Blackbird: A Warrior of the No-When

by Martin Schiller

  The location for my lesson was a major branching in the 2nd Universe, and in the early portion of its 20th century. It was also impossible to miss; this portion of the strand was an angry brown color, tinged with red. Worse yet, the years that followed it thinned out quite rapidly and then faded into nothingness.

  “What is occurring here?” I asked, noting that my displays had labeled the area as a ‘terminal event.’

  “Disease,” Ziva replied gravely. “Your universe experienced the same thing. You called it the Spanish Flu.”

  I frowned, recalling that horrible event. The Spanish Flu, so named for where it was believed to have originated, had cut a terrible swath through my world’s population. It had begun as a common enough illness, claiming only the old and infirm, before fading away. But then it had returned in a new and terrible form, cutting down the young and healthy. It had been my burden as a volunteer nurse to witness its ravages first hand, and by the end, 20,000,000 to as many as 50,000,000 lives had been lost.

  “It is much worse here though,” she informed me. “Here, if we do not fix things properly and at the right point in time, the Sibyl has predicted that it will mutate a third time and lead to the death of the entire human race.”

  “Show me what we need to do,” I replied resolutely. I was as ready to do battle with this pestilence as I would have been with any Deviator.

  She gestured towards another strand, which by terrestrial standards would have been ten or more kilometers away from our present position. This one was a healthy white color, with no indication of any form of distress.

  “Fly us over there, and when we arrive, have your ship change its magnetic fields to attract rather than repel. We want to introduce the healthy probabilities contained within that strand into this one and change the outcome in our favor.”

  “Very well then,” I responded, changing our heading and moving towards the area. Reaching it, I followed her instructions and right away, the ephemeral material that composed the strand began to follow us. As I began our return trip though, it stopped.

  “Be careful,” she cautioned. “If you go too quickly, you will lose it. Reduce your speed to half. Take your time--and take your time.”

  I nodded, smiling at the double-entendre, and complied. This time, the substance stayed with me, stretching across the blackness like so much spider silk. A few times, I was afraid that I would lose it again, but Ziva intervened and had me reduce my speed even further. It was a painfully slow process, and our return trip wound up taking the better part of an hour.

  Once there, Ziva revealed the finer points of time-weaving to me. “Weaving involves three things,” she said, ticking each item off with her fingers. “Time, space and place. We need to introduce the material into a point where it will have the most effect.”

  She directed me to my screens and some information displayed there. The first part was the calendar day and year, as well as the local time. In this case, it was 13:05:25 hours, on the 23rd day of August 1914. And when she entered a command, this corresponding section of the strand was illuminated.

  The second component were map coordinates; latitude north 49 20.044 and longitude east 5 05.376. In addition, I noted a figure for altitude, which was 1981.2 meters. This I recalled was the average height of low level clouds in the atmosphere.

  “According to the Sibyl,” the Captain explained, “this is when and where we need to insert the material. Please move us to that point in the strand.”

  Careful not to lose our precious cargo, I nudged Blackbird along until she was over the area. This task was aided by an overlay that showed me my equivalent position in the No-When.

  “Now, change your magnetic field back to repel and focus it, “she told me, “pushing the material downwards to the altitude and coordinates that we were given.”

  This too, proved to be a delicate operation, and I had to do it several times before I had it right. The new time-strands kept trying to slip away from me, and I had to readjust Blackbird’s field to keep them going where I wanted. But in the end, they sank into the century, and reached their correct placement.

  It was a thoroughly exhausting process, and my admiration for Ziva’s skill ascended ever higher. Fighting the Deviators was far simpler than worrying over such fine maneuvers.

  “Good,” she said. “Now we go back for more and do it again.”

  “However will we know when we are done?” I inquired, trying my best not to sound petulant.

  “When the distressed area of our target changes color and the whole strand stops being a terminal event,” she stated. “We don’t have enough time to stay and watch it, but eventually, the strand will thicken and lengthen and become a strong timeline that will join with the rest of the River.”

  Satisfied with this, I turned us around for our next run. In the end, we made a total of five trips, and the area we had been working on had become notably brighter and healthier in appearance. Clearly, we had achieved our objective.

  “Shall we go and see the product of our handiwork?” my companion asked me.

  “Yes, of course,” I agreed.

  “Set your course for the same time and place where the new material was introduced,” Ziva suggested.

  I was not wholly prepared for the sight that greeted me when we entered that part of the century. In fact, I do not believe that anything would have ever adequately readied me, for the event that I witnessed went well beyond what the people of my universe and time were acquainted with.

  We were over Belgium, near the French Frontier at a place called Mons. It was not the picturesque landscape that I knew of however. Rather, it was a ravaged place; a desolate wasteland of shattered earth, crisscrossed and scarred with manmade entrenchments, barbed wire and bloody, splintered barriers. And everywhere, I saw soldiers, some dressed in brown, and others in grey, locked in mortal combat with one another.

  The sheer scale of their struggle was staggering. It seemed to me as if the entire world was engaged in a massive orgy of slaughter and misery the likes of which challenged every conception I had ever entertained about war. This was no grand panoply of ribbons and medals, of colorful uniforms or noble ideals. It was carnage in its rawest form and my heart felt like lead as we soared over the battlefield.

  “Terrible,” I declared. “Absolutely terrible.”

  “A world war,” Ziva said. “They will call it the ‘Great War’ and the ‘War to End All Wars’, but they will be wrong. It is only the first of many. But that is not what I wanted you to see.”

  She was looking at my center display and I followed her gaze. Something quite peculiar was occurring in the sky, and as it made itself plain, some of the men in the trenches forgot the fighting and pointed upwards with expressions of amazement and awe.

  A cloud was forming above the battlefield. However, it was quite unlike any meteorological event that I had ever witnessed.

  It was lit from within by an eldritch light that alternately brightened and dimmed, reminding me of the rhythm of a slow, but steady heartbeat. And moreover, it communicated on a visceral level that it was something utterly alien and out of place; an intrusion in the very fabric of the heavens themselves.

  “What you are looking at is the earthly result of our weave,” Ziva said, “making itself manifest in the ether of this time and place. That is not what the men below us are seeing though. To most of them it is a group of medieval archers, pointing their bows at the soldiers in grey. To others, St. George, or even a host of angels.”

  “Why on earth is that?” I inquired. The apparition was far too vivid to be mistaken for anything other than exactly what it was.

  “Only very special beings can see reality without filtering it,” she said. “Beings like yourself. For the rest of us, when we are confronted by something that we cannot reconcile, our minds try to impose a familiar shape on it. Visions are often the result.”

  “Then you do not see the cloud?”

  She shook her head. “No. I only se
e the archers. I wish it were otherwise, but I am not like you.”

  “Like me? Whatever do you mean?”

  “That is not for me to explain,” she said. “But you will get your answer in due time.”

  She left things at that and pressed on. “Things like this always occur when we alter the probabilities of the time stream, and sometimes they even inspire great feats and religious fervor.”

  I was still wondering at what she had meant by ‘special beings’ and her inability to see the cloud, but I could tell that she did not wish to elaborate. With no choice except to resort to rudeness, I allowed her to continue and added my questions to a growing stack of unanswered conundrums.

  “These collective hallucinations are not the only bi-product of time-weaving either,” she was telling me. “When the stream is altered, it affects other beings just as profoundly as it does humans; the magnetic lines that course through the earth fluctuate. Whales and dolphins beach themselves. Birds change their migration habits, and there are even rains of strange objects. None of it is intentional of course, but merely a side-effect.”

  I was somewhat familiar with what she was referring to. In my old universe, the papers had once reported a rain of lizards in Kantolus (although the reporter had been cautious enough to state that there had been no confirmation of their heavenly origin). At the time, I had merely considered it an oddity and passed it off as nothing worth pondering. Now, I knew it for something far more profound. Clearly, a time-weaving operation had taken place in the third universe.

  “Tell me,” I asked as we ascended back into the No-When. “Are all those men down there going to become religious fanatics because of this?”

  “In an earlier century, they would have,” she admitted. “That was certainly what happened to the Maid of Orleans and her followers. Not here though. Here, the Sibyl told me that a member of the Fellowship will intervene, and write a little work of fiction that he will call ‘The Bowmen.’ It will feature the eyewitness accounts of these soldiers and transform them into something that the government will use to rally the public, but allow the truth to be blurred and forgotten.”

  “That all seems rather dishonest,” I opined disapprovingly.

  “To maintain this era’s paradyne, it will be necessary,” Ziva responded. “This is a century that depends on reason, not faith. Our agent will play his part, and help maintain social stability.’

  “But what truly matters is what we have done here. By changing the probabilities contained within this day and time, the trajectory of a German artillery shell was altered.’

  “Instead of missing as it had before our intervention, it landed in a particular trench. And in that trench was a man named Captain F.A. Royce, serving with the Middlesex Regiment.’

  “In addition to all his other qualities, he had the misfortune of possessing the DNA that would have allowed the flu to mutate into its third and deadliest version. He wasn’t ill yet, but once he contracted the virus, he would have become the Typhoid Mary of his day. Now, thanks to us, this will not occur and the human race has been saved. Despite the cost to Captain Royce, that is something to be proud of.”

  Under any other circumstance, I might have agreed, but any pride that I felt was blunted by the thought that an innocent man had lost his life to achieve our success. That, and the terrible suffering of all the other combatants I had seen on the Mons battlefield.

  If we could stop the flu by making just this one change, I reasoned, then it only served that we had the power to prevent the entire war as well.

  Yet we had not done so. I did not challenge Ziva about this though. The answers that I needed would have to come from another source.

  This was the Sibyl herself. Given her strange nature, I had pointedly avoided her since our first encounter, but I reversed my policy on the way back to Nazca. The instant that we had landed, I took my leave of Ms. Meier and sought her out.

  The Sibyl’s lodgings proved to be just as peculiar as she was. They consisted of a silver-grey room that seemed as if it had been extruded as a single continuous piece rather than the joining of separate components. Except for the door, there were no true borders anywhere within its precincts; the floor blended seamlessly with the walls, and the walls with the ceiling. And although it was well illuminated, I could not detect the light source. Instead, it came from everywhere and nowhere at once.

  The Sibyl herself floated in the very center of this space. Bo and Peep, and a third grey-skinned being, sat in seats arranged to face her. None of them appeared to be aware of my presence as I entered, and at last, growing somewhat impatient, I cleared my throat.

  “You have come seeking answers”, the Sibyl said in her child’s voice. “You want to know why we changed some things and left others alone.”

  “Yes,” I replied. “I have, and I do. I should like to know why we allowed that terrible war to go on.”

  “Because some things, however awful, must occur,” she responded. “For life to exist, there must also be death.”

  “That is a rather harsh philosophy,” I retorted.

  “Existence is harsh,” she returned, completely unmoved by my protest. “The very act of living requires killing. Even if we choose to consume only plants, we still consume. We still kill. And pain is as much a part of our lives as pleasure. Without it, we would have no warning of danger. It is the same whether we are dealing with an individual, or an entire species.”

  “What I saw did not seem necessary,” I countered. “It was a mindless slaughter.”

  “It was growth,” the Sibyl stated. “Men died, yes. But many more survived because of your actions, and those that passed through that conflict went on to fight against an even greater terror. Some of them became great men.’

  “Without strife, humanity becomes stagnant. Our greatest accomplishments have always come from our response to danger and hardship. We need adversity to transform the same way that the giant redwood of your former universe requires fire to spread its seeds. ‘

  “Surely, there is another way than that,” I challenged.

  “It is nature’s way,” she told me. “Nothing comes without a price, Penelope, and for every beautiful thing that you take unto your bosom and cherish, there is a horror that contributed to its birth.”

  Intellectually, I knew that she was right, but emotionally, I refused to accept her statement.

  “You perceive only a small slice of existence,” she continued. “And that through the blinders of your desires and prejudices. You wanted an answer, and I gave it. Yet, you still remain ignorant.’

  “There is another way though. A way for you to see and understand some of it at least.”

  While she was telling me this, Bo rose from his chair and floated over to me. When he was within reach, he raised his arm and extended his hand.

  I took it, amazed at its warmth and its smoothness, for it was consistent with his cetacean heritage, lacking pores or blemishes of any kind. Then I gazed into his gigantic black eyes.

  Watch, I heard him think. Learn.

  The Sibyl joined us, along with the other Greys, and they all laid their hands upon me, but I barely felt their touch. For I was no longer in the room, but standing in the mud of the battlefield at Mons. I watched as the sun set on that grisly scene, then rose again in less than a breath, and when it did, the land had changed. The trenches had filled in, and grass and flowers grew where only barbed wire had once flourished.

  At the same time, a numinous knowledge flooded through me. I was suddenly aware of all the men who had survived the war, and went on to become noteworthy. Men who would have never have done so had the flu continued on.

  Men like Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of my wireless device--and then all of the lives that were saved at sea because of his great work. Men like Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, two of the greatest writers that their century would ever know. And many, many more; doctors, scientists poets and philosophers who had passed through that terrible cr
ucible of death to bestow their light and wisdom to future generations.

  There were also monsters as well. I witnessed Mr. Hitler being gassed at Ypres and later presiding over the birth of the Nazi party. Then Stalin rising up from the carnage of the Russian revolution to become the greatest mass murderer in his nation’s history.

  Another dawn came after this, and again the earth was torn and bloodied by men fighting with one another. This time, the field of battle was dominated by large armored machines and terrible aircraft. Many of these bore the swastika, the emblem of Mr. Hitler, now the pied-piper of madness.

  But my heart swelled as I watched the England of that universe resist his evil machinations with all of the bravery and fortitude I knew that my countrymen were capable of. Then I cringed as it fought the Battle of Britain and suffered under the hammer of the Blitz. Death swept over nearly every corner of the world, and in the east, I felt the sky bleed as the first atomic bombs were set off.

  Just as Ziva had promised, the Great War had been surpassed by an even greater war. Mercifully though, sunset returned, and the fields were cleansed of these diabolical images.

  The pace of everything around me increased after that. The days came and went in the blink of an eye, and through it all, more knowledge was force-fed into my brain. I experienced new wars, new periods of peace, great inventions and art that overwhelmed me, and I even witnessed man setting foot on the moon itself!

  If that had been all, it would have been enough to make me concede the Sibyl’s point. She was not done with me however; the years sped on ever faster, transforming the rising and setting of the sun into a solid streak of uninterrupted brilliance.

  The earth warmed and the seas rose, and mankind ventured forth into the darkness of space, colonizing the planets. What it was to be human changed completely; new variations of race and color that I could never have imagined came into being.

  Nor did the planet remain the same. Twice, I witnessed it struck by great asteroids, and saw the magnetic poles reverse themselves. An ice-age followed this, accompanied by the explosion of a massive super-volcano in the Yellowstone.