“What do you mean, time-wise? That we are late? Or too early?” Lilian asked, wrapping herself in her blanket.
“We’re early,” replied Brentford. “Very early … So much so, I’m told, that the station hasn’t been built yet, and no submarine locomotive waits for us.”
The Most Serene Seven looked at each other as if for a quick reality check.
“You must be kidding,” Lilian finally said.
“How funny would that be?” Brentford asked. “And what’s more, according to the Colonel, there’s no possibility of returning to our starting point.”
“What happened?” Thomas inquired.
“We don’t know. Apparently, there’s always a risk that a Psychomotive will take a wrong turn in time.”
“No wonder they don’t use them any more,” Gabriel blurted dejectedly. “Peterswarden must have known.”
“And the Colonel,” Lilian added between clenched teeth. “And that wizard.”
Brentford cut her off. “Please. It’s vital that we stick together. We’re all in the same lifeboat here. Now, we’re going to go to the nearest island to try to find out more. Then we’ll decide on the next step.”
But the only answer he got was a leaden silence.
II
The Chessboard Island
Branwell steered them into a hidden cove at the north end of Grimsey Island, powered down, and then warned them that the Psychomotive was in condition to go back to Kolbeinsey but no farther. Receiving the news grimly, Brentford and Thomas, who happened to speak a little Icelandic, wrapped themselves in fur clothing, jumped out of the vehicle, and started to grope their way to the top of the surrounding ridge. Then, in the nibbling cold, they walked over grass and moss towards a small settlement whose church spire could just be made out in the hazy, bluish dawn. The church itself was good news: it meant that it was still sometime A.D. At least they wouldn’t be chased around by pterosaurs.
In front of them, twenty-five miles beyond the town, they could see the dim coast of Iceland. Behind them was the frozen ocean, an icepack spread under blue-grey skies as far as the eye could squint.
“You’ve noticed, haven’t you?” Thomas asked Brentford.
“What?”
“The daylight. And the icefield. There’s no way it’s spring here.”
Brentford shrugged his shoulders.
“If we’ve changed years, we could have changed seasons, I suppose.”
Whoever put the Grim in Grimsey had probably found it here in the first place. Waving away a flock of aggressive terns, Brentford and Thomas eventually reached a crude path and descended among the sparse, sod-covered huts of the village. It was early in the morning, but a few sturdy, weatherbeaten fishermen were already busy in the tiny stone harbour, ogling in disbelief these well-dressed foreigners looking as if they had just landed from the future, not quite without reason, Brentford had to admit. The word was already out, and the vicar waited for them in front of the small driftwood church, which was built, if they were to believe Colonel Branwell, just across the Arctic Circle.
Thanks to Thomas’s high school Icelandic and the vicar’s English, which sounded like hammered boilerplate, Brentford could explain the situation, and in a way that differed only a little from the truth. Deeming it wise not to ask the natives what year it was, he told them that he was a Canadian millionaire on a cruise with a few friends in a new-prototype ship that had, unfortunately, broken down. With no hope of repairing it, here, he would be most grateful if the islanders would allow them passage to Iceland.
The islanders, the vicar reassured them, would be very happy to help. But there was one condition, he added. A little custom to which all foreigners must submit. Brentford had a sudden vision of their heads stuck on poles againts the horizon while terns pecked out their eyes. However, the vicar’s proposition turned out to be nothing more than a game of chess. Chess was the islanders’ driving passion, he explained, and their only entertainment. Might they invite their friends over for a little game tonight? A win would ensure them any help they could get.
Hazily, Brentford recalled Gabriel’s gabbling once about a lost island of renowned chess enthusiasts. It was in line with the Seven’s current streak of luck, obviously, that they would beach precisely among these monomaniacal wood-pushers. He fumed at the unnecessary delay, but had little choice but to submit to the local rules of hospitality.
“And if we lose?” he inquired.
“Then you play again until you win,” the vicar explained with a smile.
And so that very night Brentford found himself in a smoky, stifling room, entertaining a sweating vicar above a marble chessboard, while his parishioners, huddled around them, observed their champion with evident anxiety. Brentford had even less enthusiastic support from the No-Longer-So-Serene Seven, except for the attentive Tuluk, who was trying to make sense of what seemed to him to be strange hunting strategies. The rest of the Seven—sans Branwell, of course—sat gloomily in the background, their eyes repeatedly swerving back, furiously, to the calendar page on the wall: September 18, 1895.
At first, Brentford himself could think about little other than this date—a date when neither New Venice itself nor any of the New Venetians in the room were supposed to even exist. He looked at the chessboard with a mix of anger and bewilderment, but then, sensing the Seven at his back and the dark vibrations of their mood, he knew that he could not lose. He must win this game if only to win back their trust. But luckily, as soon as he touched the white pawn, something lit up in him: a flame from the days when chess had been all the rage in New Venice and an integral part of the school curriculum. Brentford discovered that he was still at home in this pattern of darkness and light, as familiar as the grid of a well-known city—of his own well-known city, in fact, for when he was Doge, the chessboard had inspired his distribution of nighttime illuminations, so that everyone in the streets was always at walking distance from the light. In his mind the pieces now exploded and shot in and out at full speed, in ribbons of crisscrossing transparent paths, forking out according to his opponent’s possible parries. The first pawn’s move was as fatal as the start of an avalanche. The vicar was a competent player, but not a match for a man who had played three-dimensional fairy chess daily as a schoolboy.
“Checkmate!” Brentford announced half an hour later, with more relief than triumph.
But as the vicar gently laid out his king, Brentford reflected that if there ever was a fallen shah, it was nobody but himself.
“You have to pity people whose idea of fun in such a forlorn place is a goddamn chess party,” Lilian said moodily, as the Seven trudged back to the Psychomotive in the crisp, crunching darkness.
“Nice game, by the way,” Gabriel interjected. “Quite a blitz you played there.”
“Sure,” Lilian added mercilessly as she stalked along beside them. “But it’s not as if he didn’t have the time.”
“Do you know what it made me think of?” Gabriel went on hurriedly, trying to deflect the conversation. “This article by Thibaut Traymore. Remember him? ‘Retrograde Analysis in Four-Dimensional Reflecting Chess: a Metaphysical Meditation,’ I think it was called.”
Of course Brentford remembered the article. In the days when chess had become the fashionable metaphor for just about everything, their longtime college friend Thibaut Traymore had postulated an “hypnothesis,” as he called it, that had enjoyed a certain success among students and Boreemians. The alternation of nights and days, he had offered, followed the alternation of black squares and white squares on an infinite chessboard. As the pawns of creation, we experience them successively, one at a time, but who was to know whether we could not move according to different rules, as queens or knights can? This, Traymore claimed, is what we do psychically when we dream or daydream, replaying or rehearsing in our heads the moves we have made or plan to make and testing different outcomes. Going even further, he proposed that what can be accomplished psychically could also be accomplished
physically.
“I thought about that, too, during the game,” Brentford said. Then he shrugged. “It’s just another metaphor.”
“And what’s wrong with metaphors?” Gabriel asked, sounding personally offended.
“Nothing. They just won’t take us home, will they?”
“No,” Gabriel conceded. “But perhaps they’ll show us the way.”
September 1895, then. It could have been worse, Brentford told himself. But even if the previous millisecond is closer to us than the birth of the universe, it is equally out of reach.
Back inside the treacherous Psychomotive, Thomas was the first to broach the topic.
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but 1895 was sometime before New Venice’s foundation.”
“Indeed,” said Brentford. “At this very moment, even if we could get back, we would have nowhere to get back to.”
The news took a moment to sink in, probably because there was no bottom for it to alight upon.
“So, what do you suggest?” Lilian finally asked, in a tone that suggested she had just licked a grindstone. “That we wait until we are once again citizens of an existing city?”
“The only chance we have is to get to Paris,” the Colonel announced from the tabletop.
“The Paris of 1895?” asked Thomas.
“Aye, my boy. Unless you know of another one that is available at the moment. Could be that the Magical Crown we carry has got us into this jam. Some magnetic effect that I can’t fathom. But we know it comes from Paris, so that seems the only place to solve our little problem, what?”
Gabriel intervened.
“What did you tell me about it, Dr. Lavis? That those crowns were made in Paris in the nineties, right?”
“Exactly, Monsieur d’Allier. We could find the people who made them and we could ask them in what way it might be linked to our predicament. If indeed it is.”
“And how do we get to Paris without the submarine?” asked Lilian, adding for good measure, “I’m afraid I haven’t packed a swimsuit.”
“Simple,” said Brentford, sensing that this was not the time for the “Don’t-Worry-Neither-Did-I” joke. “We’ll do what everybody else does. We’ll go by boat and train. Let’s vote. Who agrees to go to Paris?”
Blankbate, who hadn’t said a word so far, was the first to raise his hand. Lavis was a close second. Then Gabriel. All the people, then, who had originally manifested a desire to see Paris. Then Thomas. Then Lilian, although exasperatedly. Tuluk watched the others for a while, not sure that he understood what the problem was, but seeing Brentford raise his arm, he chose to trust him and cast the vote that made it unanimous, or almost.
“You don’t expect me to raise my hand, do you?” the Colonel asked.
III
Exiles from Nowhere
As if going back in time was not enough, the trip forward in time to Paris seemed to render seconds into minutes and minutes into hours. It was days before the Most Serene Seven (and their multiple trunks) were able to board a trawler, which then sailed ever so slowly towards the mainland of Iceland, finally landing at Akureyri, a jumble of wooden houses sloping up towards farmlands, with a thriving little harbour full of Danish merchant steamers. Brentford negotiated with various captains and eventually got the party booked into cramped cabins on the Fortuna, which brought back part-load traffic to Denmark with a stop at Reykjavik. But it was only once they were at sea, seated at the captain’s table having dinner with Captain Hjulsen, that it was explained to them that travelling overland to Paris through northernmost Europe in the latening fall was not a good idea, as the weather was unusually bad for the season: roads and railway lines would probably be blocked by the time they arrived. Perhaps, Hjulsen suggested, they would have a better chance of getting to France by sea. There would be ships going from Reykjavik to either Ireland or Britain—from there they could catch another to Normandy. Brentford sighed and thanked him.
And so to Reykjavik, a quiet, monotonous haven with irregular houses sprawling all over the lava-plain, and one very poor hotel. Except for ponies trotting everywhere, it wasn’t very lively. But by chance, a German ship with a crew of scientists—unimaginatively baptized the Poseidon—had been delayed there on its way to Galway by bad weather, and had room to take on the “Canadian” passengers. By October 5, after going trough serious swells that tossed everyone about in their bunks, the Poseidon had safely arrived in Galway. The Most Serene Seven, still reeling from the voyage, took up quarters at an inn near the Spanish Arch, and then scattered all over the city, eager to breathe some fresh air. But that air proved somewhat wet, with a local wind that was rumoured to drive people mad—the very last thing they needed.
Paris seemed very far away, and New Venice even more so.
Yet as the last few days had revealed to them, living in the past was not the problem it could have been. New Venice, cut off from the world as it was, lived in a time of its own, largely indifferent to outside history or progress. As a matter of fact, it had been built for exactly that purpose, a dream answer to History’s nightmare. Whatever happened beyond its limits was perceived rather dimly, and certainly, for New Venetians, with their quaint clothes and manners, there was nothing particularly shocking about the Iceland and Ireland of 1895. More than a sense of belonging, though, it only made them each feel a gnawing nostalgia.
Brentford found Gabriel in front of a pint of Guinness in the taproom of Green’s, a small narrow pub full of boatmen, just across the Claddagh.
“A better model of the universe than your chessboard,” Gabriel commented, pointing to his pint, as Brentford sat. “A little foam over a cold, bitter darkness. And this place … Remind me never to call New Venice boring and drab again. It’s a trademark here: Boring and Drab, established 1124.”
“I would have thought it was some sort of homecoming for you,” said Brentford.
“You mean, me being of Irish stock and all? It is, indeed. Like that fellow from The Voyage of Bran. Falling to dust as soon as he landed on the ould sod of Ireland, for he did not know that he had travelled a hundred years from island to island.”
“Was that when d’Alliers were still Daleys?”
“That was when the Daleys were still the O’Dalaighs—a great family of seers and bards about as old as the country,” Gabriel said, with a self-mocking pride that was Irish enough. “Knowledgeable, sharp-tongued fellows whose poetry could cause boils …”
“Oh! that’s where you get your sharp tongue from, then?”
“Shh … Do you want to get me hanged? The story goes that when the English invaded, they cut down every tree in the O’Dalaighs’ domain but one, to hang their descendents on if they came back. I suppose that, unconsciously, might be the reason that the family ended up in the treeless Arctic.”
“And your father thought calling himself d’Allier would erase all traces?” Brentford joked.
“No. My mother made him do that when he was picked for Transpherence. As you know, she was a Newfoundland French Shore girl with Bourbonnais roots. She persuaded herself that she was of noble blood, because her own mother was called ‘de’ something. The French have this huge problem with nobility, as you will notice if we ever make it to Paris. But haven’t I told you this story a hundred times?”
“I suppose so. I wasn’t sure. I seem to have a hard time remembering things, these days. I’ve been … forgetting things about New Venice. Well, actually, it’s more as if I’m not forgetting them so much as growing unsure about whether they really happened or not.”
“I’ve noticed that, too,” Gabriel said, nodding with concern. “Things don’t come out very clearly. More like fantasies than memories. But after all, I suppose it is hard to remember something that doesn’t exist yet. And you know the theory, anyway: memories are but a constant process of forgetting, which we patch up with imagination as well or poorly as we can.”
“We’ll have to work hard on that, Gabriel. Memories or fantasies, we mustn’t let them disappear or
blur. It’s all we have right now. This is, as of today, the only place where the city lives,” he added, tapping his forehead.
“I have no intention of forgetting it. For example, do you remember that place where we went to see that girl together, what was her name again? We drank a whole bottle of Belovodie vodka and …”
Brentford winced, then hissed, “Well, maybe there are some things we should forget, after all.”
In the morning Brentford, in full no-nonsense mode, had gathered information and proposed his plan, schedules in hand, to the rest of the Seven. The Great Western Railway Company operated a line between Galway and Dublin. From there, it branched out to Waterford, where you could catch a boat to Milford Haven, from which you could take a train to Weymouth, before sailing towards the Anglo-Norman islands, where a ferry line ran to Granville, France. They voted in favour of it unanimously, with weary hands, as nobody had the strength for further discussion.
It proved a long and arduous trip in cramped compartments, and the glum mood among the Most Serene Seven only made it longer. In quiet, rubeous Dublin, the sulking Gabriel had bought from the Hodges-Figgis bookstore a copy of H. G. Wells’s recently published Time Machine to read on the train to Waterford. He faintly hoped that it would give him an idea about how to get back home, although the sphinx on the cloth cover did not look very encouraging. It proved interesting, indeed, on the notion that time travel is modeled not so much on physics as on the way the mind works, just as Thibaut Traymore had postulated in his chessboard theory, but on the subject of returning to a past that had become the future, neither Traymore nor Wells offered any insight. For the time being, no amount of nostalgia or hope could bring the Seven back to their home.
A ship ominously called the Vulture ferried them from the busy quays of rustic Waterford to Milford Haven, a grim, steep Welsh village that tried to pass as a port—and if that weren’t a bad enough portent, Brentford noticed that a trawler called Sybil was nearby moored in the brand-new docks. From there, they boarded another GWR train, chugging and panting across a greyish stretch of country that seemed to be tacked to the windows.
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