Clockwork Phoenix 3: new tales of beauty and strangeness

by Mike Allen

  “Mist. Photons bouncing from you become randomized in their paths as your exact position becomes uncertain. It looks like a blur of mist stretching between the various points you might affect. Gravitons likewise become uncertain.”

  But then he smiled and made a casual gesture. “But why dwell on such an ending? Rest assured that if there is any possible timeline which avoids such an appalling end, any at all, the Masters of Eternity will gently lead you into it. There need be no end.”

  “But won’t that shunt itself create more uncertainty? Another paradox?”

  “Perhaps,” he said with an airy wave of his hand and a snort of disdain. “But why worry? The results of that paradox can be postponed by means of additional paradoxes.”

  “Doesn’t sound quite right,” I said. “Like borrowing on credit to pay off bad credit. What happens tomorrow, when all the bills come due? What happens when the loan shark comes to collect? There is always a loan shark.”

  “For a time traveler, tomorrow does not exist unless he walks into it. And, if you are loyal to the Masters of Eternity, you may, one day, be exalted to that high position yourself, and have all the past and future as your plaything. Well? What do you say?”

  27.

  The cards lay shining at my feet on the marble floor.

  “Well?” came the many voices of the Master. “What do you say?”

  14.

  “Am I supposed to be impressed?” I asked the hooded figures seating around the dark table. “Enemies of the Masters of Time? How? How can you fight them? Use time travel? Manipulate the timelines, play games with eternity? Then you are Time Masters yourselves, whether you admit it or not. And if you don’t or can’t time travel, you’re sunk. So what’s the gag?”

  “We are, indeed, the enemies of the Masters of Eternity,” said the deep bass voice, “but we do not fight them. Why bother? Masters are creatures of unreason. They deny cause-and-effect; they act without heed for the consequences of their actions. We need only stand by while they destroy themselves. The only thing we really need to do is warn their victims before they too fall into the same trap.”

  “Which victims?”

  “You, for one, Mr. Frontino. Drug users often become drug pushers to afford their habit. Likewise, Time Paradox Patrolmen must often become Time Masters to protect their own personal past from being snarled or destroyed by Masters.”

  “Me? A Master of Eternity? They’re going to make me one?”

  “Perhaps someday.”

  “And this is what you want to protect me from?” I had to laugh. “Why not ‘protect me’ from becoming a millionaire? Why not ‘protect me’ from becoming a god?”

  The tenor voice from the left spoke. “Say, rather, we want to protect you from playing at God. Don’t you recognize that time travel, by its very nature, is and must be insane? Immoral?”

  I stood up. “Very dramatic. Look, I don’t know what kind of crackpots you are, but if it comes down to a show down between you bunch of flatliners and the Time Masters, I think I want to be on the winning side, thank you. So where’s the exit to this madhouse, eh?”

  I slid my hand into my coat as I stood. I was expecting my shoulder-holster to be empty. Instead, my fingers closed around the streamlined grip of my smartgun with a familiar magnetic tingle. I felt warmth in my palm. The circuits were active.

  That stumped me. Why the hell would the self-proclaimed Enemies of the Time Masters let me go fully armed in their midst? One of the robed figures spread his (her?) gloves, and spoke in a light, soft voice: “Please, Mr. Frontino. Allow us a moment to explain ourselves. Perhaps we seem zealous. That does not necessary mean that our conclusions are wrong, does it? Let us have our say, then you can judge for yourself. Your powers of reasoning are good. Use them.”

  This had not been the way Lord Iapetus had spoken, way back when I had been first recruited. I sat.

  The one at the head of the table—the bass voice—spoke: “Time travel (and I do not include harmless sightseeing) means using future knowledge to change the past. It means an attempt to elude the consequences of reality, without caring whether or not you cause the paradoxes that unmake reality. Consider also that morality judges the goodness of acts by their intentions and consequences. Time travelers deny consequences are related to intentions, or even that consequences exist at all. Is it moral to kill an innocent young girl who will one day become Hitler’s mother? Be careful before you answer; you yourself do not know what tyrants you may one day father, do you, Mr. Frontino?”

  “Maybe it’s not so moral,” I said. “But so what? Flatliners can’t fight Time Masters. They’re all-powerful.”

  There was a murmur of laughter around the room at that. One amused voice said, “All-powerful? They are as helpless as condemned criminals on death row. The Masters of Time are living on borrowed time. They know it. Don’t you? You’ve seen what’s at the bottom of their towers, haven’t you? Tell us, Mr. Frontino, what is at the foundation of the city of Metachronopolis?”

  12.

  Some hidden Master or another wanted to reward me, and the other Proctors in my squad, for the work we had done destroying the technological progress of civilization circa A.D. 2300. It had been a delicate bit of work, since we had to eliminate the society’s ability to investigate temporal mechanics—can’t have a bunch of flatliners developing time travel on their own, after all—without eliminating the technological progress leading to the development of some of the Time Masters’ favorite toys from later eras—including the multidimensional matrix formulations involved in smartguns like mine, or cataphract-style armor.

  But we had done well, killing all the right people at the right time, and the Master invited us to his tower for a party. Everyone who still had luster to him was there then, including a dozen versions of Keats, each reading a slightly different variation of his completed poem, Hyperion, and an older and a younger version of Agamemnon, which some Master had brought as a joke, to watch the older version trying to convince the younger not to go to the Trojan Wars. There was also a confused version of Thomas Jefferson talking to descendants of Shaka Zulu from an obscure timeline where the blacks kept the whites as plantation slaves in Virginia. Richard the Lionheart and Saladin had been given antigravitic power-armor, and were flying around the party scene, blowing huge chunks in the scenery and unwary guests while trying to get each other. All great fun.

  I kept noticing the servants. There were so many people who lived among the towers whose memories were not hardened enough to remember who they were or where they came from: People forgotten by the Masters once they were no longer amusing. Young versions of Cleopatra and Semiramis were both working that evening as cocktail waitresses, trying to earn a little extra money to keep their rooms in the lower towers. They had been queens, in other worlds, once, but their time-periods were apparently not in style any more among the Time Masters; they were no longer invited or received, but they knew too much about the future to be allowed back home. I saw Cleopatra serving a drink to a Marc Antony who either was a version who came from a timeline who didn’t recognize her, or just a jerk who pretended he didn’t. Sad.

  Since she lived in a bad section of the towers, I walked Cleo home after the main part of the party was over (more famous parties became part of the History Circuit, could always be revisited, and never ended), and, seeing how dark and misty things were here, and since I still had the security all-pass which had gotten me into the Masters’ floors of the tower to begin with, I wondered if I could get past sentries and gates of the lower areas and see what was at the very bottom of these towers. From the sound which sometimes came up from down below, I had for a while now started to wonder.

  I knew it was forbidden, but I was in a pretty glum mood and didn’t much give a damn anyway, so…

  15.

  In a queasy voice, I answered the Enemies of the Masters of Time: “Mist. Mist and uncertainty. There is no bottom. It just gets more and more misty the further down you go …�
��

  I shivered at the memory. The lower bridge had been invisible beneath my feet, swaying, soft and marshy, mutating in shape as I walked. The gargoyle statues looming on the railings had worn one face, then, after the mists blurred past, another. It had been dark, with muddled images of tower-roots fading and swaying around me. The thick tower walls were nothing but streams of smoke. From the abyss underfoot, a screaming voice had begged me not to pick up the white cards. The voice sounded familiar. I shouted back, but there had been no answer…

  “The towers don’t have any foundations,” I said.

  More laughter. A young man’s voice came cheerfully from the right, “An apt metaphor for the Time Masters’ whole system of thinking, I deem.”

  The laughing all the time was beginning to get on my nerves (maybe because I had almost never heard a Time Master laugh. Not nice laughter, anyway).

  “What do you guys want from me?” I demanded.

  “We would like you to withdraw your loyalty from the Masters of Eternity, not just the present group, but from the whole concept of time travel; to avoid time travel as much as possible; to prepare your memory for a massive shock. Major timeline changes are due, once the Masters are over-thrown.”

  “You are talking about the elimination of time travel altogether?”

  “Is there any other position we can take, given our philosophy?”

  “Eliminate how?”

  “By letting nature take its course.”

  “You talk as if it is …inevitable.”

  The robed figure shrugged and spread his gloves. “Suppose you were a Master of Time, Mr. Frontino, and all of time is yours. Another Master has gone back to do something which might affect your past, something that may alter the circumstances of your culture and history, or even redact your birth. Whether his meddling is deliberate or not, what is the safest way to neutralize his interference? Safest, quickest, best?”

  That was an easy one. How did Time Masters solve all their problems? “Retroactive murder. Eliminate him.”

  “Just him? Remember that you cannot really reason with the other Masters of Time. If they were people who listened to warnings about the consequences of their actions, they would not be time travelers in the first place.”

  “So if time travel necessarily—you claim—and inevitably—you claim—eliminates whoever does it,” I said, “what happens after everything collapses?”

  The bass voice said, “Our research indicates that there is one core timeline, the line where time travel was never invented, and never will be. The whole unwieldy structure of multiple branching timelines and time loops manipulated by the Masters of Metachronopolis is a temporary shadow or reflection of that core line into the surrounding chronic ylem. Our chronocosm is temporary and unstable, like the creation of certain virtual particle pairs in base vacuum, which exist for a brief time before they eliminate themselves. But some of us remember the core line. Surely you recall what your life was like before you meddled with time travel.”

  I shrugged. “My life wasn’t so great.”

  “But better than this.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t need to listen to any more of this. Look: your whole notion is based on the idea that Time Masters are all some sort of criminals or infantile maniacs. That they will keep meddling and monkeying with the past until they eliminate themselves. I don’t buy it. Aren’t some of them reasonable? Don’t some of them listen to reason?”

  “That is always our hope, Mr. Frontino. We would not bother talking to you if we did not have that hope. Here.”

  There was a mirrored glitter as he took a dark card from his robe. Then, with a flick of his gloved fingers, he slid it across the table toward me.

  I did not reach for it. “What is this supposed to be?”

  “Think of it as the Final Destiny Crystal. It is a destiny card attached to the core line. Naturally, you can only use it once; since, once you are in the core line, where time travel is impossible, and you cannot come out.”

  I looked down.

  The surface of the card was completely black, with no image at all inside of it.

  It might have been my imagination, but I thought I felt a sensation of immense cold radiating from the dead-black surface.

  “No thanks,” I said leaning slightly backward from the absolutely featureless, dark card. “Me go back to being a flatliner: blind future, irrevocable past, trapped in a present I can’t change? Sorry. Let me out of here. Unless you got something more for me to hear?”

  They didn’t.

  One of them—I think it was a woman—got up and held a candle near a mirrored frame on the far wall. Except it wasn’t a mirror; inside the depth, I saw a picture of one of the bridge-top winter gardens near the Museum of Man, in the mid-upper levels not far from the center of the city, shining with golden towers. The picture surged into my imagination…

  I suddenly had another question for them, and so I turned around, but there was only more golden bridge-way behind me. They were gone.

  28.

  “Where are the other Time Masters?” I asked the mirrored figure on the throne. “Or is elevating me to Mastership just something you decided all on your lonesome?”

  An eerie, bubbling noise like many disjointed voices laughing came from the mirrored mask. “Other Masters? Why should there be other Masters? How would you expect us to govern ourselves?”

  That one stumped me. I squinted. “Don’t know. I always thought you guys had a leader, or you took a vote or something…”

  Again, the weird blurred laughter. “Why should I tolerate to abide by the outcome of any vote, when I could play the scene again and again until the vote came out as I desired? How much less would I brook the commands of a leader! Why should I tolerate any difference of opinion of any kind whatsoever! If I know a man’s birthdate, or his mother’s, then he exists at my sufferance only for so long as it should please me!”

  “Yeah, right. What are these other thrones for, then?”

  “Meant for other versions of me!”

  “Pretty empty now, aren’t they?”

  A terrible silence hung in the air.

  I said slowly, “You’re becoming more and more unlikely now, is that it? There are fewer and fewer alternates because you’ve eliminated other possibilities. You’ve mucked around in the past so much you’ve edited yourself out of the cosmos, haven’t you? And you couldn’t stop meddling in history, even when you knew it was destroying you…”

  “You will meddle when you become a Master of Eternity also. It is our nature. Pick up the cards, my brother Master! I command it.”

  “And if I say no?”

  He stood up, his cloak of mist writhing and billowing around his glinting mirrored armor as he stood. The voices from the mask were blurrier now, shouting: “Then you die!”

  I don’t know who fired first, me or the cataphract. The Master threw his mist-cloak up, so that my shots and lines of hissing energy went into the mist, became uncertain, and vanished before they even reached the Master.

  Without thinking, I switched to a special program, something small enough and fast enough—a few molecules wide, accelerated to light speed—to make it through the uncertainty mist of the cloak without being affected.

  He must have known it was coming. The Master shrugged his cloak open and spread his arms wide, trying to catch my bolt on his chest. He had been ready even before I shot; he was right in the way, in the exact spot, even before I aimed.

  Of course he was manipulating the chronostructure, playing probabilities and possibilities like a musical instrument.

  It was not until after my shot was absorbed into the surface of his breastplate that I realized what a fool I had been. Time Master armor was made of the solid time-energy we call destiny crystal. He could focus the surface to open into whatever timespace he had potential to reach.

  And I knew exactly where and when that bolt would come back into normal space, and who it would shoot.

  I ha
d even jumped forward as I was firing, so that I was standing in the spot where, later/earlier, I would find traces of the body.

  Looking over my shoulder, I wondered why the cataphract’s million-cycle energy bolts hadn’t landed yet.

  Of course. Ugly Boy was frozen. A hundred arms of flame and energy, bullets and bolts, were motionless, radiating from him toward me. He had made movement enough to startle my gun into firing, but now he was wrapped in the deep red Doppler-shift of a time stop.

  He faded into darker reds and disappeared in a swirl of mist.

  The Master had only needed the cataphract to get me to fire, and, out of the whole arsenal of my gunplay, he had only needed that one special projectile—the one with my name on it. With the precision of a master surgeon, he had plucked that one super-bullet out of the hails and streams and storms of weapon-fire I had expended, and sent just that one merrily on its way to kill me. As predicted.

  And this whole heavy-handed approach, breaking into my room at night, pushing me, getting me riled, was all just to make sure I was mad enough to have my smartgun drawn and set on reflex. Very neat. Very nice. And I was the goat for having walked into it with my eyes wide open.

  The image of the corpse had vanished with the cataphract. Pieces on the chessboard no longer needed. But for some reason, the d’Artagnan body was still around. Being remotely teleoperated from inside the Master’s armor?

  I turned to the Master. “Open your faceplate. You’re me, aren’t you? That’s the way these damn time travel things always work out. I’ve been trying to think of what could make me change my mind—in the space of a few minutes—to make me want to join up with you and your rotten crew.

  “And the only reason I could think of was that the choice was join up or die.

  “If I stay flatline, I’ve just shot myself. The only way out is to create a paradox, change the past. The only people who can change the past are Time Masters. So therefore the only way to save myself is to become a Time Master. Q.E.D. So now you’ve forced my hand. My only question at that point was: why bother?