Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine

by Brian Stableford

  It was at that exact moment, however, that he felt the first flicker of the confusion about which Gregory Marlstone had warned him. His head whirled, and it really did seem, for a second or two, that his head was crowded with many more minds than it was accustomed to contain. There was, however, nothing alien about the other presences that seemed to be gathered around him, interpenetrating his own personality. They were familiar, and friendly.

  Because he was looking Jeanne Evredon straight in the eyes, he saw clear evidence of the confusion that passed through her mind too, and feared that she might faint, or scream, but she too seemed to find the confusion strangely comfortable—more comfortable, at any rate, than the anxious and tormented clarity that had preceded it.

  “Why, Mr. Laurel,” she said. “I do believe that you’re a Mesmerist!”

  “Oh no!” he was quick to say. “That wasn’t me! That was…,” he trailed off, unsure how to explain, or even whether he ought to try.

  “You’re too modest, Mr. Laurel,” she said, “and very kind. Thank you for your guidance and support. I think we should part now, though—I don’t want run the risk of our being seen emerging from the Maze together. I have my reputation to think of, you know.”

  “Yes, of course,” Michael said, mechanically, lost in amazement.

  “Would you mind waiting here for a few minutes?” she said. “I really am grateful—for everything—but…I’m sure you understand.”

  Michael was not at all sure that he did, but he had no objection at all to waiting behind the hedge while she ran to the exit and slipped through. He remembered what Marlstone had said about the side-effects of the time machine’s trial being largely subjective, and wondered exactly what Jeanne Evredon thought that she had experienced. He soon put the thought aside, though. When he eventually emerged from the maze himself there was no sign of the somniloquist.

  He hesitated as to whether he ought to return to the Red Room for a jacket, but decided that the weather was too hot; even his waistcoat, light as it was, seemed a trifle burdensome. From where he stood he had a clear view of the rose-garden, which with on the north side of the house, and could easily see over the hedge surrounding it, which was no more than waist-high except at the corners. The majority of the Hall’s remaining guests were picnicking on the lawn between two of the rose-beds, sitting in a circle around a vast tablecloth laden with dishes. The bushes in the beds must have been a glorious sight in May and June, but the once-huge white flowers had lost almost all of their petals now, and the ones that remained were crumpled, browning at the edges.

  Whereas the hedges of the Maze were pruned with military straightness and leveled off as if with a spirit-level, Jefferies had been given permission to express himself more artistically in the rose garden hedge, the four elevated corners of which had been trimmed to represent the heads of animals. Michael identified them as a hare, a duck, a polecat—or, more likely, a domestic ferret—and a roebuck. He made his way there at a leisurely pace, tilting his hat slightly to shield his eyes from the sun.

  “How good it is to see you safe and sound, Mr. Laurel!” Escott called out to him as he approached, having evidently figured out that he could annoy Quentin Hope by treating Michael amicably. “I’m delighted to see you undisturbed by the trickery of time. How is the painting coming along?”

  “Quite well, Mr. Escott,” Michael told him, as he bowed and nodded to the various members of the assembled company. “I’ve applied the first washes, but I need them to dry at least partially before I begin more detailed work on the sky and the ground.”

  “I dare say that Almighty God said much the same thing on the first day of Creation,” Hope observed, tartly, causing Lady Phythian and the elder Lady Langstrade to bristle at the mild blasphemy.

  Hope, who was sitting to Cecilia’s right, made no movement to clear a space for Michael, but Carmela Monticarlo, who was sitting on her other side, immediately moved to her own left—elbowing her father along in the process—in order that the newcomer might sit between the two young women. Cecilia briefly made as if to shift to her left in order to relocate the space, but thought better of it and allowed Michael to take the place that Carmela had cleared for him.

  Although he had only had bread and conserves for breakfast, Michael was not at all displeased to find himself confronted with similar fare now. The late summer heat was beginning to become oppressive now that he had been outdoors for almost six hours, and he had no desire to eat anything hot. There were stone jugs of ginger beer nestling in baths of ice, ferried from an ice-house excavated close to the shore of Cribden Tarn, and he gratefully accept a tall glass filled to the brim with the cold liquid before reaching forward to put two bread rolls on a plate and cut himself a thick slice of Wensleydale cheese.

  “We’ve been anxious that some error in Marlstone’s speculative calculations might have resulted in your being hurled back to the Stone Age or forward to Hope’s Euchronian Era, helpless to return to your own time,” Escott told him, jokingly. “We hadn’t realized, until we received Marlstone’s instruction to stay away from the Keep at all costs, that his experiments were so dangerous. It confirms all my worst fears about the horrors of technology.”

  “Don’t be silly, Escott,” Hope instructed his friend, fractiously. “We all know perfectly well that physical transplantation in time is quite impossible—unless, of course, one has two machines established in metaphasic hypersynchronicity.”

  “Actually, Hope,” Escott retorted, promptly, “I’ve been thinking about that. How do we know that there won’t be a time machine ready and waiting somewhen in your dread technological empire of the future, carefully set up in metaphasic hypersynchronicity with exactly this point in space at noon tomorrow, based on the knowledge—carefully conserved by centuries of history—that the world’s first time machine became fully operational at that exact moment in Lord Langstrade’s replica Keep?”

  “Do you think that’s possible, Mr. Escott?” Lord Langstrade asked, anxiously. “Perhaps I ought to tell Marlstone that I’ve had second thoughts about letting him conduct his trial here—or, at least, about inviting my guests to witness it at close range?”

  Michael knew full well that Escott was perfectly confident that his suggestion was quite impossible, because the pessimist had no faith whatsoever that Gregory Marlstone’s time machine would ever work—but he also knew that a lack of sincere belief would not prevent Escott from indulging in a wild flight of fancy. Even Carmela Monticarlo, whose English was limited, knew what to expect by now. She leaned a little closer to Michael to say: “I too am glad to see you safe.”

  That brought an instant response from Cecilia, who was perfectly prepared to take advantage of her greater fluency in her native tongue. “I’m delighted to find that the echoes and resonances of Mr. Marlstone’s apparatus have not caused you any distress or dyspepsia. Mr. Laurel,” she said, in a calculatedly innocent tone. “I love the idea that time, like the Platonic spheres, is blessed with musical harmonies, don’t you?”

  “Oh, indeed I do,” said Michael, quite careless of the fact that he had not the faintest idea what the musical analogies contained in Marlstone’s talk of temporal harmonics were supposed to signify.

  “In fact,” Escott said, rather insistently, with the obvious intention of drowning out any rival conversation that might reduce the audience for his speculations, “I think there has to be a definite possibility that the world as we know it will end tomorrow, at noon.”

  As conversational stratagems went, that was an unqualified success. Even Hope seemed startled, and curious to know more.

  “The argument is perfectly simple,” Escott said, airily. “Let us assume, for the moment, that Marlstone’s theory of time travel, however odd and vaguely-formulated it might be at present, is broadly correct. Suppose that two time machines, located at any two points in future history, really coul
d permit the physical transfer of material objects when established in what he calls metaphasic hypersynchronicity. The immediate effect of any such linkage would be that all the technological resources of the more advanced society would immediately become available to the less advanced society—which would, inevitably, be eager to deploy them, even if they were not to be imposed by conquest. The result would be that the less advanced society would rapidly become a replica of the more advanced one, and that the margin of historical development between them—perhaps extending over hundreds, or even thousands, of years—would be eliminated. To put it simply, the future would invade and subsume the past, creating an interval of technological equality.”

  “An expansive Euchronia!” Mr. Hope exulted. “A Euchronia capable of extending its own social perfection back in time, as a gift to all the previous generations whose patient labor and dutiful accumulation of knowledge enabled its construction. What a wonderful thought!”

  “On the contrary!” Escott objected. “It is the most terrifying prospect imaginable. The ultimate tyranny of vile machinery, having destroyed the glories of Nature in its own era, would reach out into the past with its avid and implacable steel hands, to crush the glories of Nature in the past. The establishment of a dehumanized, static society extending over centuries and millennia, from the moment that the very first time machine became operative until…well, unless time machines can somehow be uninvented once they have first been invented, until the very end of time. A dread empire indeed—a universal, unconquerable, eternal empire.”

  “My God!” said the younger Lady Langstrade, breaking the shocked silence that followed this judgment. “What an idea! Has Mr. Marlstone been warned about this?”

  “Actually,” Dr. Carp put in, “I believe Mr. Marlstone said something about the matter last evening, shortly after Mr. Hope and Mr. Escott introduced me to him. Perhaps that’s what prompted Mr. Escott’s nightmare—although I understood what Mr. Marlstone was saying rather differently.”

  If looks could have killed, Escott’s arrest for the old man’s murder would have been all but inevitable, but circumstances favored the pessimist, and Augustus Carp actually seemed to take heart from the expression on Escott’s face.

  “Do explain, Dr. Carp,” Hope was quick to say. “I must say that, although I certainly didn’t take the same dire inference as Escott from what Marlstone was saying, I’m not entirely clear as to his reasons for rejecting the idea that time machines, if ever they were successfully invented would enable the inhabitants of future eras to rewrite their own pasts, paradoxical as that might seem.”

  “So far as I was able to judge,” the Mesmerist replied, doubtless obtaining confidence from that fact that Marlstone was not present, “the key to the enigma lies in the analogy Miss Langstrade drew a few minutes ago, between Mr. Marlstone’s theory of temporal harmonics and Plato’s theory of celestial harmonics. Like Plato and John Dee, Mr. Marlstone is an atomist rather than a plenarist in his philosophical conception of space, and he seems to go a little further than the modern fashion in applying the same framework of thought to time. His application of the Pythagorean notion of harmonics to time is not unlike Plato’s notion of the organization of the solar system about a spindle of necessity imbued with the implacability of fate. Instead of conceiving of time by analogy with a flowing river, as so many philosophers do, Mr. Marlstone seems to imagine moments as discrete entities scattered within a temporal void, in much the same way that elementary particles of matter are supposedly scattered in a spatial void, like planets and stars. He does not think, though, that moments are subject to the same simple orbital patterns as the planets within the Platonic solar system; he believes, along with the famous Dr. Dee, that their arrangement is far more complicated—labyrinthine, in fact. His own work involves the most sophisticated techniques of modern mathematics, applying the insights of Lagrange’s Mécanique analytique to the extrapolation of non-Euclidean geometries, in order to calculate the resonant coincidences.”

  Hope and Escott looked at the old man in frank amazement, open-mouthed. Michael suspected that they might be a little less eager in their attempts to make a fool of him from now on. He also suspected that Carp had been up half the night preparing that little speech, ready to spring it on Hope and Escott as soon as the opportunity presented itself.

  “I do not understand this,” Carmela Monticarlo whispered in Michael’s ear.

  Michael refrained from saying “Nor do I”—not because it was untrue, but because he thought Cecilia might take exception to any expression of sympathy directed toward the signorina, however slight.

  “What on Earth is all that taradiddle supposed to mean, Dr. Carp?” Lord Langstrade demanded, coming to the rescue yet again, emphasizing his question by waving his trusty walking-stick as if to demand attention and discipline from a class of unruly schoolchildren.

  “In layman’s terms,” the Mesmerist said, clearly enjoying his moment in the spotlight, and speaking as if it required a tremendous effort for a man of his great and esoteric wisdom to lower himself to the use of everyday terminology, “Mr. Marlstone conceives of time travel not as a means of moving smoothly back and forth along a time-stream but as a matter of leaping from one propitious moment to another. I say ‘propitious’ because he alleges that it is not practicable to move from any moment to any other, but only to move through rare and intricate sequences of particular moments, whose potential linkage he describes in terms analogous to those of musical harmonics but whose calculation requires very advanced mathematics.

  “The discrete nature of these moments protects them, in his view, from the kind of alteration that Mr. Escott has described in such apocalyptic terms. Any substantial transfer of material objects, or even of valuable information, from a future moment to a past moment would not result in a consequent cascade of transformation through all the intervening moments, but rather in the generation of a parallel moment, by what might be thought of as a process of intertemporal budding.

  “Once separated from its parent moment, that ‘bud’ would become the seed of an new sequence of moments extending, as it were, sideways into the temporal void, leaving the original momentary chain unaffected. It is, I admit, a strange notion, and I was unable to grasp it immediately when Mr. Marlstone attempted to explain it, in response to Hope and Escott’s prompting. Having given it considerable thought, though, I believe that I have grasped the gist of it.”

  “What is a gist, please?” Carmela murmured in Michael’s ear. This time, he might have felt obliged to answer, but Hope came to his rescue—unintentionally, of course—by loudly taking up the thread of the discourse, intent on repairing the damage done to his intellectual image by Carp’s casual intervention.

  “In that case, Dr. Carp,” Hope said, insistently, “the kind of eternal Euchronian Empire that was earlier envisaged—which would, of course, be an Earthly paradise, not the awful tyranny fearfully envisaged by Mr. Escott—would indeed become a possibility, thanks to the successful invention of time machines, but it would exist as a branch of the initial historical sequence rather than the parent trunk. Seen from without, as it were, time would, in this conception, resemble a tree rather than a stream—or a multicursal maze rather than a unicursal labyrinth.”

  “You’re quite right, Hope,” Escott swiftly put in. “Not about your Euchronian nonsense, of course—soul-destroying mechanical tyranny would definitely be the order of the day—but about the ever-branching tree, or multicursal maze. If Carp is correct about the consequences of Marlstone’s theory, there won’t be just one dread empire of eternity, extending indefinitely into the temporal void. There’ll be dozens, or hundreds, or as many as the human mind can imagine, each one corresponding to the invention of a time machine on the main branch—which, if such an invention is practical at all, will obviously keep happening, over and over again.”

  Carmela Monticarlo leaned over yet
again to murmur in Michael’s direction, but Cecilia was ready this time, and laid her own claim to his right ear before the signorina could attain his left. “But if time is due to branch tomorrow, Mr. Laurel” she said, in a confidential tone, “which branch will we be in?”

  Michael couldn’t help feeling that the entire hypothetical discussion might well be pointless, if Marlstone’s machine failed yet again, as it very well might, but it was in full swing now and had developed its own momentum. While Hope, with long-practiced expertise, picked up the thread of the main argument from Escott, Michael started his own side-branch, glad that he had to lean a little closer to Cecilia in order to do so, and willing to ignore that slightly reproachful glance that Carmela directed at him—with some justification, given that he had refused to make a similar concession for her.

  “If I understand Dr. Carp correctly,” Michael whispered into his beloved’s ear, “we would be ‘budded’ along with the particular momentary bubble of time in which we are contained. Different versions of ourselves would be present, as it were, in both branches of the growing tree of time—in the branch fated to be absorbed into Hope and Scott’s empire of eternity and in the parent branch that Dr. Carp likened to Plato’s spindle of necessity, in which.…” He trailed off, having been struck by a sudden idea that took his breath away.

  “You mustn’t tease me like that, Mr. Laurel,” Cecilia scolded, although she did not seem at all displeased. “It’s most unfair.”

  “I wasn’t teasing,” Michael assured her, hearing the pitch of his voice rise in spite of his determination to keep it low. “I just thought.…” He stopped again, this time because the sound of his voice had caused James Escott to stop in mid-flow and turn to look at him, a trifle petulantly.