City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis

by John C. Wright

  Mister President…

  And then the girl let out a scream like the shriek of a bird of prey. She had the trained voice of a singer and an actress who could hit the high notes loud enough to hear in the cheap seats, and she certainly was built like she had the excess lung capacity.

  There were shadows in the semi-transparent window. For a moment, I thought it was two figures, the girl and her attacker come back for seconds. And then I laughed with the feeling that only cops who work for Time Wardens know, a feeling of relief, because you remember seeing the date on the headstone of the guy who just drew a knife and is coming for you.

  It is like wearing the armor of the inevitable. It is like getting a big wet sloppy kiss from Lady Fate. Because you know, beyond any shadow of the doubt, that he is a dead man, not you.

  Then I stopped laughing.

  A bulky figure in a trenchcoat and a wide-brimmed slouch hat stepped out of the shower stall, of all places, and even with the window half dim, I could see the bathroom lights shining between the upturned collar and the downturned hat brim, right through the glass of his empty head. So I knew I was the dead man.

  My head was not propped inside the machine-man's glass skull, which meant I would die by a method that destroyed the whole body, a method that left no corpse. You know what that means in this city.

  I looked down at my gun, which was now in my hand. It was a Police Special. What I held in my fist was just the aiming unit, the emission aperture and the firing controls. The real weapon was the size of a warehouse sitting in a null-time vacuole in the fourth-and-a-half dimension, halfway past next Tuesday or somewhere beyond the second star to the right, with atomic piles and dynamos and batteries of big guns and futuristic zap-rays and a whole arsenal of various brands of death and maiming and unhappiness. It could blow a hole in the Moon or pick the left wing off a housefly landing on the Washington Monument from the Empire State Building, and never mind the curvature of the Earth or the prevailing winds. It was that good.

  Now, it was useless. The Tin Woodman was programmed to identify it as a weapon. No matter what I did with it, the action would be counteracted before I fired.

  There were tremors of cold shivering through my fingers, and I saw little blurry patches of mist clinging to my fingers. A time paradox. A decision point.

  This was a moment where I either turned and ran, like Oedipus trying to run away from his cursed life, or I could go in and die like a Kamikaze pilot, a sacrifice to destiny.

  “Banzai!”

  I ran up the nearer ramp toward the girl and sprinted toward my death.

  I'd had a pretty good life, I guess. I had no complaints.

  Strike that. My life stank like an incontinent skunk pie sandwich with no mustard, if one of the slices was the crusty heel no one likes to eat, and I had loads of complaints.

  As I ran, I let go of my Special, and the gun used its tractor field to jump like a fish and slide back into my armpit holster. With the same motion, I brought the baseball bat I was carrying to my shoulder. Joe DiMaggio had given it to me. The Yankee Clipper. Signed it, too, with a hot engraver's pen. It was my prize possession.

  Jack was ahead of me. Unlike me, he had not hesitated. My face felt hot for the first time that night as I ran after him, trying to catch up to him. I was blushing for shame. Damn me if I would let a client go into harm's way first!

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Queequeg's shadow move between me and the doorway to the far ramp, the other entrance. In his bare feet, he was surprisingly quiet and surprisingly swift. His deadly harpoon, which can kill a mammal much bigger than a man, was held lightly at his shoulder. His top hat was resting carefully behind him on the balcony deck, upon the spot where he had been posted, so it would not get mussed.

  I followed Jack. Queequeg could handle himself. My ears popped as I passed through whatever unseen forcefield or abracadabra magic, or whatever it was that stretched across the threshold to the tower and allowed the Wardens to keep the weather outside without the need for a physical door.

  And, no, we did not bounce off the force field or end up five seconds in the past. Not that there was any way to find out what was off-limits until the moment after you find yourself in the moment before, looking stupid. There are no leases in the City, since the Masters of Time own everything, but there are rosters and quartermasters and people with prestige among the Swell Set. And then there were people with pull and those with favors to call in among the Not So Swell. And there were tough guys with tougher reputations to maintain among the Really Not Swell At All. Whatever the quartermaster or the ward boss assigned, you didn't take, but you swapped to someone who had something you liked better, or you gave him your marker. So everyone knew who really owned what, and who owed who, but nothing was written down.

  This was Jack's apartment. He did not live there, and his name was not on the ward roster, but he had prestige, and his lieutenants had pull, and his boys had reputations, so it was for all intents and purposes his.

  Jack was pelting up the ramp. He reached the upper corridor. It was brighter in here, all glowing gold walls and display cases like a museum. I could see the pistol in his hand, a footlong length of polished and gilded wood and lustrous pewter. It was a flintlock, or it looked like one. I had not inspected it very closely when I obtained it from Aaron Burr late yesterday, in return for forgetting his past. It had been just before the evening horserace and evening riot at the hippodrome (Bucephalus had bested Marengo in the last race, and was running against Traveller, and odds were running twelve to seven for Lee's horse.) I barely had time before evening curfew to get from the riot to Jack, and no time to instruct him.

  Had Jack even loaded the pistol? Did he know how? I did not remember whether I had told him how to load and hold it, not to assume pistols of that type would stay loaded. Inwardly, I cursed myself. It is that kind of small mistake, not double-checking the details, that gets men killed. But it was too late.

  She screamed again. Jack had seen too many movies, because he raised his foot and kicked at the door panel leading into the bedroom of the suite. He ended up on his backside staring at the glowing gold ceiling.

  I turned off the silence field and said: “Allow me.”

  My gun leaped into my hand from the holster, projected an aiming beam, then launched a missile made of white-hot plasma instead of old-fashioned metal. The gun emitted a magnetic force field shaped like a tube to guide the missile to the target, then designed and built an invisible set of braces and baffles out of nucleonic energy-tension to suppress the explosion within a five-foot radius. Then the gun focused a time distortion hole on the spot to sweep the wreckage of the door panels and part of the wall sideways out of the continuum, into the non-being between timestreams, as the missile plasma ruptured and made a miniature version of a sun.

  So, not only was Jack and half the planet not killed, all he saw was a perfect circle-shaped hole appear in the wooden wall. Also, a perfect vacuum-globe appeared in the air in front of him, then imploded with a bang. I guess nature abhorred it, since it immediately vanished and was replaced by a shockwave that pulled Jack forward and hurled him into the bedroom.

  I holstered my gun, gripped the bat in both hands and followed him at a less hectic pace.

  It was like stepping into a Museum diorama tuned to the Mid-Twentieth Century, coastal North America. The original suite had been one large chamber made of invulnerable gold walls. Now, the inside had been portioned off into human-sized rooms by walls of wood and plaster, and apportioned with furniture and appliances like you might see in a rich man's home. Since I did not often get invited into wealthy drawing rooms, the place looked like something I had only seen in motion pictures. Only everything was in color.

  There were cut crystal sets, ornaments on marble stands, a coffee table, a couch, a big silk-covered bed to one side, a door to the bathroom to the other, a bar or miniature kitchen stocked with electronic wonder gizmos, and lots of carpet underfoot. Only the far w
all, the one with the man-high window in it, was gold. Drapes were hung across it to block the golden glow from outside. And there was a chandelier overhead, to give light because the glow was blocked. This is the kind of useless extravagance that only the people the Wardens really, really like get to enjoy. Jack was not one of the middle ranks of the mortals of Metachronopolis. He was from the tip-top, the flaky upper crust. He was one of the guys the Wardens let play with their toys.

  By fate or chance or cosmic design, Jack landed on top of the guy in the long black cloak—I kid you not, the target was dressed like a comic opera villain from the Silent pictures of last decade—just as the guy tore the towel off the girl.

  No sooner had Jack landed than he was kneeling on the guy's arms, punching him in the face with one fist, and strangling him with the other hand. Blood was streaming from the guy's nose, into his gray beard and his thin gray hair.

  The bearded face was wrinkled. The girl's attacker was an old man.

  My guess was late sixties, so he was perhaps twenty or thirty years older than Jack. And it was not an opera cape that he was wearing. It was a self-heating thermocloak from the Twenty-First Century, the thing they use in hospitals to medicate patients and keep their hearts working. So, he was not only old, he was decrepit. You had to wonder where he found the juice to get his Walla Walla Washington to stand up and salute.

  A walking stick had fallen from his thin, veiny hand. It did not look like the sort of stick that rich men carry to show that they don't need to muss their hands with work. It looked like the type old men lean on because their legs are weak. At the top of the stick was a gold knob. My gun beeped at me and told me the knob was producing a time distortion effect, but it only had a nine-inch range. He had to be holding it for it to work, so it was no source of danger at the moment.

  Horrid gargling noises were coming from the old man as Jack squeezed his throat.

  The Tin Woodman turned toward me. Not turn, exactly. It blinked from facing away from me to facing toward me, its shoulders hunched and its gauntlets raised. It was holding a long-handled executioner's axe; a half-moon of sharpened metal shining like brass formed the business end with a spike sticking out the other way.

  The monster looked like a freakish cross between the headless horseman from Sleepy Hollow, the guy who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men from that radio program, and beneath that, a knight from Avalon in plate armor of purest gold. There was nothing but a fishbowl glint between its hat and its trenchcoat collar.

  Behind it, through an open door, I could see the glass door of the shower stall, of the sort you might see in a fancy New York hotel. There was a destiny crystal plate hidden in the glass door. How long ago it had been planted there? The old man could have done it decades in the past, or even centuries. My plan of watching the place from outside had been as futile as Mr. A Square of Flatland trying to sneak up on the Sphere of Spaceland by hiding carefully behind a line.

  How come I was still alive? In the same blink it had taken the Tin Man to turn to face me, he could have blinked across the room and chopped my head off, or blinked back four minutes, and attacked me from behind as I ran up the ramp.

  Then I realized that the Tin Man had not been given clear instructions. My attack on the door panel had not been an attack on his master. It did not count.

  And Jack had been thrown by accident on top of the old man. A human body is not necessarily a lethal weapon. The Tin Man was not smart enough to understand that Jack was strangling the old man. The old man could not speak and order the attack because Jack was crushing his windpipe.

  Not that anyone could have heard anything anyway. The most beautiful girl in history was standing in the middle of the room, blond and pink and quivering with fear, naked as a jaybird, round and delicious as a peach.

  Actually, she was not a blond, not a natural one anyhow, but she was so perfect in her proportions and poise that I actually took my eyes off the Tin Man—who was certain to kill me—to stare at her. Only for a moment, of course. But if that is the last thing in the life you are to see, what better to stare at? She was screaming loud enough to peel paint off the walls.

  Jack shouted: “Now! Frontino! Smash his face! Break his skull! Hit him!”

  The Tin Man did not retroactively decapitate me just yet. Maybe it was programmed to regard a baseball bat as equipment for a game and not a deadly weapon.

  What did I have to lose? I was dead anyway. I took one last look at the girl to remind myself of what I was fighting for. Then I stepped forward and raised the baseball bat overhead in both hands…

  There was a flick of misty nonexistence for a second and then I was in a version of the scene where the Tin Man was standing between me and the old man, and my bat bounced harmlessly off a dark overcoat sleeve covering an upraised arm of gold.

  I should explain: I have a hardened memory. It is a rare trait, apparently found, or so I was told, in the remote ancestors of those who will someday be Time Wardens. It allows me to remember if someone changes my past. I can remember both versions as easily as if one were real and one were imaginary. Deja vu is a weaker edition of the same effect. Anyone might have the ability, but if you never cross paths with a time traveler who changes your past, how would you ever know? Most people who are brought to this city have hardened memory in some form, some stronger than others.

  So I remembered both the original version where the Tin Man crossed the room by walking slowly until he stood between me and the old man and then blurred backward a few seconds in the time direction as well as the revised version where he appeared in an eyeblink right in front of me.

  But I did not remember a version where I smashed in the old man's head. In the original version, the Tin Woodman was simply not moving fast enough to stop me. I stopped me, not him. Jack had learned to one side as he grasped the old man's neck in both hands, to provide me a clear target. Because Jack's hands were pinning the white beard down, I saw the old man's face clearly enough to see what he would have looked like if he were clean-shaven.

  Meanwhile, in this version, the Tin Man was between me and the two men on the floor, so I stepped quickly back and raised my bat as if to bunt, hoping to parry the axe if Tin Man swung.

  There was a blur of mist around its axe, and my pistol's paradox alarm went off. At the same time I remembered the sensation of the axe biting into my neck from behind and the tingling sensation of my pistol erecting a skintight force nimbus over my body.

  You see, my gun was every bit as smart as the Tin Man. It may have been designed by the same Time Warden engineers, for all I knew. The axe rebounded from an invisible collar of force lines that were swirling around my neck.

  Suddenly the Tin Man was between me and the door—or, rather the hole—leading out. We were now in a version of the scene where the Tin Man had decided not to take a swing at me. Instead, my baseball bat had been cut in half and the palms of my hands were stinging. So were my eyes. Yes, I teared up. Not from the pain in my hands or the shock in my arms, but because an axe had just smashed through my favorite baseball bat. My Joe DiMaggio bat!

  I wanted to swear, but there was a very, very attractive lady in the room. I shouted at the old man. “I should have killed you! Smashed your damn—sorry—darned skull into pieces!”

  Why hadn't I? Because I had seen his face. And no, it wasn't my face, if that is what you are thinking.

  At that moment, the girl stopped screaming. She grabbed the towel around her head, and tucked it not very effectively around her abundant curve as she called out to Jack in a whisper of horror. “That is the man who attacked me last week. It's him! Mr. President! Won't you help me? Don't let him hurt me again!” She sounded as innocent as a lamb and as breathless as a bride caught up in the rapture of her first nuptial night. A hard combination to pull off.

  What a voice! I promised myself never to wash my ears again.

  Jack said: “Run, Norma Jean! Run!”

  The girl turned to the broken wall whi
ch had once held the door out, but the Tin Man stood in the way.

  Jack's grip had slackened. The old man managed to gasp out a word. “P-protect!”

  The command was enough. The world blinked. The Tin Man was helping the Old Man sit up and Jack had been flung like a rag doll all the way across the coffee table. He hit the far wall with a noise like a gong. He had not been decapitated. That explained a lot. The Tin Man must have known that killing Jack would create a paradox.

  I saw Aaron Burr's gun lying right at my feet. I stooped, picked it up, and looked at it. My pistol automatically scans and analyzes potential threats, and it can insert into my memory-chain the memory of having had given me a read out.

  Aaron Burr was a cheat. The inside of the flintlock had been replaced with newer technology and contained a magazine of real bullets complete with sabot and primer caps, cleverly hidden in the stock, and a rifled barrel. The bullets were made of a smart metal designed to deform on impact, so that anyone digging open the wound later would find nothing but a pistol ball. The thing even had microminiaturized ranging and aiming circuits. I'd always wondered how Hamilton lost that duel. He was the better shot, and had won each time the Time Wardens made the two weary, ever-resurrected men replay that fatal scene.

  I tossed the dueling pistol to the girl. “Don't point it at the old man until five minutes from now, after I lure the Tin Man away. There is a timer in the action. When it rings, shoot him. Twice in the chest, once in the head. Hold it in both hands, with your arms straight. Just take a breath, let it out, and squeeze the trigger slowly.”

  She said, “I am not sure I can… do that. I couldn't even butcher chickens back home.”

  Of course. If Helen of Troy were the kind of dame who could shoot a man without turning green, would she be abducted even once? Some girls are born girlish. You cannot blame them. Much.

  “Ma'am, this is the man who attacked you, isn't it?” I spoke in my coldest voice.

  Her lips quivered and she did not answer.

  The old man had climbed to his knees. He looked up and looked at her with such hunger that it sickened me. His voice was strong for an old guy, but his words were weary. “Life is a broad way and a banquet when you are young, and every sunrise is promises and hopes. When you are old, life is narrow and crooked and cramped, and all your friends are dead, and you have no tomorrow to talk about, and all you have is your memories.”