[2016] Timewarden

by Mark Jeffrey

  “Dear God,” Bantam said, his head falling. “I didn’t know.”

  “Of course not,” Fitzhenry said. “To add to our sorrow, the Nazi pin was completed weeks ago. They have successfully launched their own man to the moon. Their wretched flag is planted in the soil of that silvery world. We have lost the space race!” Fitzhenry said, lingering on the verge of tears.

  “But I must ask you a question you may be loath to answer for I know you are forbidden by your commanders to reveal future events to us: How did you defeat the Nazis in your world?”

  Fitzhenry bent forward, and Bantam saw prayer light his eyes, the hope that Bantam might reveal an important secret truth.

  Bantam bowed his head. “We’re so far off the rail from my timeline that my orders don’t matter anymore. But anything I know still won’t help you, I’m afraid. Germany never invaded America in my timeline.

  “But to answer your question. We won by hitting them on the beaches of Normandy. We surprised them. That was how we won. But that won’t work here in this world, unfortunately.”

  “You were able to contain them in Europe?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you are not concealing information? There is naught that you refuse to tell me?”

  “No,” Bantam said. “You have my word. My original orders were not to reveal any details of the future to anyone in 1944. But this isn’t the same 1944 so my orders no longer apply. If I could tell you something that would help you win the war here, I would.”

  “Very well,” Fitzhenry said. “You’re no rampsman: your word is true.”

  BUT THE WAR arrived on their own doorstep sooner than Fitzhenry had guessed. One grim morning, Rachelle and Bantam awakened to billowing smoke on the horizon. They knew Hitler was merely a few days away from MacLaren.

  Rachelle’s eyes filled with tears. “It feels like the end of all things, doesn’t it?” she said. “It’s more than the horrible event happening now. It’s that all hope has been drained out of the world. Yes that’s it, exactly. It’s the end of hope.”

  Bantam kissed her forehead. “We’ve been lucky to have the time we did. Many people don’t even get that. Don’t cry because it’s over; smile because it happened.”

  “Beautiful. Let me guess: you’re quoting a great philosopher from your world.”

  “Yes. His name was Dr. Seuss.”

  “I should have liked to have met him,” Rachelle said.

  Bantam smiled. “In this world, he won’t ever exist. Because of that,” Bantam pointed at the horizon, “he never can be.”

  “You don’t know that,” Rachelle said. “You can’t know that.”

  Bantam’s eyes touched the ground. “But I do. His real name is Geisel. They’ll think he’s Jewish. They’ll find him. And they’ll kill him.”

  Something snapped inside Rachelle that morning. Bantam could feel it.

  She had become quiet and withdrawn. She visited Volzstrang, and then Fitzhenry—alone. She’d insisted that Bantam not come.

  He’d respected her wishes. They would all likely be dead in the next few days or even hours. Everyone would have a different and private way of dealing with that.

  Yet something gnawed at Bantam. He felt he was missing something important.

  The guns on the horizon resumed, crowding his thoughts. The Nazi clanker lines were gearing up for their final assault on MacLaren. The base buzzed with defensive activity; men shoring up the walls, creating sandbagged gun nests, and preparing dirigibles for air and medical support.

  To Bantam’s surprise, Fitzhenry came to find him.

  “Shouldn’t you be commanding the battle?” Bantam asked.

  “I am,” Fitzhenry replied. “The physical battle will rage on without me. But that is of no importance. Instead, I have one last gambit to play, something Dr. Volzstrang believes has a chance of turning the war to our favor. As with all such gambits, there is a horrible price to pay. Come with me.”

  Bantam’s stomach turned to Jell-O. This terrified him, sending ice rattling to the core of his soul though he had no idea what this could be regarding.

  Horrible price to pay.

  He was marched into the room where Volzstrang housed his time capsule.

  To his horror, Rachelle had locked herself inside.

  She caught his eye through the window. For a long moment, she held his gaze—then her eyes reverted to whatever she was doing.

  “What’s going on?” Bantam yelled at Volzstrang. “You have no right! That’s my capsule!”

  “She is going to stop the timewave,” Volzstrang explained calmly. “She will use the capsule to shatter it, right here and now. She will stop it from propagating back through time. It will never cause the Day of the Red Sun.”

  “No!” Bantam howled. “Her parents met because of that day! She’s going to wipe herself out of history! She won’t ever have existed!”

  Horrible price to pay.

  “But then our world will turn back into your world, the one where the Nazis were defeated. This is our hope.”

  “That’s easy for you to say because you exist in both timelines! She doesn’t!”

  Jesus, no. Please don’t take her.

  Boom! The battle had begun outside. Already, ordinance was exploding nearby.

  “You’re not going to do it. I won’t let you.” Bantam surged forward, lunging at the door of the capsule. To his shock, it had been welded shut. Tears streaking down his face, he banged on the window. “Rachelle! Stop this!”

  She smiled, which cracked his heart. “My love,” Rachelle said. “This is the only way. Only someone versed in the Volzstrang equations can properly operate the controls of your wondrous capsule to ensure the timewave is completely shattered. No trace of it may remain, or our task will fail. Before you protest, yes, Dr. Volzstrang attempted to create an automaton capable of doing this, but the task was too complex. It requires the delicacy of human hands and mind. We have run out of time.

  “To repel a darkness this deep, there is naught but blood and toil and hard choices. But rejoice, for it was you who brought to us the means of our salvation.”

  How can there be anything to rejoice about?

  “Did I say only this morning that hope was no more? That was not so. You brought us hope. You gave us the means change our past and remake the future. In this way, we can still win the unwinnable war.”

  “By hell,” Bantam snarled, banging like a wild animal on the door, trying to kick it open.

  Rachelle laughed gently. “I knew you would react this way. That is why I insisted the door be fused shut.”

  The capsule was humming audibly. The crackling tachyon energy he knew all too well was forming around the exterior, tickling and dancing around the metal frame.

  Boom! Boom! The missiles exploding caused the nearby wall to lurch and blast cinder-soot into the room. Along with the sounds of return fire, men were shouting orders outside.

  “Get her out of there!” Bantam insisted. He ran to Fitzhenry and shook him. “Do it, damn you! Get her out! Where’s the blowtorch?”

  Fitzhenry did not reply.

  “She wanted you to have this,” Volzstrang said, ignoring Bantam’s rage and handing him a wooden box with gold-leaf edging. It looked like a flattened music box.

  “It is not to be opened until the day you depart, for the past is again today.”

  “What is it?”

  Volzstrang shrugged. “The lady did not say.”

  “You helped her plan this,” Bantam panted. “You premeditated this. How else did you have time to make this box? I’ll never forgive you.”

  “I did. I confess. But which would you choose? A thousand years of the Nazi Reich, or Rachelle? She knew you could never make that choice. Remember that when you return.”

  Return? Return to where?

  With a jolt of panic, he realized she wasn’t wearing a spacesuit.

  The Volzstrang timewave was upon them, searing, singeing, striking, and sizzling, making a great
Faraday cage of the entire room. Bantam could feel it sparking around inside his own mouth

  Boom! A wall toppled, crushing Fitzhenry under a wave of bricks. A Nazi clanker stepped through the rubble, naphtha lamps sweeping across the room, looking for soldiers to kill.

  Bantam was kicked onto his back. The clanker took aim at him and fired.

  At that split second, the timewave detonated, and collapsed. Bantam watched in horror as the capsule imploded, screeching metal bending inward, then vaporized.

  Rachelle!

  But a rebound wave expanded outward from the central point of the implosion, a ripple in the fabric of space-time. Fort MacLaren, the beautiful and magical army base that Bantam had come to know transmuted by degrees into the Fort MacLaren army base of his own world. Growlers morphed into cars. Clankers became tanks. Dirigibles became airplanes. Power lines hung from telephone poles. Electric lights lit up the night.

  Rachelle!

  Bantam was still holding the package.

  He was back in his own timeline, but marooned in 1944.

  Mobius

  “AND SO I have lived, from that day to this,” Bantam concluded.

  Sabine sat stunned and silent. “Didn’t you ever try to change anything?”

  “No,” Bantam said quietly and seriously. “I guarded against change – change of any kind, no matter how small! I became the warden of Time! If you’d once been responsible for billions of unpeople, if you’d accidentally erased living souls from history, you would be very, very cautious about anything you did after that. Only after today am I free to intervene in the history of the world once again.”

  “But you were stuck in 1944 . . . what did you do?”

  “The years yawned on ahead of me without Rachelle. It sent me into a tailspin of depression for which there was one cure: I joined the army. For the second time.

  “When I suddenly appeared at Fort MacLaren in our own 1944, everything was familiar. I knew all the buildings, knew where the recruit barracks were. I slipped in and pretended I’d arrived on the latest bus. During the chaos of the war, there were always new faces on base. No one questioned missing paperwork. Soldiers were needed, and that was what mattered.”

  “You fought in World War II?”

  “I saw a year of action in the Pacific Theater before I came home to MacLaren to serve the rest of my time. After that, I drifted around the country, doing odd jobs. In the seventies, I used my knowledge of the future to play the stock market. I became wealthy and didn’t have to work after that.

  “You never got married?” Sabine asked.

  “No,” Bantam smiled.

  “Why?”

  “I met a man in Rome once. A charming, sweet man named Mimmo. He ran a restaurant called Taverna Flavia, all the rage in the sixties and seventies. Anyway, he was in love with Elizabeth Taylor. He had shrines filled floor to ceiling with pictures and items she had once owned. He never stood a chance with her, of course, and he knew it. But he didn’t care. He loved her. He never married or looked at another woman again. As he explained this to me, I knew exactly how he felt. We toasted to this. Your grandmother was that for me.”

  “What happened to all the women, women, and more women?” Sabine asked with a sly smile.

  “They paled after Rachelle Archenstone. I couldn’t go back to that again.”

  “Did you ever run into yourself? Or see yourself as a kid or something?”

  “Only once,” Bantam said. “I have no memory of seeing myself as an old man or speaking to myself, so never when I was older. But I did sit in the parking lot of the hospital on the day of my birth. I saw my father and my pregnant mother as they walked inside. But then I left. Anything more was too risky.”

  “That had to have been weird.”

  “It was. Kind of cool at the same time.”

  “You really are my age,” Sabine said, looking at him as if for the first time. “It’s like you’re just wearing old-man makeup. What’s it feel like? To be old?”

  “Put on a heavy jacket and oversized shoes. It feels like that all the time. Except for today. Today, I feel reborn.”

  Sabine seemed lost in thought. Then she asked, “One thing doesn’t make sense though. If my great-grandmother was like, erased or whatever, how come I’m here? Wouldn’t my mother and me be erased as well?”

  Bantam smiled. “I was coming to that.

  “While I was doing a carpentry gig in a Colorado mountain town, I spotted a familiar face on the Main Street boardwalk: Cliff Cleveland! I approached carefully. It was clearly him but a more subdued and somewhat broken down version of him. This Cleveland was a painter. When he saw me, there was no recognition in his eyes. We made small talk for five minutes. He was waiting for his wife and little girl he said and pulled out a smoke. And then I got the shock of my life.

  “From the corner store, Rachelle Archenstone walked out. A little girl dangled from her hand. I knew it was Cliff and Rachelle’s child: the resemblance was unmistakable.”

  “That little girl was my grandmother?” Sabine breathed.

  Bantam nodded. “While I stood there in pure shock, Cliff introduced me to ‘his wife, Rachelle and girl, Lily.’ When Rachelle’s lightning-blue eyes rose to meet mine, I thought I would die of a heart attack. No recognition whatsoever. Why would there be? Still, it iced the heart.

  “Somehow her parents still met despite there being no Day of the Red Sun in our world. How, I have no idea. The story her mother told her in that other-world could have been a lie. Maybe her mother became pregnant out of wedlock and concocted a tale for public consumption. Whitewashing was common in those days.

  “Yet here was Rachelle, right in front me. Her skin was sallow and waxy. The early stages of the Shadow showed on her arms and legs.

  “She must have seen the expression on my face because she said, ‘Oh, don’t worry. It’s a rare disease but it’s not catching.’ Her smile broke my heart.

  “Over the next few weeks, the Clevelands had me over for dinner several times. Lily and her puppy took to me right away. Cleveland perked up a little bit in my presence, and glimmers of the Cleveland I knew in that other-world sometimes appeared. He was enamored with flight and anything related to astronomy. This Cleveland was no astronaut, but the makings were there.”

  “How did you feel about that?” Sabine asked. “Rachelle being with Cliff?”

  Bantam shrugged. “If she had to be with someone other than me, I was glad it was him.

  “During those weeks, Rachelle took a turn for the worse. The Shadow began to consume her. I knew all the signs. Cleveland told me confidentially that she had been accidentally exposed as a biological-weapon scientist during the war. There was a cure, and she’d taken that cure in time to arrest the contagious stage of the disease but not in time to save her own life.

  “It wasn’t long until she died. Around 1955, far too young. Cliff and I both wept at her funeral but Cliff did not understand why her death affected me to such a degree.

  “Over the years, I visited a gravestone marked Rachelle Cleveland. The love of my life had both loved me in return, and had never known me. I gently cleared the moss away from the grooves of the engravings left by her flowers. When Cliff Cleveland’s headstone appeared next to hers in the early 1960s, I did the same for him.

  “ I watched over young Lily from a distance, always careful not to interfere too much. Mostly, I observed from afar and made sure she remained safe.

  “The decades rolled past. The 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s until finally today. iPads and iPhones reappeared, those magical futuristic devices that did not work back during the Age of Aether, that strange other-world which I and I alone could still recall.”

  “But you have still have something from it,” Sabine said. “You still have the box Volzstrang gave you. Don’t you?”

  Bantam smiled. “Brilliant. Just like your great-grandmother.” Bantam bent to the sack he had brought with him and pulled out the slender wooden box with the gold trim.<
br />
  “But how can you have that?” Sabine breathed. “When the timeline got reset, why wasn’t that erased?”

  “Volztrang understood his own wave equations,” Bantam explained. “This box was specifically designed to resist the propagation of timewave causality perturbations. Just like the capsule had been. When I traveled back to the alternate 1944, why was I not erased upon arrival? The future that produced me would never come to pass, so why do I exist? Because Volzstrang’s device put me in the 28th dimension, which protected me. Me and the box, the only surviving remnants of that deleted era. At last, I am allowed to open it.”

  Sabine gasped. “You mean you waited? All this time? You’ve never even peeked inside?”

  Bantam shook his head. “No. Unpeople, remember? I had no right. Anything I did could have had horrible repercussions, possibly even worse than the Shadow itself. I would like to open it with you, Sabine, great-granddaughter of Rachelle Archenstone. Shall we?”

  Sabine nodded.

  He popped the lock off the box. Two envelopes, brown with time, fell out. One was addressed to Benjamin Bantam directly. The other read simply, THE CURE.

  Rachelle had written the cure to the Shadow.

  Bantam wasted no time opening the letter addressed to him. He read it in private, turned away slightly, and did not share its contents. Large sobs he could barely swallow shuddered his ribcage.

  My Dearest Benjamin,

  By the time you read this, I will never have been.

  Forgive me!

  I love you!

  Those are the most pertinent sentiments I wish to convey. And whilst I have no doubt that you already know the latter all too well, it is only recently that you will understand my reasoning in asking the former of you.

  It could not have been you in the capsule. That is what you are wondering.

  It must be me who sets her hand to the terrible task. There is another war, the one in Time. And I am Time’s Warrior, as were you, my sweet, sweet man. The first war was forced upon us. So was this.