Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine

by Brian Stableford

  Whoever was currently using Cecilia Langstrade’s delectable body was still looking at Michael as if she were direly uncertain what manner of beast he was. “Are you going to tell me who you are?” she demanded. “I don’t really care whether you’re from anywhen downstream, provided that I can do what I need to do—but if you aren’t going to help me, I might as well kill you now.”

  “I’ll help you if I can,” Michael said, quickly, feeling that his insincerity was forgivable in view of the threat of homicide, and deciding that he would be much better placed to employ delaying tactics if he were in close company with the advance guard of the invasion. “I’m not sure I’ll be much use, though,” he added, immediately getting started on the delaying tactics. “I’m just an artist, not a fighting man. What do you want me to do?”

  As he was speaking, not-Cecilia leaned sideways in order to peer around the corner of the entrance to the maze yet again. She obviously did not want to confront Hope or Escott while they had guns and she had no weapon at all, and would probably have to be wary of confronting anyone at all, given the frailty of her stolen body. Obviously, the invaders from the future were not united among themselves,

  “Which way’s this Folly?” she demanded.

  “It’s in the center of the Maze,” Michael told her. “I know the way.”

  The color had only just begun to return to not-Cecilia’s face. Now it drained out again. “This is a Maze?” she queried. “Oh, luck! Do you know your way through it?”

  Michael thought it best to be economical with the truth, while appearing to be doing his best to help, so he reached into his waistcoat pocket and pulled out the piece of paper that Heatherington had given him, a phantom version of which he had shown to the imprisoned Dedalus. “I’ve got a map,” he said.

  Not-Cecilia grabbed the paper, unfolded it, and stared at the diagram of the Langstrade Maze. Her pale face went paler, and her expression became tortured. “Where did you get this?” she spat at Michael. He presumed that she meant you in a broad sense, referring to everyone who had played a hand in the making of 1822 A.D., and suspected that she might not take it kindly if he simply said: Heatherington gave it to me.

  “Legend has it that it was handed down by Dedalus, the builder of the Cretan Labyrinth,” Michael explained, dutifully. “It’s said that he escaped to England when a volcano destroyed Cretan civilization, and ended up here.”

  “Oh, luck,” not-Cecilia said, yet again. “No wonder we couldn’t get the worm through as anything more than the vaguest phantom—it was snared by a lucky Locatelli Maze! Hell, I’m probably all on my own, and so are the skippers that slipped through from downstream. If this lucky body hadn’t actually been in the maze…well, I have to play the hero now, or I’m well and truly screwed—and so are you, whoever you are, and your beloved Cecilia too, if we can’t put a stop to this in time. Opposition be damned! We have to work together now, or we’ll all be headed for oblivion in a shooting star!”

  While she was speaking she turned the map around in her hands, as if trying to orientate herself with the aid of the map. She put her left hand to her temple, and muttered: “Something’s trying to entrance me—but there was no mechanical mind control in minus 273! Even the psychognosis is anomalous! If this really is an alternate, freshly-woven from the ether, the operation must have been planned way downstream. If someone from beyond the Cee-Zee has contrived to implant a time machine all the way back in a ripple equivalent to minus 273, and steal enough power from machines tuned in to the Change War to get far enough into its own arrears to shunt them all off-track, and somehow to surround the seed-device with a Locatelli Maze, then the whole five-thousand-and-some is under attack. The entire house of cards could evaporate, or sclerotize. Who the luck are you, Mr. Artist?”

  “I’m Michael Laurel,” Michael replied—but for the first time in his life, he wondered whether he was telling the whole truth, and nothing but. Of course I’m Michael Laurel, he thought decisively, casting suspicion firmly aside—but he still wasn’t entirely certain that he might not be someone else as well.

  “When are you from?” not-Cecilia demanded, her voice a menacing whisper now.

  “I was born just before the turn of the century,” Michael told her.

  The time-traveler’s eyes bored into his, with attempted Mesmeric authority. “Well,” she conceded, still whispering, “if you’re lying, you’re well-shielded. You still have to help me, though. I’ve got to get into that tower, and I can’t afford to get into a brawl on the way. I’ve got to get hold of the reactor controls, and tune them into the thirty-third. If those idiots with popguns can just get their heads around the idea that we need to join forces for once.…” In spite of her headache, she seemed to be thinking very hard indeed—almost as hard, in fact, as Michael. For the time being, however, she seemed to be just as much at a loss as he was when it came to formulating a plan of action.

  I ought to try to get into the Keep too, Michael thought, if only to find out what Marlstone, or not-Marlstone, is doing—but I can’t afford to get trapped in a brawl either. So what the luck am I going to do? “Am I correct in deducing,” he said aloud, to the time-traveler, “that, so far as your history is aware, the first viable time machine won’t be invented for another 273 years—which is to say, in 2095 A.D.?”

  “We don’t have any history,” the invader replied, grimly. “History ended in year zero. What we have is a five-thousand-year-plus Era of Change, in which technological stability is complemented by total conflict.”

  “There’s some kind of eternal Time War going on?” Michael asked, just to make sure.

  “What else can you expect, in a world when everyone and anyone is likely to find, at a moment’s notice, that the consciousness of everyone around him has just been displaced by skippers from further downstream, or upstream skippers fighting a rearguard action with stolen technics? It’s not eternal—no skipper’s ever come back from anywhen downstream of the fifty-fifth—but whether there’s war or peace, history or eternity after that is anyone’s guess. We thirty-thirders have always preferred to assume that it’s the boundary of the Euchronian Eternity we’ve been trying to establish for three thousand years, although the diehard pessimists keep right on insisting that it must be the Ultimate End of the World, after which there’ll be no time at all.”

  “So various time-travelers from the future are about to start fighting one another to the death for control of the Marlstone machine?” Michael said, trying to get it straight in his head. “But you’ve decided that you all need to combine forces against a greater threat?”

  “If you’re really a historical, you wouldn’t understand,” the fake Cecilia assured him. “If you’re not, you already do. Anyway, I don’t know the answer to the second question myself. I’m just a humble foot-skipper, and I seem to be on my own. The one thing I do know is that we have to get to the machine, and quickly.”

  “Why?” Michael demanded. He already had a vague idea, but he was direly in need of a little certainty in what was obviously an extremely confused situation.

  “Because we have to disrupt the weaving of the alternate before the effect spreads too far downstream. Either we have to smash the machine—although that might not be possible, if it’s cleverly designed—or we have to help the future operators to stabilize the tune it’s playing, so that someone downstream can start shipping materiel through. If the thirty-thirders can’t do it, better the bastards from some other resonance-point succeed than the roof of time falls in on all our heads, but if I can’t get it across to those other idiots that there are bigger things at stake here than loot and flesh—even two hundred and seventy-three years of loot and billions of warm bodies—they’ll just shoot this body down. If this really is a scheme hatched further downstream that any human mind has ever skipped, we have got to subvert it.”

  “Why?” Michael asked. �
�If it really is the work of people from an era of eternal peace and prosperity, surely you ought to welcome their endeavor?”

  “Oh, I’m all in favor of the Euchronian Empire,” not-Cecilia told him, “provided that it’s our Euchronian Empire. What the luck do you think we’re all fighting for? We have to move, though. The guys downstream must be trying everything humanly possible to tune in so that they can move apparatus through the focal point when the actual resonance-point arrives, but if the moment isn’t seized, it’ll be gone. If the chain’s a six-pointer, it might take weeks, in real reckoning, for headquarters to set up a usable beachhead from the thirty-third, even if I can help out from this end, and I have to start before the local optimum arrives. Are you with me, or do I really have to kill you?”

  Michael thought that he understood what was at stake. If the time-traveler actually contrived to take control of Marlstone’s machine, and her masters “downstream” contrived to bring a sequence of their own machines into tune with it at the crucial moment, then the Era of Change would henceforth begin today—and history, as Michael and all his contemporaries knew it, would end, to be substituted by a war in which God only knew how many sides were hopping back and forth through the centuries, taking over people’s bodies and identities willy-nilly, in vain attempts to dictate an ever-shifting pattern of events sprawling over more than five thousand years of un-history.

  Perhaps, he thought, the best thing that he could do, in the circumstances, was to knock the time-traveler unconscious, if only to save Cecilia from being shot by Hope or Escott—but that would have meant hitting Cecilia, and that was something that he was very reluctant to do, even though Cecilia was definitely not herself at present. The second best thing he could do, obviously, was to continue to play along, at least for the time being, just in case she was capable of carrying through her threat to kill him.

  The person employing Cecilia’s delectable body, alas, was not as scrupulous as Michael was. She was obviously incapable of reading his mind, but she seemed to have figured out the cunning manner in which his thoughts were moving. While he stood there, dithering helplessly, and as someone’s footfalls became audible on the other side of the hedge, not-Cecilia caught him square on the chin with an unexpected right hook, and Michael fell sideways into the hedge, momentarily stunned.

  The thorns, which almost seemed to have been lying in wait for him, gripped him avidly, as if with a loving but savage embrace.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  STORMING THE CITADEL

  By virtue of fierce and painful struggle, Michael eventually managed to free himself from the thorns, although his only waistcoat and second-best trousers were ruined in the process, and the dizziness that had been afflicting him periodically for more than twenty-four hours had been excited once again by the after-effects of the unexpected punch.

  Not-Cecilia had run into the Maze. She had dropped Michael’s map, but that was presumably because she had no more need of it. She had referred to a “Locatelli Maze” as if it were something familiar. That element of the time machine’s contrivance had evidently followed a conventional pattern.

  Michael stood up straight, intending to go to the entrance of the maze and looked out—but he was too late. James Escott’s slender form was already coming through it, shotgun at the ready.

  “Don’t shoot!” Michael cried. “I can help you!”

  “Who the luck are you?” not-Escott snarled.

  “Someone who knows what year it is and what’s happening here,” Michael snarled back. He hardly paused before adding: “It’s minus 273, and someone from way downstream of the fifty-fifth has planted a time machine here, intending to blow the entire Era of Change into oblivion.”

  Escott’s dark eyes fixed themselves on his, obviously attempting to exercise Mesmeric authority. Michael had no alternative but to stare back, meeting the challenge squarely.

  “Okay,” not-Escott said, presumably accepting temporary defeat. “I’m listening. Convince me you can help.”

  “The time machine’s in the Keep in the center of the Maze,” Michael said. “The machine’s local manufacturer is in the Keep. There are now three other people in the Maze, although two of them were unconscious last time I saw them. None of them has a gun, but if you want to get to the Keep in time to take a hand in this you’ll need to hurry. You probably know how a Locatelli Maze is laid out, but I’ve been through it so many times it’s virtually second nature. Follow me, and I’ll get us to the center without delay—provided that we don’t bump into any unexpected obstructions.”

  Not-Escott stared at him, incomprehension mingled with mistrust. The Viking decided soon enough, however, that he had nothing to lose. To hasten his decision further, more footfalls sounded outside the Maze, running along the hedge. “Go!” he said, abruptly.

  Michael went, at a run. He fled through the Maze as fast as his legs could carry him, but he did not manage to catch up with not-Cecilia. Lord Langstrade and his son were no longer lying unconscious on the path, but there were no obstructions of any kind blocking the way.

  When Michael eventually erupted into the central arena of the Maze, though, he stopped dead. Less that ten yards away, Lord Langstrade and Jack were squirming on the ground, seemingly engaged in a wrestling-match, in which the small boy seemed to be holding his own with surprising skill.

  The fake Cecilia, moving surreptitiously, had obviously gone around the squabbling pair, and had almost managed to reach the nearer end of the drawbridge. As soon as Escott saw her, though, he raised his gun to his shoulder and shouted: “Stop!”

  Not-Cecilia stopped—and so did the wrestlers. Langstrade and his son released one another and moved apart, then began to get to their feet, slowly.

  Michael knew that Jack and the Earl had no way of knowing that Escott had already fired one shot, and they were presumably able to guess that the double-barreled weapon could be fired twice before needing to be re-loaded. They were very careful to make no hostile move.

  Not-Cecilia paused momentarily, but she did know that the shotgun had already been fired, and her one and only priority was to get into the Folly, where Marlstone’s time machine was. As soon as she set off to make a run for the doorway, though, someone emerged from the tower to take up a position on the drawbridge, blocking the entrance with his body. The person in question was inhabiting Gregory Marlstone’s body, and the aggressive pose he struck was almost as familiar as the scowl he wore, but Michael was certain in his own mind that it was not the inventor at all. It had to be some time-displaced soul, opposed to the particular army in which Cecilia’s possessor was in service as a humble foot-skipper.

  Gregory Marlstone was a big man, and whoever was using his body now obviously appreciated that fact. He had a desperate gleam in his eyes. Given that the drawbridge was so narrow, it would not be easy for anyone to get past him—especially a delicate creature like Cecilia Langstrade. The fake Cecilia evidently realized that. She immediately drew herself up to the fullness of her meager height, and turned sideways so that she could address the three men at the entrance to the Maze as well as not-Marlstone. She began to harangue the entire company in a very insistent manner.

  “There are bigger things at stake here than old feuds between the thirty-thirders, the thirty-sixers, and the forty-fivers, you idiots!” she shouted. “There’s one thing we all want, and that’s to widen the battlefield. This is minus 273, damn it—and it’s a lucky alternate! There must have been some far-downstream jiggery-pokery involved in opening the door, but we can still out-maneuver the masterminds behind it, if we can just work together. We’ve got a chance to reclaim nearly three centuries for the Era of Change, but we have to help someone—anyone—downstream tune a big machine in before the local optimum arrives. If we can’t do that, we have to smash this one before optimum and sever the link. If any operators downstream can tune in well enough to move so
me heavy apparatus through, we can all come out ahead in this affair—but if the way-downstreamers complete their own plan, we’ll likely be blasted into oblivion. If we carry on trying to knock seven bells out of each other, we’ll lose everything—but if we combine forces, we can change more history at a single stroke than anyone’s ever changed before. Who’s with me?”

  Michael had never thought of Cecilia as a leader of men, but he had to admit that whoever was using her body just now might have given Joan of Arc a run for her money. There seemed to be at least three rival groups among the five Vikings currently present, but the revelation that they had somehow contrived to land in 1822 A.D.—and not the 1822 A.D. whose record was preserved by their own history—was evidently sufficient to make them rethink the causes of their rivalry.

  Michael heard not-Escott, not-Langstrade and not-Jack utter a rapid collective mutter of disbelief, in which the word “impossible” featured more than once, but the former combatants took time out to look around: at the neatly-trimmed walls of the innermost hedge of the Maze, the distant cottages on the ridge above Bancroft Scar, and the sandstone walls of the Keep. The Keep was brand new, but it looked old—evidently old enough, in combination with everything else, to convince the visitors from the future that they really had been cast away in the remoter regions of history, before the Era of Change had previously begun.

  Michael guessed that not-Langstrade, who was the first to call out “We’re with you!” was one of not-Cecilia’s fellow “thirty-thirders”—but the others didn’t know that for sure, and not-Escott, who took up the cry immediately afterwards, must surely have been from another party.