Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine

by Brian Stableford

  “Oh, luck!” said not-Cecilia.

  The mud-stained not-Marlstone groaned: “I told you so!”

  Both of them, along with the other five human-seeming time-travelers, had already turned in the direction of the door, as if intending to retreat, but it was a mere desperate reflex. There was no retreat. They were caught.

  The new Labyrinth, Michael assumed, was drawing power through the door that had been opened in time, in far greater abundance than the Mistress had been able to steal before—and that flood would increase vastly as the twelve chimes of noon vibrated in the air above the dale.

  The seven human figures that had burst through the door of the Keep with such bellicose fervor were writhing pathetically now, whipping the air with their arms as if trying to take off and fly, but all they achieved was to become unrecognizable humanoid blurs, while the new whirlpool of light consumed them. It was as if they were sinking, or melting into the mazy tide of luminosity rising from the floor—but Michael neither sank nor melted, and the worm clung to the pendulum cable.

  Feeling the stone floor secure beneath his feet, Michael continued to lean his back against the wall of the Keep, with the splayed fingers of one hand in front of his eyes, and the other clutching the ivory hilt of Langstrade’s swordstick.

  The maze designed in liquid light on the floor of the Keep was very much larger and much more complicated than the one described by Dedalus, Pietro Locatelli and Signor Monticarlo, but it clearly bore a family resemblance to it. The other had been, as Locatelli had aptly titled it, a capriccio: one of a whole sequence of capricci enigmati. This one was far more than a capriccio, and far more than a sonata. The new Labyrinth, Michael judged, was not one of the six glorious mysteries known to Heinrich von Biber, but a kind of seventh wonder: not merely another bead on the chaplet of an existing temporal sequence, or a new branch on its rosary, but a whole new set of threads twisting through the ultimate void.

  Michael had no way of knowing whether the new Labyrinth really was the master-plan of some unknown genius from the legendary far future that extended beyond the Era of Change, inaccessible and unknown to the masters of primitive time machines, or whether it was something spontaneous, arising miraculously from a soul that had become incarnate in Gregory Marlstone’s time machine by virtue of a freak of chance, but he was no longer in any doubt as to whether the mysterious Mistress of the Labyrinth was capable of wanting anything. She was not only capable of wanting what she wanted, and wanting it very much; she was capable of wanting what he wanted, and of a determination to help him—not merely by way of a bargain, in compensation for the help that he was rendering her, but because she approved of what he wanted. Just as she had approved of what Quentin Hope had wanted, in respect of the broader philosophy of progress, the Mistress of the Labyrinth approved of Michael’s art and Michael’s love—and she was not the kind of Mistress to settle for anything less than all she ever wanted.

  He could hear a violin playing, apparently very loudly, although the sound could only be making its way into the Keep through arcane material channels. This time, the music was not accompanying a ghostly displacement of Pietro Locatelli, originated a hundred years ago, but was being played in real time, by Signor Monticarlo. Dissatisfied with the previous evening’s performance, Monticarlo had doubtless begun by merely practicing—but his practicing had turned into composition, and his composition—inspired, no doubt, by the Mistress of the Labyrinth—had acquired immediate perfection. The labyrinthine music had already trapped four times as many skippers as had contrived to escape its snare, and had also provided safe havens for the minds displaced by the skippers who had run into the Keep, in virtual brazen heads that were refuges rather than prisons—but there was still work to be done in that respect.

  The new Maze had no center, but it included a vast series of cells set at the termini of various dead-end passages, marked with various symbols that were difficult for the human eye to clarify or identity, because they extended in more than three dimensions, but presented the virtual appearance of brazen masks. A few of these masked cells held prisoners, but they were widely scattered. Michael’s painter’s eye knew from their pattern that there were forty-two in all, but that the ones of most personal relevance to him fell into two groups of seven. Seven of the brazen masks had familiar features, while seven were Vikings.

  Like many Mazes, this one had a puzzle innate within it. It only took Michael a few seconds to visualize the solution to the puzzle. At first glance, the task of reaching all fourteen of the critical points in the Maze, in exactly the right order, seemed terrifyingly difficult, all the more so as it was not at all obvious how he might move into or through the Maze from his present position. His artist’s eye had sufficient aesthetic sensibility, however, to tell him how the Maze ought be negotiated in order to reach the prisoners he needed to reach, and how to deliver them to safety while leaving the remainder in the traps appropriate to their culpability—or, rather, how the Maze might be danced in order to achieve that end.

  The Maze had to be danced, because it had to be sustained in its mysterious harmony while it was in musical formation, and that could only be done by dancing. The Mistress of the Maze was its primal dancer, its shaping force, its creative goddess. She had a purpose, and a jealous desire, whether or not they had been originated and assured by some higher identity, and the Maze was an expression of that purpose and desire. She had been dancing this Maze since the moment when it had first been imagined—which was, in one sense, the moment when Gregory Marlstone had envisaged his machine, long before he had constructed it and made it ready to be set in motion, but which was also, in another and perhaps more accurate sense, the origin of time itself.

  Michael’s mind filled with a musical dream, not unlike the one he had experienced the previous evening when, Signor Monticarlo and Pietro Locatelli had both played the Locatelli capriccio, but much more vivid and much more real. He had no option but to dance to the music of the new Maze, so he did.

  The dancing he did was actually more like flying; in fact, he literally flew into the air that was enclosed within the Keep’s propitious space. He flew like a windborne avenging angel, blade in hand.

  The slow lightning above him—the breath of the insatiable, monstrous Era of Change—and the worm that had triggered it both recoiled before him. Within the heart of the fading thunderbolt he saw armies and artillery, and guessed that their potential firepower was sufficient to blast the world apart—but they were no more now than a lick of fiery breath, and the invisible worm was no more than an intimidated thread. There was no real combat, to speak of. Michael was a hero, after all, and he could fly—as Dedalus never truly had, in spite of the credit of legend. The worm tried to flee, and five thousand years of incessant warfare fled before it.

  Instead of having to battle the retreating enemy, Michael was able to reach out as he danced in the air, to shuffle the faces behind the masks with delicate precision, taking seven displaced souls into his momentary possession, as he had been taught to do, and replacing them where they belonged. In order to do that, he had also to take seven unfamiliar souls into momentary possession, before casting them into a dark Underworld from which they would never return—but he was an angel, after all; it was the role he had to play, and it did not sicken or pain him. The wind of his passing was so awesome, as it swept through the contours of the maze, augmented with every turn, that it sent the souls of the damned tumbling helplessly through the alleyways of the Maze as they fell, one by one, into their cages of brass.

  Michael had almost reached the exit of the new Maze when the lightning-flash suspended in the Keep suddenly began to expand again, and the worm turned. Precisely because the Mistress of the Labyrinth had concluded her own weaving, her enemies came into full possession of their own power once again. Michael screamed in rage and frustration, thinking that he might yet be shot down in flight, and that the wo
rld as he knew it might yet be doomed.

  Then, still impelled by his whirlwind dance, he flew up into the air, and whirled the blade of the swordstick around with a single mighty sweep, slashing clean through the body of the invisible worm, and cutting clean through the cords sustaining the driving-weights of Marstone’s clockwork time machine. Had the blade been mere matter, it would have passed harmlessly through the phantom worm, but it was charged, as he was charged, and it was deadly—as the worm had evidently been aware when it had tried to retreat.

  The weights fell, and so did the two halves of the sundered, blasted worm.

  The weights were only impelled by gravity, while the lightning was impelled by a much greater force, produced by sunbursts—but the weights had less than thirty feet to fall, and the lightning had centuries of intertemporal gravity to oppose. For one horrid moment, it seemed as if the lightning might win and reclaim its worm—but the vanishing labyrinth of light swallowed the broken worm like a hungry bird, and it was the weights that struck the floor first. The clockwork of the time machine, no longer guided by the pendulum, grated horribly as it suddenly seized up.

  The grating sound turned into an oddly human screech, and Michael tumbled through the exit from the temporal maze at the very instant when its luminous threads folded up, and its awesome multicursal complexity collapsed into a mere unicursal labyrinth.

  There was not so much as a sigh from the Mistress of the Maze as her soft voice, maternal warmth and measured presence vanished from the dark and sullen space, her elegant dance completed and all her monsters duly slain.

  Michael was tempted to think, as he fell to his knees and clutched the pendulum-cord in order to support himself, that the whole of time was in the process of being healed, and that it might never be disturbed again, but he knew that any such conviction would be far too optimistic.

  Some day—perhaps not for a hundred or a thousand years, but some day—someone else would invent a time machine, which might not be so generous, or so human, in its self-disposition. Then, the Era of Change would begin anew…or the Dread Empire of Eternity, or the Euchronian Millennium, or something else, depending on the whimsical collaboration of fate and luck.

  Time travel, Michael understood, was not a wise thing to invent even once, and likely to be deadly if invented twice. Visitors from the future, even if they were unable to arrive in the flesh, were bound to cause trouble. From their own temporal viewpoint, they would change history simply by arriving, let alone by virtue of what they might do thereafter, with the information in their minds and any physical equipment they might contrive to transfer. Chaos was bound to ensue—and would not easily be resolved. It really did not matter overmuch whether the hypothetical spindle of necessity was imagined to be casting off new buds, or whether it was envisaged as tying itself in knots—the maziness of the temporal ether was equal to either interpretation, or either challenge—the real point was that the one and only moment of becoming would be become unsteady, troubled and corrupted by a dark malaise. The unicursality of logic would be replaced by a multicursality in which it was theoretically possible to be lost forever, and the music of time, dissolving into discord, might be replaced by an eternal and irredeemable cacophony.

  Once a time machine had been invented, and had become available for resonant interaction with its future kin, the reimposition of unicursal order was bound to be a very costly business, and such order could only be provisional unless and until the time machine had been uninvented again—a task even more paradoxical, and thus even more difficult, than the original invention. Obviously, that process of uninvention required pivots of some sort: not only goddesses but heroes, prepared to fight the forces of confusion with their minds and their arms, and with resources of a far more fundamental sort.

  Michael knew that he had succeeded in his own part of the ordeal far more by luck than by judgment—but he thought he understood, now, why the inhabitants of the Era of Change thought luck obscene. The point was that he had succeeded, just as Signor Monticarlo had succeeded, and the Mistress of the Labyrinth herself. It had all worked out, with the awkward precision of what Quentin Hope would doubtless have called, more accurately than he knew, a deus ex machina.

  Cribden Church clock had completed the twelfth chime of noon, but it had left strange overtones vibrating in the empty air above Langstrade Hall. The clockwork mechanism powering Gregory Marlstone’s time machine made a feeble attempt to extend its screech further, but the sound faded into cacophonous ignominy. The machine had stopped. The chain of moments that had briefly extended for thousands of years into the future was severed. History had resumed its course: the course that it had seemingly followed since the dawn of time—or would, at least, seem from now onwards to have followed since that pale and tentative dawn.

  There were seven bodies lying inert on the floor of the Keep, with two shotguns and a catapult lying nearby. Michael dropped the poniard of Lord Langstrade’s swordstick on the floor, and used the hand thus liberated to stop the swinging pendulum as he went past to kneel beside one of the supine forms.

  Michael picked Cecilia up and carried her out of the Keep and across the drawbridge. He eventually set her down close to his easel, where his painting still rested serenely, unaffected by the entire adventure. He felt a strange sense of déjà-vu as he watched the eyelids open, and eyes whose blueness was exaggerated by the reflection of the summer sky stare up at him.

  There was nothing steely about their gaze

  “I seem to have fainted,” Cecilia said, when Michael set her on her feet. “My head hurts terribly. I think I was coming to see you, but I seem to remember feeling faint almost as soon as I had set foot in the Maze. I had the most remarkable nightmare, in which I was imprisoned in a giant head of bronze, and it has left me with the most painful aftermath. Have I been poisoned?”

  Michael offered her his arm, so that she might support herself, but she sat down on the grass instead, and put her aching head in her hands.

  “Yes,” Michael told her, as he sat down beside her, “You were poisoned, for an hour or two, but the Mistress of the Labyrinth protected you, while.…” He left off there, unsure as to what he ought to tell her. Propriety instructed him to be silent, but she was, after all, his intended wife, from whom he ought to have no secrets.

  “Your ear’s bleeding,” Cecilia told him. “Are you hurt?”

  “It’s just a scratch,” he assured her.

  “Were we inside the Keep?” Cecilia asked, apparently remembering, at least, where she had been when he had picked her up.

  “Yes,” Michael said.

  “Is Mr. Marlstone still there?”

  “Yes,” Michael confirmed told her. “Nor is he alone. He’s been poisoned too, as were your father and Jack, Mr. Hope, Mr. Escott and Lady Phythian—but it might have been a great deal worse, I think. The Langstrade Maze must have shaped and directed the field of the machine, in such a way that only a small contingent of Vikings contrived to get into the dale, and most of them fell prey to a Mesmeric spell woven by Signor Monticarlo’s violin. Had you not actually been inside the Maze.…” Again he trailed off—but Cecilia was not yet feeling well enough to give him her full attention, or to demand a further explanation of what he was saying.

  “Everything’s all right now, though,” Michael went on. “I managed to cut the cords of the driving-mechanism and stop the machine, exactly when it needed to be stopped—to the very second. I can’t claim the credit for that, though—the time machine was the expert in timing, as is only appropriate. I don’t believe that Marlstone will have the audacity to attempt another trial—but if he insists, I doubt that he’ll obtain any result at all, and will only make a fool of himself.”

  “I’m glad it’s over,” Cecilia said, trying to collect herself as her distress gradually eased. “I was afraid, when the machine threatened to run amok.”

>   “So was I,” Michael admitted, no longer feeling the need to be brave, or to pretend to have been brave. “It was a very frightening time.”

  “Will Mr. Marlstone be upset,” she asked, “that so many people came into the Keep and disturbed his experiment?”

  “I don’t think so,” Michael said. “At any rate, he can’t complain, because I succeeded in doing what he tried to do and failed—and he’ll have to change his clothes and take a bath before he does anything at all, because he fell into the moat and covered himself in mud. I’ll tell him that my success in stopping the machine was pure luck, but he probably won’t believe me. To a mathematician like him, luck is a dirty word.”

  “Was it pure luck?” Cecilia asked.

  “In a way, yes—but it was also fate, and cunning design.”

  “Whose design? Yours?”

  “I fear not—that particular design required far more cunning than any mere artist could provide, or even a clockmaker’s son. Such an accomplished designer, I suspect, will not be born for thousands of years…but eternity is a long time, and I don’t doubt that she’ll be born one day.”

  “A great inventor, no doubt?” she said, looking at him quizzically between her dainty fingers, which were still clutching her agonized head.

  “Quite the contrary,” Michael told her—but then he tired of speaking in riddles and stood up. He went to look at his painting, to make perfectly certain that it was making satisfactory progress, in spite of the time he had lost.

  While he was appraising it with a critical eye, Jeanne Evredon came though the gap in the hedge from the Maze. “Lady Langstrade—Millicent, that is—has dispatched her daughter, Carmela and myself to search for eight lost souls,” the somniloquist said. “We’re picnicking in the rose-garden again, but there’s no sign in the house of Lord Langstrade and Jack, or Mr. Hope and Mr. Escott, or even Lady Phythian. I hoped, at least to find Mr. Laurel and Mr. Marlstone here.”