Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine

by Brian Stableford

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE MORNING AFTER THE NIGHT BEFORE

  The next morning, Michael got up at five-thirty, washed and dressed, and went down to breakfast on the stroke of six. He found Gregory Marlstone already in the breakfast-room, standing up and haranguing Heatherington. The other guests were apparently still in bed.

  “You must make absolutely certain that no one comes into the Maze this morning,” the inventor was saying to the butler, insistently. “It’s absolutely imperative that I be left alone while I make one last attempt to stop my time machine and prevent catastrophe. If you can, you must persuade the guests to leave, but the one thing you must do, even if you cannot do anything else, is to forbid them to come into the Maze.”

  “I fear, sir,” the butler replied, his politeness so scrupulous as to be icy, “that I have no authority to forbid anyone to enter the Maze, or to go anywhere else in the grounds. Only Lord Langstrade can issue orders of that sort, and I can do no more than pass on your request, in order that he might decide for himself whether to act upon it.”

  “That’s not good enough, you insufferable machine!” Marlstone complained.

  “Let him alone, Mr. Marlstone,” Michael said, as he sat down at the table and helped himself to bread and marmalade. “He’s right, as you know perfectly well, and it’s unworthy of you to rail at him like that.”

  Marlstone rounded on the newcomer. “What has it got to do with you?” he demanded, intemperately. “You’re just some fool of a painter, who doesn’t even know when he’s sticking his head in a lion’s mouth, and is too stupid to care!”

  “Sit down and eat something,” Michael retorted, mildly. “If you’re going to spend the next six hours laboring like Hercules to save the world, you owe it to the world to keep your strength up. Thank you.” The last two words were addressed to Heatherington, who had taken advantage of Marlstone’s distraction to pour a cup of tea.

  Marlstone looked for a moment as if he might explode, but he still had enough presence of mind to collect himself and sit down. Heatherington poured him a cup of tea as well, wearing a contemptuous expression on his face that spoke volumes.

  “You intend to resume work on your painting, don’t you?” the inventor said to Michael.

  “Of course I do,” Michael said. “It’s what I came to do. Do you really think it will make an atom of difference whether I’m standing at my easel, playing billiards with Lord Langstrade or fleeing southwards in a railway carriage when the clock in Cribden Church strikes noon?”

  Marlstone simply shook his head, and said: “You’re a fool.”

  “No, Mr. Marlstone, I’m not,” Michael said, placidly, in between mouthfuls. “I might not have had a university education, like you, Mr. Hope and Mr. Escott, but I’m not a fool. In fact, I think I understand the nature of time as well as you do, if not better, even though I don’t know the first thing about the mathematics of metastatic hypersynchronicity, intertemporal gravity and the harmonics of the temporal ether, or the corollaries of the law of conservation of non-identity.”

  Marlstone was taken aback by Michael’s apparent confidence, and narrowed his eyes suspiciously, as if he thought that Michael might be mocking him. “What do you understand?” he demanded, pugnaciously.

  “I understand that the only moment that really exists is the present one,” Michael said, speaking slowly, although he was not making it up as he went along. Indeed, the idea had emerged into his mind while he was still in the margins of sleep, and had gradually clarified itself while he washed and dressed, bringing with it the conviction of revelation. “Everything that moment contains is, of course, the product of the past, just as everything it portends is the substance of the future, in the same way that everything I am—just like every other human being—is the sum of all the accidents of happenstance that have befallen me and all the choices I’ve made, while everything I do is calculated to produce some future result. The fact remains, though, that everything there is, simply is, and is confined within the moment of the present: a single incessant instant of becoming, too brief to be measured and imperceptible in itself, because all that we can ever see, let alone remember, is the ghost that it leaves behind. That single, ever-changing moment is the summary of all past existence, and the prelude to eternity; that is its nature and its essence.”

  “Very poetic,” said Marlstone, with a slight sneer. “Where did you read all that?”

  “I didn’t,” Michael said. “I worked it out for myself.” He suspected that he might be claiming a little too much credit, and that the revelation might have been a gift from the Mistress of the Labyrinth, but he still felt entitled to claim some of the credit for “working it out”.

  “But how does it help to solve the problem?” Marlstone wanted to know.

  “I didn’t say that it helped,” Michael told him. “I just said that I understood something of the nature of time. I understand that the moment of becoming is evolving toward some kind of crisis, and that what happens when that crisis erupts will somehow redetermine all of the past that it seems to have left behind, and all of the future that it seems to imply. I don’t know what will happen to us when the crisis comes, and I don’t know if it’s even possible for the human mind to imagine it, but I do believe that we needn’t and mustn’t panic, if we’re to play a part in the reconfiguration of the future that the crisis will facilitate. We ought to stay calm, and sane, and polite—and do what we came here to do.”

  “In your case, paint a picture of the Keep?” Marlstone said, sarcastically.

  “Exactly,” Michael said.

  “What I came here to do,” Marlstone informed him, loftily, “is a great deal more difficult than that.” He drained his tea-cup, although the care he had to take in order to leave the residual leaves behind undermined the gesture’s capacity to emphasize his point.

  “Perhaps it was,” Michael agreed, mildly, politely refraining from any suggestion that Marlstone might have been a mere puppet, invented by the Mistress of the Labyrinth for the purpose of her own self-construction.

  Marlstone buttered a slice of bread, and began spreading fish-paste on it. Then he asked Heatherington if he might have another cup of tea. The butler obliged, still radiating a controlled and implacable hostility.

  Michael thought that the tacit peace treaty they had now established might extend as far as Marlstone walking through the Maze with him before they took up their respective stations of duty, but it did not. While he was donning his smock and picking up his equipment, Marlstone stalked off ahead of him, and Michael never caught him up. By the time Michael arrived in the center, the inventor had disappeared into the Keep.

  Michael patiently set up his easel, positioned his canvas, deployed his paints on his palette, and set to work. He had not the slightest idea what part he would be fated to play in the settlement of eternity’s affairs, so he simply did not bother to think about it. He focused all his attention on the two things that were of primary importance—the painting and his love for Cecilia—and he simply blanked everything else out.

  It was a strategy that worked perfectly while he was still plying his brushes and undisturbed by any other human presence, but when he heard the Cribden Church clock chime nine he felt that he ought to take a short break to rest his eyes and arms. No sooner had he stopped work than Lord Langstrade emerged from the Maze and came to a halt in the open space, looking at him quizzically.

  The Earl was alone—which seemed slightly surprising, given that he had not previously been confident of his ability to navigate the maze unaided.

  After a brief pause, Langstrade strolled over to the easel. “Do you mind, Mr. Laurel?” he asked, indicating with a gesture that he was angling for permission to inspect the work in progress.

  “Not at all, Milord,” Michael replied, and moved aside briefly so that his employer could take up the
position from which the landscape was intended to be viewed.

  For a full two minutes the Earl’s gaze moved alternately back and forth between the painting and the scene represented therein. Finally, he nodded his head. “It’s very good,” he said. “You’ve really captured the essence of the Keep—although I’m still in two minds about the yew-tree. I know the tree’s symbolic, but still I don’t quite understand what it’s symbolic of.”

  “Continuity, Milord,” Michael murmured. “The ancestor of that tree was here when Emund Snurlson was slain, and a remoter ancestor provided shade in the prison-space above the dark cell to which Dedalus was confined by the tyrant Minos.”

  Langstrade thought about that for two full minutes, before venturing a further question. “It wasn’t just a dream, then?” he said. “You remember it too. We were really there.”

  “The entire past is a kind of dream from which the present moment is perennially waking, Milord,” Michael told him, “but no—it wasn’t just a dream. I was present when you slew Emund Snurlson with a phantom sword, and became the legendary Harold Longstride.”

  “And that is how Snurlson died? Really and truly? In 822 A.D.”

  “Slain by a phantom blade, Milord. His heart stopped. It could not do otherwise. The Vikings never got this far inland again until Eric Bloodaxe founded a kingdom in York, a century later. Your strike changed the course of history, just like Dedalus’ sighting of the map of the maze, and Hope’s little chat with Edward Kelley though a black window in time. We changed history, both knowingly and unknowingly—for it needed no conscious involvement for us to serve as Lady Phythian’s ghosts, the manifestation of which provided us with the motive to come into the Maze in time to catch the tide.”

  “It’s all rather paradoxical,” Langstrade observed.

  “As Dr. Carp once pointed out to me, only logic is afraid of paradoxes. We should be braver, if we aspire to be more than automata driven by the despotism of cause, effect and the calculus of probability.”

  “Right,” said Langstrade. “Jolly good. Has anything further happened this morning?”

  “I haven’t felt any more ripples,” Michael told him, “but that doesn’t mean that she isn’t doing anything, it just means that she isn’t doing anything that’s manifest in the here and now. We still have an appointment with destiny at noon, and I don’t doubt that she’s still doing her utmost to prepare herself, and her instruments, as the moment evolves.”

  “Who’s she, exactly?” asked Langstrade, warily.

  “The Mistress of the Labyrinth. The time machine.”

  “And what does she want? What is she trying to achieve?”

  “As Marlstone says, it’s not obvious that she wants anything, or is capable of any motivation at all. In his way of seeing things, she’s just a machine. On the other hand, when I was staring at the Sir Richard Trevithick on King’s Cross Station two days ago, I couldn’t help feeling that machines might have more soul and intelligence than we give them credit for—more, at any rate, than mere Nature. If there’s some kind of contest between Nature and Mechanism to determine the direction of the evolving moment, as Romantic rhetoric sometimes suggests, I’m not at all sure which side I ought to prefer. I don’t have the kind of faith in progress that Hope has—or the faith in its illusory nature that Escott has, for that matter.”

  Langstrade chewed his lower lip momentarily, and then said: “Escott came to see me this morning. He asked for my permission to ask Cecilia to marry him.”

  Michael had thought himself beyond the reach of astonishment, but that news struck him like a punch in the gut. “Escott asked you for Cecilia’s hand?” he gasped, suddenly winded. The ungrateful swine! he thought. After I risked my life and sanity yanking him out of that bronze tomb, he promptly takes it into his head to try to break my heart! He realized, though, that Escott had no way of knowing how he felt about Cecilia, even if the combative pessimist had noticed a certain tension between him and Hope, and that it must have been the experience of being entombed in such an extraordinary fashion that had woken Escott up from his long existential torpor and urged him to attempt a crucial change in his circumstances.

  “It surprised me too,” Langstrade admitted. “I was expecting Hope. In fact, he came along half an hour later with the same request. He flew into quite a rage when I told him that Escott had got in first, and swore that the fellow had only done it to spite him, to pay him out for that quarrel they once had, when they fought the duel he mentioned yesterday. He calmed down a little though, when I told him what I’d said to Escott.”

  Michael felt numb, and quite incapable of asking what it was that Langstrade had said to Escott—and, for that matter, to Hope—even though it was the most important question in the world.

  Gregory Marlstone came out of the Keep then and strode over the drawbridge with a truly imperious air about him. He came to stand beside the easel, his scowling gaze alternating between Michael and Lord Langstrade, as if he were trying to make up his mind which one he ought to attack first. Eventually, though, he relaxed, and became defensive instead, although he did not sacrifice his characteristic scowl.

  “I’m truly sorry, Milord” he said to Langstrade. “I never realized. I miscalculated badly. I thought the experiment was perfectly safe, because its temporal range was so restricted. I should have suspected, but I didn’t realize that it was all connected: the Keep, the Maze, even Monticarlo’s concert. I was blind. I’m sorry. I can’t do anything about it now. You might think that I can simply refrain from setting the machine in operation, but I can’t. It’s already operating, already beyond control. We’re just microscopic cogs in a catastrophic plan that extends backwards—and perhaps forwards too—across millennia.”

  “I know that,” Langstrade replied, a trifle miserably. “I’ve already done my bit—my first bit, anyhow.”

  “Don’t feel too badly about it, Mr. Marlstone,” Michael said to the scowling man. “You might imagine that you invented the machine, but the reality is that the machine invented you. You’re just as much a product of the dream-imagination as Harold Longstride. We all are.”

  That was a little too presumptuous for Marlstone’s taste. He rounded on Michael angrily. “The only reason you think you’re such an expert now,” he said, “is because you happened to be standing here yesterday when the field emitted that pulse, and fell more completely under the machine’s spell than anyone else—including me. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to do it, but at least I know what it is that I need to do, and I’m still trying. I haven’t the slightest idea what you might be able do, except for standing around spouting philosophical hot air and slapping paint on your pathetic scrap of canvas.”

  “That’s a bit strong, Marlstone,” Lord Langstrade said. “I don’t like to hear my guests insulting one another like that.”

  “Your guests!” Marlstone hissed, seething like an overheated Cornish Engine. “Do you still imagine that you’re the host of this catastrophe? You’re a pawn too, as you just admitted. I built the machine, but you built the shell to house it. Whatever has gone wrong, it has as much to do with the design of your infernal Folly and this damnable Maze as with my mathematics and mechanics—but you were only the instrument that she employed to build them.”

  “We three ought not to quarrel,” Michael said, swiftly. “We’re all on the same side, after all.”

  “Are we?” Marlstone queried.

  “I think so,” Michael answered. “That’s what the rules of etiquette require, at any rate. We’re all fellow guests of Langstrade Hall. We have a duty to one another, and to tradition. If the words relayed by Mademoiselle Evredon from my future self can be taken at face value, the present is due to be invaded on the stroke of noon—by the equivalent of futuristic Viking marauders, I presume, intent on laying waste to everything before paving the way to Hope’s Euchronia or
Escott’s Hell. Our duty is to stand together, to protect the ladies if we can, and to defend one another. I don’t know how we might do that, or what obstacles we’ll have to overcome—and we might stand no better chance than a rabble of Celtic peasants faced by Emund Snurlson’s berserkers—but that’s our objective. That’s what we have to do, if it’s humanly possible. According to my future self, it is. Whether he’s reliable or not, I can’t be sure—but who else am I to trust?”

  Marlstone’s scowl deepened impressively. “That’s all very well,” he said, bitterly, “but I still don’t have a clue as to what we might hope to achieve, if and when everything starts to fall apart.”

  “Nor have I—yet,” Michael said, meekly. It seemed a wiser course than making a more provocative answer.

  Marlstone’s bellicose pose relaxed slightly. “Of course not,” he said. “I’m sorry—I’ve been slaving away for the best part of three hours, trying to stop the machine, but it frustrates my every move. I’m not even sure that’s the right thing to do—perhaps she’s the one thing standing between us and chaos. I don’t know anything any more. The theory seemed so elegant, so perfect—but all I had to do was to look at my perfect equations, think for a moment, and ask myself: what if there’s more than one way to tune a time machine? What if there’s more than one set of functional harmonies? I never even thought of it—and now the world as we know it is about to collapse, and God only knows whether she’ll be able to put it back together again, if she even wants to. She might fancy herself the Mistress of the Labyrinth, but she isn’t really, any more than I am.”

  Michael stretched his arms, which now seemed sufficiently rested, then raised his palette and his brush, and resumed work on the body of the Keep, carefully delineating each individual slab of stone. He must have been doing that for three full minutes, while Marlstone and Lord Langstrade simply stood there, watching him, when he suddenly stopped, realizing that he had left an awful gap yawning in the continuity of his existence. He looked at Langstrade, but was still unable to frame the question.