Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine

by Jw Schnarr

  And there, at a newsstand, I had my first shock. From the front page, I gazed back at myself—but so much older! The masthead proclaimed it to be March 24, 1925. I had chosen my birthday, since one date was as good as any other.

  I stared at the paper in consternation. I have never enjoyed having my portrait taken. Despite the lines of care, the parchment skin and thinning snow-white beard, it was a good likeness. The headlines lauded my life and offered an issue of commemoration for the man who had been “the peacekeeper of our times.” The article referenced many great achievements.

  The world spun through my head as I read that paper. The Boer War had ceased—so had our aggressions in Egypt. Conditions for the working class had improved so much that that all enjoyed a level of comfort, if not luxury. Women could vote at the same age as men. Britain maintained its might, but extended the hand of benevolence to its subjects, soliciting their participation.

  And the article laid much of the praise for this at my own door.

  The blood pounded in my temples, and my leg ached as if in warning of the gout. But I stood firm. I found a library and began to explore the past—my future.

  It seemed I’d had tireless energy in spreading the message of art and beauty, equality and goodwill, respect for one’s fellows and the earth. And somehow, I had found a way to transform technology into true art: for the people of this time had combined photography with the magic lantern show to produce moving pictures, with written placards that could be translated to make my message understood around the world. I spoke to them in “newsreels.” But more than that, in gorgeous hand-tinted scenes, I showed the possibilities of my fairy-romances even to those who could not read. The actors mimed emotion so well, those interpretive placards were not even truly needed to make the story understood.

  There were other things necessary, of course. Back in 1894, the post of Poet Laureate stood open. I had refused the honor; the inanity of court poetry would have deadened my spirit, and I could not stand to rise so high above my fellows. But as a new-made member of the royal household, I would have the ear of the queen, and my verses would reach the mighty as well as the oppressed. Surely I could learn to grit my teeth, rein in my temper, and couch the truth so that they would listen.

  I felt dizzy with all the possibilities. As the sun sank, I realized I had forgotten to eat. In a friendly tavern, I ordered a hearty meal, food that actually tasted of the country, not the town.

  Somehow, I would have to do exactly as I had vaguely imagined I might do, when Bertie first showed me his machine.

  Somehow, I must make certain that this future world would actually occur. I could continue to work passionately for eighteen hours most every day. I could take a more active role in the politics that had so disgusted me. The one thing I could not do was resume the life I’d known.

  But there was something else in all this, Georgie. Something that might be compensation for any sacrifice I might make.

  For you see, my dear, there was another fact the newspaper had mentioned. How my heart leapt when I read those words.

  After Janey’s death in 1914, I married you.

  That was the beginning of it, my love. The days that we had did not stretch like an unbroken chain; rather, they were like stepping stones across a river, the colors woven through a tapestry, as I skipped ahead in time to where I was needed, stitch after stitch. You were the bright thread that gave meaning to my life. A continual joy to my heart. I spent as much time with you as I could, but there were always other matters whose importance we could not deny.

  You helped me, exerting your influence with friends and acquaintances, enlisting the strong pen of your nephew, Rudyard Kipling. You also helped me hide my absences with excuses so vivid that I almost believed them myself.

  I had Bertie by my side as well, helping for all he was worth. Sometimes he might tell me of important events that he had learned about in former voyages, but we both agreed on the danger of stepping too far ahead while our work was yet unfinished.

  Great were those years, as we spread the message of Fellowship to all. What a joy it was to stand before those crowds. To watch my words touch laborers and shopkeepers alike; to see even the industrialist wipe away tears as we all sang one of my new Chants for Socialists. To witness the face of the earth changing before my eyes, becoming better. Becoming whole.

  As the threat of major wars melted away, science advanced side-by-side with philosophy and moral responsibility, until science itself began to cure the very ills that it has caused in our own day. People worked together, growing closer in mind and spirit. Folk of many nations came to study side by side in schools around the world, regardless of class, culture, or creed. Technology grew into harmony with the natural world until it became ennobling, rather than dehumanizing, and all cared for the earth, and for each other.

  I could not have written myself into a more beautiful future. I was jubilant. And mortally exhausted.

  By your direction, as I grew old and worn, I had put in more appearances in those odd years when I’d been so often absent, 1894 to 1896, to get some much-needed rest. My work in the future scarcely let me pause for an instant, and I was weary, so weary, Georgie. Sometimes, I was so weak I could neither walk nor stand. For four months I had to be carried about in my chair. But those periods of rest were hard, lighted only by your visits, and Ned’s. Those looks of compassion you gave me were still not enough to stave off the sorrow of those days, when I must act as though we had never been together.

  At last that dreadful day arrived—the day that I feared above all others. The day when you took to your bed and we both knew you would not rise again.

  How sweet you were to me even then, Georgie. How I tried to comfort you with equal tenderness. I hate to tell you of those moments, dear—of how you looked, or what laid you low. But I cannot tell the rest without what happened then.

  “Was it worth it, Topsy dear?”

  “Was it worth it?” I repeated, tremulous at first. “You know it was always a struggle to leave you, even to do what I must. I wanted our time together as much as you did, darling. But they needed me.”

  I fell silent then. No words such as these could ever tell the strength of my regret. Not regret for what I had done. Regret that there would never be enough time with you.

  You whispered, “Has it all turned out as you hoped?”

  “I have done everything I could,” I said with anguish.

  You smiled weakly—but that was answer in itself. And I, too, wanted to know how the story ended. I kissed you on the lips, the cheeks, the brow, then rose swiftly, that I might the sooner return. You clung to my hand with your little strength. In your eyes was knowledge already of what I would do. And then, because I could not bear it, I caught you in a fierce embrace. I left, wanting only to rush back to this very moment, and lie down by your side.

  I climbed back to the attics. I knew, even as I swung my leg through the bars of the machine, that I had nearly reached my end. Despite the periods of rest, the strain and weakness had never fully left me. I could feel it threaded through my bones.

  I had spent out my life in service to this dream. I had done so because I knew with no trace of doubt whatsoever that it was worth it, to benefit humanity.

  When I stepped on the attic floor again in 2120, I learned just as certainly that I was wrong.

  I felt much steadier on my feet when I got off the Time Machine. The sun streamed through the windows of the attic, charging the pillars that supported the roof beams with a haze that made them shine like luminous ghosts. A bright new day. I could see the verdure beyond the window, dark green fluttering against the blue sky.

  Walking down the attic stairs, I was pleased to find that the new owners had been keeping up the place. The most vocal of the stairs no longer creaked, and the rail was new.

  The tapestries that hung on the walls of the stairwell and brightened the hall, the wallpaper in the kitchen, the carved and decorated mantle, the Sussex chairs th
at I’d designed—it all looked as if I’d only left the house this morning. The carpets were new, all the worn places gone.

  Feeling that strange dreamy dizziness of a man close to waking, I crossed a patch of sunlight and stepped down into my study.

  All my books were still there. The deal table still carried proofs from the Kelmscott Press, with my own writing upon them. But the project—the project was Le Morte d’Arthur, which Ned and I had been discussing for years. We’d never gotten very far, though this looked like authentic Kelmscott style. I reached out to touch one, and found that a transparent layer of glass, ground so smooth it did not reflect the light, stood between me and the page.

  Some sound must have warned me: the passage of air through the old house. A step within the hall.

  He stood in the doorway. That shock of dark hair, the thick beard. That robust frame. A high, broad forehead, large eyes, wide nose: I had seen that image most often in my friends’ artistic caricatures, though the youthful face looked utterly serious now.

  He proffered his hand. I took his in a firm clasp that jolted me to the core. His eyes never left mine as I shook hands with myself.

  “I wondered if you would ever come,” he murmured. “Let’s get out of here, before the Delegate arrives.”

  Mystified, I followed the dark-haired young man, myself. He could not be more than 30. We walked out into the garden, a sweet sight, just as I remembered it. I felt disoriented when I saw the little yew dragon that I had trimmed myself. When was I? It seemed that everything had been kept just as I liked it. Yet I had never lived at Kelmscott Manor when I was this man’s age. In those days, I was still enmeshed in the dream of Red House, and Janey and I had what passed for happy lives, with two little girls toddling at our feet.

  We slipped through the flower gardens and between the hedgerows. He led me farther, toward the wilder section of the meadow, where the trees began. We had just reached a bench where I loved to sit on a summer day, when he stopped and looked back toward the house with the startled eyes of a deer who spies its hunter.

  “You haven’t seen me,” he muttered, and slipped into the wood.

  Puzzled, I walked back through the flowers I’d chosen and helped to tend. Just under the eaves, I discovered the source of my companion’s alarm. A red-faced man, bald, and fairly bursting with irritation, occupied most of the bench near the door. He grunted and forced himself to his feet as I approached. I had the sun at my back, so perhaps he did not see me clearly; for when I stood closer, he flinched, squinting at my face.

  “Where is he?” the man demanded belligerently. His face bloomed with rage.

  “I beg your pardon,” I answered politely.

  “There’s a William Morris loose in the garden! You should have done your job by now!”

  He squinted at me, and I tensed; but then he pursed his lips and shook his head, as if it were somehow ridiculous that a man as old as I could be the one he sought.

  I muttered in as unintelligible a voice as I could muster, while he blathered and blustered. He was apparently a Party man. I, too, was supposed to be a loyal Party man, though I could not guess whom he might take me for, if not myself.

  “Now get out there and take care of that clone!” he bellowed. His girth gave him the force of an opera singer.

  I was happy enough to leave my red-faced, roaring bull of a friend, though I had begun to feel like a man trapped in a maze. I wandered through the roses and flowering bushes, trying to look stealthy.

  I found me again at last, hidden among the trees. He extended an arm to draw me through into the deepest, darkest part of the shrubbery. We pressed through waxy green leaves and delicate white petals, the tangles of plant and tree growing so thick I would have been lost if not for the tether of his hand.

  At last we emerged in a glade, the forest having grown so thick here in the last two hundred years it seemed as though I’d stepped into one of my fairy-romances, rather than the future. There, in the dim green light cast by the leaves, he said, “We expected you a long time ago.”

  “‘We’?”

  “I’m William Morris #7.”

  “Does that make me William Morris #1?”

  He shook his head with a sardonic air. “No, he died long after your time.”

  We fell silent again. The birds laced the air with their warbling and the rustle of wings and branches.

  Gesturing toward the house, I said, “Who was he?”

  “Our esteemed Delegate is a Party man.”

  “Socialist Party?”

  His lip curled. It was a shock, seeing such anger etched on my own young face.

  I asked, “Why has nothing in the house been changed?”

  “It’s a museum now. A museum dedicated to you. All the world loves William Morris,” he said, but this time his voice faltered. “We live there, of course. In the basement.”

  “‘We’?” I repeated, for the second time.

  “All the clones,” he said bitterly. “‘Living history.’ Not that there are any of us left now, but me.”

  It took him several moments then, to explain what this might mean—the doppelgangers of me that the Party had created out of flesh and blood decades after my last visit to the future. Samples of my genes were apparently present in my handiworks, and they were able to recreate me, again and again, and perpetuate the lie that I had never died—the living embodiment of what the people were supposed to believe.

  “But this isn’t the world you dreamed of, Father,” he continued, his voice gentler as we sat upon the green. “They have taken your ideals and twisted them, perverted them to their own ends. The destruction of the earth has stopped, and class divisions no longer exist. All people have whatever they need. But freedom and intellect have eroded under the conformity to Party rules. The Party has organized society, telling us what to think and do. Under the tyranny of plenty, art has withered and died. People grow restless, unhappy and stifled without being able to say why, since they have all they need—except the ultimate freedom to choose their own fates. They fight without cause, and demand things one moment only to repudiate them the next. They act like petulant children.”

  He pushed back his rumpled mass of curls and eyed me keenly. “The Party decided that the best way to calm the unrest was to bring back their most popular hero—an artist who understood the needs of working people, and acted nobly on their behalf. But unfortunately for the Party, we William Morrises are not the type of simple folk-artist who might be easily swayed by rhetoric. Each copy eventually rebels and is wiped out.”

  A flash of danger shot down my spine. “Why me? If there is some trouble in the Empire, some threat, why not a great political leader—”

  A sad, lopsided smile. “Well, they consider you a rather loveable but harmless buffoon. They only want us to keep the people happy, to distract them with noble sentiments while the world slides slowly into hell. They think all I can do is sit here and write poetry and fairy-romances in hopes that I might again inspire the folk with better deeds and better days. The Party views this with amusement, as a harmless distraction. Even I know it won’t be enough.”

  As William Morris #7 told me about his world, I had a powerful feeling of déjà vu as I remembered what Bertie had shown me in his novel—the future populated with mindless children, the museums and universities deserted, crumbling and cobwebbed. A garden state inhabited by no one with a will or intelligence greater than that in unenlightened Eden. In this new future I had helped to build, garden groves were maintained to delight the eye, while hidden farms and factories were run by self-operating machines and copies like my William Morris, who were treated no better than slaves. For the originals who remained, there was no useful work to fill the void left by the absence of useless toil. The poor had become rich, without becoming wise.

  “I want to live,” he said, gripping my wrist so hard it hurt. “I’ve been eluding them here in the gardens as often as I can, trying to call you down the long chain of memory.”
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  “I think I heard you. An echo, in a dream.”

  He nodded as if this were a viable form of communication. Perhaps, since we were such strange kin, it was.

  “But not like this,” he continued. “Not in this soulless world. Not unless we can change things for the better. Spark Hope. Rekindle Dream. Bring passion and beauty back, to replace this mindless passivity. Only with the fire of their imaginations will the people rise to change things.”

  His eyes burned into mine. He leaned so close I could feel his breath warm on my cheek. His face grew ruddy with this inner flame.

  His words sounded similar to the ones I had spoken with such passion not long ago—his complaints the ones that had drawn me to Socialism. Only now, the position of society had been reversed. Much of what I proposed as necessary for the ideal world might seem to be attained, albeit not in the manner I’d envisioned. And yet the problems were still much the same.

  I felt a painful pressure spreading out from the hard knot at the pit of my stomach, a sickness greater than the Time Machine had ever inspired.

  “Of course,” he said, “the Party itself has overlooked one crucial fact in my creation. I’m irrelevant now. I have no reason to exist. The people smile and love me, they gush over my designs and weep for my verses, they hound me for my autograph, that useless scrawl. But they don’t have it in them any longer to care what the Party does. They lead good lives, quiet lives. They believe themselves to be happy. They have no reason to rebel. They listen to me as the quaint and beloved hero of a long-dead age.”

  The leaves shifted, and darkness fell down into his eyes. I stood to go, pushing myself up on legs that did not want to move. He steadied me, but I could not meet his gaze.

  “You’re going back, aren’t you? You’re abandoning me.”

  I owed myself an honest answer. “I have to fix this.”