"Devil's Peak," Jesse blurted. He felt his own eyes light up as the pieces locked into place in his mind. "The rabbit-hole in the desert. The one Wayne and Susanna and I fell into—"
"You must understand," Black said with a thin smile. "Being gatekeeper of an entire desert's not an easy job. Holes can pop up anywhere, at any time. And the targets that get through are quick, and small. Like rats. It's a burden I've had to bear for a very, very long time."
Black might have laughed a little just then; it was hard to tell. "To be perfectly honest, Jesse, you and your companions are a pestilence. Your very presence upsets the natural order of things. You're like conquistadors, giving smallpox to the natives."
"So why not kill me where I stand?" Jesse asked, curiosity overriding any reasonable fear. "Or why not have your goons do it, if you really aren't capable? You've got me right where you want me."
"That's true," Black said. "But I'm no monster." He looked up to the heavens for a moment. "At least, not anymore." His eyes returned to Jesse, and he took a deep breath. "Jesse, I'm not going to kill you. I want to help you. And more importantly, I need your help."
Jesse's head was beginning to feel light, and he could spot a slight shimmering around the edges of the objects in the tent. Even Black, who seemed to live up to his name by absorbing the light around him like some crushed-velvet vortex, wore a halo just then. Was it just shock at the strangeness of it all? Was the surreality of Jesse's last day and a half finally catching up with him? Or had the gangster put something in his tea?
Of course. He'd just been slipped a mickey.
Sound was stretching out all around him, taking on the quality of having mass and tangible dimension. The imagined barriers between both space and time were breaking down. Jesse began to perceive only the one true property of the universe, that of space-time. The moments just before, and the moments just after his sudden cognitive break, were visible to him in spatial relation, as apparent and mundane as three upturned plastic cups on a table. This was no hallucination. This was more spectacular, more real, than any acid blotter or mushroom could deliver.
A warm, white glow began to fill Jesse's chest and tingle throughout his body. He looked down at himself—at least, he thought that's what he was doing—and he saw his true form for the first time. He was a great, long wormy thing, at one end a zygote and at the other, ancient bone-dust dissipating into potentiality. Every moment of his life that he'd ever lived as a 5' 11", steel-eyed three-dimensional being was just a single slice of himself. A fragmentary snapshot of a continuous, but finite, organism that existed in time and space. This meta-body curved and kinked its way through space-time, as three-dimensional Jesse, back in the lowly three-dimensional world, made choices and committed actions, blithely unaware of where he was, in truth, going.
"Jesse," a voice called out from across the ether. It was Black. "I know this all seems very strange, but try to focus."
"How are you showing me this?" He didn't know how he was speaking, only that his voice was echoing out across—well, across whatever existed outside his ordinary perception of life and the universe.
"Think of where you are, right now, in space-time."
"I'm everywhere."
"But where were you? Just before you became fully aware?"
"I was in the tent, with you. Back at your camp."
"Good. Now where were you a day ago?"
Jesse moved back along his wormy meta-body, shuttling through the snapshots in time as though flipping through a rolodex. Actually, it felt more like jogging through a filmstrip in reverse on one of the Movieolas he used to use at UCLA.
There he was, exactly twenty-four hours earlier. He was in the general store, asking the shopkeep why he wore a green visor on his head. He could recall the moment with perfect clarity. The dust visible in the sunbeam cast by the storefront window. Every wrinkle and crevice on the old man's face. The sour smell of the shop's old wooden floorboards.
"I was in the general store."
"Okay," Black responded. "Now, come back to the tent."
Jesse shuffled ahead, back to where he had been.
"I'm there now."
"Now Jesse, I want you to try to move ahead in time. Visualize the future, and tell me what you see."
Jesse moved his consciousness forward now. It required more effort. It felt like climbing a rope in gym class. Still, he could manage.
The snapshots came in inconsistent bursts, gaps between them. He suspected that if he focused on any one point, he might be able to better understand their context, but it hurt to do so, like straining his eyes to read very small print by moonlight. Besides, he was too anxious to spend too long on any one moment.
He was back at the ranch house, having a conversation with Wayne. It was heated, that much he could tell.
Then he was by himself, writing a letter. The words were fuzzy, and seemed to elude him, like in a dream.
Next, he was editing a film. That seemed odd, because he wasn't back home yet. He still felt like he was in this period. But he was definitely cutting and splicing footage together, by candlelight. Holding the delicate strips up to the light to examine their tiny, repeating images to find just the right frame...
He had difficulty seeing beyond this point. There was a certain interference that came over his perception the farther out into the future he went. He felt as though he were staring into a box of darkness, trying to identify the contours of its contents, to no avail. "Is the future already been set in stone?" Jesse asked. "Is there no free will?"
Black seemed to laugh. "It would take a more knowledgeable man than I to answer that second question. But as for the first…"
"Yes?"
"Yes and no."
"I don't understand," Jesse contested. His grip on the future was beginning to loosen, his attention drifting back to the tent. "It's an either-or. There can't both be a future, and not be a future."
"There are many stones casting ripples in the pond of Consequence. You and I are but two of them. Keep looking forward, Jesse. Through the static. You'll find the haze of uncertainty begins to clear up around, oh, somewhere around the nineteen-forties."
Jesse didn't see how he could look forward that far. It seemed impossible. But he'd never been one to turn down a challenge, so he resumed his climb. He felt his mind crawl through a dense maze of spiderwebs. It was impossible, at this point, for him to make sense of the cacophony of overlapping realities he caught indirect glimpses of, like floaters on his periphery.
When his consciousness at last emerged from the clutter, he no longer felt bound by any kind of physical form. His own presence was of little relevance in this place. But it seemed that, for the most part, the trillions of possibilities converged and overlapped in one terrifying inevitability:
He saw the whole Earth on fire. Cratered by a progression of atomic explosions, and cast into a nuclear winter.
In each instance, whole cities were wiped off the map. Millions of lives snuffed out again and again, reduced to skeletal shadow-imprints on the rubble.
"War," Black reiterated. "Nuclear annihilation. In the world you come from, Jesse, the leaders of the East and West flirted with disaster, but avoided it." He added, "Mostly."
"But he's changed that, hasn't he?"
And with Jesse's realization, space-time went dark. Existence folded in on itself in his mind, and lost most of its weight.
Everything became flat, and Jesse returned to the tent. The tea cup quivered in his hand, clinking against its saucer.
"Holy fucking shit," was the most eloquent thing he could muster.
Black got up, and walked over to his desk, where he picked up three rocks. He brought them back to Jesse, and of these, he placed one in Jesse's hands.
"Take a good look at it," Black said.
Jesse palmed it, one eyebrow raised as he ran his fingers along its rough texture. "Okay."
Black took it back from him, his face betraying nothing. "Imagine this rock is the universe."
Jesse wasn't even sure what he was supposed to make of that.
The mystic held his right hand out straight, looking to Jesse as if readying to deliver a judo chop. He brought it down against the rock, cleaving it cleanly in two.
Black separated the two halves like coconut shells, presenting their interior out to Jesse. Inside, brilliant purple geodes glimmered along the linings of the hollow object. It was apparent to Jesse that the rocks must have come from Devil's Peak. There was no mistaking that vibrant hue.
"The inside of this rock is fascinating. Structurally rich," Black said, and took a breath. "But you wouldn't say it's changing. It's not in flux."
Jesse was struggling to understand if there was some point Black was alluding to that he was missing.
"You are like an ant, Jesse, crawling along the inside of the geode. To you, it's all ups and downs, peaks and valleys. Constant, unexpected change. But if you could only pull back far enough and take a good look, you'd realize it's static. Eternally whole."
Black leaned in close, and lowered his voice. "There is no now," he said. "Past, present, and future are one. That's the truth that you just witnessed. You went beyond the veil."
"Okay," Jesse said. "I buy it." He'd come to far weirder cosmic revelations long before meeting Mr. Black. "But if that's the case," he countered, "Then nothing ever changes. And we were always meant to fall through the rabbit-hole. But that's impossible, because Wayne's changed so much from how it was before. If we always went back in time—"
"Ah, but wait," Black said, an excitement spreading across his features that was disconcerting only because it seemed so unlike him. He then placed the two halves of the bisected geode back together and set it down before Jesse. Then he slid the other two rocks alongside, so that the three formed a set. "There are so many universes. You, Jesse, you and your friends merely hopped across to another one. That's why the history of this place is unfamiliar to you, even though you retain your memories of your old world. You were always going to hop over to another rock, this rock, the one you're living in right now. That much is set in stone."
"Then how can I stop a war that was always meant to be?"
"There's no such thing as meant to be," Black countered, almost cutting him off. "Have you ever heard of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle?"
Jesse thought back to his general education days, before becoming was an upperclassmen. The name sounded familiar.
Black didn't wait for an answer. "In the world that you know, a few decades from now, a very smart man by the name of Werner Heisenberg publishes his uncertainty principle. Heisenberg will state that the very act of observing activity at the quantum level affects that activity.
"You are a component of a system, and as such, you cannot change that system. But once you step outside your universe and look at it directly, you change its structure. Because you change your own behavior from that moment on. The question is, which script have you written for yourself?
"Your friends splintered the world the day they fell from the sky. They made a new rock. And now the three of you own the moral implications of whatever happens to it. But it's my job to fix it. To try to save the billions yet unborn who may very well die in a global fire."
Jesse tried to process this. It was grounding, in a way, to think of Black as just a man trying to protect his rock collection. It was, however, less grounding when he considered that Black was a man trying to protect a rock from changing on the subatomic level because an ant named Jesse time-traveled to another rock. Still, he'd take what he could get as far as helpful metaphors went.
Black sat, monk-like in his grave stillness, a question perched on his lips. "Do you think you can reach him?"
Jesse pondered this in earnest. "I don't know."
"I've tried," Black said. "But he's stubborn. Foolhardy. Driven by a greed that blinds him."
Jesse nearly took another sip of the tea before remembering what it had done to him. He still felt woozy from the effects of whatever had been in the cup. "I can get keys to the factory, or inside information. Whatever you need. But I just have one thing to ask of you."
"I will do what I can to help you return to your home," Black answered. "I will make sure that you either leave this place for good, or die so that you cannot cause any more harm than you already have." He stood up, and walked over to his desk.
"Just don't kill her," Jesse said after him.
The man, or whatever he was, turned to face Jesse. "As I said, I will do what I can to see that you leave this place." He then picked up an ancient-looking device, seemingly constructed of copper, off his desk. Jesse could see it held great intrigue for Black; he could just imagine Black's solitary nights in this tent, contemplating whatever unimaginable mysteries he occupied his mind with.
Black continued idly inspecting the artifact. "Your brother has spent the last five years causing a commotion. Wristwatches, radios, telephones. I've done everything from sending him telegrams to bombing his factory, trying to convince him to stop. He cannot think I'm merely crazy. I've proven to him that I know the world you both come from. At this point I'm certain he is willfully ignoring the obvious truth of the matter.
"When the first car rolls off that factory's assembly line, it will lead this civilization down a path of rapid industrialization that will punctuate in global chaos. I cannot abide it any longer. That factory must burn. Cole Company must be destroyed."
* * *
Wayne was livid, the image of that burning oil field still fresh in his mind. Someone had a lot of explaining to do. And that person was Mayor Edsel Sheldon.
Wayne had more than one reason to be testy where the mayor was concerned. Sheldon had recently constructed an upscale neo-grecian two-story in the hills for his homely wife and himself, situated—to Wayne's chagrin—within eyeshot of Wayne's patio. His was one of the few homes in the newly-booming Bridgetown that could rival Wayne's for its size and price tag.
But Mayor Sheldon didn't seem too interested in spending much time at home with the missus. Wayne knew he had developed quite an expensive and time-consuming hobby: opium addiction. This habit was nearly matched by his appetite for exotic and carnal delights.
Sheldon was wise enough not to get familiar with any of the local prostitutes. Instead, he sent away for working women from Los Angeles to visit him in his dingy drug den in the outskirts of town. This unassuming hovel was a factory of iniquity and sin worthy of Caligula himself.
He preferred Oriental girls. For one thing, they didn't speak much English, and weren't likely to go running to the papers or start asking too many questions. Sheldon thought he was being quite sneaky about the whole thing, but with the opium clouding his mind, rumors about his marriage began to circulate through Bridgetown's sewing circles and beer halls.
So Wayne knew exactly where to find the mayor's love shack.
He pounded on the door, and barked at Sheldon to show his face. From within, Wayne could hear a gramophone's muffled music coming to an abrupt end. He could just imagine Sheldon inside, naked, pantomiming to the girls to hide behind the sofa.
At last, the deadbolt slid back, and Sheldon opened the door, his eyes bleary and bloodshot. "Cole? What is it?" he managed. In his addled state, he was either unaware or unashamed of the erection visible underneath his untied velveteen robe.
"No more 'fifteen percent.'"
Sheldon had the audacity to laugh at this. "We have an agreement. Cole Company pays me my fifteen percent, pre-tax, off the books."
Wayne grabbed the mayor by the wadded-up robe's equivalent of a collar. "Listen, you scumbag, you may be the mayor, but I'm the boss in this town. And do you know why that is?"
"Fuck off," Sheldon slurred.
"Because I make the money. I bring home the bacon. And yet, you continue to extort me." He released Sheldon, pushing him away and making a broad gesture with his outstretched arms. "Why should I put up with it, Ed? Because from where I'm standing," he said, making a point to look down at the mayor
's rapidly-deflating member, "It sure seems like I've got the home field advantage. You need me to help you win elections now. Now that you're screwing up things for yourself so bad."
Sheldon spat at Wayne's feet. "I got you that land you so desperately wanted. A year ago, you were groveling at my feet to send White and his deputies around to get you those deeds."
"Yeah," Wayne said. "You haven't done shit about those bandits burning those fields." Wayne got in Sheldon's face again. "You know, when I asked White why his men are having such a hard time with the Lotus Boys, you know what he told me?"
"What?" Sheldon seemed barely-engaged with the conversation.
"He told me you refused his last three equipment and personnel requests."
Sheldon gave an unimpressed look. "Well, you're the big spender! Why don't you buy him his new toys?"
Wayne smacked Sheldon across the head with an open palm. The blow barely registered in the addled mayor's mind. "Because it's your job, Edsel."
Sheldon grumbled. At last, he seemed to be capitulating. "I'll have to talk to my secretary―"
"Listen," Wayne barked. "You're inhaling my profits. My money. Get it together. This is supposed to be a partnership."
Sheldon said nothing.
Wayne slammed the door behind him on his way out. Eventually, he was going to need a solution to the problem of Edsel Sheldon.
* * *
Jesse looked up at the ranch house. The peculiars of its geometry no longer seemed merely odd. They seemed like heresy.
Was it possible, as Black insisted, that Wayne was willing to sacrifice the future for his own short-sighted gain? Could he possibly be that callous? Jesse and he had their differences, sure, but the wholesale eradication of civilization as they knew it was another game entirely.
Surely Wayne had reason to believe, in his mind, that Black was crazy. Whatever future "facts" Black had presented in his telegrams must've been the kind of thing Wayne could have dismissed as the ramblings of a crackpot. Jesse had experienced how difficult it was to discern future events in his vision. Maybe Black had simply gotten the details wrong.
Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival Page 11