The Forest of Time - Hugo Nominated Novella

by Michael Flynn

  “You’re showing off, aren’t you, Rudi?”

  “I’ve spent a lifetime noticing details on documents.”

  “But do you see the significance? The inventions came earlier and faster in Kelly’s world. Look how they gush forth after 1870! Why? How could they have been so much more creative? In the early part of the list, many of the same men are mentioned in both columns, so it is not individual genius. Look...” His forefinger searched the first column. “The electrical telegraph was invented, when? In 1875, by Edison. In Kelly’s world, it was invented in the 1830s, by a man named Morse.”

  “The painter?”

  “Apparently the same man. Why didn’t he invent it here? And see what Edison did in Kelly’s world: The electrical light, the moving picture projector, dozens of things we never saw until the 1930s.”

  Knecht pointed to an entry. “Plastics,” he said. “We discovered them first.” He wondered what “first” meant in this context.

  “That is the exception that proves the rule. There are others. Daguerre’s photographic camera, Foucault’s gyroscope. They are the same in both worlds. But overall there is a pattern. Not an occasional marvel, every now and then; but a multitude, every year! By 1920, in Kelly’s world, steamships, heavier-than-air craft, railroads, voice telegraphy with and without wires, horseless carriages, they were old hat. Here, they are still wonders. Or wondered about.”

  Inventions and gadgets, decided Knecht. Those were Vonderberge’s secret passion, and Kelly had described a technological faerieland. No wonder the Kommandant was entranced. Knecht was less in awe, himself. He had seen the proud ranks of the 18th New York mowed down like corn by the Pennsylvaanish machine guns at the Battle of the Raritan. And he had not forgotten what Kelly had written in his notebook: There were bombs that destroyed whole cities.

  Vonderberge sighed and rolled up his list. He tied a cord around it. “It is difficult, Rudi,” he said. “Very difficult. Your General, he only wants to hear about the inventions. He does not wonder why there are so many. Yet, I feel that this is an important question.”

  “Can’t Kelly answer it?”

  “He might. He has come close to it on several occasions; but he is...confused. Ochsenfuss sees to that.”

  Knecht noticed how Vonderberge’s jaw set. The Kommandant’s usual bantering tone was missing.

  Vonderberge pulled a watch from his right pants pocket and studied its face. “It is time for my appointment with Kelly. Why don’t you come with me. I’d like your opinion on something.”

  “On what?”

  “On Kelly.”

  Knecht sat backward on a chair in the corner of the cell, leaning his arms on the back. A cigar was clamped tightly between his teeth. It had gone out, but he had not bothered to relight it. He watched the proceedings between Kelly and Vonderberge. So far, he did not like what he had seen.

  Kelly spoke hesitantly. He seemed distracted and lapsed into frequent, uncomfortable silences. The papers spread out on his table were blank. No new equations. Just doodles of flowers. Roses, they looked like.

  “Think, Kelly,” Vonderberge pleaded. “We were talking of this only yesterday.”

  Kelly pursed his lips and frowned. “Were we? Ja, you’re right. I think we did. I thought it was a dream.”

  “It was not a dream. It was real. You said you thought the Victorian Age was the key. What was the Victorian Age?”

  Kelly looked puzzled. “Victorian Age? Are you sure?”

  “Yes. You mentioned Queen Victoria...”

  “She was never Queen, though.”

  Vonderberge clucked impatiently. “That was in this world,” he said. “In your world it must have been different.”

  “In my world...” It was half a statement, half a question. Kelly closed his eyes, hard. “I have such headaches, these days. It’s hard to remember things. It’s all confused.”

  Vonderberge turned to Knecht. “You see the problem?”

  Knecht removed his cigar. “The problem,” he said judiciously, “is the source of his confusion.”

  Vonderberge turned back to Kelly. “I think we both know who that is.”

  Kelly was losing touch, Knecht thought. That was certain. But was he losing touch with reality, or with fantasy?

  “Wait!” Kelly’s eyes were still closed but his hand shot out and gripped Vonderberge’s wrist. “The Victorian Age. That was the time from the War Between the States to World War I.” He opened his eyes and looked at Vonderberge. “Am I right?”

  Vonderberge threw his hands up. “Tchah! Why are you asking me?”

  Knecht chewed thoughtfully on his cigar. World wars? And they were numbered?

  “What has this ‘Victorian Age’ to do with your world’s inventiveness?”

  Kelly stared at a space in the air between them. He rapped rhythmically on the table with his knuckles. “Don’t push it,” he said. “I might lose the...Yes. I can hear Tom’s voice explaining it.” The eyes were unfocused. Knecht wondered what sort of mind heard voices talking to it. “We were just BS’ing. Sharon, Tom, and...a girl, and I. The subject came up, but in a different context.”

  They waited patiently for Kelly to remember.

  “Critical mass!” he said suddenly. “That was it. The rate at which new ideas are generated depends in part on the accumulation of past ideas. The more there are, the more ways they can be combined and modified. Then, boom,” he gestured with his hands. “An explosion.” He laughed shrilly; sobered instantly. “That’s what happened during the Victorian Age. That’s what’s happening now, but slower.”

  A slow explosion? The idea amused Knecht. “Why slower?” he asked.

  “Because of the barriers! Ideas must circulate freely if they’re to trigger new ones. The velocity of ideas is as important to culture and technology as, as the velocity of money is to the economy. The United States would have been the largest free trade zone in the world. The second largest was England. Not even the United Kingdom, just England. Can you imagine? Paying a toll or a tariff every few miles?”

  “What has commerce to do with ideas?” asked Vonderberge.

  “It’s the traveling people who carry ideas from place to place. The merchants, sailors, soldiers. At least until an international postal system is established. And radio. And tourism.”

  “I see...”

  “But look at the barriers we have to deal with! The largest nation on the Atlantic seaboard is what? The Carolina Kingdom. Some of the Indian states are larger, but they don’t have many people. How far can you travel before you pay a tariff? Or run into a foreign language like English or Choctaw or French? Or into a military patrol that shoots first and asks questions later? No wonder we’re so far behind!”

  Knecht pulled the cigar from his mouth. “We?” he asked. Vonderberge turned and gave him an anxious glance, so he, too, had noticed the shift in Kelly’s personal pronoun.

  The prisoner was flustered. “You,” he said. “I meant ‘you.’ Your rate of progress is slower. I...”

  Knecht forestalled further comment. “No, never mind. A slip of the tongue, ja?” He smiled to show he had dismissed the slip. He knew it was important; though in what way he was not yet sure. He took a long puff on his cigar. “Personally, I have never thought our progress slow. The horseless carriage was invented, what? 1920-something, in Dusseldorf. In less than fifty years you could find some in all the major cities. Last year, two nearly collided on the streets of Philadelphia! Soon every well-to-do family will have one.”

  The prisoner laughed. It was a great belly laugh that shook him and shook him until it turned imperceptibly into a sob. He squeezed his eyes tight.

  “There was a man,” he said distantly. “Back in my hometown of Longmont, Colorado.” He opened his eyes and looked at them. “That would be in Nuevo Aztlan, if it existed, which it doesn’t and never has...” He paused and shook his head, once, sharply, as if to clear it. “Old Mr. Brand. I was just a kid, but I remember when the newspapers and TV came arou
nd. When Old Brand was a youngster, he watched his dad drive a stagecoach. Before he died, he watched his son fly a space shuttle.” He looked intently at Knecht. “And you think it is wonderful that a few rich people have hand-built cars after half a century?”

  He laughed again; but this time the laugh was brittle. They watched him for a moment, and the laugh went on and on. Then Vonderberge leaned forward and slapped him sharply, twice.

  Knecht chewed his moustache. What the prisoner said made some sense. He could see how technological progress—and social change with it—was coupled with free trade and the free exchange of ideas. Yet, he wasn’t at all sure that it was necessarily a good thing. There was a lot to be said for stability and continuity. He blew a smoke ring. He wondered if Kelly were a social radical, driven mad by his inability to instigate change, who had built himself a fantasy world in which change ran amok. That made sense, too.

  He glanced at his cigar, automatically timing the ash. A good cigar should burn at least five minutes before the ash needed knocking off.

  Suddenly, he felt a tingling in his spine. He looked at the cigar as if it had come alive in his hand. It had gone out—he remembered that clearly. Now, it was burning, and he could not recall relighting it. He looked at the ashtray. Yes, a spent match. I relit it, of course. It was such an automatic action that I paid it no mind. That was one explanation. It was his memory playing tricks, not his reality. But the tingling in his spine did not stop.

  He looked at Kelly, then he carefully laid his cigar in the ashtray to burn itself out.

  “You just wait, though,” Kelly was saying to Vonderberge. “Our curve is starting up, too. It took us longer, but we’ll be reaching critical mass soon. We’re maybe a hundred years off the pace. About where the other...where my world was just before the world wars.”

  That simple pronouncement filled Knecht with a formless dread. He watched the smoke from his smoldering cigar and saw how it rose, straight and true, until it reached a breaking point. There, it changed abruptly into a chaos of turbulent streamers, swirling at random in the motionless air. Then we could do the same, he thought. Fight worldwide wars.

  Afterwards, Knecht and Vonderberge spoke briefly as they crossed the parade ground. The sun was high in the sky, but the air held the cool of autumn. Knecht was thoughtful, his mind on his cigar, on alternate realities, on the suddenness with which stability could turn to chaos.

  “You saw it, didn’t you?” asked Vonderberge.

  For a moment he thought the Kommandant meant his mysteriously relit cigar. “Saw what?” he replied.

  “Kelly. He has difficulty remembering his own world. He becomes confused, disoriented, melancholy.”

  “Is he always so?”

  “Today was better than most. Sometimes I cannot stop his weeping.”

  “I have never heard him talk so long without mentioning his Rosa.”

  “Ah, you noticed that, too. But three days ago he was completely lucid and calculated columns of figures. Settings, he said, for his machine. They take into account, ah...‘many-valued inverse functions.’” Vonderberge smiled. “Whatever that means. And, if he ever sees his machine again.”

  “His machine,” said Knecht. “Has anyone handled it?”

  “No,” said Vonderberge. “Ochsenfuss doesn’t think it matters. It’s just a collection of knobs and wires.”

  “And you?”

  “Me?” Vonderberge looked at him. “I’m afraid to.”

  “Yet, its study could be most rewarding.”

  “A true scout. But if we try, four things could happen and none of them good.”

  Knecht tugged on his moustache. “We could open it up and find that it is an obvious fake, that it couldn’t possibly work.”

  “Could we? How would it be obvious? We would still wonder whether the science were so advanced that we simply did not understand how to work it. Like a savage with a steam engine.” The Kommandant was silent for a moment.

  “That’s one. You said four things could happen.”

  “The other three assume the machine works.” He held up his fingers to count off his points. “Two: In our ignorance, we damage it irreparably, marooning Kelly forever. Three: We injure ourselves by some sort of shock or explosion.”

  “And four?”

  “Four: We transport ourselves unwittingly to another world.”

  “A slim possibility, that.”

  Vonderberge shrugged; “Perhaps. But the penalty for being wrong is...”

  “Excessive,” agreed Knecht dryly.

  “I did examine his ‘calculator,’ you know.”

  Knecht smiled to himself. He had wondered if the Kommandant had done that, too. Knecht had learned little from it, himself.

  “It was fine work: the molded plastic, the tiny buttons, the intricate circuits and parts.”

  “Not beyond the capabilities of any competent electrosmith.”

  “What! Did you see how small the batteries were? And the, what did he call them? The chips? How can you say that?”

  “I didn’t mean we could build a calculating engine so small. But, is it a calculating engine? Did you see it function? No. Kelly says the batteries have gone dead. Which is convenient for him. Our regimental electrosmith could easily construct a copy that does the same thing: mainly, nothing.”

  Vonderberge stopped and held him by the arm. “Tell me, Rudi. Do you believe Kelly or not?”

  “I...” Well, did he? The business with the cigar was too pat. It seemed important only because of Kelly’s toying with another cigar a few weeks before. Otherwise, he would never have noticed, or thought nothing even if he had. Like the prophetic dream: It seems to be more than it is because we only remember them when they come true. “I...have no convincing evidence.”

  “Evidence?” asked Vonderberge harshly. “What more evidence do you need?”

  “Something solid,” Knecht snapped back. Something more than that I like the prisoner and the Kommandant and I dislike the Hexmajor. “Something more than a prisoner’s tale,” he said, “that becomes more confused as time goes on.”

  “That is Ochsenfuss’ bungling!”

  “Or his success! Have you thought that perhaps the Hexmajor is curing Kelly of a long-standing delusion?”

  Vonderberge turned to go. “No.”

  Knecht stopped him. “Heinrich,” he said.

  “What?”

  Knecht looked past the Kommandant. He could see the sentries where they paced the walls, and the cannon in their redoubts, and the gangways to the underground tunnels that led to the big guns fortified into the mountainside. “Real or fantasy, you’ve learned a lot about the prisoner’s technology.”

  “Enough to want to learn more.”

  “Tell me, Heinrich. Do you want to learn to make nuclear bombs?”

  Vonderberge followed Knecht’s gaze. A troubled look crossed his face and he bit his lower lip. “No, I do not. But the same force can produce electricity. And the medical science that produces the miracle drugs can tailor-make horrible plagues. The jets that fly bombs can just as easily fly people or food or trade goods.” He sighed. “What can I say, Rudi. It is not the tool, but the tool-user who creates the problems. Nature keeps no secrets. If something can be done, someone will find a way to do it”

  Knecht made no reply. He didn’t know if a reply was even possible. Certainly none that Vonderberge would understand.

  When Ranger O Brien brought the news from the Nations, General Schneider was away from the fortress, inspecting the outposts on the forward slope. Knecht received O Brien’s report, ordered the man to take some rest, and decided the General should see it immediately. He telegraphed Outpost Three that he was coming and rode out.

  The crest of Kittatinny Mountain and all the forward slope had been clear-cut the distance of a cannon shot. Beyond that was wilderness. Ridge and valley alternated into the distant north, dense with trees, before rising once more into the Pocono range, where Wyoming had her own fortress line. Lega
lly, the border ran somewhere through the no-man’s-land between, but the main armies were entrenched in more easily defended terrain.

  Knecht reined in at the crest of the Mountain and looked back. The valley of the Lehigh was checkerboarded with broad farms. Farther away, he could discern the smoke plumes of cities at the canal and rail heads. There was a speck in the air, most likely an airship sailing south.

  When he turned, the contrast with the land north of the Mountain was jarring. He must have gazed upon that vista thousands of times over the years. Now, for just an instant, it looked wrong. It was said to be fertile land. Certainly, enough blood had manured it. And some said there was coal beneath it. He imagined the land filled with farms, mills, and mines.

  At that moment of frisson he knew, irrationally, that Kelly had been telling the truth all along. Somewhere the barbed wire was used only to keep the milch cows safe.

  And the bombs and missiles? What if it were a rain of death from the other side of the world that we feared, and not a party of Mohawk bucks out to prove themselves to their elders? A slow explosion, Kelly had said. The inventions would come. Nature kept no secrets. The discoveries would be made and be given to the petty rulers of small, quarrelsome states. Men with dreams of conquest, or revenge.

  Knecht clucked to his horse and started downslope to the picket line. Give Konrad Schneider that, he thought. His only dream is survival, not conquest. Yet he is desperate; and desperate men do desperate things, not always wise things.

  “Hah! Rudi!” General Schneider waved to him when he saw him coming. He was standing on the glacis of the outpost along with the Feldwebel and his men. The General’s staff was as large as the platoon stationed there, so the area seemed ludicrously crowded. The General stood in their midst, a portly, barrel-chested man with a large curved pipe clenched firmly in his teeth. He pointed.

  “Do you think the field of fire is clear enough and wide enough?”

  Knecht tethered his horse and walked to where the General stood. He had never known Schneider to ask an idle question. He decided the real question was whether Vonderberge was reliable. He gave the cleared area careful scrutiny. Not so much as a blade of grass. No force large enough to take the outpost could approach unseen. “It seems adequate,” he said.