Paradox Bound

by Peter Clines

  “He said hello and asked if I needed to use the well. To this day I can’t remember what I said. He’d never tell me. I think he liked teasing me with it. But I ended up standing next to him and filling an old canteen that had been hanging dry on my mule’s pack for a year or so, just for an excuse to talk to him.

  “He had on a brilliant red undershirt. I’d never seen such vibrant colors, or such fine-woven cloth. Almost like silk. And there was a face painted on it in dabs of black ink. I remember at the time I thought it was an image of the Lord Jesus. He was one of the few people I’d seen paintings of at the time.” She glanced at Eli. “I learned later it was Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara. He was a freedom fighter in the late—”

  “I know who he is,” said Eli. “Mrs. Pritchard.”

  She smirked. “We talked for an hour. About Eleanor. About the world outside. He’d already traveled most of the country at that point. And most of history, as well, although he was very clever about not letting on.”

  “And then you ran off with him?”

  “No,” snapped Harry, although her eyes brightened. “What kind of woman do you take me for?”

  “The kind who’d show up at someone’s door in her underwear at one in the morning.”

  She raised a threatening fist. “Christopher was a gentleman, unlike some people. He left—alone—but promised to return. And he did, just a week later. I remember thinking his beard had grown very fast.”

  Eli nodded.

  “He kept coming back. Sometimes to refill the main tank. Sometimes the reserve. By the seventh or eighth visit it was plain he wasn’t coming for the water. And our town well was awful. In retrospect, he must have been cleaning Eleanor’s filters and carburetor out every night.

  “The twelfth time he came and stayed for four days. He’d told me a little about the search, but I still didn’t understand what a risk he was taking, staying in one place for so long. He bought some good clothes, went to see my pa, and asked permission to court me.”

  Eli pursed his lips. “This was…1902?”

  “By that point, 1904.”

  “They were still doing that then? Asking permission to court someone?”

  “No, as a matter of fact, they were not. It wasn’t unheard-of, but it was a bit old-fashioned. Pa had heard about the mysterious stranger seen with his daughter. This made him seem more eccentric than respectable. He asked Christopher to leave and forbade me from ever speaking to him again.”

  “Ahhh.”

  “It was two months before I saw him again. At the well, filling Eleanor’s tanks. Looking for me. It was a week before Christmas.” She glanced at Eli, and the edges of her mouth twitched again. “That’s when I ran off with him.” She sighed, a slow, happy sound that warmed the small guest room.

  “We searched together for six months before he formally proposed. Three weeks later we were married in the city of Las Vegas. Entertainment capital of the world. Elvis Presley himself performed the wedding.”

  “When was this?

  “2006.”

  “Okay,” said Eli, “just to be clear, because of all this time-travel stuff—”

  “History travel.”

  “Right. When you say Elvis Presley performed the ceremony, do you mean the Elvis, or…”

  “I didn’t think to ask.”

  “Ahhh.”

  “We were together for three glorious years. Three years, three months, three weeks, five days. Three, three, three, five.”

  “And then…?”

  The light in her eyes dimmed. “And then we weren’t.”

  A few possible responses went back and forth in his mind, and Eli picked the one he hoped would be best received. He reached out and set his hand on hers. Harry tensed, relaxed, then turned her hand over so their palms slid together.

  Her hand was very warm. She squeezed his once—a good, solid grip—and then released it. “Thank you, Eli.”

  He took his hand back.

  She sat up, squared her shoulders, and raised her eyes to his. “Christopher Pritchard. Phoebe Fitzgerald. Abraham Porter. Alice Ramsey. Roscoe Montgomery.”

  He nodded. “Christopher Prit—”

  “No,” she said. “My fault. You need to start with me. Harriet Pritchard, then Christopher Pritchard, Phoebe, and so on.”

  He nodded. “The next link in the Chain.”

  “Precisely.”

  “And you want me to learn this so…?”

  She snorted. “For a clever man, you can be quite daft at times.”

  “I…Thank you?”

  “I’m teaching you because you’re my partner, Eli. Because someday you may have to teach it to someone else. You’re the next link.”

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  “You’ve earned it. So…” She shifted in her chair. “Harriet Pritchard. Christopher Pritchard. Phoebe Fitzgerald. Abraham Porter. Alice Ramsey. Roscoe Montgomery.”

  “Harry Pritchard,” echoed Eli. “Christopher Pritchard. Phoebe Fitzgerald. Abraham…Porter?”

  She nodded.

  “Abraham Porter. Alice…Ramses?”

  “Alice Ramsey,” she said. “Then Roscoe Montgomery. Say it again.”

  “Harry Pritchard. Christopher Pritchard. Phoebe—”

  “You should use my proper name.”

  “But I know you as Harry.”

  “This is for posterity. I’d prefer it if people remember me as a woman.”

  “But not a lady.” He gestured at her knee. The robe had fallen open again to reveal red flannel.

  “Don’t be an ass,” Harry said, but the edges of her lips twitched as she did. “Say the Chain again. Properly this time.”

  “Harriet Pritchard,” he recited. “Christopher Pritchard. Phoebe Fitzgerald. Abraham Porter…”

  23

  Eli stepped from his guest room. Harry had left him an hour ago, after they’d recited the Chain back and forth a hundred or so times. Then he’d stretched back out on his bed and…

  Stared at the ceiling.

  He flexed his toes on the carpet of the narrow hall. Bare feet still seemed luxurious. Even having an untucked, half-unbuttoned shirt felt refreshing.

  He hooked his thumbs into his pockets and wandered back to the dining room. The lights had been dimmed. He hadn’t seen John Henry since dinner. The train seemed huge and sprawling for one person, and Eli wondered what kind of hours their host kept when he had the train to himself.

  “Can’t sleep?”

  Eli jumped and looked over his shoulder.

  The man himself sat in one of the chairs in the corner. He’d removed his coat and loosened his tie again. A book sat in his lap where he’d lowered it.

  “You scared the hell out of me,” said Eli.

  John bowed his head. “Apologies, my friend.” He kept his voice pitched low and quiet. “Is there something wrong with your room?”

  Eli shook his head. “No, it’s wonderful. This whole train’s amazing. And not just because I’ve been sleeping on dirt and blankets for a couple of days.”

  “I’m pleased to hear it.”

  “What about you? Keeping an eye on us?”

  John shook his head. “Harry’s one of the few people I completely trust with the Steel Bucephalus. And she trusts you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because you’re traveling with her. That woman doesn’t let anyone into Eleanor for a second longer than they have to be there.”

  Eli shrugged.

  “So,” John said, gesturing at the chair across from him, “what brings you out and about at such a late hour, Eli Teague?”

  He sat down. “Every time I start to nod off,” he said, “I remember where I am. And when I am. Or when I could be, I guess?”

  “We’re in the summer of 2033,” said John. “This particular branch of track has been abandoned for a while at this point. It’s a nice seven-year stretch of history where I can park the Bucephalus at night.”

  Eli bit his lip. “Can I ask you a question?�
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  “Of course. You’re a guest.”

  Eli patted out a quick drum solo on the arm of the chair.

  “I’m not a genie, Eli, and I don’t have much of a temper. You don’t have to worry about how you phrase it.”

  “You and Harry, you’ve both traveled back and forth a lot.”

  “Tens of thousands of miles, each of us.”

  “The length of American history?”

  John nodded. “Slightly more for her. As I’ve said, I’m limited by the tracks.”

  “Why only three hundred years?”

  John raised his bushy eyebrows. His pleasant smile dimmed just enough to notice.

  “I get that you want simpler machines,” said Eli. “Things you can fix yourself with local resources. That makes sense. But nobody has a…an antimatter battery or a Mr. Fusion or something. And both of you talk about history as, well, a set block of years. That you can only go so far forward. And everybody she’s mentioned to me, all the searchers…it seems like they’re almost all from the past or the present. Well, my past.”

  John nodded. “You’re very observant, my friend. It took me months of traveling to discover something you noticed in just a few days.”

  “So what is it? Is there a war? Does the United States…disband or something? Fall apart?”

  “Things get…tricky once you pass 2050.”

  “Tricky how?”

  John closed his book and set it on a side table. “People get lost up there, in the far future,” he said. “Most of them never come back. Some do, maybe a quarter of them, but they’ve never seen the same thing. Everyone who returns tells a different story.”

  “Like what?”

  “Some say it’s a paradise. The dream’s been restored, the country progresses and prospers in harmony. Others say things have collapsed into anarchy. Warring city-states, like the Dark Ages of Europe.” He sighed. “And yes, a few say it’s just a wasteland from the atomic wars. Some see survivors. Some don’t. One old-timer even said he saw—”

  John stopped and smiled.

  “What? What did he see?”

  “He claimed he went way up there, to 2063, and everything was gone. Everything. No cities, no water, very little life. Just miles and miles of sand…and huge monsters up in the sky, eating anything that was left.”

  Eli raised an eyebrow.

  “He barely got away, as he tells it.”

  “As he tells it,” Eli echoed.

  John shrugged. “He’d only tell the story if you got a few drinks into him.”

  “So what’s that mean? That we can’t travel far ahead?”

  “Everyone has ideas, of course. Personally, I think it means we’re running out of time.”

  “Is that a clever play on words or…?”

  “I think,” said John, “when the dream was stolen, the future began to unravel. Maybe there was a set future for the United States at one point, a grand destiny, but it began to fray and come apart, to spread itself in different directions. And I think it’s going to continue to unravel, all the way back to the beginning.”

  “You mean, back to when the dream was made.”

  John nodded. “Our whole country undone.” He gestured out the window, at the blackness. “What will the world be like,” he wondered, “if there never was a United States of America? The world wars? The space race? All the many inventions and innovations and entertainments born here?”

  A few heartbeats passed. Eli became aware of a faint, distant wheezing with a coarse, rasping edge to it. He imagined old pistons and gnashing gears, and then remembered being woken up when he and Harry slept under the stars.

  John glanced over his shoulder at Harry’s room. “Forgive me,” he said, his attention returning to Eli. “I don’t mean to make it sound like the end is nigh. I just think there’s much more at stake here than individual goals.”

  Eli nodded. “Harry’s kind of said the same thing.”

  “More of us should be working together. Myself included.” He sighed. “You’ll have to forgive me. I tend to get a bit maudlin sometimes when I sit up at night like this.”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “Depends on what we’re drinking, I suppose.”

  “Do you stop every night?”

  “The Bucephalus?” John shook his head. “Depends on where I’m going. When I need to be there. I never slept much when I was a younger man. It’s a trait I’m glad has followed me into middle age. Lets me cover more ground.”

  “So you just travel all the time? Back and forth across America.”

  “Back and forth,” he agreed. “Forward and backward. If there are tracks somewhere and somewhen in the United States, odds are I’ve ridden them.”

  “Must be a lot of work. Keeping all this up and running. And clean.”

  John chuckled. “I have some people on retainer. I just don’t like the idea of servants, forced to live here in their master’s home.” He swung his hand to take in the room.

  “Why do you need all this, then?”

  “The guest rooms?”

  “No,” said Eli. “Well, yes. Even going with the idea that you’ve chosen a train as your…your mode of transport, why do you need all this space?”

  John set his fingertips together.

  “I mean, it seems like Harry and everyone she talks about gets by with cars. You could’ve done a mobile home or something, but you went with a mobile apartment building. A mobile mansion.”

  “I suppose I did, didn’t I?”

  “So why do it if you’re just going to be alone?”

  John stared over his fingertips at Eli. “Let me show you something.”

  He stood up and gestured for Eli to follow him. They walked back through the train car to the rear door, outside onto the car’s small deck, and across the connector into John’s private car. Simple carpet lined the floor. Three chairs formed a loose triangle. Another stove, this one not quite as polished and elegant. Two wardrobes stood face-to-face halfway down the modified Pullman car. They moved past them, revealing a simple bed, a desk, and another bookshelf. Eli had expected something more lush and not quite so…functional. It reminded him of a few loft apartments he’d seen.

  John walked straight through to the door in the back, pulled a key ring from his coat, and unlocked it. They stepped outside, and the cold platform chilled Eli’s feet. He stepped across to the next car, one of the ones with the shades drawn. He thumbed through the brass keys and unlocked that door as well.

  “This,” said John, stepping aside, “is my search.”

  Summer camp art projects popped into Eli’s mind, with bright yarn twisted around Popsicle sticks to form colorful shapes. Then the patterns separated and refined in his eyes, and the room looked more like one of the museum exhibits he’d always tried to find interesting in college.

  The Pullman car was filled with standing panels, not unlike the cubicle dividers Eli knew so well from his local Stahlbank branch. These, at least, matched the aesthetic of the train, with deep-red fabric panels framed in dark hardwood. They stretched the length of the car, breaking it up into three long aisles.

  Each panel had a poster-sized picture on it. Heavy threads of yellow, orange, and red crisscrossed each image. The threads led to hundreds of bright plastic pushpins, each one marking a specific point on…

  Eli looked again. Not pictures. Maps.

  A few of the colorful threads ran between maps. Some stretched over panels and across aisles. Manila tags hung on those.

  Eli stepped in close to study one in the center aisle. A typed index card at the top of the panel declared it to be January 4–October 23, 1838. The United States reached the Pacific coast up by Washington, but lacked a big square swath that included most of the southwest, including a whole stretch of coastline. There were nine pushpins in the map, five along the northeast coast, one on the other side of Florida toward the Gulf of Mexico, and three scattered out across the Midwest. It was hard to be sure where without state line
s.

  He followed a line across two panels to another map, June 12, 1840–April 1, 1841. A spiderweb of threads sprawled across this one too. Thirteen pins, all in different places. The strings were different colors and different lengths. He spun to look behind him, at August 7, 1892–December 31, 1892.

  “Is this…” Eli turned to John. “Is this all the places you’ve been?”

  The other man shook his head. “To be honest, I’ve traveled to less than half of them.”

  Eli stepped into the next aisle and looked at the map against the train’s inner wall. February 15, 1940–November 8, 1940. “It’s the other searchers,” he said. “You’re keeping tabs on them.”

  “No, although many of them are up there in one way or another.”

  “Then I have no idea,” said Eli. “I’m still not even sure what questions to ask half the time.”

  “Astronomy is another fascination of mine,” said John. “Celestial mechanics. As I said, I’ve always slept very little, so as a boy I’d watch the stars. I’ve sat in on several lectures from Neil deGrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan.”

  “Carl Sagan is the Cosmos guy, right?”

  John nodded. “In astronomy there’s a method of searching that’s best called mathematical prediction. It’s a way of looking for things which can’t be seen by tracing the effect they have on other things. This means looking for minor alterations in orbits, radiation levels, and light refraction. For example, the existence and location of Neptune was predicted by studying the orbit of Uranus.

  “For me”—he gestured at the panels—“it means watching for examples of the dream influencing people’s lives.”

  Eli looked at the aisles of maps, the miles of string. “So all this is…it’s the same sort of thing Harry’s following?”

  “In a way.” He stretched out a finger and set it on a pushpin. “These are all people who’ve been touched by the dream.”

  “There’s thousands of them.”

  “Tens of thousands,” agreed John. “Almost four hundred maps of the United States, stretching across almost three hundred years. The diagramming continues in the next car. And I’m always refining my data.”