Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine

by Brian Stableford

  “I’ll wager that you never thought, when you were listening to Lady Phythian tell her story in the railway carriage yesterday,” Escott said to Michael in a low voice, as they made their way on tiptoe to one of the Hall’s side-doors—moving quietly for fear of disturbing the ladies in the dining room—“that within thirty-six hours you’d actually become one of her ghosts.”

  “If not two of them,” Hope quipped.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” whispered Lord Langstrade

  “He’s just showing off again,” Escott said, softly. “Hope realizes—as I do myself, admittedly—that Marlstone’s machine might perfectly well cast two images of the four of us into the past, originated from slightly different present moments, which will inevitably move in step, as if one were following the other. If so, alas, we won’t meet any of the other ghosts within its bounds…but let’s not prejudge the issue. You’ll have to guide us through the maze, I suppose, Laurel…although we must remember to separate and drift apart when we reach the central arena, just as Lady Phythian observed.”

  “Must we?” Langstrade queried.

  “Absolutely,” said Hope, again. “Our duty as gentlemen, remember? History must be conserved. Otherwise, the whole thing might come apart. Wouldn’t want that, would we?”

  “No,” said the Earl, unconvincingly, twirling his walking-stick. “I suppose not.” By this time, they were outside, and the Earl had closed the door quietly behind them.

  The trek across the lawn was completed in a few minutes, and the other three men then stood aside to let Michael take the lead as they went into the Maze. He felt responsibility descend upon him like an unseasonably thick cloak—although it might, he thought, on due reflection, be mere weariness.

  “You’re the one with Ariadne’s thread graven in his memory, my young Theseus,” Hope said, taking care to maintain a perfectly pleasant tone. “Watch out for the Minotaur, though—not to mention fire-breathing dragons and swarms of mating fireflies.”

  “If Mr. Marlstone’s machine is the Minotaur,” Michael riposted, as he led the party along the outer ring of the maze past the first seductive junction, which gave access to an impasse, “it’s unlikely to do us any harm tonight. What worries me slightly more is the prospect of meeting the Mistress of the Labyrinth.”

  “What on Earth did the somniloquist mean by that?” Lord Langstrade asked. “I didn’t understand it at all.”

  “Cretan myth is somewhat confused with respect to Dedalus’ Labyrinth,” Hope was quick to explain. “As well as the Minotaur, there was a mysterious female personage attached to it, sometimes referred to as the Mistress of the Labyrinth, sometimes simply as the Lady. Escott and I found evidence.…”

  “Oh, that’s right!” Langstrade said, cutting him off. “I remember now. You went on about it for days on end when we were all in Crete.”

  “The Mistress of the Labyrinth was undoubtedly the prototype of the Christian Virgin, in her capacity as Queen of Heaven,” Escott put in, thoughtfully. “That was the subject of Heinrich von Biber’s sonata, remember—the one that Pietro Locatelli adapted, and which was in turn adapted by Niccolò Paganini.”

  “That’s a patently false analogy,” Hope said. “I don’t say that Laurel is right to be afraid of meeting the Mistress of the Labyrinth, but any pagan goddess is likely to have been far more exacting of her worshippers than the meek mother of Christ.”

  “When Carp asked the voice whether she was a goddess,” Lord Langstrade recalled, “she didn’t reply…but she seemed to be about to say something. I must admit that I’m utterly at a loss when it comes to finding any sense in all this, and I don’t know how you chaps can be so complacent about it all. Why did you ask that final question, Laurel? It took me completely by surprise.”

  “Yes,” said Hope, interestedly. “Why did you? You were supposed to be asking a question of your future self, remember? It’s almost as if you were deliberately trying to bring the somniloquist out of her trance.”

  “I asked the question because Signor Monticarlo had asked it of me before the séance began—and because I was curious to know the answer myself,” Michael said, as he led the party from the fifth ring of the Maze into the fourth. “I wanted to know whether there was anything in the Maze to be frightened of—and, if so, what it is.”

  “And what made you think there might be?” Escott asked—but then stopped dead, causing Hope, who was behind him, to bump into him and curse.

  “Can you hear that?” Escott asked.

  “What?” asked Lord Langstrade. “Oh.…”

  Michael could hear it too: the sound of music, played on a seemingly distant violin. He recognized the piece.

  “It’s Monticarlo, practicing again,” Hope said, dismissively. “A trifle antisocial, at this time of night.”

  Michael didn’t bother to point out that the Orange Room, in which Signor Monticarlo was lodged, was on the far side of the Hall, nor that the music was not, in any case, coming from the direction of the Hall. Indeed, if it were emanating from any Earthly location, it could only be coming from the upper regions of the Keep. He could not imagine that Marlstone had a violin among his equipment, or that was likely to be playing it if he had, so he concluded, privately, that the music was in the heads of its listeners, composed of pure and mazy mental imagery.

  He turned a corner into the third ring just then, and immediately turned again in order to follow a path parallel to the one the party had just been following, in the opposite direction. He had taken three strides before he looked back to check that his companions were following him, and when he saw that he was quite alone, he stopped dead.

  “This is why I thought that there might be something frightening in the maze,” he murmured, belatedly answering Escott’s question. The music seemed to be worming its way into the depths of his mind now, although he knew that he could not really be hearing it at all, since sound could not be transmitted through time.

  He went back to the gap in the hedge and stepped back through it, to see whether his three companions had somehow missed the turning and carried on straight ahead. There was no sign of their lanterns anywhere.

  I knew the Maze had become more complicated than it was before, he said to himself, forming the words rather deliberately. I couldn’t be sure, of course, that it now extends in time as well as space, but that must surely be the case. Somehow I’ve taken a step that has taken me out of my own time. But isn’t that supposed to be impossible, for physical objects? Always provided, of course, that I’m still a physical object.

  He reached up with his right hand, closed his fist and tapped himself on the forehead with his knuckles. He felt solid enough.

  But that doesn’t mean anything, he told himself, if my hand and my head are made of the same stuff. He reached out with his left hand, which was clutching the lantern, and thrust the lantern into the densely-clustered branches forming the wall of the Maze. The lantern vanished into it without meeting any resistance, its ghostly light eclipsed.

  Even though he had been half-expecting that result, Michael felt his heart accelerate, and felt a wave of incipient panic.

  Damnation! He thought. I really am a ghost. I’m a phantom, blown away from the present by a gust of wind from Marlstone’s time machine…except that it’s much more complex than any mere gust of wind. That’s what the music is: the thread extended by the Mistress of the Labyrinth to draw her victims through the maze in a solemn procession…or a crazy dance.

  He had no doubt, now, who the Mistress of the Labyrinth was, or that she really had spoken through the medium of the somniloquist. “She” was Marlstone’s time machine, now moving by virtue of her own inertia, as powerfully and irresistibly as any Leviathan of Steel and Steam, along her own Labyrinthine track.

  But from where, Michael wondered, was she drawing her power, if Marlstone had
not yet engaged the full force of his own mysterious driving mechanism?

  To make perfectly certain of his own insubstantiality, Michael stepped sideways and thrust the full length of his right arm into the hedge, bracing himself reflexively against the assault of the thorns. None came. His flesh met no more resistance than the stick.

  Well, he thought, if that’s the case, there’s no reason to take the roundabout route to the center, is there?

  Bracing himself again, he stepped clean through the hedge into the next ring of the Maze. It was easy. A dozen more strides took him through three more hedges and into a third pathway—but then he hesitated, sure that he ought to have arrived in the center by now, if he were only moving through space. He had not—and he paused to wonder whether his “short cuts” might only make it more difficult to find his way back to the present.

  But what does it matter? he said, silently. I’m trapped in the Maze regardless, until the Mistress of the Labyrinth consents to let me out. We all are, whether we know it or not, and we all have been, for quite some time. Marlstone’s machine is already doing its work, extending its influence back from tomorrow noon into today, yesterday, and who knows how many other yesterdays? Hundreds of thousands, if the ghost of Harold Longstride really is haunting the Maze on the sixteenth of August 1822, in any more than a metaphorical sense.

  He stepped through yet another hedge. This time, the stride did take him into a central arena of sorts—but not the one with which he was familiar. He was, however, quite certain that it was the same location in purely geographical terms, even though there was not the slightest sign of the looming Keep. There was a yew tree, growing in a similar location to the symbolic yew tree he had included in his painting, and the particular shape of the black silhouette of Bancroft Scar was still recognizable to an artist’s eyes, even by moonlight.

  When he glanced behind, to estimate his exact position by means of the hedge, he was not surprised to see that the hedge was no longer there either. Nor was Langstrade Hall. Where the Hall had stood a few minutes ago—or would stand, a thousand years hence, or perhaps had stood a thousand years ago, there was nothing but a silent forest, whose tall trees obscured the low-lying place where the waters of Cribden Tarn might or might not have been. There was a three-quarter moon descending toward that western horizon, but he took no comfort from the familiarity of its partly-obscured face.

  Michael Laurel knew that his ghost had traveled a great deal further than the mere minutes and hours with which Gregory Marlstone had ostensibly been juggling on the afternoon of Friday, August sixteenth, 1822—and although he had to suppose that an insubstantial ghost had nothing to fear from any physical threat, he was afraid. He was afraid that he was lost, and that he might never get back to his own time, his own body, and his own world—because he was afraid that none of those things still existed, or ever would, in any presently-meaningful sense.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE GHOSTS IN LANGSTRADE MAZE

  Michael walked toward the yew-tree, not for any particular reason, but simply because it was the only thing within walking distance that seemed half-familiar. In the distance, the horizon delineating where the starry sky met the Earth was undoubtedly comprised by the ridge of Bancroft Scar, but he could not see the face of the inland cliff, so he could not see whether the rocky protrusions and wooded clefts followed the same pattern as those in his painting. The stars were doubtless the same ones that shone on Langstrade Hall in the nineteenth century after the Nativity, but they too seemed lost in the remote regions of the Heavens, and did not offer Michel any impression of homeliness. The yew was all he had.

  When he got closer to the tree, he perceived that it was very ancient. It was thick in the trunk and very gnarled, with as many dead branches as living ones, although the living ones carried summer foliage. There was something shining through the ragged bark, apparent from the heartwood of the trunk, at about head height. He mistook it at first for a pale lantern, although he realized as he drew closer that the gleam was purely reflective. The glimmer did not originate from his own ghost-lantern, however, but from the stars in the sky and the three-quarter moon that was behind him in the west.

  The moon would have stood directly above the chimneys of Langstrade Hall, had there been a Hall, but the Hall was lost in time. The reflected light seemed just as coquettish as the moon’s own face, with its teasing quarter-shadow. Pale as the reflected light was, Michael realized that the object secured within the trunk of the tree was actually black in color. It was smooth and polished, but jet black.

  Michael recognized the substance, in spite of its anomalous location, as obsidian: a glassy substance produced, he seemed to remember, by volcanoes, valued by sculptors for its sinister charm but notoriously difficult to work. He realized that the block of obsidian must have been integrated into the tree-trunk by the artifice of human hands: that it had been deliberately set into the wood, in order that the tree would actually grow around it, over a period of decades, imprisoning it and enclosing it. He could only presume that it had been done for religious reasons, in connection with some kind of pagan belief. The action had been intended to make the tree something more than a tree, to fit it with a kind of beacon…or a kind of magical window.

  The music of the maze was still playing in Michael’s head, although his ears were inactive. He could not hear any of the sounds of the world into which he had come, because sound waves made no apparent impact on his eardrums—but he could hear the music, and he could also see. If light passed through his eyes as easily as sound passed through his ears, then there had to be some other conduit of sensation that substituted for sight: a second sight, akin to the special sensitivities of somniloquists.

  When he arrived in the imperfect shade of the tree, he tried to peer into the obsidian window, fully expecting to see nothing but a void.

  He saw a man staring back at him: a man with no ears.

  Even more remarkably, the man with no ears seemed to see him, and started with alarm.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Michael said, reflexively, forgetting that he could not make any sound in this world that was not his own.

  The fact that he made no actual sound did not seem to make a difference to the magical stone, which evidently transmitted his meaning regardless, relaying it to the earless man’s mind without the need of any physical transmission. The other started again, evidently finding it difficult to obey the instruction.

  “My name is Michael Laurel,” Michael said. “Will you tell me yours?”

  The other’s distant lips moved. “Edward Kelley,” was the substitute for sound that seemed to slips into Michael’s brain, borne by the fateful music, which seemed irredeemably eerie by virtue of the scordatura effect.

  “Edward Kelley?” Michael repeated.

  “Edward Kelley?” echoed another voice, which Michael took for an echo inside his own consciousness, until it added: “Did you say Edward Kelley, Laurel?”

  Michael turned his head, and saw Quentin Hope standing behind him, the phantom light of his phantom lantern making his phantom salmon-pink waistcoat shine weirdly and garishly bright in a gloomy world devoid of any other color.

  “Yes,” Michael said. “We are, I think, on the far side of his black stone—the one with which John Dee’s skryer sought to communicate with angels. The far side in temporal terms, that is—it’s just an element in the Maze.”

  “Of course,” said Hope—and smiled. It was a genuine smile of amusement, slightly supercilious.

  “But why does he have no ears?” Michael asked. “That makes no sense.”

  “Kelley had a misspent youth,” Hope told him, glad to be playing the educator again. “He was convicted of forging the coin of the realm and his ears were cut off as a punishment—a relative light punishment, in those days, for such a heinous crime. One presumes that he was only forging sixpences,
not sovereigns.” The optimist giggled cheerfully, enjoying himself thoroughly.

  He thinks this is a dream, Michael realized. He thinks that he is asleep, enjoying a lucid dream, in which the day’s remarkable events are stirring his imagination. He thinks that he is safe, and that he knows what he is doing. He is his confident, optimistic self—perhaps even more so than he ever feels free to be in waking life, no matter how hard he pretends.

  The painter stepped aside, with a slight bow. “This is your destiny, Mr. Hope,” he said, politely. “This is your moment: the moment when your intellect might change the course of history for the better. You may inform John Dee’s secret college of all the things its members need to add to their own resources, in order to bring the great tide of progress to its flood.”

  “I know that,” Hope replied, gaily. “I know exactly what to say. I’m an angel, after all. My name is Hope.”

  Hope stepped up to the mysterious telegraph set up by the Mistress of the Labyrinth, by means of surrogate human hands that had only the vaguest idea of what they were trying to achieve. Without wasting an instant, the philosopher of progress began to make his own contribution of wisdom to the mighty tide that Michael had mentioned: the tide that would ultimately produce the time machine herself.

  What would Escott say now? Michael wondered. Would this confirm or falsify his conviction that progress is a misfortunate or malevolent force, driving humankind to Hellish enslavement? But Escott was not here; the Mistress of the Labyrinth had been careful to separate the two rivals, in order that their interminable argument could not spoil her scheme.

  Michael had just begun to wonder what ultimate objective the Mistress of the Labyrinth might have, and whether it was likelier to result in Hope’s Euchronium Millennium or Escott’s perpetual infernal torment, when he was impelled by a sudden, urgent arpeggio to take a sideways step.