End of the Century

by Chris Roberson

  That was the plan, at any rate.

  When the Change Engine first made contact with the space-time Alice called home, it had collected specimens to examine. The first sample it had brought through the phase boundary transition was Alice Fell.

  The first examinations had produced confusing, conflicting results. There were elements of Alice's genetic makeup which, paradoxically, could only have come from within the Change Engine itself.

  The Red argued that the sample had been contaminated on retrieval, and that another should be gathered. The White argued that the results of the examinations were as yet inconclusive, and should be continued.

  The Dialectic reached stability, and the decision was made to modify Alice biologically, so that she could survive in the desired parameters, should the space-time be xenoformed to match the Change Engine's universe of origin. This was a standard test in the Change Engine's procedures, the reasoning being that if an organism originating in the physical conditions of the newfound universe could be modified to survive in conditions which prevailed in the Change Engine's universe of origin, then by extension the newfound universe could conceivably be xenoformed to support the biologics which had originated in the universe of origin.

  The results were inconclusive. Another specimen was required.

  Experimentation on the second sample was performed while the Dialectic considered the confusing entropic structure of the new space-time. The data received from beyond the phase boundary transition, the gemlike “skin” of the Change Engine, suggested that the entire space-time was anti-entropic, which the scientists who had originally created and programmed the Dialectic had considered impossible.

  It was only after the second sample had been examined and modified that the Dialectic reached a conclusion. It was realized that the Change Engine was impacting the local space-time orthagonally, moving opposite the flow of entropy. The space-time itself wasn't anti-entropic, but the Change Engine was colliding backwards against entropy's flow.

  This was counter to the Change Engine's protocols. Proper xenoforming could not be carried out in such conditions. The Dialectic considered the question of disengaging and moving on, which should have been a foregone conclusion. However, a novel element interfered with the decision. The second sample had not been placed in stasis, as was procedure, but was still being interrogated by the Red. This sample, which labeled itself with the concept-term “Mervyn,” reached decisions on an irrational basis, not following any logic or protocols that the Dialectic could discern. This sample, this Mervyn, had begun to influence the decision-making process of the Dialectic. It corrupted the Red protocols, altering the Red agenda, changing the standards by which the Red determined its position.

  With the Dialectic unbalanced, and the White unable to counter the now irrational positions of the Red, the decision was made to remain and begin the process of xenoforming.

  Moving opposite the flow of entropy, though, as the Change Engine pushed more of its bulk into the local space-time, strange temporal tides sprang into being around the phase transition boundary. These tides ebbed and flowed, with regions around the boundary sometimes exhibiting entropic attributes, sometimes anti-entropic, and sometimes showing no movement whatsoever.

  As the Change Engine moved against the flow of time, it pressed deeper into the local space-time, becoming larger in the past than it had been in the future. And as it moved backwards in time, the affected biosphere expanded, ever larger, no more than a few picometers across at first, then nanometers, then microns, then centimeters. An object placed near the phase boundary at this stage, pushed within range of the temporal tides, might find itself traveling backwards into its own past: cells would grow younger, injuries would heal, decay would retreat. Or it might find itself frozen in time, until the tides again ebbed and flowed.

  Time moved at a different rate within the Change Engine. Past and future were merely points on the maps, which one could visit again if one walked long and far enough.

  But Alice could not go anywhere. Alice remained within the white heart of the Change Engine, forever falling.

  “I want out of here. All right? I just want to go home. If I help you, I just want to go home.”

  The little white rabbit regarded her, its pink eyes unblinking.

  “You cannot return to your ‘home.’ Having been altered, you cannot survive in your universe of origin, but only within the Change Engine, or within the affected biosphere, already xenoformed. And even there you cannot go, as the Red holds sway, and the Red will not agree to your release. You must remain here, at the Change Engine's heart.”

  If she could still cry, she would have.

  “But the White is not entirely without resources. You can be granted limited access to the Change Engine's systems. You will remain here, but your proxy could be broadcast elsewhere. This, in exchange for helping us cope with the corrupting influence of the Mervyn, and helping us restore the Dialectic to the appropriate balance.”

  “How…how can I help you?” Alice looked at the small white rabbit floating before her. If there had been any wind, she'd have thought they were falling together, side by side. But there was no wind, no sound at all. “I don't even understand everything you've shown me. A lifeboat from a dead universe? Is that even possible?”

  “The Red controls the results of the Mervyn's interrogation,” the white rabbit replied, “but the White has limited access. Would you like to know what the Mervyn told the Red, that corrupted its protocols? We cannot parse the meaning, but perhaps you might.”

  Alice considered it. What choice did she have? It wasn't as if she was doing anything else.

  Another glass flower bloomed in her mind, as new memories unpacked.

  And then Alice understood, at least in part.

  She remembered seeing a man with wiry hair and a stringy beard, dressed in the clothes of a Victorian gentleman. But all of it—hair, beard, clothes—was a deep, unrelenting red. She remembered hearing his high, reedy voice, explaining to the machine intelligence of the Change Engine about a barbershop with three barbers, and a boy and his two uncles, Joe and Jim, one of whom needed a shave. She remembered hearing the confusion of the Red, trying to parse out the statements.

  She remembered all of this, though she'd not been there, hadn't seen or heard it herself. These were more memories, planted directly in her mind by the White. Alice knew that.

  Alice also knew what this Victorian gentleman, this Mervyn, seemed to have done. She recognized the story about Uncle Joe and Uncle Jim and the three barbers, Allen, Brown, and Carr. It had been in the Lewis Carroll collection her father had read to her when she was a girl, before the accident, before she fell. It was a logic paradox in story form, a parable about competing hypotheticals that could not coexist. Just the sort of logic problem and twisted reasoning that was behind all of Carroll's Alice stories, the nonsensical-seeming thought processes that twisted the mind in circles.

  Alice didn't know anything about the beings who had built the Change Engine, or designed and programmed the artificial intelligence which governed it, the two-poled Dialectic. Somewhere in the Change Engine, she knew, there were indestructible silver disks, on which the survivors had been encoded as pure information, to one day be decanted into new cloned bodies in another universe. Perhaps someday she might meet one of them, face to face, and learn what sort of people they'd been. But she knew one thing about them, already. Their culture had never produced a Lewis Carroll.

  This Mervyn had baffled the Red by reciting Carroll's logical paradoxes, and nonsense poems, and so forth. Knocking it off its pins enough that it could coerce the Red into changing its protocols. And why?

  Because Mervyn had learned what Alice had just been told, that he could never return home to his own space-time. His body had been fundamentally altered, irreversibly, and the only place he could exist would be a world likewise modified by the Change Engine. And so Mervyn had realized that, if he was to have any kind of existence at all, he
would have to convince the Dialectic to remain in his universe, and change enough of it to give him room to move around. If he failed, and the Change Engine moved on, back into the higher dimensions, he and the other sample would be discarded, their usefulness gone.

  Mervyn had accomplished this by altering the Red's operant protocols, talking endlessly to the Red until its own goals, objectives, and strategies had been effectively rewritten. Not huge changes, but enough that in the tug-of-war of ideas and ideologies with the White which formed the basic functioning of the Dialectic, the Red would always prevail on the question of remaining in this new universe and modifying it per protocols.

  Mervyn, made red by the same process that turned Alice's hair and clothes white, intended to remake the world over again, and set himself up as its ruler, with the Red's help. The world would belong to him, the Red King.

  And changed in the past, the world would be changed in the future as well. It wasn't enough that the world Alice knew would be gone. When the past was altered, the Earth remade, then the world Alice knew would never have existed at all.

  OMEGA DID NOT COMMUNICATE IN WORDS. It read the memories of the lacuna and responded with action as appropriate. When communing with Sandford Blank, it had gleaned from his remembrances everything it needed to know, updated the record of memory, and then communicated the new memory back to Blank's organic self at the appropriate point in history, in this case the third day of July 1897.

  “Well, that's much better,” Blank said, standing.

  His jacket, vest, and shirt were still cut wide open and gored with blood and viscera, but the flesh beneath was now smooth and unmarked. While in communion his body's processes had worked overtime, knitting skin and muscle together, redirecting resources as appropriate, healing what had been hurt.

  Blank was now in possession of an hour of new memories, more or less, while only a matter of moments had passed in the portrait gallery. It was hardly surprising. After all, if one could encompass eternity in an hour, as mad old William Blake had said, surely it would be a simple matter to cram an hour into a moment.

  “I don't know about the rest of you,” Blank said, clapping his hands together, “but I for one could very much use a drink.”

  Having cleaned up and dressed in a fresh shirt and suit, Blank joined his guests in the sitting room downstairs. Miss Bonaventure had opened a bottle of Madeira, and she, Taylor, and Dulac sat drinking generous portions, speaking little. On the table between then rested the crystal chalice, the source of all their troubles.

  “So, Mr. Dulac?” Blank said, going to the sideboard and pouring himself a glass. “Or shall I call you Monsieur Jean Gilead?”

  Dulac managed a weary smile. “I have been both, and more. Dulac, both Jules and Giles. Jean Gilead. Johannes Lak.” He shook his head. “More than I can remember. I think perhaps my current name wears thin, though. Perhaps next I'll be Delamere, eh?”

  “Look, what's all this about, anyhow?!” Taylor demanded. “Just why ain't you dead, Blank?”

  Blank took a seat next to Miss Bonaventure on the sofa and shrugged. “I am in the employ of an entity called Omega, and Omega has hard enough time finding agents without letting them bleed to death needlessly. While I sat in that chair, my body healed itself, because it was what Omega desired.”

  “What is this Omega?” Miss Bonaventure said, eyes narrowed.

  Blank gave her a slight smile. “An infinite brain enclosed in a narrow circle, my dear.” He turned his attention back to Dulac. “But suffice it to say that I have been alive quite a few many years. Though not, I suspect, nearly so many as you. Tell me, what was the first name you carried, sir?”

  Dulac took a deep breath, and closed his eyes for a moment, sinking into memory. When he opened them again, a wistful smile played at the corners of his mouth. “My parents were good Christians, though of the Pelagian variety, and as they considered that I brought a breath of scented air into their darkened lives, they named me for the biblical source of such balm.” He sat up a little straighter, and in an unrecognizable accent said, “I am Galaad of Glevum.”

  Blank nodded. “Who, as Lady Priscilla would no doubt point out, were she here, the later chroniclers misremembered as Galahad.”

  A slight blush rose in Dulac's cheek, and Taylor looked from him to Blank and back with widened eyes. Dulac nodded, reluctantly.

  “How much of it is true, what the legends say?” Blank asked.

  “Not all,” Dulac answered, “but enough. I sailed with Artor, in those last days of the fifth century of the Christian calendar. With him and his captains I entered the Summer Lands, and with him pierced to the heart of the Unworld. There I was remade by the White Lady, and given the task of safeguarding the tower of glass, until the far future date when the White Lady would enter it and remove all impurities.”

  Blank only understood a measure of what the man said, but enough to capture the general drift.

  “When the Summer Lands retreated,” Dulac went on, “the Tower of Glass still stood atop the tor, and so I had constructed around it a great fortress, enclosing it entirely. In time, the fortress crumbled, and we built another on the spot, and when that fortress fell we built a church, and then another. Nothing could last long in the near vicinity of the Tower of Glass. But each time the walls fell, the tower was revealed to have shrunk, and so each time the enclosure was smaller, and smaller. In time, it receded entirely into the earth, leaving only the surrounding structure of mundane stone standing.”

  Miss Bonaventure gestured to the crystal chalice on the table between them. “And that is what remained of your tower?”

  “It wasn't my tower,” Dulac shot back, eyes flashing. Then he calmed, visibly. “But yes. I knew that it would one day be unearthed by a man named Bonaventure, and since it was given to me to safeguard the tower whatever its form, however diminished, I set about finding this man. I knew, from what the White Lady had told me, that it would be the nineteenth century of the Christian calendar before the crystal would be unearthed, and so there was little need for rush, but I wanted to know where the man would be when the time came. So centuries ago I sought out the Bonaventure family and found it in the kingdom of Varadeaux, once an independent nation, then a part of France, and now part of the Swiss Confederation. I became a friend to the family in various guises, drifting away for a time and then returning to another generation under a different name. When a branch of the family moved to England, centuries ago, I followed it here, splitting my time between the septs, now in one country, now in another, unsure which would one day give birth to the man for whom I waited.”

  “When I knew you as Jean Gilead in the days of Louis XIII, you traveled in the company of a musketeer named Etienne Bonaventure,” Blank said.

  Dulac smiled, remembering. “He was a good friend, was Etienne. As were Amandine, Achille, Hieronymus, Michel-Thierry, and Cornelius, to name but a few.” He looked to Miss Bonaventure. “That's why I was so perplexed on meeting you, girl. I thought I knew the name and provenance of everyone born with that surname for the last three or four centuries at least.”

  Miss Bonaventure gave a sly smile in return. “Perhaps I'm an apple that fell a bit farther from the tree than most.” She paused, and her grin widened. “Or perhaps I haven't yet been born.”

  Dulac barked a laugh. “Well, stranger things have happened, and that I can attest.”

  “What became of Mervyn Fawkes?” Blank asked. “He disappeared in that flash of light, but there is no way that he could have escaped on foot in so short a time.”

  Dulac shook his head. “I can't say the reason he was drawn in, but I can tell you without doubt that he has entered the Unworld, the realm within the crystal. And having entered, I can tell you that he will never be able to leave. Of all those who have ever passed inside, only myself and one other have ever returned, and only one of us while still living.”

  “What will you do now?” Blank asked, his tone measured.

  Dulac sighed and
indicated the crystal chalice with his chin. “Return that to safe keeping, I suppose. Perhaps when Peter returns he can help me arrange a more secure holding, perhaps buried under the British Museum. Then I wait for the coming of the White Lady, as was my charge.”

  “And the man with the red eyes and red sword?” Miss Bonaventure asked. “Who is he?”

  A cloud passed over Dulac's features, and when he spoke again, his tone was more grave. “One of Artor's captains, another who journeyed with us into the Unworld. In death, his body was desecrated by the Red King and sent out into the world to do his bidding. The Huntsman also waits for the White Lady, but to stop her entering the Unworld, where I stand to secure her passage.”

  “The Huntsman?”

  “That's the only fit name for him, Blank,” Dulac answered, “though in life he answered to Pryder. While my life and energies are sustained by the White Lady, the Huntsman is sustained by the Red King. We have met one another a time or two over the long centuries, but in death he lacks the stamina of my lengthened life. For every year or two that he walks abroad, he must spend nearly half a century asleep beneath the ice, somewhere cold. I've sought his resting place these many long years, but never yet found it.” He let out a ragged sigh. “I fear that I'll never catch him sleeping, and must wait until that final day when we face each other, all for the sake of the White Lady.”

  “But what should happen if you find him now, and he defeats you?” Miss Bonaventure asked. “I'm not saying it'll happen, but surely you've considered the possibility.”

  Dulac smiled ruefully. “If I fall before the appointed day, leaving unprotected the White Lady yet to come, I can only hope that she finds some other champion or that someone else steps into the breach in my stead.” His smile faded, and his expression darkened. “If not, I would fear for us all.”

  Finishing his Madeira, Dulac climbed to his feet. Hooking the scabbarded sword back onto his Sam Browne belt, he picked up the crystal chalice and tucked it safely into his pocket.