided him with an ancient ancestor. As for The Time Traveler’s own intelligence, he felt humbled by the miracles of George’s science, such that his machine, though dead and powerless, was the only thing that prevented him from feeling, at best, like a glorified ape.
The Eloi and the Morlocks had been products of distant centuries, though in most ways, even the English, with all their arrogance and murderous imperialism, had been more advanced. Eventually, The Time Traveler imagined that the species had dwindled with its ebbing intellectual abilities, leaving only those monstrous crabs on the beach. The Earth had been dying since Weena’s time, and George, being the magnificent creature that it was, seemed like an outsider in this place. The Time Traveler tried to explain his machine to George, and although his language was lost on the creature, his love came across, and George wept, bleeding mercuric tears from the bowls of its eyes. This was a creature of heart as well as intelligence, and when The Time Traveler asked him whether he was the last of his kind, George touched his shoulder, and within that touch passed understanding.
They were two of a kind.
The true meaning of George’s communication lay encased in ice, no more than one hundred meters from where the time machine had died. Those castles of ice along the beach had apparently grown naturally, but George climbed inside, and his lofty frame was dwarfed by spectacular crystal spires. The creature caressed those crystalline structures as The Time Traveler had caressed his machine, and then they shared the warmth of that castle so that the Englishman would know, at last, what George was. This was no structure of ice, but of a soft, cool glass, and it had carried George here, to the end of the Earth.
Although George had originated from an era far in advance of the old warring Earth, the creature had been unable to repair his machine, because the death of the planet signaled the death of machines as well. It had something to do with shifting magnetic fields, George explained through the touch of flesh and glass, and even in one so advanced as this creature, curiosity had been his undoing. They were, indeed, two of a kind, though The Time Traveler still felt the sting of his own inferiority, particularly in the size and depth of his own heart.
Their world had consisted of the two of them, but after a new machine sputtered and melted into the frozen sand, George had a fresh life to save, and the Englishman helped as much as he could, given his knowledge of Nineteenth Century medicine. The stranger looked more conventional to The Time Traveler than George had, and, in fact, it resembled a Morlock. Its machine looked uncomfortably like his own, and The Time Traveler wondered what the Morlocks might have learned while they had held his invention within the white sphinx.
They pulled the Morlock from its machine, and it struggled as The Time Traveler had, but then George put the tiny crabs to work, and before long the creature had a new pair of lungs. There was something wrong behind its yellow eyes, and the creature gasped and tore at its chest, but before George could make things right, the Morlock convulsed, then stopped moving. They tried to get its heart pumping again, and even made use of The Time Traveler’s archaic notions of medicine, but in the end the Morlock suffered the same fate as his machine. Earlier in his journey, The Time Traveler might have killed such a creature with little remorse, but George had taught him something of the value of life, and so they burned a hole in the sand for their new companion.
The Time Traveler knew that George had done what he could for the Morlock, and that sometimes even the efforts of such an advanced being could prove inadequate. The creature was only human, after all, a fact that aggravated even The Time Traveler, at first, despite his deep respect for the theories of Darwin. The Morlocks had adapted to a subterranean existence, just as George’s people had adapted to a future Earth. A renaissance of thought had flowered after the docile Eloi had fashioned their intellectual wasteland, and The Time Traveler could imagine George’s kind building upon the ruins of those who had come before, burying England and Eloi alike beneath a new technology that operated hand in hand with love.
They said their good-byes to the creature who they never knew, and then they moved on, stopping to watch the horizon.
The sun was growing larger.
Even the lichen that had clung to the rocks before it, too, had died, had carried the scent of living things, but here, there was nothing but the scent of The Time Traveler himself, and of George, a creature who kept himself clean with the aid of small metallic box. This was just another facet of the creature’s behavior that assured The Time Traveler’s feelings of inferiority. He was bound to the old ways of doing things, but eventually he relented to the use of George’s device, and learned that the metallic box was not only an efficient tool, but pleasurable as well. As for more private matters, The Time Traveler continued to perform in the traditional manner, and he would adjourn to a secluded area of the beach when nature called.
Life might have gone on like this for some time had it not been for the arrival of other time travelers. It seemed that the closer that they drew to the death of the Earth, the more often that new explorers would arrive. George and the Englishmen would wait on the beach, and in the distance there might be a flash or a puff of smoke, followed by devices that, at times, could scarcely be recognized as time machines at all. There were castles of glass and metallic cubes, as well as ridiculous spidery contraptions and organic machines that gasped for a final breath just as their masters had done upon arriving in this land of shattered dreams. George was able to save some of The Time Travelers, but others resisted his administrations as madness overtook them, then they escaped across the surface of the sea, only to be swallowed as the ice gave way. Their forms varied just as their machines had, and the Englishman found it remarkable how the human race would evolve through the Eons. He doubted that even Darwin himself could have imagined such fanciful creatures, and the beach became a bestiary of humankind.
This once desolate world grew populated not only with the creatures who George had saved, but with many who survived without his help. It seemed that the Englishman was, by far, the most primitive human of the dying Earth, and despite the realization that he had invented time travel prior to these other creatures, he realized that he would never survive without George’s help. This fact also set him apart from the other creatures, as those who had survived initially, with or without George, lived independently. Many of them were occupied with their machines, but their efforts to get them operational accomplished nothing. The Englishmen could read fear and frustration upon their faces, and a few of the creatures died of exposure. George would peel their frozen bodies from their machines then bury them beneath the ice. This world became a cemetery world, and George and the Englishman were the final pallbearers for the glories of humankind.
The Time Traveler thought it strange that these beasts of future Earth were not more like George. While generosity was a common trait, selfishness was more universal when matters of life and death were involved. It was this that made these creatures human, for better or worse, and George and the Englishman found themselves alone despite the influx of new arrivals. While The Time Traveler, being of primitive stock, needed George to survive, the others had their own methods of providing themselves with food, clothing, and shelter. At times, their methods seemed cryptic, or worse, barbaric. This became particularly apparent upon the arrival of a creature that The Time Traveler would later call the “Queen of Hearts.”
While the Englishman had read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, he had not truly come to appreciate the author’s imagination until his final journey had brought him here. This was a world that might have sprung from the pages of a children’s book, albeit a nightmarish one, or perhaps more appropriately, from the tales of Edgar All
en Poe. Before the others had arrived, The Time Traveler had begun to find a certain odd beauty within the desolation, but later, as the beach filled with all manner of fantastic creatures, he was reminded of the bustling streets of London, and of what he had once thought of as the “modern world.” It had been a city of crimes and cruelties, and he had hoped to escape into better times, only to find Morlocks, or worse, a creature who literally stole human hearts.
The Queen of Hearts was no Morlock, but a survivor that apparently cannibalized organs in order to keep itself alive. It bore no resemblance to any of Lewis Carroll’s characters beyond its odd appearance, and even that surpassed the most perverse fancies of any author. The Queen had great, crystal wings that hung motionless from its scaly back, and sharp claws like nutcrackers. Its skin appeared to be transparent, and within its massive chest all those stolen organs could be seen, pumping and quivering and digesting the bones of those who had gotten in its way. The Englishman had witnessed those executions, and while the primitive urge to fight boiled within The Time Traveler, George told him in so many ways that he needed to be strong, and that there were other arts to master than those of hostility.
The attacks continued, and the new inhabitants of Earth fell victim, in one way or another, to the Queen. In its own technologically barbaric manner, this monster was trying to survive, and The Time Traveler imagined a future populated with such creatures, when morality would be set aside to make way for matters of survival. The others did fight back as the Queen added their mass to its own, but aside from a few minor victories, the Earth, ever hopeless, became more so for those who struggled for a new glimpse of the old world. It was entirely possible that the Queen was best suited for life here, and the Englishman imagined that despite the battles and brutalities of his own time, there would be no colder land than that which they inhabited, here, under that ailing sun.