Blackbird: A Warrior of the No-When

by Martin Schiller

  The place that I chose was in the 3rd universe in the 19th century, in the wastelands surrounding our old city. There, I selected a large cluster of shattered towers and carefully guided Blackbird into an open place where the remains of a fallen structure had created a primitive hanger of sorts, offering us some concealment from the air. Naturally, I was concerned about our safety, given the great age of the ruins, but I reasoned that everything that could have collapsed, would have done so already, centuries before our arrival.

  “I should have realized it,” I declared, removing my harnesses and going over to my companion. “When I awoke and everyone was there--everyone except you. Now I wonder just how great the lie truly was. When the Professor told me that no one knew if you had been cloned or not, I believed him. But now--“

  “The Professor?” Elizabeth interjected in surprise. “Professor Merriweather?”

  “Why yes, my darling,” I replied. “He died in the raid on our lab, right along with Jenny and myself, but he--“

  Now, Elizabeth seemed even more alarmed. “Jenny?!”

  “Yes…Jenny,” I answered, becoming somewhat nonplussed. ”They were cloned, like I was. Like you were.”

  Elizabeth’s expression clouded anew. “Then the falsehood is even greater than we imagined,” she said. “When I awoke, it was the Professor and Jenny who greeted me. And Pierce. Since that day, Merriweather has been my tutor and confidant. In fact, I spoke with him just before my flight today.”

  Stunned, I knew what I would have to ask next, and I was almost afraid to hear the answer. “Exactly how did you come to cross paths with me today? What brought you to this part of the River?”

  “A dream,” she told me. “A vivid dream, and then the Sibyl was there, at my bedside, assuring me that the vision was a true one. She urged me to come here. She said that I would find you.”

  “Yes, of course,” I replied bitterly. “A dream and the Sibyl too. Tell me Elizabeth, what are the names of your fellow pilots?”

  She hesitated for a moment, and I knew that this was out of what remaining loyalty she still had for her faction, but finally, she responded. “Manfred, Ziva, Cassie, Wing Commander Hamilket…”

  I placed a finger to her lips, stopping her there. This was exactly what I had feared.

  “We have been fighting none other than ourselves,” I declared. “For those are exactly the names of my comrades.”

  I let this sink in, before I added, “You were not the only one who dreamed of our meeting. I too had such a vision--and my Sibyl encouraged me to seek you out. Oh, this is truly monstrous!”

  It was, and more. After I had drawn us both a meal from the Phaseship’s emergency stores, we talked further, and compared our experiences. By the end of our discussion, the situation that we found ourselves in had assumed truly staggering proportions. For it had proven to be more than merely a matter of our clones being set against one another. The very war itself was a complete lie.

  The signs had been there all along, and I had simply failed to perceive them. I had been too overwhelmed by it all, too consumed with my hatred for Pierce, and my longing for Elizabeth to apprehend the truth.

  The Professor had provided me with the first clues almost from the very start; when he caused me to remember that the nine universes were in fact limitless in number. That they split off into new and alternate dimensions in order to avoid a paradox.

  Then there had been the matter of Hitler Day, and the remark that Louise had made when I had impulsively shot Mr. Hitler without checking our list. That my mistake would be ‘fixed’.

  Fixed! As if none of what we had done had had any consequence whatsoever.

  Which was exactly the case. In a universe of infinite variation and possibility, neither side could ever truly win, nor lose. There would be universes were the Deviators triumphed, and others where the Continuity was the victor--and in the greater scheme of things, neither would have any real effect. It rendered all of our suffering and sacrifices absolutely meaningless.

  “They owe us an explanation,” Elizabeth finally said.

  I heartily agreed. “Yes. And I think that it is high time that we met these Masters face to face and demanded an accounting.”

  After my harrowing experience with the Sibyl, I was mindful of the possibility that we might be facing something just as overwhelming, or even more so, but I did not care. I was too angry. With a determined expression, I rose from my place, returned to the pilot’s seat, and set our course for the year 3000.

  ***

  The pursuit that I had feared was not long in coming. Only a few minutes into our flight, another Phaseship registered on my instruments. It was Pierce.

  “Ms. Steele,” he said, his voice sounding even more inhuman than ever over the cabin’s speakers. “You are not to proceed to the year 3000. Turn about and come with me. You have an enemy combatant aboard your ship and it is your duty to bring her back to Nazca for questioning.”

  I did not even think of asking him how he knew about our situation. That much was patently obvious; either the Sibyl had advised him, or my mysterious clone had paid another visit to the base and whispered the information into his ear. All that mattered was that he had come alone, and that I had no intention of complying.

  “I shall not, sir,” I answered. “We are done with this silly war.”

  “Then you have signed your death warrant,” he replied. “And this time, your demise will be a permanent one. I promise you that.”

  He was closing into gun range and I had no doubt that he would fire on us. I was not concerned though. Rather, I felt elation. I would put paid for the pain and sorrow that he had visited upon my life at last.

  Pierce fired the instant that he had the chance, but I was already sending Blackbird upwards into an evasive roll and his shots missed. Coming into the apex of my maneuver, I dropped the nose and came around sharply, answering him with blasts of my own. Pierce did not allow me to remain on his tail though, nor did I truly expect him to.

  Instead, he flipped over, dropped and began a loop that would turn the tables on me if I failed to respond. Right away, I descended and began a loop of my own.

  In turn, he went hard to port, and I mirrored his maneuver. For moment, he was above me and accelerating, and I used this to my advantage; rather than attempt to increase my own speed, I barked an order to Blackbird, “Hard deceleration now!”

  She responded to my command even as I brought us upwards again. I had only a second to prosecute my strategy, and I did not hesitate. My first shots missed, but the steady stream of destruction managed to catch him along the aft surface of his starboard wing. Pieces flew off it and I smiled in satisfaction. First blood was mine.

  He was not disabled however, and turned away. A lesser pilot would have attempted to regain the upper hand at this stage by attempting to come around on me, but for all his distasteful qualities, Pierce was no amateur. He executed a tight roll that would never have been possible with the monoplanes of my old universe.

  Then he was above and behind me, dealing out punishment. I managed to evade most of the bolts, but one lanced through my starboard wing, whilst the other penetrated the cabin.

  Alarms shrilled as our air began to leak away. Occupied as I was, I could not attend to the problem, but our mechanica could. It unlimbered itself and set straight to work applying a patch, freeing me to concentrate on the fight and returning the advantage to us.

  Rather than break away, as he must have expected, I used Pierce’s maneuver myself, spinning the Phaseship nose over tail. This placed him directly in front of me, and in the perfect position for an attack.

  I shot. This time it was no glancing blow, but a sure strike directly amidships. Although he managed to fly on, the back half of his Phaseship was now badly damaged.

  “Concede the battle, sir,” I demanded rising into another loop. “Clearly, I enjoy the upper hand.”

  “I will not,” he snarled. “I serve the Masters, and I will see you dead f
or the traitor you are!” It was an empty threat; now that his craft had suffered as much destruction as it had, it was nowhere near as nimble as mine.

  To his credit, he still tried to come around again, but I had dropped beneath him. This gave me a clear shot at the craft’s belly and I seized the chance. My chonoguns ripped into the Phaseship, and unable to withstand such a pounding, it disintegrated. But not before I saw Pierce eject and spin helplessly through space.

  “You may have won this round,” I heard him broadcast, “but I shall find you again Penelope Victoria Steele, wherever you are and however long it takes. You cannot hide from the Masters. Or me.”

  Had he been fully human, I might have adhered to my chivalrous code, and refrained from pressing the advantage against a helpless pilot. He was not human though, and he had a debt to pay.

  I let go with one final fusillade, watching as his robotic body exploded under the onslaught.

  Yet I had no illusions about my victory. If the Masters willed it, a new copy of Pierce would be created and I would be forced to fight him all over again. Unless, in the process of obtaining our answers, I managed to convince them otherwise. Sobered by this, I returned us to our original course and flew on.

  CHAPTER 10: Ouroboros

  In which the tenth and final artifact becomes known. Then the year 3000, and the answers to all of my questions.

  At our destination, our eyes were not met by an endless white void. Instead, we encountered the ordinary in a place where the extraordinary should have been; for we were gazing on the shores of Greenlake.

  It was precisely as I recalled, save for one salient difference. Instead of clouds and blue skies, the heavens above the waters were dominated by stars.

  I recognized the largest of these from Hypatia’s portrait at Maddenhill. They were the Pleiades, and I knew that their presence was not accidental by any means, but part of some message that our hosts were attempting to convey.

  I was not overawed though, nor did I struggle to puzzle it out. Rather, I landed Blackbird on the shore without a jot of hesitation. After all, there was really no point in rumination; I was here to confront the Masters and get some plain answers. Why waste any precious time on the mysterious when there had been mystery enough already?

  Instructing Elizabeth to remain aboard, I exited the craft. And I even managed to walk two whole steps before my perspective changed and I found myself sitting in one of the rowboats in the middle of the lake.

  Again, I was not astounded. After all, we had entered the realm of the faerie and things like this happened in such a magical place.

  I was also not alone.

  A figure, dressed in a spotless white robe was drifting over the water towards me, and as it neared, I realized that it wore my features. The only dissimilarity was that she parted her hair to the right as opposed to my left, identifying her as none other than the mysterious woman who had visited me in Nazca.

  I also noted that she wore a bracelet on her wrist. It was the Ouroboros that resided in my cabinet of curiosities back in Nazca.

  So we come to the final part of the puzzle at last, I reflected.

  “Who are you?” I demanded. “Are you one of the Masters?”

  “Indeed I am,” she replied, “You have found what you have been seeking, Penelope.”

  “Not quite,” I said. “I came in search of the truth. What are you? And why are you compelling us to fight in this war? What is the point of it?”

  The woman looked upwards at the stars with a blissful smile. “What should actually concern you is who we are, and who you truly are,” she replied. “You should also ask yourself why it was that you could see the cloud at Mons, but others could not.”

  “Yes,” I began to say, “Ziva mentioned something to me about that…”

  She returned her gaze to me and I was startled to see that all of the white in her eyes had vanished. They were completely black now, reminding me of Bo and Peep. The effect was extremely unnerving.

  “When you comprehend these truths, everything else will become clear. This is because you are not what you think you are, Penelope. You are far more. The Greys and the Reptilians should have provided you with all the clues.”

  I had no idea what she was referring to, and I was beginning to wonder if she was insane. Nevertheless, I repeated my question, and if anything, she seemed to be amused by my persistence.

  “What, you ask is the point?” my duplicate responded. “What for that matter, is the point of anything?’

  “Why must men and women fall in love, have children, and then grow old and die, only to know that their children will in turn suffer the very same fate, ad infinitum?”

  “Why for that matter should anyone bother to create great art, write poetry or compose music when it will only be forgotten a thousand years later? Why should any nation declare its existence, and then wage wars when all of the combatants will one day become nothing but dust? Why, I ask you, should any of us strive, or struggle at all?”

  I had no answer to this, but I supposed that this apparition was about to furnish me one, and remained silent.

  Then the scene around me changed. Now we were in Professor Merriweather’s old laboratory back in Seattle.

  “What is the truth?” she asked, holding a test tube aloft in emphasis. Her sclera had returned to their normal coloration and once again she and I were twins.

  “What is the purpose of existence when the inexorable march of time seems to render all things transient and apparently meaningless?”

  “I am sure that I do not know,” I finally said.

  “It is the journey itself,” she told me, returning the tube to its wooden rack. “It is the very process of learning, growing and ultimately realizing perfection--and then repeating it all over again. That is the ultimate truth. Only beginnings and endings are the lie.’

  “You came here wondering who we were and why we have staged this conflict. The war is just as endless as you think it is. It’s ‘conclusion’ changes with every perambulation. Each side is both the victor and the vanquished.’

  “In the end however, none of that matters. What does is the struggle itself, the unending dance of existence and the pressure that this exerts upon the soul to grow and evolve.’

  “By now you should be quite familiar with this concept. While there are many copies of you in many universes, the ones living in the third are some of our most successful experiments. The twin pressures of oppression, and the desire to rebel against it, come together there to produce the most precious of diamonds.”

  I responded with a nonplussed expression, for I did not know how to react to this.

  “There is a people that call themselves the Hindus,” my host continued. “They believe that the soul is immortal and that it lives in a body, then dies, and is reborn anew. Again and again and again.”

  I finally had to speak up. “To what end, madam? If you ask me, this is all complete madness.”

  She smiled patiently. “Not madness, but an effort to achieve enlightenment, to find a connection with what the Hindus call Nirvana. To them, every life is a step towards unity with the ultimate truth. They perceive existence as a great play, with the same troupe of actors playing many roles upon a cosmic stage.”

  The laboratory was gone now, and in its place was another familiar landmark; Frye’s Opera House. I was seated in one of the gilded box seats and my host was standing on the stage, looking up at me.

  “Sometimes these souls play the lover and the friend. At other times, the son or the daughter, the wife or the husband. The savior--“

  She transformed, becoming Bookman Pierce.

  “--or even the executioner. But always the same spirits, on the same journey together, and with the same ultimate destination.”

  An instant later, she had returned to her original form and was seated in the box alongside me. “The Hindus have the basic arrangement aright--and we agree with them, but our means differ. Where they see the transmigration of t
he spirit from one vessel to the next, we employ another method.”

  “The transmission of memories from one clone to the next,” I volunteered.

  “Indeed,” she agreed. “And you have put your finger on the very heart of what we are and always will be; none other than the end product of thousands of years of imprinting, gathering new information, and passing that data along to the next instance of ourselves. Through this accumulation, we have found our own way to rebirth and immortality. We are, Penelope, the sum total of all our former lives, taken to its logical conclusion.”

  “And the end?” I asked. “Is there an end?”

  “Yes and no,” the figure answered. “Like the Hindu model, we are constantly in flux, arising in ignorance and progressing to a state of transcendent perfection, only to forget everything and start all over again.’

  “But the journey, my dear Penelope, the magnificent journey, is what makes it all worthwhile. We are as the Hindus say, God, experiencing and re-experiencing itself in one great eternal dance.”

  “I do not believe in God,” I retorted firmly.

  To my surprise, she laughed as I had once done at parties when I had just been told something utterly absurd; lightly and with censorious amusement.

  “Oh Penelope, you might as well proclaim that you do not believe in the sun. It will still shine down upon you regardless, although you will not enjoy its warmth half as much.”

  With that, she reached into a fold of her robe. When she brought it out and opened her hand, I saw that it was one of the collar pins of the Bookman uniform, the familiar winged hourglass. Then it morphed into a perfect infinity symbol.

  “The universe and our existence within it is without end, or beginning,” she stated. “An infinite loop, the Ouroboros consuming its own tail, ending, arising and ending again, forever.”

  Her hand closed at this, and when I looked up, we were in the examination room where I had awakened from my first death and begun life as a Bookman.

  “And now I will tell you who I am. I am you, Penelope. I am exactly what you will one day become, and this is why, when we knew that you would come here, I volunteered to be your teacher. You see, someday, our roles will be reversed. When that time comes, try to remember everything that I told you this day. For I will be sorely in need of your wisdom”