City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis (18 page)

The Tin Man and I were stalemated. It would not hurt me, and I could not hurt it, not with anything it recognized as a weapon. Tin Man could not stop me from shooting, but could stop me from killing Jack.

A few minutes later the three of us were running across the darkened bridge toward the Babylon tower, I had dialed my hand weapon to a flamethrower and high-energy laser setting, so that deathrays and masses of flaming jellied gasoline were washing and rolling every which way. Tin Man was blinking through every version of the scene so quickly, and shattering the timestream into smaller and smaller fractions, that the mist under our feet grew thicker and angrier, and the cold got colder, and finally, it started to snow.

Picture a bridge made of slippery golden crystal metal, too dark for human eyes to see, coated with frost and falling snow and new ice and pools of burning petrol melting a layer of water beneath the ice. And there were gaps in the surface underfoot which no Warden bothered to order repaired, even assuming anyone in this city knew how to repair this stuff. Or assuming anyone knew who built it. The Wardens say they built it, but you can't believe everything you are told.

Normally a robot that can step backward through time cannot slip and fall. Nor can a man whom the robot can easily dodge tackle it. But a harpoonist with a steady hand and the best eye in the Pacific Ocean, a dark prince in a tall hat, who stands silently on a balcony overhead and watches like a hawk, well, he can throw his harpoon straight and true into the glass skull that is the monster's only weak spot.

It did not kill the Tin Man. How could it? It was just a machine. The glass skull was merely a hood ornament. Something to scare its victims.

But it had a collar and heavy clamps to hold its trophy skulls in place. The razor-sharp harpoon could not penetrate on the gold null-time substance of the armor. But the toggle barbs in the shaft could catch the protrusions inside the metal neckring of the machine, and lodge the harpoon fast as if it had been hammered in.

The Tin Man would have dodged a spear or a lance or a javelin, stepped back in time, and decapitated the spearman. But the circuits in my pistol did not recognize a whaler's harpoon as a weapon. I found that out the day I met Queequeg the first time. And whoever had programmed the Tin Man made the same mistake.

Now, you may ask, why did Tin Man not simply step backward in time and step to one side of the predicted flightpath of the harpoon? You may have noticed how often I let the Tin Man hit me in the neck. You may have noticed that the damned thing did not learn. It was not programmed to update its programming. It kept trying to decapitate me because that was what it was ordered to do.

There were no loopholes, no exceptions, no if's and's or but's. When the target (me) was holding a weapon that threatened its client (in this case, Jack) and was in the position to be struck in the neck by the Tin Man's axe, then, as predictably as loaded dice rolling a lucky seven, the Tin Man had to move to that position and take that swing.

It was not programmed to watch its step and protect itself, because what could hurt it through its ultra-invulnerable time-null armor? And if it was hurt, so what? Just get the Warden to replay the scene and change the ending.

So when I saw the harpoon enter the glass skull and lodge there, I realized what I had to do next (next from my point of view), to explain why the Tin Man would not in a moment from now (or, from its point of view, just a moment ago) retroactively dodge Queequeg's harpoon strike.

I took my gun in my teeth with autogyroscopic aiming circuit turned on, so the barrel spun this way and that like the nose of a tapir, always keeping an aiming laser pointed at Jack. Then I rushed towards the Tin Man and tackled him.

Queequeg heaved on the harpoon line with the strength a man gets from wrestling whales, and he yanked Tin Man off the slippery metal frost-coated bridge deck.

Our trenchcoats flapped and fluttered, and my hat flew off, as over the side we went.

It was programmed to keep decapitating the threat. As we fell, the Tin Man reversed its grip on the axe and made a motion like a man swatting a fly on his face. And then it did it again, and again, because Tin Man was not ordered to save itself from danger. It was programmed to hit me. And the only place it could hit me, if I were off the bridge, was likewise off the bridge.

I hope you can follow this Celtic knot of cause and effect here. If I hadn't grabbed the machine that can dodge any grab, the machine would not have stood still and let itself get harpooned with the harpoon, because then my grab would have missed. And it permitted me to grab it, it could not do otherwise, because with my arms around it, it could hit me, and if it had dodged, it could not.

We were in plunging towards the mists. With gun still clenched in my teeth like a pirate's cutlass, I seized the harpoon line with both hands and both legs and managed to snag it. Then, with one hand and two legs still clutching the line, I drew my switchblade with my free hand, flicked it open and reached for the loop between me and the Tin Man. Just then the line went taut, the wind was knocked out of me, and the switchblade went spiraling downward into the mists of oblivion.

Dammit! The day Gavrilo Princip was hanged in the stairwell of the Royal Exile Diner, where Franz Ferdinand of Austria worked as a busboy, Franz wept for joy into his apron, but he had nothing to give me. So John X. Beidler, who ran the northwest Vigilance Committee, let me keep the assassin's switchblade knife. First my bat, now this. It was my day for losing things

I put one hand on the line above the harpoon head, and had my feet kicking and slipping on the golden shoulders and ripped trenchcoat of the Tin Man.

Above us, through the swimming blur of intervening mists, I saw Jack, staring over the side of the bridge in awe and fear.

Jack's head jerked up and disappeared when the girl screamed again, and I also, very dimly, heard the timer I'd set in Aaron Burr's pistol go off. Had it been five minutes already? It felt more like five years.

But no shot rang out. Some people are just too kind-hearted for their own good. Or too soft-headed.

There was only one thing left to do. I put my head down so that the harpoon line was clamped between my chin and my breastbone. I felt the pain in my neck as the machine reached up and swung his axe at me, severing the line which was the only thing preventing his heavy and utterly invulnerable body from plummeting into the bottomless, smoky white nothingness below.

Goodbye, Tin Man. I think I'll miss you least of all.
I wish that its engineer would have programmed the damned thing with a voice circuit, so that I could have heard it go
Aaaeeiiii!
as it plunged into oblivion. Design flaw, if you ask me. Anyway, that was one pain in the neck gone.

“Down, boy,” I muttered. And my gun magnetically walked down my chest into my holster, folded itself up, and slid inside for a nap.

Getting back onto the bridge did not take as long as it seemed, because Queequeg was hauling me up even faster than I was climbing the line, so before I knew it, I was above the mist surface. Then a strong dark hand with thick calluses and grimy nails was reaching down and plucking me up as easily as I might have plucked up a kitten drowning in a toilet bowl.

“You jump. What for? No life no more for you?” Queequeg squinted and hid a smile.

“Nope. I wasn't committing suicide. The man we're hunting saw me in a destiny glass. A prophecy. But he did not say he saw me die. He only said he saw me fall. He could not see what happened after I fell into the mist, because destiny glasses can't see through the mist. That's why he thought the outcome was safe, so why he entered the scene.”

Queequeg stepped over and carefully picked up his top hat, brushed it fastidiously, and placed in on his head, raising his chin with princely pride. “Enemy, he falls too. Not a good death. Nothing to eat.”

“Which enemy?”

“Talamaur.” He pointed toward the mist with a jerk of his chin.

“You can't eat metal. You would have broken your teeth.”

“Yojo, he eat spirit. No eat metal.” Queequeg looked at the severed end of his line in his hand where there hung the conspicuous absence of his best harpoon. He grimaced stoically, and began winding up the slack around his elbow in rapid, practiced motions. “Yojo, he says I save you enough for one day.”

“Am I still in danger?”

“Yojo smells death. Death soon comes. Man we hunt, you say he looks. Sees future. Sees what comes. He sees you fall down into mist. Yes?”

“Yes.”

He poked me in the chest with a thick, dark forefinger. His finger felt like an iron poker. “Then why it is he sees not you climb out of mist? He dies. He sees he dies, yes? But if he sees, how it is he dies?”

He turned and walked away into the gloom.

“Quickwig! What about the hunt? I said you would feast after we get him!”

A hollow laugh answered me. “Eat flesh, not mist.”

You are probably wondering why I was not rushing back to save the girl I'd left alone with the lecherous old man. But I'd lived too long in the city beyond Time to be in a hurry. You see, I figured it was a done deal. If I was not the dead man, then he must be the dead man. No matter what happened, the old man was not making it out of this scene alive. Sooner or later, this was the end for him.

So I did not run, I strolled back up the ramp, through the hole in the wall, and into the room with the hole in the bathroom.

The girl was there. She had draped the silk sheet from the bed around her body, making it look as if she was wearing a long flowing toga. She was sitting on the edge of the bed and slowly getting to her feet. Her eyes were half-lidded, as if she had just been hit with a stun ray. Or maybe that was just the natural cast of her features.

And Jack was there, with Aaron Burr's cheater gun in his hand. The alarm was still ringing. Ding, ding, ding, ding. The girl was moaning, sobbing, which somehow she still managed to make sound alluring. And Jack was panting as if he had just run a race.

The old man was on the ground at Jack's feet, gasping and unable to speak, trying to hold his thin and trembling hands over his face and stomach and groin all at the same time. He had the walking stick, but he was not using it to block the blows or strike back. In fact, he was curled around it as if trying to protect it.

“Any last words?” said Jack. The old man was out of breath, and could not speak. He just whimpered.

“It's not a good shoot, Mr. K.” I said. “He isn't placing anyone in immediate threat of life or limb now. This isn't self-defense.”

Jack gave me a look of hatred. “You going to stop me, flatfoot?”

“Hell, no. You went to a lot of trouble, more than you remember, to set up this scenario. I don't care about him and I sure as hell don't care about you. How old are you, Jack? You look about fifty. You were supposed to die at forty-six. Any time you lived here was extra time. And here you are, throwing it away.”

“Mr. President, don't you understand what he's saying?” the girl said anxiously. “Don't shoot him! Please don't!”

The old man had gotten his breath back, and he had a strangely calm look on his face. A look of resignation. Of defeat.

But in his eyes there gleamed an eerie hate-filled look of victory.

Jack pulled the trigger. The noise felt like a hammer driving a spike into my ear. The gun barrel was less then two feet from the old man's head, so his skull exploded like a watermelon, and the carpet was transformed into the floor of your local butcher shop, the one in the back room that no customer ever sees. The smell of blood and cordite did to my nose what the deafening report had done to my ears.

Jack said something. I could not hear him, but from the way his mouth moved, from the look on his face, he was saying something about justice, or maybe vengeance.

Then he stopped, his face thoughtful, intent.

He was staring down at the corpse.

Perhaps he realized at the last minute what was really happening. The body refused to evaporate. It stayed real. It stayed inevitable.

He squinted in disbelief, staring even more intently. He started trembling then, and not from the cold.

Jack, now the only Jack here, turned toward me. His eyes were haunted. “You said I went to some sort of trouble, more than I remembered, to set this up. But all I did was go to your office. Luciano recommended you. We talked about killing a man. What did you mean? What don't I remember?”

“A lot, Mr. K. For starters, you don't remember who punched you in the eye. You don't remember entering my office, or what we talked about for the first twenty minutes. You don't remember what you had in your hands. The bowling bag, with a helmet inside.

“We talked about killing a man,” I continued. “That part you remember. But you don't remember how many times I told you not to do it. You should have listened. It's too late now.”

Maybe Jack was listening, or maybe not. He was staring in horror at his gun hand. Mist was trickling up from between his fingers. Of course that was where the paradox would spread out from. That was the epicenter.

He dropped Aaron Burr's pistol clattering to the bloodstained floor and screamed, grabbing his left hand with his right. Now the flesh was boiling off his hand, turning into white and ghostly smoke, and the ghosts of his fingers, in every possible position his hand might have been in or could be in, surrounded the stump of his disintegrating arm like the branches of a swaying tree. The flesh of his face was already transparent when he screamed, and his eyes, rimmed with red muscles, were staring out, horror-stricken, from his bone-white skull. His other arm and his leg was also fading into mist, and the mists were rapidly dissipating.

The sound of his pleading was the worst. It was not just his voice, begging me to save him, begging the girl, begging the dead guy, begging the Masters of Time, because a multitude of his voices were speaking all at once, saying all the possible things he might have said at this point, overlapping, interrupting.

I understand temporal paradox is a painful way to go, since the nervous system, as it disintegrates, sends contradictory signals from all your dispersing versions into the pain center of your brain. He seemed like a brave man. I am sure at least some versions did not complain or beg, or maybe one version said a prayer, or something. But it was lost in the throng.