The Dedalus Book of Austrian Fantasy;1890-2000

by Mike Mitchell

  The devil also got something. ‘I had hoped for a soul,’ he said, ‘and got two. But out of respect for you, Snitto, I shan’t allow them to hang themselves in your house.’

  So the devil found another house, and the First and the Second were so furious they hanged themselves because they couldn’t marry handsome, pleasant Snitto, the inventor of stench.

  This story, or something like it, was told in Finland.

  The Trouble with Time Travel

  Martin Auer

  ‘What strikes me when I read all this speculation about time travel,’ said Vladimir, ‘is that some problems are never touched on at all. For example, the problem of arrival. If you arrive in a different time, then there’s only one way you can do it: suddenly. A moment ago you weren’t there, now you are. So you’d be arriving at an infinitely high speed, even if it’s not quite clear from which direction. But that would mean that a collision with even the lightest of atoms would be fatal. I’m a pilot, not a physicist, but I imagine if you were to collide with an atom at an infinite speed, an infinite amount of energy would be released and everything would explode. And I mean everything. Even intergalactic space is not so empty that I would risk it.

  And that brings me to the second problem no one appears to have thought about: space. I just cannot imagine how, if you’re going to travel through time, you can determine the place where you’ll land. You see, it’s time that holds us in space, time alone that defines space. To put it another way: we’re here because immediately before we were in a similar place. Nothing stays the same. While we’re sitting here in this bar, the walls all around are slowly rotting away, even if they are made of non-degradable aluminium. There are atoms decaying, there’s the constant bombardment by radiation, people are coming and going, leaving behind the vapours their bodies give off, the air is being shifted round by the ventilation system, though I think they ought to turn the thing up a bit, and so on. And all the time the planet’s revolving round its sun, the sun is travelling round the centre of the galaxy, and the galaxy’s moving round God knows what, and anyway, as we all know, the whole universe is flying apart in all directions and at one hell of a speed. The point is, space is different all the time, and, if truth be told, we’re not in the place we were a moment ago any more. That place no longer exists.

  Even if I only want to take a tiny jump in time, say ten minutes into the future because I want to see if Hopalong’s going to cut his forehead open when he gets so pissed he slumps onto the table, I still have to somehow extricate myself from time. But if I do manage to get outside time, how do I get my time machine to stay in this place?

  The planet’s gravity field can’t hold me, if I’m outside time. Everyone knows gravity needs time to attract me, or, to look at it from the other side, that I need time to overcome it. The same is true of the force of inertia. As long as I’m in time, my body puts up resistance to every change in its state of motion. But outside time there is no motion, no state of motion, even less a change in the state of motion, to say nothing of resistance to it.

  So, how can I programme my time machine to stay here?

  While I stay here, the bar will keep revolving and disappear from under my feet, the whole planet’ll vanish into the distance at a great lick, the solar system, the galaxy – all depending on what it is I’m ‘standing still’ in relation to. I have the feeling that as soon as I step outside time, if only for a moment (for what kind of moment, if I’m outside time?), then it’s a matter of pure chance where I reappear in time. Because there’s no such thing as absolute space, because there’s no fixed point in space I could hold on to ‘while’ I’m outside time.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Tinhead – so called from his artificial frontal bone – reflectively. ‘But if we could solve that problem, then we could use time machines to travel through space at any speed we liked. I could, say, just hop over to old Ma Goddam’s cathouse. It’s three hours away from here, but if I also travelled back in time three hours, I’d be there in literally no time at all, and without any hassle.’

  ‘You’d even be here and in the whorehouse simultaneously, and at all the infinite number of points in between.’

  ‘Well if I had a time machine,’ Hopalong’s rumbling voice came from somewhere under the aluminium table-top, ‘I’d go to Ginger at Ma Goddam’s, and I’d get there yesterday evening, at nine o’clock precisely, and I’d screw the arse off her for an hour. At ten o’clock I’d hop into my time machine and travel back to nine o’clock again, so that simultaneously I could give it her from…’

  ‘Okay man, okay. I think we all get the idea.’

  ‘No you don’t. I wouldn’t just duplicate myself, I’d…’

  ‘You’d do nothing of the sort. One of you’s more than enough. Ginger would throw up the moment a duplicate appeared, so you can scrub all plans in that direction, sonny boy.’

  ‘You just don’t understand me,’ Hopalong muttered, slipping even farther under the table.

  ‘The question that concerns me above all,’ Vladimir went on after the interruption, ‘is this: if I step outside time, what will hold me together? It’s only temporal continuity that gives me my sense of identity or, if Popol insists, the illusion of a sense of identity. If I step outside time and then step back in somewhere else, am I then still me? That’s what I ask myself.’

  A leaden silence was the only answer Vladimir received to his question. But then Popol the Aged said, ‘I arrived in Kruun about a year after they had invented time travel there. I’ve no idea whether they’d asked themselves any of the questions Vladimir has been airing here – or now – or here and now, I suppose I should say. It worked, and that was that. One of the first things I saw there was a demonstration outside the Kruun Historical Museum. Young people, mostly students of course, were demonstrating against what they called the plundering of Kruun’s history. Kruun is not dissimilar to Earth. Naturally they don’t have sphinxes or Venus de Milos there, but I’ll explain the matter in terms of Mama Earth to make it easier for you to understand. The company that had the initial monopoly on the time machine patent launched the thing with a spectacular advertising gimmick: ‘What did the Venus de Milo look like when she still had arms?’ Then they sent off an expedition which followed the history of the statue back into the past, all the way to the sculptor’s workshop. There they bought it from him and took it with them back to their own time, where they installed it next to the one with its arms broken off that everyone knows. You’ll have seen the photo of the two statues, it was in the papers all over the universe.

  “But how can that be possible?” some people said. “If they’ve brought the Venus de Milo here from the past, then it was never lost, it’s arms were never broken off, and it couldn’t have been found on Melos in 1820. How can it be here at all?”

  “But you can see it! There it is!” said the company’s PR men, and there was no answer to that. Soon after, the market in antiques went haywire. Greek vases, Roman swords, Celtic spears, you name it, you could get it. The prices were horrendous, but the goods were brand new.

  Before long the artists and craftsmen of all ages were spending all their time working for what for them was posterity. The Teutons spent their booze-ups lying on straw because their bearskins had disappeared into the future – until, that is, the dealers started supplying them with car-seat covers in orange PVC velours from the 1970s. And instead of beer and mead, they were soon swigging Synthecola with aspirin because the purchasers of their bearskins naturally also wanted authentic drinks from the period to go with them.

  And that’s the way it was in all periods. The Viennese Biedermeier family ate off tables made out of tea-chests, Aztec priests dumped the hearts of their victims in plastic buckets. There was soon a firm employed in dismantling the sphinx stone by stone, beginning with its nose, and transferring it into the future.

  And then came the package tours. A few highbrows wanted to experience Shakespeare’s plays live at the Globe, or the tragedies of S
ophocles in ancient Athens, but the most popular by far were trips to see the gladiators in ancient Rome, bullfights in Seville at the beginning of the nineteenth century, niggers being lynched in the USA, and football hooligans in the later twentieth century. Tours of the three World Wars were also in great demand.

  Eventually they started bringing the best gladiators from Rome into the present and getting them to fight against mammoths and dinosaurs, which had been transported from various geological periods. The authorities did actually soon ban them, but the entrepreneurs just transferred them to the tertiary period, or to the twentieth century, when people weren’t so wimpish.

  And there was big business in dead babies. Mothers whose children had died couldn’t wait for the chance to travel back into the past and see their babies again. They went back a few years and watched themselves changing nappies. That was relatively harmless. The problems started when they wanted to kiss and cuddle their little darlings. The kids went half mad with fright when a second mother – and one who in some inexplicable way had aged – suddenly appeared and clasped them to their bosom. Some children never recovered from the shock and died even younger. Then, of course, there were cases where the mothers simply flipped their lids and tried to abduct their children and bring them back to the present. The courts were swamped with the number of cases that caused.

  There were even more people who travelled back to see their dead dogs and cats. Many got bitten for their pains.

  Just as many tried to use time travel to solve their sexual problems. And I’m not just referring to the fat cats who had famous whores like Rosemarie Nitribitt or Christine Keeler brought to the present for them, or engaged Salome to do a striptease. People whose lovers had left them went back to happier times to vie with their formers selves for the favours of the object of their affections. Married couples who felt the magic had gone out of their relationship no longer took a second honeymoon to try and save their marriage, but travelled back to their original honeymoon, to relive their days of wedded bliss. Can you imagine on your wedding night a paunchy middle-aged couple in Bermuda shorts and sunglasses suddenly appearing from the wardrobe and saying, “Hi, we’re your future!”

  The hotels shut up their honeymoon suites and reverted to letting single rooms to travelling salesmen because they were fed up to the back teeth with all the double suicides and the hordes of policemen constantly tramping through the building.

  But why limit oneself to the past? Trips to the future opened up undreamt-of opportunities. Firms shut down their R & D sections and simply brought inventions and new developments back from the future. They bought them or just stole them, in the latter case especially from those enlightened ages that had abolished money. And at the same time, naturally, they headhunted specialists who could handle the technology from the future. One after another the universities closed down, then all the schools apart from primary schools. No one bothered to learn anything any more. There was no point: without future know-how you had no chance of landing anything but a dead-end job. The one possibility was to get a place at a university in the future, but only very few managed to reach the standard of future entrance qualifications.

  It was the same in the arts and the entertainment industry. Soon the only thing pop music companies were doing was sending out expeditions to the future to supply an insatiable public with next year’s hits, or those of the year after, of the next decade, the next century. The natural consequence was that two, ten or a hundred years later no one wanted to hear such tired old numbers, so that quite different songs, often in completely different styles, made the charts – only, of course, to be immediately transported back to be sold to the disc-buying public as the real hits of the future. The musicians of the future soon got fed up with finding that all their most successful numbers immediately turned out to be ancient hits from the last century. The best among them fled to other epochs, which led to some surprising new developments in Gregorian chant and the Indian raga.

  When I left Kruun after I’d finished my business there – given the circumstances, it was difficult to say exactly how long my stay had actually lasted – the situation was that the opponents of time travel had a small majority, and that it was about to be banned. Those in favour of time travel merely shrugged their shoulders and said that in that case they would simply stay in the time before the ban. That led to a fierce debate among its opponents as to whether it was morally justified to declare a retrospective ban on time travel, and if so, how to make it effective. Eventually the suggestion was made that the whole confusing epoch should somehow be chucked out of the time continuum. I quickly made my departure before they did something that might mean I had never been on Kruun. After all, I’d done some big deals on Kruun, and didn’t intend to lose my profit.’

  In the Sand

  Barbara Neuwirth

  There people walk in such a way their clothes become quite slender, there they hold their heads so high each one must see the other, there children never cry; but no one laughs either.

  The approach to the plain is bordered by the most mighty peaks. A hundred metres high and more, they are like battlements guarding the yellow sunrises. The cold wind sweeps down the slopes like a pack of wolves and woe betide anyone who leaves their house before the morning brings its warmth. On some days, when the storm refuses to die down, iron-red sand dims the daylight. Then stones fly through the air, slashing at the plaster on the houses.

  To each house one room. To each room just one person. And far away another house, another room, another person.

  The traveller is looked after by the natives, she is given food and neutral ground to sleep on. The visitor house, the place is called, similar to the others yet different: for there in that night lovers meet / to talk or make love / as it says in the old texts. The place where time is not. For ever and ever. And beyond understanding.

  The pointed domes above the rooms have been made from branches and spread with mortar, grey crouching on red, like elephant skin. But it is a long time since there were any trees on this plain, saltlicking tamarisks and acacias creep into the depressions and bow down behind piles of stones.

  /The graves,/ certainly, are one of the strangest aspects of the customs of those people. Whenever one dies they do not gather, but seem to flee. Just one stays. Perhaps it is the one who loved the dead person most of all, perhaps one who had nothing to do with them, what the truth of it is I don’t know. The dead person is taken out into the open country, to a place where there is nothing but tears. They are laid down with their face to the ground and arms and legs spread out, almost making them like a cross. The body is enclosed in stones, painstakingly collected, they rise up over its back and when it is completely covered, the work is done. The master of ceremonies goes. No prayer, no service detains the people at the place of the dead. The dead person’s house becomes a visitor house until a child leaves its mother and needs somewhere to be alone.

  The language of this tall people is loud and violent, a shock on first hearing, so unsuited to the calm faces do the harsh sibilants seem. Apparently they use different words for love, but they do not fall in love with strangers and I did not hear those words.

  Hospitality for three days, then leave. An awakening as never before and no one left there. And the wells dried up. And the wind a frenzy of red. (And alone.) That is how they indicate the end of their hospitality to strangers. The herds of sheep have moved on, the dogs among them like sacred wolves, the shepherd in front with his long crook.

  Only the track in the sand to follow them.

  The wind drives everything before it down the slopes, but the traveller must go up into the mountains and pin the wind to her shoulders to get home. A hundred metres high and more the ranges tower up above her, and soon the ranges will be behind her, or between her and the sand. The sand.

  The Furnished Room

  Barbara Neuwirth

  The bare wood shone black in the light from the bulb. The night threw cats off the wal
l. They scattered with yowls of protest and leapt out of the window. When the moon was sad, it told lies. The fragrance of lilac warmed the night.

  The book still lay open and it had an air of wisdom or culture, even though no one was looking at the characters. Dust had settled on the open pages. It had no qualms about covering the black print and gilt borders. It was a valuable book. Whenever the wind sniffed round the room, the motes danced over the rough paper.

  The light bulb gave off a dull glow, but it was still a wasted effort. No one came into the room.

  Perhaps the woman who lived there had gone away, perhaps she was dead … she had not come into the room for some considerable time, and the bulb had been shining over the round table ever since the moment she had left the room with her short, pitter-patter steps. During the day no one saw it, it was too weak to attract notice. But at night the cats saw it and they avoided the light. Wailing, they fell off the wall and dashed to the window. They jumped into the lilac bush and sang a song to the moon. Sometimes they squabbled over the best branches. Their song came plaintively from their lips, for the moon was telling lies for sadness.

  The little girl behind the chest of drawers was wearing a frilly white dress. She was holding a ball with coloured stripes. When it slipped out of her fingers and rolled away, she ran after it and picked it up again. Then she clutched it to her chest and looked up at the light bulb. In the past she had had visitors, every day, or at least almost. Now no one came any more, she had put on her pretty dress for nothing. What had happened to constancy?

  Annoyed at the continual changes in temperature, the wood creaked and little cracks spread all over the velvety surface. In the past it had been rubbed down with liquid furniture polish once a week. That had made the wood gleam.