“Any iron or steel at all?”
“No sir.”
“Good. Do you know letters and numbers?”
“Only a little.” Mariette’s heart beat fast at the lie. Unlike most of the slaves on the plantation, she had learned to read quite well, but her instincts were telling her that she should keep her knowledge close to her bosom. Bronson needed to underestimate her.
As a house slave, Mariette was expected to follow simple directions and recipes and to take messages from visitors. And so she’d been taught to read and write along with Mr. Turner’s youngest children. Her lessons ended once she knew practical words like “fish” and “sugar” and “cup”.
But while Mariette was still recovering from her amputation, Mr. Turner’s mother Helen—possibly her own grandmother, she now realized—started to go blind. Helen loved penny dreadfuls shipped in from England and read them by the boxload until her vision began to fail. None of Mr. Turner’s legitimate children had the time for (or interest in) reading to their granny. And so the elder Mrs. Turner enlisted Mariette to read her stories and London newspapers aloud to her. It was hard, at first, but the old lady was eager enough for entertainment and company that she patiently gave Mariette the proper pronunciations once she spelled out unfamiliar words.
“You best not let on to anyone how well you can read,” Mrs. Turner said one day when Mariette brought in her afternoon tea. “Folks don’t trust slaves with too-sharp minds. Can’t say I blame them, but I reckon you’re one of the good ones, so it can be our little secret.”
The old lady’s words were a cozy lambswool shawl draped over a cane knife: Displease me, and I’ll destroy you.
But Mariette was adept at keeping her perhaps-grandmother happy. The girl’s starving mind absorbed the informal tutoring, and soon she was sneaking into the library at night and reading more difficult books, puzzling them out by candlelight with the aid of the huge cloth-bound copy of Johnson’s Dictionary that roosted on the bottom shelf. During the day, she took great care to dust the library thoroughly so that no one would see the tracks of books being pulled from shelves.
She read the entire works of Shakespeare, and but kept returning to his play The Tempest. It was mostly because of the magic-filled story, which she could easily picture happening there on Barbados. But it was also because of Caliban and Miranda. She hated him for trying to rape her, but at the same time she thought that he was right to resent her father Prospero, who pretended he’d done Caliban a favor by enslaving him. And Miranda had no freedom at all, even though she got her handsome prince. The play’s happy ending didn’t fully satisfy her mind, and she felt compelled to re-read it, as if the words would rearrange themselves and some other ending might emerge.
If there had been any books on Africa, she’d have surely read and re-read them, too, but the subject was of no interest to the Turners.
“I can read some recipes and such,” she told Bronson. The other house slaves knew she could read that much, and admitting it meant he’d be less likely to catch her lie.
“Hm,” He seemed disappointed. “I suppose I am the victim of wishful thinking, as ever. The African mind is not suited to higher thought processes, but I do miss having helpers who can read things for themselves.”
This time, the peg leg she wielded in her mind went straight through his eye and out the back of his skull.
Instead, she said, “I will do my best despite my mental deficiencies, sir.”
At that, his eyes narrowed a bit and his eyebrows went up, but she kept her face carefully neutral and his moment of suspicion that she was being sarcastic apparently passed. He took one of the padded canvas coats and one set of the brass goggles from the rack and handed them to her.
“Put these on. There are gloves in the pockets of the coat; put them on, too. Button it up to your neck; you’ll want the protection from the cold.”
She did as he asked. The gloves she found were made of a thinner waxed canvas and had leather palms and fingertips like Mrs. Turner’s gardening gloves. Everything was several sizes too big for her, but she was able to cinch the strap on the goggles down over her head scarf so that the heavy leaded glass lenses stayed in place over her eyes.
Bronson reached for the bronze knob of the door leading into what had to be the main laboratory and paused, giving her a sharp look. “You are about to embark on a most noble endeavor. It’s entirely possible—and, if you fail to obey me, highly likely—that you shall lose your life in this room. But know that you are doing it for the greater good of mankind.”
Despite the disdain he seemed to have for her, there was a showman’s gleam in his eye. He craved an audience, Mariette realized. And if she were careful in her questions, she could use his eagerness to good advantage.
“What will we be doing, sir? Is it something to help Johnny Turner?”
“He will be helped, yes, but my research will do far more.”
Bronson opened the door into the laboratory. There was a strange burnt smell like the air after lightning struck a tree. The first thing Mariette saw was a pair of huge round glass tanks conjoined by a glass box with leather-covered portholes. Each of the round tanks was seamed with riveted brass strips and had enormous gleaming coils of copper wire at the top and bottom.
In the tank to her left, a strange, pulsing mass floated mid-air between the coils. It writhed bonelessly like a living thing. One moment it seemed black as tar, the next red as the setting sun, the next white as the moon. Even though it gave off no strong light, looking directly at it made her eyes ache, and she felt the exposed skin on her face grow warm as if she were standing beneath the noonday sun despite the cold of the room.
“What is that?” Mariette squinted away from the tanks and finally noticed the wall of brass instrument panels and racks of wooden tongs and blown glass bubbles. Thick rubber-coated cables ran from the copper coils to sockets in the base of the panels.
“Achronic aether,” Bronson replied proudly. His breath fogged away from him as if he were not a man but a dragon exhaling smoke. “Others have postulated its existence; I am the first to distill it and contain it. And soon, I shall be the only man able to control it.”
“W-what does it do?” Her teeth were starting to chatter, whether from fear or physical chill she couldn’t tell.
“At the moment, it strips heat from air, life from flesh, and sanity from minds,” he replied. “But once it is properly tamed, it shall make me master of both time and space.”
She stared at the blob again despite her discomfort, and she felt the hairs rise on the back of her neck beneath her stiff canvas collar. “How?”
“You’re beholding a fundamental solvent of the universe. We think of time and distances as fixed, linear. Trinidad is 60 leagues away; even if you took to the skies in a dirigible, you still have to travel the distance. Christmas is seven months away, and the faithful must suffer through every day between now and then. But with a stabilized crystal of achronic aether, a man of intelligence can escape the mundane bonds of time and distance and go when and where he wishes.”
Mariette blinked, thinking of Scrooge and his glimpse of the future in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. “He could go where and when…and change his fate?”
“Of course!” Bronson’s laugh was equal parts delight and scorn. “There’s no profit in merely being an observer! The possessor of the crystal could go to the future to discover wonders not yet invented…or go into the past and change his own starting fortunes entirely. The possibilities are limitless! But, as per my agreement with your owner, my first proof-of-concept will be to go back in time to convince Johnny Turner to stay here in Barbados instead of joining the British Navy.”
Her stomach buzzed as if she, too, had been hooked up to the electrical current from the great steam engine laboring outside. The achronic aether pulsed emerald inside its magnetic glass cage. No science could prove it, but she was certain it was eyelessly observing her.
“How many assista
nts have you had, sir?”
“Oh, seventy or eighty…I’ve rather lost count.” He paused. “Ours is a world of hundreds of millions of people. One might believe that an individual can have no possible consequence in the swarming sea of humanity, but history has proved otherwise over and over. Imagine that the great Leonardo da Vinci had left no heirs…would the world now have clockwork men and flying machines? He mattered; and soon, I shall matter even more.”
* * * *
Day after day, Mariette took the painful hike up the hill to the laboratory, where she did exactly what Bronson told her to do. It was an endless, nerve-wracking repetition of getting a pair of wooden tongs and a round flask, using the glove box to coax a bit of the aether from the first chamber into the glass, and then quickly transferring the aether-laden flask into the second chamber. Once she’d gotten it into that second chamber, she had to hold it perfectly still as Bronson worked his control panel to increase the magnetic fields to try to crush the aether into a crystalline configuration.
If the magnetic field ever failed, the aether would eat through the side of the glass and then through the tongs, and then the substance would behave as if she had dropped it. And if she ever dropped it, one of two immediately fatal things were likely to occur. The aether might explode into a fine black mist that would latch onto the nearest source of heat and moisture: her. And it would freeze her entire body solid before it dissipated back into the cracks of the universe. The second thing was that the aether might stay intact, but would ring like the very bell of doom, vibrating at a frequency guaranteed to drive most people insane if they were close by, and perhaps turn their brains to soup if they were quite near. Bronson had designed the room so that his seat at the instrument panel was a safe distance away.
Mariette did not drop the glass. Every day, she silently prayed to the Christian God and the forbidden Obeah spirits alike that Bronson would keep the magnetic field working. And when he wasn’t looking, she strained her eyes to glimpse his notes and try to figure out what he intended to do once he had his crystal. But she gained no useful clues from his scribbles and equations.
At the end of each session, Mariette’s shoulders, hands, leg and eyes ached, and her face was as dark as if she’d worked the entire time in the fields. She fell into an exhausted slumber and dreamed of strange worlds far beyond the Earth. She got Sunday afternoons off, as did all of Mr. Turner’s slaves after they’d attended church and dutifully listened to the white preacher’s sermons, but she found it harder and harder to make small talk with the others. Just as each day she and Bronson drew minutely closer to getting the aether to conform, each day she felt as though her mind was being forced open and taken away into a dimension of probability and causality. Even the Crop Over celebration, which she’d looked forward to every year since she was a small child, couldn’t bring her drifting mind back to shore.
But one day in November, Mariette was grimly clutching the tongs as she tried to keep the flask-bound aether steady in the second chamber. Bronson was trying the 316th new magnetic bombardment pattern he’d designed since Zeke ordered her to the laboratory; she had counted them all. Suddenly the aether crackled like hot molasses candy dropping into ice water. In a blink it had collapsed into a perfect, iridescent tetragon that rang like a silver bell.
And in that moment, she nearly dropped it in surprise and wonder, but she held fast at the last minute.
“Sir, sir, come quick!” Mariette had no faith that the aether would be stable and hold its shape for more than a few seconds.
She heard the clatter of Bronson knocking over the tongs rack in his haste to join her.
“Bring it forth!” he demanded.
“But it—”
“Bring it forth!”
Mariette took a deep breath and pulled the flask out of the chamber through the glove box porthole. Once released from the magnetic field, the bean-sized crystal clinked to the bottom of the glass. For one terrible moment, she was certain it was about to explode or eat through the flask, but it glittered perfect and still. Stable.
“Hold it up to the light!” Bronson wore the ecstatic expression of an atheist who had finally found God.
She carried the flask over to a nearby lamp so that Bronson could examine it more closely. Her mind churned. She’d spent so much time in the laboratory that she wanted very badly to see if the crystal worked as Bronson predicted…but she could not forget the terrible fates he wished on people like her. And he’d never revealed how it was that he intended to actually use the crystal. Even his notes had shed no light on that part of his plan. Should she wait and see? Should she fling the crystal against the wall to destroy it and probably herself and Bronson, too?
To her profound surprise, Bronson snatched the flask out of the tongs with his bare hands.
Bronson’s eye grew wide with wonder, as if he saw something miraculous in the far distance. “It’s…”
But then his body jerked as if he’d been struck and his eyes went dull, unresponsive. His knees buckled and the flask slipped from his lifeless fingers.
Mariette lunged forward to catch the flask in her gloved hands before it could shatter on the hard wooden floor.
The moment the glass-clad crystal settled in the palm of her gloved hand, the laboratory seemed to fall away and she felt as though she were floating in the vast, cold darkness amongst the stars.
“I have been summoned.” The voice was all around her. “What do you wish? Choose.”
“Who are you?” she whispered, terrified.
“Ylem.”
Suddenly, the vast wave of all the possibilities in the entire universe crashed down around her. She could go to any time, any world, any dimension, anywhere. The capacity of her mind expanded as fast as light, but it could not keep up with the infinity of possibility in the universe.
“Choose,” Ylem demanded. “I have been summoned, and you must choose.”
The impossibility of choice in the face of infinity threatened to burn her mind down like a blade of grass caught in a supernova.
But nonetheless, she chose: “I don’t want to be a slave. I don’t want to have been a slave. I don’t want any human being to have suffered as we have.”
“You have chosen. Now, make it so.”
The lines of history and probability and causality opened before her mind like a vast treasure map, and she raced backward through the ages, an Angel of Death for some, a guardian ghost to others. To kill, she had to but brush her spectral hand through a ribcage to stop a heart. To save a dying infant, she had to but picture healthy lungs or a full belly and it was so. But the more greed and evil she erased, the more there seemed to be. Slavery was intertwined with war and conquest so deeply that it was impossible to separate the two. And the wars seemed to go back forever and ever.
After what seemed like an aeon of saving and slaying, she found herself upon a sun-bleached veldt. A family of dark, slender, slightly-built apes clung to each other, keening softly as a gang of tall, burly apes from a different tribe surrounded them, hooting in victory and brandishing sharpened sticks.
She saw into the minds of the big apes. They would slay all the small males and roast them over the fire they had recently learned to capture from lightning strikes. But they might leave some of the small females alive as breeding slaves. These big apes delighted in killing and taking territory, reveled in the misery of the others they drove before them.
And she saw the minds of the small ones. They, too, had learned to use fire to harden clay for pots and beads and to boil the grains they foraged. The small ones delighted in making love and singing and crafting and only killed when they could find no plants or grubs to eat.
Mariette made her choice.
“It is accomplished,” Ylem said when she stopped the heart of the last big ape.
For a moment, Mariette found herself back in the lab, staring down at the crystal in the flask in her gloved hands as Bronson lay dead at her feet.
And then the
crystal evaporated and the laboratory melted away.
Mariette—no, her name was Kmbana of the Green—stood on the deck of a ship floating above the clouds, staring down into empty hands. Hands that were brown and quite narrow and which bore short red fur. Completely familiar and yet utterly alien.
“Are you all right?” trilled her sister Nmbena in a language so far from English that she could not compare the two, but she knew it just as well.
Kmbana looked up at her sister’s earnest amber eyes and excitable whiskers and made herself smile. “Yes. I’m fine. Just daydreaming.”
Her mind now held two completely different memories: her life as the slave Mariette, and her new life as Kmbana, and her brain reeled trying to reconcile it all.
“Do you like the new leg?” her sister asked.
“Oh yes,” Kmbana replied reflexively as she suddenly remembered that here, in this new now, she’d lost her leg falling over the edge of an airship when she was just a child. “It’s lovely.”
And it was lovely, she realized. It was a gorgeous work of wood and brass made to match her flesh leg, and inside it had clever tiny motors and clockworks to allow her to move the metal foot like a real one.
“It’s amazing,” Kmbana added.
“Do you think you would like to take a walk along the seashore? The shipmothers are talking about stopping at the island below us.”
Her sister pointed over the railing at a teardrop-shaped island, and Kmbana gave a start when she recognized it from the shape she’d once seen on maps: Barbados! She breathed in the smells of rich soil and seaweed. But here it was the tip of a nameless archipelago. She tried to make out the rise where the plantation would have been, but it was all forest.
She wanted to laugh with joy at the wonders of this peaceful new world, but she also wanted to weep for the good she’d inadvertently erased along with the bad. She and her sister and the other millions of souls upon the planet were people, certainly, but none human as she understood humanity. There had never been a British Navy, nor a Johnny Turner to be twisted by it. But there also had never been a Dickens, nor a da Vinci, nor a Shakespeare. There had been others just as brilliant—the Great Mothers they learned about in school—and people had accomplished immortal works of art and invention in the absence of war. But they were not the same.
The Third Cthulhu Mythos Megapack Page 3
