Clockwork Phoenix 3: new tales of beauty and strangeness

by Mike Allen

  “I don’t take cases from Time Masters, see? All you guys are the same. The murderer turns out to be yourself, or you when you were younger. Or me. Or an alternate version of me or you who turns out to be his own father fighting himself because for no reason except that that’s the way it was when the whole thing started. Which it never did, on account of there’s no beginning and no reason for any of it. Oh, brother, you time travelers make me sick.”

  He drew himself up, all smiles gone now, all pretense at seeming human. My guess was that that was not even his real body, just some poor sap he murdered to have his personality jacked into the guy’s brain. Perfect disguise. No fingerprints, retina prints, no nothing. Just another flatliner dead for the convenience of the Masters of Eternity.

  “Why did you retire from the service, Mr. Frontino?”

  “Let’s just say I was tired of cleaning up after all the messes you guys leave all across your past and future. You’d think when you were done, you’d at least have the common decency to put everything back the way you found it.”

  “Everything? Absolutely everything?” His eyes were glittering now. “Be careful what you think, Mr. Frontino. Thoughts have consequences.”

  The timer on my gun was entering its final cycle, chiming like a little tiny bit of doomsday. “My friend here says you have about thirty seconds to leave. You have just enough time to try to scare me into taking the case by saying someone is knocking off these so-called ‘other versions’ of mine to stop me from taking it.”

  “No need for me to say it, Mr. Frontino. You’re performing admirably.”

  “Twenty seconds…Unless you want to admit you’re not a Master after all and tell me what this is really all about?”

  “No, Mr. Frontino. You will be convinced I am a Master. And, before I forget to mention, you yourself will be the murder victim. I trust your interest in the case has increased? And should you still doubt my bona fides, here. I will leave a card.”

  And then he was gone. Something glittered in midair where he had been standing, the size of a playing card made of crystal, and fell with a chime of noise to my floor.

  0.

  Stories about Metachronopolis, the shining city outside of time, have many beginnings, they say. And I say that they all come to the same miserable end. If you ask me. If there is anyone out there left to ask me.

  29.

  Let’s start with the ending. I want you to imagine tumbling end over end in a featureless gray mist, no gravity, no nothing, watching in horror as your fingers dissolve.

  You don’t remember what this means or how you got here, of course, unless you’ve got special memory like mine. Hardened memory. It lets you remember things that didn’t happen, not in your timeline, anyway.

  If you’ve got hardened memory, like mine, you can torment yourself to ease the boredom while you get erased, by going back over and over the stupid things you’d done, telling yourself that if you had the chance, just one more chance, you’d do it all differently next time around.

  And if you’re not too bright, it won’t even occur to you that that’s exactly the kind of thinking that got you into this mess in the first place.

  (Except which place is the first place, anyway?)

  1.

  First beginning:

  I regretted the words the moment I said them. But there are some things, once said, you can’t take back.

  I was opening my mouth to begin to apologize when she slapped my face. She leaned into the blow and gave me a good wallop, for a girl. Then she stood a moment, watching me with those beautiful hazel gray eyes of hers. Beneath half-closed lids, her eyes were like sparks of luminous fire. She stood, lips pouted, or sneering, coldly studying the effect on me.

  I raised my hand to rub my aching jaw. Maybe I didn’t look sorry enough, or maybe I looked too sorry. Never can tell with women.

  She turned on her heel and swayed over to the door. She gave me one last burning look over her shoulder.

  “Baby-doll, come back,” I said. “I can make it right between us. Like none of that stuff ever happened. Like none of it ever had to happen…”

  Maybe it sounded like I was whining, or maybe it sounded like I wasn’t whining hard enough. Whatever, it was the wrong thing to say.

  A faint look of disdain curled her perfect red lips. “You’re a smart boy, Jake,” she said, her voice husky and low, dripping with carefully chosen notes of contempt. “Smart enough to weasel out of some things. But not smart enough to know you can’t weasel out of everything. Actions have consequences. Like this one. Watch me. Good-bye.”

  She swirled out the door, graceful as a lynx, and slammed it shut so that the glass rattled. I saw her slim silhouette against the glass for a moment, and heard the bright clatter of heels against the floorboards, down the hallway toward the elevators.

  Then she was gone.

  17.

  There wasn’t any real government in this city, except for the hidden Masters. But some of the important statesmen, Jefferson and Machiavelli and Caesar and guys like that, had thrown together a militia. Sometimes the militia circulated papers on unsavory characters, from petty thieves and party-crashers, up through to the odd rapist or kidnapper who molested one of the famous women from history, Helen of Troy, or Cleopatra, that some of the Masters supposedly kept around in their harems.

  And then there was me. Jacob Frontino, Private Eye. Since there were no regular cops among the glittering towers, there was work enough for me to do. Except when there wasn’t. People paid in favors, big or small, or in foodstuffs, ever since my Creator Box went on the blink. I got by. Why hadn’t the Masters of Time shut me down long ago?

  No one knows why they do anything.

  I pulled on my trousers and tucked in the tails of the shirt I hadn’t bothered to take off when I sacked out on the couch. I whistled a command-code toward the wardrobe, and serving-beams draped my trench coat around my shoulders. Not that I expected to be cold in my own apartment; the fabric is woven with defensive webbing, and detection-reaction cells. My own shabby version of shining armor.

  And the wardrobe slapped my hat onto my head. It must have thought if I needed my coat, I needed my hat, right? Like I said, this was a low-tower apartment, and the circuits here were kind of dim.

  I walked over slowly to where the Time Master had been standing. Something was shining on the floor.

  The card lay between my feet, glittering like a lake of deep ice. Distant shapes, like drowned buildings seen at the bottom of a clear lake, hovered in the cloudy reflection. I reached down…

  18.

  Perhaps I wasn’t thinking. Perhaps it was what flatliners call a coincidence. Only I don’t believe in coincidences. I know there are Time Masters.

  I had actually bent over and was reaching my hand down toward the damn thing when my smartgun emitted its shrieking chronodistortion alarm, and jumped out of its holster and into my hand. The grip tingled where the energy field had to grab my fingers and fold them around the stock.

  By then it was too late. My eyes had focused on the image floating deep below the mirrored surface of the card. This one was attention-activated.

  Whenever a human brain pays attention to any event, the possible timelines radiating from that point multiply, since that observation might affect the human’s actions. There are circuits which can detect these multiplications, though I’d never heard of one being focused through a destiny card.

  You look. You’re trapped. Very neat, very tidy.

  It was a picture of a wide, high place surrounded by pillars. Of course I recognized it. The Prytaneum of the Masters of Eternity. And then I was there.

  19.

  “Welcome to the crime scene, Mr. Frontino.”

  3.

  Second beginning, this one brighter than the others:

  I recall my first view of the city.

  I thought it was a job interview. I had no other work, no future, and the best woman I had ever laid eyes on had walked out on
me the night before. I wasn’t in a great mood, but, at that point, I was willing to listen to anything.

  Almost anything.

  “Time travelers?” I said, trying to look chipper. I was trying to think of a polite way to say good-bye and get lost.

  He didn’t look crazy. (The real crazies never do). Mr. Iapetus was a foreign-looking fellow in a red long coat of a fabric I didn’t recognize. He had dark, magnetic eyes, high cheekbones, and wore a narrow goatee.

  The office was appointed with severe and restrained elegance. To one side, a row of dark bookshelves loomed; in the center was a wide mahogany desk, polished surface gleaming; to the other side, heavy drapes blocked a hidden length of window. I did not think it odd at the time to see bright sunlight shining from the carpet at the lower hem of the window drapes. It had been raining when I had come into the lobby just behind me.

  Mr. Iapetus was standing by the window. He took up a fold of drapes in his hand. “I believe in what you might call the shock-therapy method of indoctrination. It helps make the tedious period of disbelief somewhat briefer.”

  A wide yank of his arm threw the drapes aside. A spill of blinding sunlight washed around me.

  Blinking, I saw I was high up, overlooking a city of towers rising from clouds. It had been overcast, a dark day, on the ground floor when I came in. I had trudged up two flights of stairs. Now, I was miles up in the air. And glory was underfoot.

  4.

  “Behold Metachronopolis, the city beyond the reach of time!”

  Towers made of gleaming gold, taller than tall mountains, rose in streamlined ramparts all around me, like swords held up in high salute. Far underfoot, in the canyons and gulfs between the towers, cloudbanks drifted, stained cerise and gold from the light shed by the towers. I could not see the ground.

  Great bridges, elfin-graceful, arched across the miles from balcony to balcony of the gleaming structures, with giant statues placed at even intervals, sentry-like, along their tremendous length. The balconies were thickly grown with hedges and arbors, and the bridges were like parklands suspended in the air, with figures dimly glimpsed strolling among the greenery. Or flying.

  I thought they were seagulls at first. They rose from the clouds below. Bright figures rose and soared past the window, comet-swift, and I saw that they were manlike beings, robed in cloaks of light which fanned out like angel wings to either side of them. Up along the wind they fled, swifter than rising sparks, handsome men, and women with faces like young girls, heads thrown back and eyes alit with pleasure. They were dressed in the costumes of all ages.

  Among the flock were monsters like satyrs and chimera and animal-headed people, like the gods of ancient Egypt, jackal-headed or hawk-headed.

  The air was alive with fliers, darting from window to window, or from minaret to minaret, balcony to balcony, bridge to rooftop-garden.

  And, dimly through the glass, I heard the air was filled with music.

  Iapetus’ voice rang with pride: “Many histories have many strange beginnings, but time travel is inevitable in every time line, and, from time travelers, the Masters of Time come forth, the Masters of Eternity, and all come here, one and all, their mighty monuments and towers to build. Yes! Metachronopolis has many beginnings, but all timelines lead to her!”

  I was impressed by the sights. “When do I get my chance to sign up?” I said softly.

  Iapetus opened the window. I smelled the scent of wind-blown petals from the far gardens, and heard the flourish of trumpets, and the tolling of deep bells. “In a sense,” he said, “You already have. Examine your memory.”

  He took a gun out of his pocket and shot me in the leg. I fell screaming, blood pumping through the fingers I clenched onto my shattered knee…

  And then he hadn’t. Never had. No gun, no wound.

  The shocking memory of having been shot, horribly wounded, was already beginning to fade, like a bad dream.

  But I didn’t let it fade. For one thing, it was impossible for me to have two separate and distinct, mutually contradictory memories of the same event. I was so shocked by the blatant impossibility that I clung to the memory, forced it to stay in my head, just so I could look at it.

  Because I somehow had seen both: his fingers were momentarily blurry, as if I were seeing them through a thin mist. His right arm somehow seemed to be both hanging at his side and bending at the elbow as he put it in his pocket.

  For another, I wanted to remember the look on Iapetus’ face as he shot. Just for a second, as he raised the strange pistol, he wore a look so inhuman and expressionless, that I would have called it cruel, if he hadn’t seemed so cavalier and nonchalant…

  “Déja vu is a milder form of the same phenomenon,” he continued in the same bored, dry tone. “Some people have a naturally hardened memory. Our training can increase the talent. It is, of course, a talent utterly useless except when there is a Master of Eternity nearby, manipulating the chronocosm. Then it is precious. Useful to us. Our instruments show you have a strong natural hardness of memory; a stubborn streak. Being able to remember alternate versions after a time-change does not make you a Time Master, of course. But, still, it’s better than being a flatliner. We call it pawn memory. I trust you see the humor? Pawns cannot leave their own files, their own timelines, so to speak, unless a major piece is near. And, yes, some pawns reach the final row.”

  20.

  So of course I recognized the place. Highest tower in the city, biggest, brightest. A vast floor of shining black marble, inset with panels of mirrored destiny crystal, stretched across acres toward wide balconies, which looked down upon the titanic gold towers far below. The place looked like it was open to the air on every side, but between the tall pillars must have been panes of invisible glass or some sort of force field to maintain the pressure at this altitude. The sky above was so dark blue it was almost black.

  I think I saw the curve of the horizon.

  Standing near one of the thrones that formed a semi-circle embracing the floor, was the smirking smart-alec who talked like a Time Master and dressed like d’Artagnan, floppy hat, boots, rapier and all, who had so neatly sucked me into what he called the crime scene. We were not alone. Standing near me was a cataphract in power armor, circa A.D. 4400, the era of the Machine Wars. He had his faceplate up, and I could see the cold, no-nonsense look in his eye. The armor was throbbing on standby; I could hear the idling hum of the disrupter grids and the clicking of the launch-pack warm-up check from here.

  There was a whine from his elbow servo-motors when he folded his arms, putting his fingers near the control points on his chestplate.

  I was fast with my smartgun. I didn’t think I was that fast. I put it back in the holster, slowly, like a nice little boy who didn’t want to get flattened.

  At his nod, an aiming monocle clicked out of its slot on his helmet visor and fell over his eye. Little red dots appeared up and down along my chest, just to let me know he was thinking of me.

  I turned to d’Artagnan. “Cute trick with the destiny card,” I said.

  “You didn’t want to be here. Well, now you are.”

  “What’s the big idea with the tin can here?” I said, hooking a thumb at the cataphract.

  “That should be obvious, Mr. Frontino. We want you to solve a murder, not to prevent it. Even highly trained Paradox Proctors get uncertain about their oaths if ever they look into the circumstances of their own future deaths. They always wonder, can’t the universe stand just one more small strain? Surely one more tiny fold in the fabric of time won’t unravel the whole web? And what does it matter to me anyway, if the chronocosm dies, so long as I myself can live?”

  He chuckled, then added: “If that’s what loyal Knot-cutters think, well, well; what are we to expect from one who is retired? Especially since he did not ask our permission to retire, did he?”

  I turned away. I wasn’t sure what I would say, so all I did say was: “And where’s the body?”

  “I have composed a nu
ll-time vacuole to bracket the event,” he said, drawing a mirrored destiny card from his doublet. “You may examine it at your leisure.”

  First clue: why did d’Artagnan here bother saying so much? Time Masters are only talkative in virgin time. When they’ve been through the same scene a dozen times or so, they usually get right to the point. He had been acting the same way last night, when he interrupted my beauty sleep. Was there such a thing as a Master of Time who didn’t like to time travel?

  Clue two: why me? Why these high-pressure tactics to herd me into this thing? They had other paradox-killers. Plenty. One of them was looming behind me right now, dressed in his happy mechanical-man suit.

  D’Artagnan slid the destiny card into the crystal material of the nearest throne-arm. The throne itself was made of a block of the same “substance” as the card: an area of frozen time-energy. The surface was time-conductive, so it reflected the image in the card. (I’ve always wondered why they make their chairs that way. I guess nothing else is good enough for a Master of Time to warm his butt on. On the other hand, no one could monkey around with any of these throne’s histories, not made of what they were made of, or go back and have had built bombs or bugging cells inside them or whatnot.)

  And the strip of the floor leading from the throne to where I was standing was also made of the same substance. I saw the new scene too clearly to deny it. And I was there.

  21.

  I saw a single, still moment of time.

  Everything was “lit” by the weird non-glow of null-time. Any object grew bluer and dimmer the longer you stared at it. I was used to the effect; I kept my gaze swinging back and forth as I stepped into the scene, always moving. D’Artagnan and the cataphract stepped in behind me, the leg-motors on the power-armor humming with understated strength.