Jeremiah Willstone and the Clockwork Time Machine

by Anthony Francis

  “She didn’t fail. We failed,” Lord Birmingham snapped, and Dame Alice scowled. “I’m still learning how the Victoriana Defense League operates, but I thought the reason for our failure was quite clear: we didn’t give her enough personnel or materiel!”

  “Respectfully, sir,” Jeremiah interrupted, before Dame Alice could take his head off, “the matter remains on my head. This assault was one of the largest of its kind, but I failed to make the case we needed to bring more to bear, starting with separate reconnaissance and assault forces—”

  “Are your Rangers,” Dame Alice asked, “not capable of both?”

  “Capable doesn’t mean ‘in two places at once,’” Jeremiah snapped, before containing herself: Dame Alice, as was her habit, would pull on the thread of failure until everyone could see its source. And so, as diplomatically as she could, Jeremiah reviewed the military doctrines at stake: separate forces to scout the strike and follow through, more behemoths to guard the rear, additional airships to pincer the ZR-101 if it took to the air. Still, she got more wound up as she went. “Why, we were spread so thin I had to run a recce myself—and what kind of foolishness is that for a Commander? What if I’d been ambushed and captured? That’d’ve beheaded the assault quick—”

  “Yes, yes, you’ve made your point,” Dame Alice said. “Clearly, with more Rangers, Frogmen and Frogwomen in the ground assault, you and Harbinger wouldn’t have ended up tackling the Baron alone—but had you made that point as clearly at our planning briefings as you did just now, you’d have had those forces. It’s your responsibility, Commander, to explain your plans in sufficient detail to convince your commanders and, if necessary, to call them on their foolishness—”

  “Yes, well,” Jeremiah said, wondering how well that conversation would have gone with the legendary firecracker before her; but perhaps Dame Alice’s point was that she needed to be more bold. “I see that I could have more clearly shared my strategy, or more freely my misgivings—”

  “You did freely share your misgivings,” Natasha said, joining them on the projection dais. “You told me in no uncertain terms that my whole platoon of Falconers might as well stay home if you didn’t get more ground support, and you were proved right—”

  “Don’t make excuses for the Commander, Lieutenant,” Dame Alice said.

  “Do you really believe that Natasha and her Falconers are lying to cover my pert arse?” Jeremiah said. “After she nearly killed us there’s no love lost—”

  “Oi!” Natasha said. “Defending you, I am—and was—”

  “Within a centimeter of dying, I said,” Jeremiah snapped; she didn’t need defending! “Less than a second fore or aft, and Patrick and I would have been a smear—”

  “Lord Birmingham fired on you,” Dame Alice said.

  “I gave strict orders to hold fire until signaled—” Jeremiah said.

  “The Prince Edward was under my command,” Lord Birmingham said.

  “And you were under mine,” Jeremiah said. “You delivered us, but it was my operation—”

  “Hang the chain of command, you weren’t aboard that airship and couldn’t see the whole picture,” Natasha said. “Had Birmingham fired when I first suggested, rather than waiting, Lord Christopherson’s machine would have been destroyed before he had a chance to board it—”

  Jeremiah scowled: Natasha had a point, damn the cheeky Falconer—though secretly she suspected Natasha would have egged Birmingham to jump the gun regardless. But this bickering was unbecoming—and not just because it was happening in front of Dame Alice; if Jeremiah recalled her own words right, she’d just upbraided Natasha for coming to her aid. That would not do.

  “A fair point, Lieutenant,” Jeremiah said. Was something still stuck in her craw? “And thanks for the assist, shattered glass or no, but clearly we would have been better off taking your advice and promptly destroying the machine, rather than letting it escape to parts unknown—”

  “Not completely unknown,” called an arch voice from the plotting table. “These little clockwork orbs that Commander Willstone’s team recovered may provide a clue.”

  “Oh really? What says our computer?” Dame Alice asked, glaring at them. Jeremiah, Sonia, and Birmingham realized she was glaring at them to move, and they stepped aside so the spectroscope’s lens could focus on the plotting table, where their computer labored.

  The Newfoundland authorities had confiscated the bulky Zodiac Machine, but Jeremiah’s Expeditionaries had secreted four spherical clockworks out of Christopherson’s lab and, back at the Eyrie, had subjected the most complete of the devices to thorough computer analysis.

  After a moment processing, their computer spoke.

  “I say this is the most fantastic machine I have ever laid eyes on,” said the Lady Georgiana Westenhoq, second Viscountess Greylock, seated primly at the plotting table in one of those great bustled, feathered, buckskin-trimmed dresses of the Mahican aristocracy, an elaborate, impractical affair that complemented her ruddy skin but clashed with the array of tools and parts spread before her. Beneath the upswept beehive coiffure that concealed the calculating tubes embedded in her skull, Georgiana wore the visor of a jeweler’s lens, inspecting with it the parts of the clockwork orb she slowly turned in a ratcheting gear. “A truly remarkable aetheric escapement—and inside, I have identified twenty-three hundred gears and eleven thousand distinct wires, all exquisitely machined to extremely strict tolerances, and all part of an intricate analogue calculating circuit—”

  “Your point, Lady Westenhoq,” Dame Alice said.

  “My point,” Georgiana said, eyes narrowing, but never leaving the machine, “is that the navigation settings of this immensely complicated device were hardwired—physically configured, probably taking hours, even with the aid of a well-programmed Mechanical. When an inner relay in this orb burned out, it could not simply be replaced without first stripping the wires that define the settings.” She raised the visor of her lens and leaned back, turning the device once more. “No. It would have been easier to wire up a new unit.”

  “All the loose parts we found,” Jeremiah said.

  “Hang the parts,” Lord Birmingham said. “If it’s a navigational device, tell us where he went with Her Majesty’s airship!”

  “Oh, I know where he went,” Georgiana said. “The dark heart of Georgia—”

  “Oi,” Patrick said. “That’s a bit on the nose—”

  “You know what I mean,” Georgiana said, scowling at her darker compatriot. “Atlanta.”

  “That hellpit?” Birmingham said. “Impossible, hang his reasons. We haven’t heard a peep from the Confederacy about an airship crossing their airspace, and believe you me, Lady Westenhoq, the Confederates would know, even if it was demagnetized—”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Georgiana said, “because where he went isn’t the issue. The question is, when.”

  Birmingham stopped and stared at her. “You can’t possibly mean,” he muttered, then shook his head. “Hang it all, Lady Westenhoq,” he said, shrugging off the implications in forced yet earnest seriousness, “I’m speaking of the trip he took last night.”

  “That’s when he started his trip, yes,” Georgiana said. “I can see that from the wiring. But when he finished it, well, there’s the question. Commander Willstone, please repeat what you told me that you observed upon the departure of the vessel.”

  “Of course, Lady Westenhoq,” Jeremiah said, her mouth quirking slightly at the Peerage convolutions that led to formal address between roommates. “When that great diving bell of Lord Christopherson’s disappeared, it seemed like . . . it seemed to ripple the air around it—”

  “A demagnetizer?” Dame Alice asked.

  “No, ma’am,” Natasha said. “Falconers are trained to be quite familiar with the operation of demagnetizers, and I and my men and women thi
nk this is different.”

  “It was more like a visual echo,” Jeremiah said. “In the ripples, like we could see what just had been . . . and what was soon to come.”

  “You mean, it had a precognitive function?” Dame Alice said. “Perhaps it had a psychic cloak rather than a Hertzian one. Something that engaged and, perhaps, addled your perceptions before the vessel fully demagnetized and took off?”

  “Nothing took off under my nose,” Lord Birmingham muttered.

  “Lord Birmingham is correct, ma’am,” Natasha interjected. “The hangar doors remained closed throughout the affair, and even counting the hole in the roof, there was no other exit from the hangar large enough for the device—it was the size of a house, a large house—”

  “Even by Peerage standards,” Jeremiah quipped, and Dame Alice glared.

  “And the visual imagery, as Commander Willstone said, was highly distinctive, like ripples in a pond,” Natasha said. “In them, I saw . . . I saw, very distinctly saw, myself and my crew assault that giant clockwork. Moments later, I gave that very same order and performed the same actions.”

  “Lieutenant, I,” Dame Alice began . . . then faltered, just a tad. “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

  “They were ripples, but not ripples in the air or water,” Georgiana said, confirming in public the suspicions Jeremiah, Patrick, and Natasha shared with her in private—and that Georgiana had later confirmed through analysis of equipment confiscated in the lab. “They’re ripples in time. Lord Christopherson’s ‘clockwork,’ as Natasha called it, is a vessel for traveling through time.”

  “In . . . time,” Dame Alice said, trying to digest that. Then, as Jeremiah had wagered might happen to anyone who hadn’t witnessed the event, she tried to spit the idea back up. “What? No. Balderdash. You deduced that from muddled reports of heat waves coming off an engine?”

  “No,” Georgiana said. “I deduced that from this device. Its inertial monitoring system is no ordinary gyroscope. A sailing ship needs two coordinates; an airship, three. This one has four, perhaps five coordinates, though the last term might be an imaginary residue—”

  “Imaginary residue?” Dame Alice said. “Leaving us with a time machine, as we might find in one of Wells’ aerograph romances—or young Einstein’s popular speculations? Lady Westenhoq! I asked you for a serious analysis, not a reading from your recent love letters!”

  “Well, I,” Georgiana began, the slightest flush coming to her already ruddy skin—then she gathered herself and spoke decisively. “The facts are plain. Lord Christopherson has escaped. The ZR-101 is also gone. And Commander Willstone, Lieutenant Harbinger, Sergeant Faulkner-Jain, and twenty of her Falconers all witnessed a machine the size of a house disappear before their own eyes from a sealed hangar covered with a Faraday cage, accompanied by the distinctive rippling effects one would expect from a temporal distortion in the Continuum—”

  “But,” Birmingham said, “but why would he even want to do such a thing? Tomorrow comes whether you would want it or not—”

  “Yesterday doesn’t,” Georgiana said. “Einstein and I gave this a lot of thought when we worked for Wells, and there were two reasons someone might travel in time. Forwards, to gain a weapon; or backwards, to undo the past.”

  “Undo . . . the past,” Birmingham said, eyes going distant. “Bloody hell.”

  “But where, excuse me, when, when was he going?” Patrick asked. “Are we talking a day in the past? A year? A decade?”

  “I’m not quite certain. I freely confess the maker of this device, whom I believe is another human computer, is also my better,” Georgiana said, examining the machine carefully. “Decades, at least—and I mean the time programmed for travel, not the half-century up on me my rival has—”

  “God, tell me it’s not forty years in the past,” Birmingham said. “At the right point during the War of Realignment, with just one modern airship, much less a dreadnought like the ZR-101, he could have . . . could have saved Atlanta, enabled the North to win the war—”

  “Wouldn’t that be a good thing?” Jeremiah quipped, then blanched. “Hang on—”

  “Think, Commander, think!” Lord Birmingham snapped, unaccountably both disturbed and ashamed. “Queen Victoria’s war crimes prompted us to depose her. The right act of mercy at the wrong time could, God, undo the overthrow of Victoria and restore her to her throne—”

  “No,” Jeremiah said. The War of Realignment was a cavalcade of horrors, from the millions killed in its ten thousand battles to Sherman’s near-biblical Scouring of Georgia—but the Territories Liberated from Victoria were liberated in its aftermath. “The Baron’s aim can’t be that—”

  “The man’s a Restorationist,” Dame Alice said.

  “And she’s the Dark Queen. Even Lord Christopherson has to have some moral standards,” Jeremiah said hotly, surprised to find herself defending her own uncle. “When my uncle and I fell out, I asked him if he meant to kill the Queen. ‘Why stop at just the present one,’ he said.”

  “And here I thought he was just being metaphorical,” Georgiana said, examining the settings of a ratcheting gear. “But it’s not forty years. More like a century. What happened then? It was during the Regency, though I can’t think what significant historical event—”

  “Oh . . . bloody hell,” Jeremiah said, raising her hand to her forehead. “I know what happened at the turn of the eighteenth century, and so does that blackguard. It’s our family history—and he’s threatened to undo it since I was in Academy.”

  ———

  All eyes turned to her as Jeremiah said, “He’s gone to undo Liberation.”

  8.

  The Liberation of Women

  “THAT’S . . . SIMPLY NOT possible,” Georgiana said, aghast. “Knowing the man, I could believe he’d favor such an aim, but . . . the Liberation of Women wasn’t a singular event. It was a mammoth historical movement, that spread to every corner of the globe like a tidal wave—”

  “Like an avalanche, started by one tossed rock,” Jeremiah said. “Tossed in the Southern Colonies a century ago, before the war, when they were a haven for all the women who fled the European Purges, a haven in particular for my great-great-grandmother—”

  “Oh bloody hell,” Patrick said. “Mary Wollstonecraft—”

  “The Architect of Liberation,” Jeremiah said, with restored family pride. “Emigrated to the Southern Colonies at the turn of the century, with my great-grandmother in tow. And precisely one hundred years ago, in eighteen aught eight, she published her magnum opus, The Equality of Man—”

  “God,” Patrick said. “If Christopherson killed her before she wrote it—”

  “He can’t have done,” Georgiana said. “She’s his own great-grandmother—”

  “Hang on,” Birmingham said. “If her daughter was already alive, he could—”

  “Exactly,” Jeremiah said, feeling her brain stretch as it struggled with the possibilities. “But perhaps he wouldn’t need to. If he suppressed her book and the movement it started, all of Liberation would fall like a house of cards.”

  The awful implications of that slowly sank in.

  “Oh bloody hell,” Lord Birmingham said. “I knew the man’s a reactionary, but that’s quite out of line! Deposing the Queen’s one thing, but undermining his own family legacy—”

  “I think that’s quite enough speculation about alternatives to the Commander’s family history,” Dame Alice said, her cold voice cutting through the air. “As horrific as these possibilities are, discussing them is pointless. Time travel is impossible.”

  “Not impossible,” Georgiana said, “if Einstein’s unified field theories—”

  “Lady Westenhoq, I do not care how attached you have become to young Einstein or how important his discoveries are,” Dame Alice said, “but I do expect you to disting
uish his more serious theories from the speculations that arose from your dalliances with that despicable Wells.”

  Georgiana flushed. “I fail to see what bearing my romantic adventures—”

  “They bear on your judgment,” Dame Alice said. “You may be besotted, but Einstein’s own mentor, the founder of the theory of the flexible ether, dismissed time travel out of hand. Professor Riemann said, and I quote: ‘If light cannot bend back on itself, neither can time.’”

  Georgiana drew herself up.

  “With all due respect, Dame Alice,” Georgiana said archly, “you are not well versed enough in these matters to pass judgment on my technical judgment. Herr Riemann is mistaken. His theory does not forbid time travel. It simply does not provide a mechanism for it. Einstein’s does.”

  Dame Alice’s red glare didn’t waver. “And is this more than idle speculation?”

  “It is,” Georgiana said. “I am in contact with America’s leading expert on gravity, Simon Newcomb, who assures me that time travel has not been accomplished outside the laboratory—outside, mind you—because bending light into a closed loop requires a vast amount of energy.”

  “Or cleverness,” Lord Birmingham said, staring at the device on the table. “Einstein’s plans for a time machine required the power of an exploding star, but if Natasha’s description is correct, Lord Christopherson’s machine used less power than the Prince Edward’s thermionic engines.”

  “You struck the mark, Lord Birmingham,” Georgiana said. “The laboratory experiments Newcomb described used castoff airship engines to power a device with aetheric escapements . . . escapements just like these.” She tapped the rings on the outside of the device significantly.

  The whole Eyrie fell quiet as the implications of that rippled: the device on the table was a time machine which could potentially be powered by an airship. A cold wind hissed against the dome, followed by a sharp rattle as that great airshark, the Prince Edward, shifted against its moorings.