by KW Jeter
"Arthur," I said mournfully. The truth was obvious. I had come too late. The old king was dying, beyond the help of Excalibur or any other power.
"Your king is checked," said Merdenne, lifting his hand from the piece he had just moved. "And mate? Yes, I believe so."
"Are you sure of that?" said Ambrose. He made no move toward the chessboard. "Are you sure there's nothing about which you may have been deceived?"
Something in the other's confident tone caused Merdenne's brow to crease in puzzlement. His eyes returned to the board, studying it…
"Hocker," said the figure in the bed in an achingly frail voice. "Come closer."
I stepped up to his shoulder, and stood gazing into his ravished visage.
"You have the sword? The sword Excalibur?"
"Yes," I said, lifting the bundle and showing it to him: "I'm sorry– "
"No, no," His voice cracked with impatience. "Unwrap it – quickly."
I did as he asked. The blade glinted in the candlelight as it lay across my palms.
"Read the inscription," he commanded.
Sick at heart, I turned the blade to my eyes. For a moment I didn't see it, as my mind was filled with a vision of the Morlocks, unchecked, ravaging the green English countryside. All was lost, down to the last little spark of hope that had remained alight in my heart.
"Read it," came the quavering voice again.
I shook off the doleful vision and focused upon the blade in my hands. The ancient runic letters danced in the dim light, then froze as my eye caught hold of them. They seemed to leap from the blade, and the world swam dizzily about me.
Take the sword…
Some time later – years, centuries, compressed into seconds – I looked from the blade into the old man's eyes. "Yes," he said solemnly. "Now you know the truth. It is in fact only General Morsmere you see dying here. You are Arthur. Excalibur is your sword to use."
I knew he spoke the truth. The runic inscription on the blade of Excalibur was the key that unlocked my true identity. For one lifetime I had been Edwin Hocker; for many lifetimes before I had been Arthur. King of Britain, Saviour of Christendom. My sword lay in my hand. The deed to which I had been called from the world beyond this one lay far below my feet.
"Why did you and Ambrose deceive me, old man?" I said, my voice now great and terrible.
General Morsmere's withered face looked up at me without fear. "The sword was stolen by Merdenne and diminished in its power before you ever had a chance to see it. Yet you were the only one who could be called upon to find all the swords and merge them back together into one. Ambrose enlisted me in his plot to masquerade as King Arthur, and thus throw Merdenne off your trail. As I was already dying of consumption, Merdenne was easily persuaded that his reduplication of the sword by using the Time Machine had a weakening effect on Arthur himself. But as you see, you have succeeded in your quest; Excalibur is a key to power, not the power itself."
"But couldn't Ambrose have simply told me I was Arthur? Why deceive me as well?"
"Would you have believed him?" said the old man, smiling faintly. "No, for Edwin Hocker was a rationalist and a sceptic. It took a great deal to convince him that there was a King Arthur reborn, let alone, that he himself was England's resurrected hero."
"Yes," I said, gripping the sword tight in my hand. "But now I know."
"Yes," breathed the old man. The effort of explanation had exhausted him. Only a little time was left before his death. "Go now and vanquish the invader, as in the past you have done. You are one, and they are many. But most will flee before your coming, as your power is great. Go." He collapsed back against the pillows.
I left that place, leaving behind one old man dying and another bewildered, and retraced my way to the sewers' entrance. There I descended, sword in hand, into the most secret bowels of the Earth.
• • • •
And then there was much shedding of blood in the darkness below the surface. Only those who know not killing would sing of such. It is an old tale, that of metal against flesh, to such a one as I. The armies of the Morlocks were advancing upwards when I met them. The old man's prophecy was correct – most fled at the sight of my grim visage and ran shrieking back into the safety they thought they would find in the depths. They knew that to cross Excalibur meant their deaths.
A few, braver or more desperate, stood their ground. I fought past them, heedless of the shots they managed to aim in those close quarters, and at last stepped over their fallen bodies as I continued downward to the root of the evil cancer at the Earth's heart.
And finally came a time when none, of the Morlocks stood before me. I stood in the chamber of the Time Machine, having made my way through all the remembered passageways and across the bridge the Morlocks had erected over the underground sea. The gleaming apparatus stood in the dim light, a mute witness to Man's ingenuity in creating havoc with the Universe. I raised Excalibur and struck deep with it into the shining metal and crystal.
The one blow was enough. Silently the cosmos flowed back together, knitting up the wound the infernal device had created. The dim light vanished and I knew that all the scattered Morlocks, dead and alive, were gone, returned to their rightful place in Time. All was as it should be now. The just order of the Universe was restored. My task was finished.
Suddenly a wave of weakness engulfed me, and I tottered and nearly fell. I pressed my hand to my side and found a warm wetness pulsing out of my many wounds. On my will alone had I reached this place. My life's blood was even now ebbing from me. I sat down with my back to the chamber's wall. My arms and legs felt heavy and immobile.
Then Ambrose came to me in that place. The destruction of the Time Machine had liberated him from the trap where he had bound Merdenne. I knew it was him, the old friend and guide that in other times I had called Merlin, even though I could see nothing in the darkness.
"Well done, Arthur," he said, but why was he whispering?
My own voice sounded far away. "I don't feel very much like Arthur now," I said plaintively. "I feel more like Edwin Hocker again."
"He was a good man," said Ambrose. "A pity he has to die with you. Arthur will return, I and even Merdenne will return countless times, but Hocker's life is over."
"I don't feel bad about that," I said. Somehow the darkness about me was growing even darker. "But I do feel sorry for poor Tafe. I don't quite see why she had to die."
"You've forgotten. She came from a time that is yet in the future. She has yet to be born and has a whole life to live in a world free from the Morlocks."
"Yes. Of course. I'm not thinking too well now." Where were my hands? I couldn't feel Excalibur in them. "She… she'll be the same person, though, won't she?"
"She will," said Ambrose. "But in a brighter time."
"And a holy terror, I wager, to anyone who crosses her. I'm glad Hocker got to know her. He was really quite lonely a lot of the time." Something moved inside me that made me gasp, but the pain soon passed away. "I'm very tired now. Perhaps you'd better go."
"Yes. And I'll take the sword with me."
I could hardly hear him, or myself. "What will you do with it?"
"I will cast it into the underground sea here, so that it might return to you when you have need of it again. Farewell." Then he was gone away from me.
Only a little time had passed when the darkness folded about me like the softest and warmest of shrouds. And then, in that time and place – our Lord's year 1892 in Victoria's England – I saw no more.
About the Author
K. W. Jeter attended college at California State University, Fullerton where he became friends with James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers, and through them, Philip K. Dick.
Jeter wrote an early Cyberpunk novel, Dr. Adder, which was enthusiastically recommended by Philip K. Dick. Jeter is also the first to coin the term "Steampunk," in a letter to Locus magazine in April 1987, to describe the retro-technology, alternatehistory works that he published along with his
friends, Blaylock and Powers.
As well as his own original novels, K. W. Jeter has written a number of authorised Blade Runner sequels.
He currently lives in San Francisco with his wife, Geri.
www.kwjeter.com
Extras...
K W JETER, MORLOCK NIGHT
by Adam Roberts
There is no single English word for "writing the sequels to a classic novel by a conveniently dead popular novelist"; but there ought to be. Plenty of writers have done it, and as an activity ("classicaposthumosequelizing") it has proved particularly popular in the world of SF. After all, more than most genres, science fiction is determined by its backlist of classic texts. New SF novels inevitably written in dialogue – openly or covertly – with the masterpieces of the genre's history. Writers insufficiently knowledgeable about the traditions of SF are condemned to a belatedly tedious process of re-inventing the wheel. Writers less ignorant know that their alien invasion story, or robot story, or generation starship story must deal with the many previous iterations of that theme.
Take, for example, time travel. A great Nile of SF novels, stories and films has flowed from one source: H G Wells's superb 1895 novella The Time Machine. It is (as of course you already know) the story of a man who propels himself out of time and into the future. In the year 826715 he discovers that human society has divided along divergent evolutionary roads: on the one hand, the useless, foppish nineteenth-century aristocracy have become the brainless, useless Eloi, existing in a purposeless idleness in the future's sunlit green spaces; on the other, however, the proletariat have degenerated into the subterranean, dark-adapted, monstrous Morlocks. Wells' story reveals that these latter literally prey upon the former, coming out at night and carrying them belowground to eat them. Whether this can be described as cannibalism is surely a moot point (since the Eloi and the Morlocks are separate species, it is perhaps technically not so); but it is a horrific narrative revelation for all that. Wells's story ends with the time traveller returning to his own time, but pausing only long enough to pass on his story before returning to the future with the intention of intervening to help the beautiful and helpless Eloi.
As befits so influential a text, various writers have produced various unofficial sequels to Wells's time travel adventure – both novels (Christopher Priest's The Space Machine, Steve Baxter's The Time Ships) and films (one of Trek-director Nicholas Meyer's early cinematic offerings, 1979's Time After Time, brings Wells's Time Traveller and Jack the Ripper to 1980s Los Angeles). But none of them have the brainboggling, wigged-out splendour of K W Jeter's 1979 proto-Steampunk masterpiece Morlock Night. There's a reason for this, I think, and it has to do with the uniquely ferocious imagination of Jeter himself. Most sequels attempt a sort of plasticene stretching out of the original text, extruding a narrative here, elongating a familiar character there. Jeter takes the original text, tears it to pieces with his bare teeth, and moulds the resulting mass into striking new shapes. He's not interested in tamely carrying-on Wells's storyline and characters. Instead he takes the book's most iconic items and retools them for the modern age.
In Wells's original story the Morlocks are little more than beasts. That won't do for Jeter's more ornate imaginarium, so he postulates a breed of super-Morlock, cunning, dangerous and capable of large-scale military organisation. Wearing blue spectacles to protect their subterranean eyes from the sun, these blanched-skin horrors have captured the time machine itself and are using it to ferry themselves back to late nineteenth-century London, where they are gathering, in the sewers, with grand and terrible plans.
The book pitches us straight into the storm. One of the things I love about Jeter is his splendidly loose-limbed, unencumbered approach to plotting You never quite know where you are in one of this tales, which, in a genre lamentably oversupplied with predictable narratives, is a very good thing. The novel starts, briskly, just after the end of Wells's novella, but within pages we've been pitched forward into a grisly post-apocalyptic London wasteland, where the remnants of humanity hide like rats in the ruins, and then whisked back again to the nineteenth-century. The more simple-hearted reader, catching their breath at this point, might think that the novel will now follow the straight line of story of resistance to the Morlock invasion leading to a big bang-bang battling climax. But that is not Jeter's way. Instead he makes a series of jolting but brilliant narrative knight's-moves: Merlin, Arthur and Excalibur! Atlantis! A whole subterranean world beneath London, including sunless oceans traversed by Verneian submarines! When some writers throw a whole bunch of disparate elements together the result is a mess: but in Jeter's hands it somehow, madly, coheres.
Picky readers might, I suppose, ask: why does a sequel to Wells's famous time-travel fable also turn out to be an Arthurian novel? It looks on paper (as the phrase goes) like a strange confection, for there is, after all, nothing about King Arthur in Wells's original. This is not to say that it doesn't work, in a weird sort of way; but it is unexpected. I have my own theory about this, although I have no direct evidence for it. I think that Jeter, not wanting to limit himself to textual riffs upon one great nineteenth-century author, played a sort of imaginative textual counterpoint upon another one – Mark Twain, whose A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court (1889) is the other great precursor novel in the traditions of time travel fiction. Although Twain's book came out six years before Wells, its influence on SF has been much less. Some would not even call it science fiction, since it lacks the pseudo-technological for its temporal voyage: there is no machine in Twain's story, his protagonist simply and inexplicably drops back in time to the Arthurian era. But like Wells, the heart of Twain's narrative is really about the plight of the poor under the careless rule of the wealthy, for in Twain's telling, Arthur's knights turn out to be much more cruel and violent than chivalric and noble. I'd be tempted to argue that Wells's approach, by satirically inverting the relationship between aristocracy and proletariate, is more penetrating. But these two core narratives – the one sending a traveller into the far future, the other sending him into the distant past – find a kind of gonzo synthesis in Jeter's Morlock/Arthur mash-up.
The point is that this sort of bravura juxtaposition of elements is exactly right for the kind of novel this is – Steampunk, I mean, a mode of writing that Jeter has a claim to have invented. People sometimes assume that Steampunk is an offshoot of "Cyberpunk", taking the high-tech future-noir adventure of the sort popularised by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson and moving the action back to a steam-powered Babbageized nineteenth-century. In fact Steampunk fiction predates Cyberpunk (though the name does not). Gibson's Neuromancer came out in 1984, and Bruce Bethke's story that gave the movement its moniker, "Cyberpunk", was published in 1983. But the historians of SF locate the origins of what would later be called Steampunk in three novels by three Californian friends: Jeter's Morlock Night (1979), Tim Powers's The Anubis Gates (1983) and James P. Blaylock's Homunculus (1986). In all three novels, Gothic excess takes the place that is occupied by the conventions of "detective fiction noir" in Cyberpunk itself. And in all three books, London is as much a character as the human players: a gnarly, über-Dickensian city that sprawls both horizontally and exists vertically, from the zeppelins above to the populous sewers below. Indeed, the subterranean locus of much of Morlock Night generates a great deal of its dream-haunting power. This is a novel about things that are hidden, that lurk in the collective subconscious: Arthur and Atlantis; Teutonic cruelty and the fear of racial degeneration; the up-welling monstrosity that persists beneath civilisation's thin veneer. It is entirely fitting that the protagonist of the tale discovers that he has never really known who he is.
Steampunk as a mode has, arguably, become diluted with overfamiliarity into a sort of watery tech-y Victoriana. But to read Morlock Night is to return to the source. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the real McCoy. Or perhaps I should say, the real MorlocCoy. Jeter's Morlockian night is darker than most, and looks forward to tha
t night that comes to us all eventually. This book is a hectic masterpiece.
Adam Roberts
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Back to the future
Originally published 1979
This Angry Robot edition 2011
Copyright © K W Jeter 1979
K W Jeter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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