Jeremiah Willstone and the Clockwork Time Machine

by Anthony Francis

  Striding past the Walrus with a friendly tut-tut, the woman Jeremiah had heard but not seen walked around the promenade of the Machine, checking instruments with practiced ease. She wore a high top hat over a mess of salt-and-pepper hair that clashed with her oddly youngish face, and her dark blue dress was topped with a black leather corset Jeremiah could see was lead-lined.

  When she completed her circuit surveying the instruments, the woman—presumably, Jackson, mistress of the Machine—threw a switch. The Machine slowed, the shuddering and distorted harps reduced, and then full, natural weight returned as the Machine tilted to level and settled to Earth . . . if this was Earth, that is, or her Earth. God knew where this really was.

  The Jackson woman checked readouts on the Machine against her clipboard, studiously avoiding looking at Jeremiah as she called numbers out to the Walrus, who circled the Machine just as she had moments earlier. They stood together, compared notes, and then nodded.

  “All right,” the woman said. “Open her up.”

  “Jackson, it’s a giant cuckoo clock. It isn’t a she,” the Walrus said.

  “It isn’t a he either,” she said, adjusting her glasses. “Now open her up.”

  Jeremiah painfully craned her neck round the corner as the Walrus stepped forward, peered out a porthole, Jackson stepping close behind him. The Walrus threw two latches, then turned a crank. There was a hissing and release of gas, and Jeremiah’s ears popped.

  After the pressure equalized, with some trepidation, the Walrus opened the hatch. The footmen reached under her arms and lifted her up, and with some fear she realized they’d already uncuffed her, and her left hand had fallen, insensate, into her lap. It was truly gone to her now.

  Jeremiah let herself relax in the arms of the guards, helping them walk her as much as her legs would let her, and let them carry her into a new world.

  The Clockwork Time Machine stood on a vast sheet of concrete within a titanic chamber. Huge columns climbed up around them, ten stories high, supporting mammoth girders overhead, outlining a space large enough to hold a stadium. But the most striking feature of the room was its window: a clear, nearly invisible sheet of glass, as high and as wide as the room, through which she could see the slender silver prow of the ZR-101 airship edging past . . . and beyond it, the spires of a city far, far taller and vaster than Atlanta, lying almost completely in ruins.

  “Oh . . . oh my,” Jeremiah said. Some of the buildings looming in the mist were so large, they looked like vertical mountains, or a forest of stone, but clearly the building they stood in was taller than most, as the tips of some of the cyclopean buildings were below her eye level. A handful of the giants were nearly intact, but their facades were weathered and cracked; the bulk of the rest were blasted hulks, many tottering, fallen, or snapped in two.

  Instinctively her Scarab eyes refocused, seeing through the ZR-101, seeing into the buildings, looking for signs of life. In some nearer buildings she saw moving heat signatures of human forms, stationary heat signatures she recognized as fires, even a herd of pigs high on the upper floors of one mammoth building. In shock her eyes focused back, and she could see the blasted windows of the building and the ugly smears where years of cook fires had scarred its surface.

  “They’ve destroyed themselves,” she said. “Are we . . . in the future?”

  “Yes,” Jackson said. “Far forward. Nineteen ninety-seven, in fact.”

  “But that’s the past,” Jeremiah said, and then got it. “Yet another world.”

  “Quite right, my dear Mya,” Lord Christopherson said, and she turned to see him stalking up to her, not changed a thread from the point where she’d seen him in the laboratory of the CDC—except for chucking the surgical mask. “Our secret base, as it were, where—dear God.”

  Lord Christopherson dropped the wrench he had in his hand, bolted forward, and knelt before Jeremiah. His jaw dropped, the shift in his skin tugging slightly at the burn she’d left on his right cheekbone. His hand reached out and touched her cheek, and while it was warm, it did not burn her. He gently turned her head to the side, inspecting the head of the monster; it felt different now, closer, as if the thing had burrowed not just into her head, but had merged with her back. Lord Christopherson let her head fall back; then his hand cradled her cheek.

  “I told myself I could not have possibly seen what I thought I saw,” her uncle said. Was that a bit of wetness accumulating in those hated blue eyes? “I convinced myself you’d tackled the Scarab, had pinned it to the ground to prevent it from implanting—”

  “Uncle . . . you wanted to do this to yourself,” she said. “Why?”

  Lord Christopherson winced. “Not this,” he said. “Not this stage, the larval stage. This stage was meant . . . for the cow.”

  Jeremiah swallowed. “I was afraid of that . . . so it is going to eat me.”

  “Who told you that?” Lord Christopherson said.

  “Lord Birmingham,” Jeremiah said. “He’s with the Black Tea Society.”

  “Blast it,” Christopherson said, planting one mammoth fist on his knee. “I’d hoped . . . I’d hoped Lady Westenhoq was the agent—”

  “Almost everyone but her is infected—her and the Owl. The Tea cannot possess computers or psychics,” she said, and at that Jackson smiled. Jeremiah squinted at her, realizing the top hat concealed the woman’s vacuum tubes. “And it’s Boolean: you cannot become infected partially over time. Either you’ve drunk enough to become a member . . . or you haven’t.”

  “That’s . . . more than we’ve learned in the past few years.” Lord Christopherson looked at her in admiration. “Well done, Jeremiah. Well done. Your success is . . . extraordinary, given the circumstances. How did you find out about the Tea? Why did you come over to our side?”

  “I haven’t come over to your side,” Jeremiah said, “and as for how I found out . . . you told me. You were oblique, of course, not knowing whether I would be overheard by an infected crewmember—”

  “We haven’t . . .” Lord Christopherson said.

  “I’m afraid,” Jackson said, “things have become tangled.”

  ———

  A FOOTMAN STOOD Jeremiah before the window, pinning her head in his hands, forcing her to stare straight ahead. When they’d realized how good her vision had become, Lord Christopherson had demanded it, but not before Jeremiah had gotten a good look at the glass board he was working on and the rows of glowing timelines running across it.

  One timeline was labeled VICTORIANA, one AMERICA (with –NA struck out), the third EMPIRE OF NIPPON. She didn’t catch the others before they turned her, but she did see the dark lines Christopherson was drawing, from 1908 Victoriana to 1997 Nippon to 2009 America and back again, the last two a curdled mess of lines that he’d expanded out to a larger diagram. She stared into the distance, recalling the diagram, and somewhere deep within her, there was a whisper.

  That graph has a cycle. They have created a causal loop.

  After several minutes, her uncle came to the same conclusion. “Damn it,” Christopherson said. “Damn it to hell! We’ve crossed our paths! We picked up a copy of Jeremiah influenced by the outcome of our Stanford operation, which we haven’t undertaken yet!”

  “So Quincy was right,” Jackson agreed grimly. “We’ve created a causal loop.”

  “Can we undo it?” asked Walrus-moustache, the one Jeremiah guessed was Quincy.

  “No,” Lord Christopherson said. “Not easily.”

  Jeremiah tried to twist and look at them, but the footman seized her jaw more firmly and kept her turned away. The movement made the great bug on her back squirm, and Jeremiah cried out in pain; moments later, the footman cried out in disgust.

  “Oh, let her go,” Lord Christopherson said.

  “But, sir,” Jackson said. “If she were to escape—”

&nbs
p; “Look at her, Jackson,” Lord Christopherson said. “She’s going nowhere.”

  The footman stepped back, and Jeremiah sank slowly to her knees. Night had fallen, and she looked aside at her reflection inside the glass. They’d stripped her backpack and cloak and left her in the bloody shift; the monster had eaten its way further into her, a great humped scab made of scales of copper, half bug, half pine cone, with golden light and black ichor leaking through the cracks.

  “We’ll do this,” Lord Christopherson said, and she looked over to see the vast pillar of a man leaning over a writing table and pulling out a paper. Beyond him, the cracked pane of glass with its glowing lines had been zoomed in onto the timeloop, a horrible mess of past and future events that were not easily represented even in the three-dimensional view afforded by the living glassboard on this alien Earth. “We’ll do precisely as she said: send her a note,” he said, writing with a firm, assured hand. “If we can’t remove the loop, we can reinforce it—”

  “That’s so dangerous,” Jackson warned. “We’ve got to at least try—”

  “Why,” Jeremiah said, “do you need to remove it?”

  “Why? It’s a causal loop!” Jackson said. “Fast becoming an ontological paradox—”

  “Jackson, she needs context,” Lord Christopherson said mildly, and for one brief moment, she remembered why she’d admired him: once, he had always taken the time to explain his reasons. He finished the note and stood up. “Look out there, Jeremiah. What do you see?”

  Jeremiah didn’t bother to look. “A shattered city. People hiding in buildings. Herds of pigs living off their waste. Cook fires burning the outer walls black through years of use. Like the aftermath of the Apocalypse.”

  “And yet, almost the same world that we just left,” her uncle said. “We haven’t quite figured out the rules, why things differ, but the point of departure was the city first wiped off the Earth by atomic weapons: Kyoto rather than Hiroshima.”

  “That led to a cascade of events,” Jackson said, “a more hostile world where Japan isolated itself and grew strong again, where the great powers were freer with atomic weapons. Ultimately the giants ate each other, and the center of gravity shifted to Tokyo; this great city was the last to fall.”

  “But that’s not the point,” Lord Christopherson said. “The point was that the difference was a simple choice, a single event. Our travel has shown that the river of time is fluid, can even fork, but the worst case is—”

  “An eddy,” Jackson said authoritatively, her face quite grave. “A causal loop of events and choices feeding back on themselves, ever changing, a snake eating its own tail as fast as it can grow it. Causal loops naturally want to undo themselves, sometimes through violent changes.”

  “One of my counselors—the Eldest Moffat, you recall?—said you could not travel to the past or the future,” Jeremiah said. “That it was like trying to step off reality into a dream. If the dream can feed back into reality—”

  “Reality will try to wake from its nightmare. If the choices you make now can undo the choices you made in the past, they could unmake the present,” Jackson said. Jeremiah’s heart leapt: perhaps what had been done to her could be undone—and at that realization, she felt the beast at her back shudder in fear. Jackson continued, “At best, unpredictable changes could be made to the future. At worst, all reality could unravel into the dream.”

  “Tell me, what’s the loop?” Jeremiah said. “How did it happen?”

  “We have been traveling back and forth in time,” Jackson said. “But there is always a bit of slop, a bit of drift in the settings. The Machine is a clockwork, in the end, and the gears do slip from time to time. We know some jaunts of the Machine between America and Imperial Japan have happened out of temporal order. Quincy and I have arrived today earlier than expected; more than a week has passed for us that has not passed for Lord Christopherson.”

  “Not normally a problem,” the Walrus—yes, he was Quincy—said, “but in this case—”

  “But in this case we don’t know why you are here,” Lord Christopherson said. “This is no simple temporal shift. Ultimately, the ZR-101 had to flee Americana—Lord Birmingham is just too good in the air. But we did draw a bead on the Scarab and sent the Machine back after it—and found instead you seeking us because we had called you. But we haven’t called you yet.”

  “But . . .” And with that, Jeremiah saw the loop, and with that understanding, even more hope for her salvation. “But . . . I came because you called me. And if you didn’t call me, I wouldn’t have known where to come. That information . . . came out of nowhere.”

  “Precisely. We’re already in the eddy; who knows how we first ended up with you at my feet, if ‘first’ even has a meaning,” Lord Christopherson said. “Perhaps we sent you the note to lure you to us—but the date got muddled in the sending. Or perhaps we’d skipped a gear in a different way and were trying to recover from the situation. Regardless—you found us, we caught you, you sought us out, we tricked you in—there’s no longer a way to tell. All we know now is that the snake’s eating its tail; something about now caused the past, and something in the past created the now.”

  He raised the envelope. “We’re stuck with the loop, but perhaps we’ll salvage the situation. We need to create a self-consistent solution. We’ll send this when we next return to Americana: a letter which warns you of your betrayal and brings you to the park.” Lord Christopherson stared at it grimly, considering; then asked Jeremiah, “Where should we send it?”

  “Go to hell,” Jeremiah said.

  “Do you want history to be destroyed?” he asked.

  “Could we not undo the loop by not sending the letter,” Quincy asked, fingers brushing his walrus moustache in thought, “and trying our best to capture her otherwise?”

  “It’s too late for that, Quincy, we’ve already got her,” Christopherson said. “Yes, we could have caught her anyway, but now, it would cause a direct contradiction—”

  “But wouldn’t the contradiction resolve to a new stable state?”

  “Too risky. We’ve spent weeks devising a response to her theft of the Scarab,” Jackson said. “With that much time open to change . . . who knows what would happen?”

  Jeremiah listened to them argue. They, the boffin in particular, were taking this deadly serious. Well, fine, bugger them all. Then she thought through the implications of not having the information to come to the park: she would have been recaptured by the Prince Edward.

  “Oh, bollocks, hell’s already here, isn’t it?” Jeremiah asked, shifting painfully underneath the weight of the thing on her back. “It was Lord Christopherson’s letter which convinced Marcus, the American agent, to aid me. Without it, I would never have found you, nor ‘stolen’ the Scarab. Send it to the hotel, by post, so that it arrives at two twenty-seven in the afternoon. Oh . . . and you should ask for a signature, to be sure that it gets directly to me.”

  “Why did you change your mind about helping us?” her uncle asked.

  “You want the Scarab to end in the hands of the Black Tea?” she replied.

  Jeremiah didn’t say that it was her handwriting on the back that had led her to believe the note, and she had no intention of writing that message now. Like threading a needle, she hoped the note contained enough information to keep her infested self out of the hands of the Tea, but not enough to get her infested in the first place, an insurance plan operative across all realms of possibility. Now, if she remained silent, she hopefully would never go, would never have gone to the CDC, would never have been bitten by this . . . this horrid thing. At that thought, the horrid thing on her back convulsed again, and Jeremiah leaned forward and dry-retched.

  “God,” Lord Christopherson said, as she hacked.

  “Are you still wanting to go through with this?” Jackson asked.

  “
I don’t see any choice,” Lord Christopherson said.

  As Jeremiah stared at the pavement, heaving, she realized that if she undid the timeloop, Lord Christopherson would be able to proceed unopposed. He’d implant this in the cow . . . and then in himself. But in God’s name, why?

  “Why did you want to do this?” Jeremiah said. “It’s taken my hand. It’s eaten my eyes!” And at that she started to see. “But my eyes are . . . better now. Is that it? You expect . . . expect this thing to do something for you? To make you . . . somehow . . . better?”

  Lord Christopherson considered, holding the letter in his hand. Then he turned to Jeremiah slowly. “Very well,” he said, in that same mild tone he always used to explain something difficult. “You deserve to know the truth, if you are going to die to help make it happen.”

  Jeremiah swallowed.

  ———

  “It’s quite simple, really,” he said. “I want to become a god.”

  45.

  Dark Corners of the Universe

  “THE DARK CORNERS of the universe are filled with terrible monsters. Things of immense power. Things of unlimited hostility. Things that must be fought,” her uncle said—and then those crystal-clear blue eyes practically gleamed. “But everything had its beginning.

  “Everything that is something had its moment where it was nothing. Everything that holds great power had its moment where it held none. Everything we fear had its moment where it was no more fearsome . . . than I am.”

  Lord Christopherson smiled, bared teeth in his black beard. “So . . . why not me?”

  “Blood of the Queen,” Jeremiah said. “Uncle, you’ve gone mad as a hatter.”

  “Get off,” Christopherson said. “Your own people understood my vision—”