An authentic, guaranteed, proved ghost, but only a ghost, alas! Only that. In his first visit Soames was a creature of flesh and blood, whereas the creatures among whom he was projected were but ghosts, I take it – solid, palpable, vocal, but unconscious and automatic ghosts, in a building that was itself an illusion. Next time that building and those creatures will be real. It is of Soames that there will be but the semblance. I wish I could think him destined to revisit the world actually, physically, consciously. I wish he had this one brief escape, this one small treat, to look forward to. I never forget him for long. He is where he is and forever. The more rigid moralists among you may say he has only himself to blame. For my part, I think he has been very hardly used. It is well that vanity should be chastened; and Enoch Soames’s vanity was, I admit, above the average, and called for special treatment. But there was no need for vindictiveness. You say he contracted to pay the price he is paying. Yes; but I maintain that he was induced to do so by fraud. Well informed in all things, the Devil must have known that my friend would gain nothing by his visit to futurity. The whole thing was a very shabby trick. The more I think of it, the more detestable the Devil seems to me.
Of him I have caught sight several times, here and there, since that day at the Vingtieme. Only once, however, have I seen him at close quarters. This was a couple of years ago, in Paris. I was walking one afternoon along the rue d’Antin, and I saw him advancing from the opposite direction, overdressed as ever, and swinging an ebony cane and altogether behaving as though the whole pavement belonged to him. At thought of Enoch Soames and the myriads of other sufferers eternally in this brute’s dominion, a great cold wrath filled me, and I drew myself up to my full height. But – well, one is so used to nodding and smiling in the street to anybody whom one knows that the action becomes almost independent of oneself; to prevent it requires a very sharp effort and great presence of mind. I was miserably aware, as I passed the Devil, that I nodded and smiled to him. And my shame was the deeper and hotter because he, if you please, stared straight at me with the utmost haughtiness.
To be cut, deliberately cut, by HIM! I was, I still am, furious at having had that happen to me.
TROUSSEAU: FASHION FOR TIME TRAVELLERS
Genevieve Valentine
It’s a mistake to go. Let’s start there.
If you insist, there are some things you’re better off knowing.
Jumpsuits. Jumpsuits for Forward motion.
Now you’re thinking about some movies you’ve seen or some ads you’ve read on the rail about a future where everyone’s in skin-tight white. You snickered at how silly it looked, or admired how immaculate, this world where no one is ever carrying coffee and no one sweats and if they have subways instead of personal transport pods then the train cars get wiped down every ten minutes, and nothing ever touches you.
If that’s why you’re travelling Forward, you should rethink.
Cleanliness is for the people who can afford it. Whatever future you jump to (and the ads are incorrect, there’s never just the one), on whatever orbiting body you end up, there is going to be a ruling class, and you are not going to be in it.
The numbers are against you, and the future’s a treacherous place even if this isn’t your very first jump. Even if you chanced it with a bespoke bioluminescent evening ensemble and lucked out in the right climate to sustain it and enchanted the right social echelon so that they’d take a stranger in to dinner, running with the rich and the beautiful is more than you’re ready for.
(If you run with them now, congratulations, and it’s no wonder that you’re aiming high, but the practicals will undermine you in ways no one has trained you to think of. Depending where you land, the bios that make up your jacket have a labor union, and you’re screwed for keeping them out past sunset without paying overtime. Be safe. Stay low.)
You need work boots that don’t jog anybody’s memory; you need a jumpsuit, unmarked and dark and baggy, with some pockets outside and some pockets inside where no one can reach. The future isn’t safe. Have a backup plan strapped to your thigh.
If you think that means a weapon, rethink.
Backward isn’t any better, to be honest.
You have to be able to aim before you can plan for the journey, and your first time will be a wash, no matter what they tell you. Nervous people end up on the outskirts of remote Viking camps or out too far in the Dead Sea and have to use their callback in a hurry.
Don’t worry. Sensors get sharper every day, and any couture house worth its salt has a satisfaction guarantee. (Give no money to an establishment that won’t accommodate.) House of Lewis, the now-vanished icon of the trade, distilled theirs into only six words: “Come back. Look forward. Start again.”
Remember that moving through time is a skill; no matter who’s holding your hand when that bright machine powers up, there are no chauffeurs for what this is.
When you’re headed Backward, wear natural fibers only. Rayon gets you burned as a witch if you’re not careful.
A long linen tunic will pass about sixty-five percent of the time. If caught out, claim you were set upon and divested of the rest. It’s a prime opportunity to appreciate the immersive experience of being in another place and time as you do labor to earn other garments.
(There are no guarantees that even that cover story will work; the world’s a funny thing. You’ll be all right in Cleopatra’s Egypt, but if you land in feudal Japan and they slice you open for disrespecting the presence of the Emperor, you’re on your own.)
Your second-best bet is wool. Wool isn’t fancy, but you shouldn’t be – sumptuary laws shoot to kill, in some places. Make your sleeves wider than you think you’ll need, hems longer than you think is safe. You’ll be surprised how cold nights can get in the Andes. You’re travelling light; every half-yard of wool you can use is your insurance.
Silk is softer, sometimes finer, but a risk. Make sure your Arabic or Hindi or Chinese dialects are up to snuff, and even then, be prepared to claim the garment is a gift from someone who’s dead, and to peel it off to give whoever’s asking.
Adornments of any kind should stay out of sight until you have the lay of the land. No exceptions. It doesn’t matter when you are or who you’re trying to impress. There are no definitive census numbers regarding those Travellers who go missing, killed every year on the roadside, or in alleys, or in dark rooms by someone who knows you’re a stranger and will never be missed. No Travel agency is willing to release them.
Think about why that is; leave anything that glitters out of sight.
It’s impossible to disappear into your dress.
Everything you wear betrays you – its make, its cost, its cut, its age. Why you have it, or why you don’t. Think what a thin gold band on a single finger means; where you’re going, wherever that is, every stitch will give you away.
You might – if you’re confident enough to jump, if you aim as you hoped, if you land where you’re powerful – be in a place where you can almost disappear. A man in a well-cut dark grey suit can go fifty years from now in either direction, across thousands of miles, and avoid the sort of notice that gets you pointed out to constables.
(It’s easy when you’re powerful. Anything is. If that’s the reason you’re travelling local, rethink.)
In eighteenth-century France, a heel less than two inches high is for a man with aspirations past his abilities. An Ethiopian habesha kemis in white signals a guest at a formal occasion. A man in Tokyo in 1872 is a toady or a traitor, whether he wears a kimono or a waistcoat. An unmarried Russian wears her kokoshnik open in the back, and to close it claims a thing you might not mean.
Clothes speak for you; go carefully.
The Persians invented cotton underwear several centuries BC. Maybe start there.
Two hundred years from now, they say, our clothes will be loose and woven through with UVB, cocoons of safety from an ever-warmer sun.
Everyone who goes Forward has said it; whatever future
they come from, we’re more doomed then.
It’s a mistake to go.
Don’t wear or carry anything on the cutting edge. You can always explain something a little out of fashion, but rarely can you pass off the new.
If you mention a technology (a fabric, a color, a concept) that doesn’t exist, and someone questions you, say, “I saw it on a card.” Carry a handful of cigarette cards or postcards or cartes des visites with you in a silver case, and sift through them a moment as if it was just there and you’re hoping to find it. Everyone will think you’re eccentric, but that’s better than the alternative.
If you’re somewhen without cards, say, “I heard it from a traveller.” If you’re in small or far-away places, be prepared to describe someone specific. Make them old; soldiers rarely go after those who sound as if they’re about to die on their own.
If all else fails, say, “I saw it in a dream.”
People will believe that. They’ll expect you to have strange dreams. Anywhere you go will be neck-deep in superstition, but taken one at a time, people aren’t fools. Wherever you end up, they know already that you’re odd; they can tell you’re not theirs.
Black is a color of sophistication, except when it’s the color of death. Forward travellers in black might be given responsibilities beyond what they can guess; black is the color of a judge’s robes. Black is the color of plague doctors, of people to be taken very seriously.
Red is the color of blood, the color of a hundred feuding houses you’ll never be able to keep straight; it’s the color of fishing boats you can’t steer, the banner of allies who won’t reach you in time.
Where purple exists, it’s the color of kings. Don’t even think about it.
Green is the color of forest outlaws and spring kimono; it’s a color of starting over. It’s the color of messengers and the Holy Roman Empire. Optimists and armies wear green.
Blue is the color of mystics, the color of weddings, the color of dresses meant to call rain down on the grass. Blue you can make without worry for a throne; blue is safe, as colors go.
White is the color of purity, except when it’s the color of mourning. It indicates an absence; it’s the color of unfinished things. It’s the color of all those sleek, cold spaces we haven’t built yet, made for people to stand in and never touch.
Grey is the safest color. It’s the color of being undecided; it’s the color of never quite belonging, but having no loyalties that might be of concern. It’s the color of strangers who have come alone.
Never pick up a watch. Their usefulness is deceptive. Watches are sentimental things, given from people who care about time passing to people who get sensitive about every wasted second. Every watch is a reminder of death. Whoever you steal it from will know it’s missing; there will be complications.
Whoever has a watch like that is the sort of person you fall in love with. It’s hard not to love a person who can sense what matters.
Whoever has a watch like that will find a way to get it back. Keep time some other way.
There are things, amid the shoes without lefts and rights and the folding of a sari and the way to wrap a fur to outlast the Mongolian cold, that you will have to accept.
Any time someone jumps, a past or a future bursts open. That person comes back from a world that didn’t exist before, might never again. The How-To posters you see on the street with their clean lines and destinations stamped in circles like subway stops are Art Deco propaganda, and mean nothing.
Those who jump pull everything apart, if they manage to hold on to it at all. No matter how quiet and careful you try to be, the cut has been made, and when you callback, whatever you’ve done either ruins us in ways we can’t know, or vanishes. If you’re going to jump, accept this.
(Don’t love anyone, whatever you do. When you leave them behind, it’s either to a nightmare or oblivion.
It’s a mistake to go.)
There are no lines; there might be circles, or loops, or just holes. Don’t think about it. It’s important not to think about it. You can get trapped on your way back, if you have doubts while you’re travelling.
From there to home is a delicate process; if you doubt it at all, you’ll disappear.
Come back. Look forward. Start again.
MAZES AND TRAPS
THE CLOCK THAT WENT BACKWARD
Edward Page Mitchell
Edward Page Mitchell was an American journalist and early science fiction writer. Most of his fiction was published in the 1870s and 1880s in such journals as Scribner’s Monthly and The New York Sun. His best-known story is “The Tachypomp,” published in 1874. “The Clock That Went Backward,” released in 1881 in The Sun, is the first time-travel story ever published, coming out several years before H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine.
A row of Lombardy poplars stood in front of my great-aunt Gertrude’s house, on the bank of the Sheepscot River. In personal appearance my aunt was surprisingly like one of those trees. She had the look of hopeless anemia that distinguishes them from fuller blooded sorts. She was tall, severe in outline, and extremely thin. Her habiliments clung to her. I am sure that had the gods found occasion to impose upon her the fate of Daphne she would have taken her place easily and naturally in the dismal row, as melancholy a poplar as the rest.
Some of my earliest recollections are of this venerable relative. Alive and dead she bore an important part in the events I am about to recount: events which I believe to be without parallel in the experience of mankind.
During our periodical visits of duty to Aunt Gertrude in Maine, my cousin Harry and myself were accustomed to speculate much on her age. Was she sixty, or was she six score? We had no precise information; she might have been either. The old lady was surrounded by old-fashioned things. She seemed to live altogether in the past. In her short half-hours of communicativeness, over her second cup of tea, or on the piazza where the poplars sent slim shadows directly toward the east, she used to tell us stories of her alleged ancestors. I say alleged, because we never fully believed that she had ancestors.
A genealogy is a stupid thing. Here is Aunt Gertrude’s, reduced to its simplest forms:
Her great-great-grandmother (1599–1642) was a woman of Holland who married a Puritan refugee, and sailed from Leyden to Plymouth in the ship Ann in the year of our Lord 1632. This Pilgrim mother had a daughter, Aunt Gertrude’s great-grandmother (1640–1718). She came to the Eastern District of Massachusetts in the early part of the last century, and was carried off by the Indians in the Penobscot wars. Her daughter (1680–1776) lived to see these colonies free and independent, and contributed to the population of the coming republic not less than nineteen stalwart sons and comely daughters. One of the latter (1735–1802) married a Wiscasset skipper engaged in the West India trade, with whom she sailed. She was twice wrecked at sea – once on what is now Seguin Island and once on San Salvador. It was on San Salvador that Aunt Gertrude was born.
We got to be very tired of hearing this family history. Perhaps it was the constant repetition and the merciless persistency with which the above dates were driven into our young ears that made us skeptics. As I have said, we took little stock in Aunt Gertrude’s ancestors. They seemed highly improbable. In our private opinion the great-grandmothers and grandmothers and so forth were pure myths, and Aunt Gertrude herself was the principal in all the adventures attributed to them, having lasted from century to century while generations of contemporaries went the way of all flesh.
On the first landing of the square stairway of the mansion loomed a tall Dutch clock. The case was more than eight feet high, of a dark red wood, not mahogany, and it was curiously inlaid with silver. No common piece of furniture was this. About a hundred years ago there flourished in the town of Brunswick a horologist named Cary, an industrious and accomplished workman. Few well-to-do houses on that part of the coast lacked a Cary timepiece. But Aunt Gertrude’s clock had marked the hours and minutes of two full centuries before the Brunswick artisan was bor
n. It was running when William the Taciturn pierced the dikes to relieve Leyden. The name of the maker, Jan Lipperdam, and the date, 1572, were still legible in broad black letters and figures reaching quite across the dial. Cary’s masterpieces were plebeian and recent beside this ancient aristocrat. The jolly Dutch moon, made to exhibit the phases over a landscape of windmills and polders, was cunningly painted. A skilled hand had carved the grim ornament at the top, a death’s head transfixed by a two-edged sword. Like all timepieces of the sixteenth century, it had no pendulum. A simple Van Wyck escapement governed the descent of the weights to the bottom of the tall case.
But these weights never moved. Year after year, when Harry and I returned to Maine, we found the hands of the old clock pointing to the quarter past three, as they had pointed when we first saw them. The fat moon hung perpetually in the third quarter, as motionless as the death’s head above. There was a mystery about the silenced movement and the paralyzed hands. Aunt Gertrude told us that the works had never performed their functions since a bolt of lightning entered the clock; and she showed us a black hole in the side of the case near the top, with a yawning rift that extended downward for several feet. This explanation failed to satisfy us. It did not account for the sharpness of her refusal when we proposed to bring over the watchmaker from the village, or for her singular agitation once when she found Harry on a stepladder, with a borrowed key in his hand, about to test for himself the clock’s suspended vitality.
The Time Traveller's Almanac Page 74
