by Scott Meyer
One of the first lessons any modern person learns when they go to live in the distant past is that everyone, including the domestic servants, are much more hard-core than you will ever be.
Phillip stepped out the door to a sunny Atlantis morning.
* * *
Martin materialized on the landing to Brit the Younger’s home and watched as Phillip stepped out the door onto the Atlantean street, muttering, “One live chicken.”
Phillip closed the door behind him, turned to walk away, and nearly walked straight into Martin.
Martin smiled and said, “Hello.”
Phillip let out a tiny high-pitched shriek and jumped a few inches into the air.
“Oh, man, I’m sorry,” Martin said, laughing.
“Yes, you sound it. What do you want, Martin?”
“Just to talk.”
“Well then, why not just call me?”
“I wanted to talk to you in person, alone. I kinda hoped it would seem like I’d just ran into you, all casual like.”
“Well, those hopes have been dashed.” Phillip looked at the closed door into Brit the Younger’s apartment, then back at Martin. “Still, why just lurk out here? Seems like a waste of time, and I might well have had Brit with me.”
Martin smiled. “Oh, I haven’t been waiting. I set up an algorithm to watch all of the doors of your and Brit’s places and tell me the next time you came out alone so I could teleport over.”
“Oh,” Phillip said. “That’s certainly . . . alarming.”
“Don’t worry. There’s no reason to be alarmed, as long as I only use the algorithm for good.”
“Very reassuring.” Phillip started walking and Martin followed.
“So where are you headed?” Martin asked.
“Nowhere. Just out for a walk.”
“Then you won’t mind if I come along.”
“I suppose it won’t hurt anything if you tag along for a bit.”
Immediately upon setting out, Martin saw that there was much more clutter and traffic on the street than usual. The going was slow, as all traffic was squeezed through a narrow channel carved through all of the detritus on either side of the path. The way in front of them was flanked by hastily made scaffolds holding workmen, various tools, and an oblong tin basin. Various wooden planks and other building materials cluttered the ground.
In the distance, near a trough where people let their animals drink, a metal dome-like structure hung high in the air, perched at the top of a metal rail that stuck straight up like a flagpole. The whole assembly looked to Martin like the world’s least effective and most dangerous umbrella.
Ahead and to the right, a set of stairs was carved into the wall of a building leading up to the roof level, where the next path up allowed still more people to walk around the circumference of the great bowl of Atlantis. Martin wondered if that path was as crowded as this one today. He considered suggesting that they take it to get out of the crowd, but then he saw a large bucket sitting unattended at the top of the stairs. Farther along the edge, he could see a strange wooden contraption, made up of two big wooden gears and a crank. He took it as a sign that progress would be no less difficult up there.
Martin shielded his eyes, squinting up at the scaffolding. “What is going on here?”
“Looks like some sort of construction,” Phillip said.
“Don’t the sorceresses do all of the building in Atlantis?”
“Brit the Elder built it to begin with, but I assume the citizens take on the occasional project themselves.”
Martin furrowed his brow. “Why wouldn’t they just ask a sorceress to do it?”
“I don’t know. Is this really what you wanted to discuss, Martin?”
“No. Sorry. It’s this Gwen thing.”
“Of course it is.”
“I think I want to marry her.”
“So you say.”
“The idea that she doesn’t feel the same way, it’s just awful.”
“I would imagine.”
“Phillip, you know, you’re not really saying anything useful here.”
Martin glanced up at the edge of the path above theirs. They’d drawn closer to the weird mechanical apparatus. Martin saw that it consisted of two large gears, a long shaft, a wooden paddle, and a wooden dowel hanging from a crossbar with a large boot hanging at its end. The boot didn’t alarm Martin, even though it appeared to be a modern combat boot. The city was controlled by time travelers; it wasn’t unusual to see anachronistic things pop up where they didn’t belong. But something about the entire construction bothered Martin, as if he’d seen it before somewhere.
Phillip did not slow his pace. “You haven’t asked me any questions, Martin, and you know much more about the situation than I do. Unless there’s some specific piece of Gwen-related information I know that you don’t, I’m not sure I’m going to be much help. Perhaps if you go think of some specific way I can be of assistance, then come back—”
“Where are you going?”
“What?”
“Where are you going, Phillip? You seem to be in a rush to get somewhere.”
Phillip said, “What? No. I’m just out for a walk.”
“You’re keeping up a heck of a steady pace.”
“The whole point of going for a walk is to walk. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be walking.”
Martin’s eyes narrowed. “Uh-huh. And why pick such a congested area for your walk?”
Phillip looked lost for a moment, then said, “Nobody likes to eat in an empty restaurant.”
On the path above, the complex wooden machine creaked into motion. Martin didn’t see anyone turning the crank, but the two gears rotated, causing the shaft to move, pushing the paddle into the boot, which swung forward and hit the bucket sitting at the top of the stairs.
The bucket fell over, and a large sphere similar to a bowling ball but carved of stone rolled out and started slowly working its way down the stairs.
“Who just leaves a stone ball sitting in a bucket?” Martin asked.
Phillip made only a small grunt to acknowledge Martin’s question, which he clearly hadn’t really heard, as he continued to work his way through the crowd.
Martin pointed to the stone ball, still torturously working its way one step at a time down the stairs, emitting a low rumble as it rolled, and a percussive bang each time it fell. “And how was a boot heavy enough to knock over a bucket that was holding that thing in the first place?”
The ball reached the bottom of the stairs and rolled along a barely noticeable furrow in the ground. The people near enough to the ball for it to be a tripping hazard all saw, and carefully avoided it, but the bulk of the crowd, including Phillip, remained oblivious.
The ball wended its way along beside the path and finally crashed into the base of one of the scaffolds. The shock worked its way up the supports, magnifying as it went, until the platform, roughly two stories up, rocked violently. Martin watched as the motion dislodged a second stone ball, which rolled along the length of the platform.
Martin slowed to a stop, his eyes glued to the top of the scaffold. “Okay,” he muttered, “what is this?”
The second ball fell off the end of the planks, landing in the oblong basin on the platform below, and rolled along its length. When it reached the far end, the floor gave out, leaving a perfectly round hole where the sphere broke through.
The stone ball landed on a pile of loose building materials, hitting the raised end of a thick plank of wood. The ball drove the plank’s high end down like a teeter-totter, lifting the far end, which Martin had not seen was under the heels of a statue waiting to be installed.
The statue flew into the air and landed in the water trough, creating a huge splash and nudging the metal pole that held the
metal-lattice dome aloft. People scattered as the webbed hemisphere slid down the pole, but not all of the people. Phillip, single-mindedly working his way through the crowd, had not noticed anything odd, and only snapped out of his stupor as the area around him suddenly emptied. He looked up just as the iron dome crashed down over him.
“Well this is just typical, isn’t it?” Phillip said.
“Yeah, you never get trapped in a falling metal cage unless you’re in a hurry.”
“I’m not in a hurry, Martin, I’m just out for a stroll.”
“Mm-hmm.”
Phillip looked at the metal framework surrounding him. “That said, I think, since I’m going to have to teleport out of here anyway, I’ll just go ahead and go all the way to my walk’s, uh, natural end point, and walk back.”
“Sounds good,” Martin said. “Let’s go.”
“Yeah, Martin, here’s the thing; I’d kind of like to continue alone.”
“Of course you would. I understand completely.”
“Do you?” Phillip looked stricken for an instant, but regained his composure. “Oh, good. Well, see you around Martin.”
“See you.”
Phillip said, “Transporto al,” then looked at Martin, and muttered the last part under his breath.
Phillip disappeared.
Martin grasped the steel cage and shook it, feeling its strength. He wondered what it was supposed to do, and why it had been perched at the top of a pole to begin with. He looked at the statue sticking out of the tub of water, the teeter-totter plank, both stone balls, and the boot and bucket at the top of the stairs. It all seemed to be trying to stir a memory in him, but like an urge to sneeze that just fades away, it left Martin unsatisfied, with a squinty expression on his face.
He stood there, concentrating for several seconds before it finally came to him. Mouse Trap. It’s the crazy machine you’d put together in the board game Mouse Trap!
That one realization triggered a chain reaction of further deductions in Martin’s mind. It was too big a coincidence that the mechanism from Mouse Trap would get re-created in its entirety by accident. That meant someone had to deliberately re-create it. That meant that the person who re-created it had to have been from a time when Mouse Trap existed, i.e., the future. That meant that it was created by a time traveler, someone who had found the file. This was too complicated to be Gary’s work. Too high-concept, and far too public and risky to be any of their other friends. The cage was only large enough for one person, and was set up in an area that Phillip frequented. It was sort of a fluke that Martin was there, which suggested that the whole ornate ruse had been put together specifically for Phillip, much like the package the night before.
The conclusion hit Martin like a rolled-up towel snapping him in the brain.
It’s the Jawa!
Martin spun around, searching the area until he saw the familiar burlap hood peeking over the edge of a roof. The cloaked figure flinched and darted out of sight the instant it became clear that Martin saw him.
The strange thing about teleportation is that it’s the fastest, most convenient means of transportation imaginable, once you know where you’re going. Selecting and then somehow designating a landing spot close to where you want to be that isn’t inside a wall or suspended several feet above the ground, or both, can be a fiddly, time-consuming task, unless you’ve developed a work-around. Thanks to his dual childhood loves of X-Men comics and the game Toss Across, Martin had. He reached into his pocket, grasped a small beanbag, and threw it, hard and fast, at the spot where the cloaked figure had been. It landed with an audible thump.
Martin said, “Bamf,” and teleported, materializing on the upper level where the beanbag had landed. He scooped up the beanbag and hurled it as hard as he could into the fleeing wizard’s back. As the beanbag bounced off the running figure’s cloak, Martin said “Bamf,” again, and materialized directly behind him.
Martin grasped the man’s hood, which slid off his head, and quickly pulled tight around his neck, becoming a leash of sorts. Martin’s staff fell, clattering to the ground as he pulled back on the hood with both hands.
With his hood pulled down, the Jawa’s bald, misshapen head and pointed ears were exposed. He let out a string of strangled curses in a low, guttural voice as he stopped running and turned around, causing the hood and neck of his cloak to twist around to the front of his throat. His emerald-green eyes radiated fury, distracting from his long, pointed nose, his thin, cruel lips, and his mouth full of jagged teeth.
Martin asked, “What are you, some kinda goblin?”
The stranger slapped at Martin’s hands. “Maybe! So what? You prejudiced or something? Let go! Let go, damn you,” he spat in a deep, unnatural growl as he unleashed a barrage of stinging slaps.
Martin tugged harder at the hood and shouted, “No!”
The two of them stood there, at the center of a growing crowd of Atlanteans, Martin pulling on the hood while the goblin slapped and cursed to no avail. Finally, the goblin grasped his own hood and twisted it, causing Martin’s hands to rotate, loosening his grip enough to allow the goblin to break free.
Martin took a hasty step backward to keep from falling down, but tripped over his own staff and landed directly on his tailbone. He sprang to his feet and jumped up and down, hunched over with both hands clasped to the spot where lower back becomes upper butt.
The goblin backed up several steps, watching Martin dance and moan in pain before finally thrusting his finger at him and shouting, “Yeah, serves you right!”
Martin stopped jumping and moaning, but remained hunched over, and left his hands where they were. He looked up at the goblin and shouted, “Who are you, and why are you trying to hurt Phillip?”
“What? I’m not trying to hurt Phillip!”
“Sure. Who are you?”
“I’m nobody you should worry about. Just forget you ever saw me.”
“What should I call you?”
“Nothing! You shouldn’t call me! Don’t talk to me, or about me, or near me. Forget that I exist.” He waved his arms around in great, swirling arcs. Ravens flew in from behind every building and around every corner. From any place in Martin’s field of vision large enough to conceal even one raven, many appeared, until the air was so full of flying black birds that the bright, cloudless day seemed gray and overcast.
“Listen to me, and listen well, Martin Banks. Do not interfere with me. Forget you ever saw me, or else the consequences will be dire.”
Martin asked, “Dire for who?”
The goblin said, “I think you mean dire for whom, and the answer is you, obviously. Dire for you.”
Martin said, “I don’t think it’s that obvious at all.” He dove for his staff, slid on his belly as he grasped it, and rolled over. He pointed the staff’s head at the other wizard and shouted, “Malseketa pantalono!”
The goblin instinctively shielded his head and ghoulish face with his arms. He stood frozen for several seconds, waiting for the spell to manifest itself, then a confused expression came over his face. He scowled, rotated his pelvis a few times, and said, “Okay, what the hell?”
Martin stood up, looking pleased with himself. “I realized a long time ago that it’s next to impossible to really hurt a magic user. We’re pretty much invulnerable. We can be embarrassed, though. So I started working on the spell I just hit you with. The pants wetter.”
The goblin rolled his eyes and whined, “Oh, man, that’s just . . . ugh!”
“I know, right? That’s kinda the point. You’ll be happy to hear it’s just water. Of course, it’s still a work in progress. The final version will just cause a stain about five inches around. This one completely saturates the pants. It’s kinda overkill.”
“It’s pointless! I’m wearing a robe, you dolt! Nobody can see that my
pants are wet!”
“But you know it,” Martin said. The goblin stepped forward, then convulsed into a full body cringe. “Aw, man! I hate the feeling of wet pants!”
“So you find the discomfort to be a deterrent as well,” Martin said. “Noted! Thanks for the feedback.”
“Feedback? You want feedback? Here, let me introduce you to my focus group.” The goblin swept his arms around and brought them both together, clapping with stiff arms so that his hands pointed directly at Martin. The thousands of ravens that had been swirling around over their heads changed direction as one, converging on Martin.
Martin’s brain was certain that the birds were not real. The way they all looked identical, moved in exactly the same repeating pattern, and made the same noise was a dead giveaway that they were part of a man-made macro, and couldn’t really hurt him.
His feet didn’t want to hear it.
He had turned and run two steps before he realized what he was doing. Of course, before he’d completed his third step, the birds were on him. Martin spun and shouted, and swung his arms wildly, but nothing he did dislodged the flapping, cawing mass of talons, beaks, and feathers. He staggered several steps, blind, caught his balance, and stopped. He continued swinging his arms, but more slowly, and then only a little, feeling to see if it made any difference, which it did not.
Martin stood motionless for a moment, collected his thoughts as well as one could when covered with a chaotic mass of angry, screeching birds, then turned back toward the goblin, or at least in the direction he believed the goblin had been standing, since he only caught the smallest glimpse of light through the mass of birds.
Martin said, “They don’t hurt.”
The goblin shouted, “What? I can’t hear you!”
“It doesn’t hurt,” Martin repeated as loud as he could. “I’m impervious to cuts and scrapes, so this isn’t doing anything.”
“Yes it is. It’s making you look ridiculous.”
“How long are they going to keep doing this?”
