City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis (20 page)

Jack's memory was fairly hard, and so, to him, getting shot and then suddenly finding himself in the scene that never happened was no different from me getting killed and having the circuit in my gun retroactively erect a nimbus a moment in the past, and suddenly being never-killed half a hiccup in the direction of elsewhen.

The helmet probably just erased the hardened parts of the memories, the anachronisms. It should be easy, given Time Warden technology, to turn into mist those memories in your head that, from the point of view of the time continuum, came from nowhere for no reason.

But from the point of view of the non-dead Jack, his personal continuity, what happened? I assume the shooter and his gun disappeared into mist before the trigger was pulled. Which meant that the job he had hired me to do could not get done.

Well, Hell. I was not going to let that happen, not if I could help it. I needed to find a gun that would not vanish into the discontinuity mists.

A few minutes later, with the bowling bag and the accursed helmet under my arm, I found a newsboy at the corner of two bridges willing to swap me a paper for a half-empty carton of melted strawberry ice cream. He agreed. Some people are just desperate, I guess.

Ben Franklin and William Howard Russell published the paper. Beneath words of wisdom from Poor Richard, was the Recurring Events section. There I found the announcement of the next duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton.

I may have a hard life, but I am glad I am not Aaron Burr. Imagine having a hardened memory, and remembering Hamilton's pistol ball pass through various parts of your body, breaking bones and piercing organs of which you are particularly fond, rolling in agony on the ground in a pool of your own blood, leaving you maimed or leaving you dying, slowly or quickly, over and over again, and knowing it would happen again tomorrow, as part of the opening ceremonies at the beginning of every horserace between the Blue and Green. And all because some Time Warden thinks it is funny that Alex Hamilton is a much better shot than you.

I patted the bowling bag tucked under my arm. I guessed Old Aaron would be delighted to swap, and I wanted to get rid of this thing. Probably as bad as he wanted to get rid of the memories of his endless duel with Hamilton.

Why couldn't they just forgive and forget? Can't people change?

The second time I met Jack, it was in my office. This was on day three thousand twenty-eight, about noon.

He was sitting on my couch. It is a pretty nice couch, actually, because I don't have a bed, and I sleep on it. The gold helmet was sitting on the floor next to the arm of the couch, right where it had been dropped.

I was not going to pick it up. I did not want to touch it.

You can understand why such an instrument would be useful in a city full of retired time travelers, people who like to play God with other people's pasts and futures. No matter how unlikely it was that someone would develop the theory and practice of such a hideous machine, rest assured, the Time Wardens were bound to fiddle with the timelines until they produced a version of history that led to a helmet like this.

Jack groaned as if he was having a bad dream. Little did he know that any nightmare was better than what was he was about wake up into.

He sat up suddenly, like a punch-drunk fighter hearing the bell. “What–what just happened?”

“You took a nap on the couch.” Which was true as far as it went.

He rubbed his eyes, got up, frowning in puzzlement. He touched his black eye and he winced.

“Quite a shiner you got there,” I said. “You box? You been in a fight?”

He looked around my office for a moment, touching the tender black flesh around his swollen eye. “No, I don't remember–who hit me? Who let me get hurt?”

Who let me get hurt? That said something about his character. Not something good.

“You left your men outside,” I said. “Step out the door, take a look. Ask them the time and date, if you think you've been time-ducted. Ask them what you are doing here.”

Jack raised his voice. “Eddy!”

My outer door opened instantly, as if the guy had been keeping his hand on the knob. Blackbeard the Pirate stuck his shaggy head in. He had his sword and flintlock stuck through his sash, and firecrackers tied to his beard (which covered his cheeks almost to his nose) and fuses under his hat, but nothing was drawn and the freakish beard was not lit. Thank goodness.

“Yes, Mr. President? Is ought nae proper, sir?”

“Tell me the date, and where we came from, Mr Teach.”

Blackbeard was not surprised at the question. He'd been in Metachronopolis long enough to know the ropes. “Sixty-three days since your last, sir. You done burned the ken at the grogshop with Lucky Luciano, and crossed here with me and me boys through the Japanner Tower. I reckon but an hour past, sir.”

Burned the ken
, in case your doohickey that retroactively feeds Eighteenth Century slang into your head goes haywire, is when strollers leave an alehouse without paying their quarters. I reminded myself to get paid in advance.

“Why am I here?” Jack said.

Blackbeard looked at me narrowly. He said, “To silent a man after pommeling him right, sir. Some rum cull snabbled your frisky game-pullet. You came here to dawb Jakes the Miller.”

That would be yours truly. Jacob is my Christian name. Miller is slang for a murderer, a killer.

“How did I get this black eye?” asked Jack. “Did someone hit me?”

Blackbeard looked astounded, at least, as astounded as a man can look when you can only see a T-shape of flesh surrounding his beady eyes and big beak of a nose. “How would I be knowing if you're nae telling?”

“When did it happen?”

“Yesterday. On sixty-two. Out you went alone on privy business, abram of your loyal bullies. You come back with that knock on your costard. Never cackled who fetched you that culp.”

Jack waved him away and Blackbeard closed the door. I took out my gizmo that deadens any outgoing noise, and set the zone to exclude everything outside the door. If business were better, I would have a waiting room out there, but it is just a section of hall where I put some chairs and a desk for Penny.

Jack said apologetically. “Mr. Teach does not know what a private detective is. He thinks you are an assassin. I only want you to find a certain man.”

“All right. And then?”

“Then assassinate him.”

I shook my head. “I am telling you not to do it. It is suicidal. I mean that literally. You won't survive the scene.”

Jack crossed over to the chair in front of my desk and sat down. He put his elbows on the desk, but he was a client, so I said nothing.

He said, “I remember walking in the door. Lucky recommended you. He says you always keep your word. He told me, there was this time you had been hired by the one gang to guard a shipment of opium due in from the Second Century, but another gang hired you to leave the side door of the cargo carrier unlocked.”

“Blues and Greens,” I said. “The horse-racing factions. The game was crooked in their day too, back in Byzantium. They were political factions, too, and they played for keeps back then.”

The Wardens swept up some of them from out of the time stream, and looked at them and played with them and asked them questions, but no one is sent home again from Metachronopolis, and the Wardens don't really much care what you do once they're done with you. The Blues sided with Richelieu and the Capone gang, and the Greens took up with Hannibal and Billy the Kid's outfit, and their ancient, meaningless fight continues.

He said, “You left the door open, as promised, and when the Green's men started to come in, you took a meat cleaver in one hand and a switchblade in the other and killed the whole mob of them. So you protected the shipment, also as promised.”

“Don't believe everything you hear. It was a khopesh, not a meat cleaver. There were only three guys, and I only maimed them.”

“You kept your word.”

“Technically, yes,” I said. “If I take the case, the man you are hunting down will die. The culprit will come to justice. But I won't kill him. And you won't survive.”

“You cannot know that for sure,” he said.

“It's a done deal.”

“How can you know?”

“Because I already found the guy. He came back to the now. He wants to see her.”

I whistled for the magic picture. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. This time it did, and the image of Old Glory I have on the wall to the left, right above the dream coffin and next to my broken Anything Maker, shimmered and formed a nice poster of the perpetrator. He was lounging at the side of a pool on some high level of a Tower near the Museum of Man, which loomed in the background, a stepped pyramid larger than Everest, rising from a misty base. The pool was one of those fancy types from the Mid Twenty-Ninth Century, two lenticular shapes of water, one above the other held in midair by some sort of manipulation of Van Der Waals repulsion. A swimmer could swim out of the bottom of the upper pool and swan-dive through the air into the lower. The special properties of the water also allowed bathing beauties wearing Saint Peter Slippers to stand upright on the water surface, which bent under their weight like a rubbery sheet of clear gelatin.

That was what six beauties were doing now. It was a beauty contest, between five versions of Helen of Troy and her ancient rival Cleopatra. Don Juan was one of the judges, and so was Jacques Casanova de Seingalt. Seated right behind them, in the top-hat-and-white-tie VIP section, was our perpetrator. He was leaning on a gold-headed cane.

“It's you,” I said. “You're the criminal you want to kill. The man you want to protect the girl from is you.”

His eyes narrowed slightly. That was all.

“You are not surprised.” I observed dryly.

“I wish I were. I–I may not be that kind of man. Not now. But my father–ah, well, never mind.” He squinted. “I thought he would be older.”

“Older you is about thirty years prophet of you now. He's in his late seventies, early eighties. When he holds that walking stick—see the cane with the gold knob?—he looks as young as he wants. He can look your age. Or forty, or thirty. It's also got a stunner built into it so no one can take it from him.”

“How can he look so young?”

“Magic.”

“Really?”

I shrugged. “The Wardens can adjust the time energy tension in your body without influencing your thoughts or memories, but, heck, just call it magic. I'm not paid to understand things, just to hunt men and break heads.”

“And if I pay you to–”

“Then you'll die.”

He shook his head. “Not necessarily!”

“In this case, necessarily. Look, pal, I been around the block. Back in your world, you were the boss. You understood things. Here, you are a greenhorn, wet behind the ears. How long you been here?”

“Not long. But I think I understand how time travel works. If I go to her room when he is there, my older self, and I shoot him dead, then me, the I that I am now, all I have to do is look down at my own corpse at my feet and know that this is my sure and certain fate. I'll know I can never go to her again. I can decide and stick with the decision. The moment I make that decision, the future is changed. They say the body lying on the ground will turn into what they call a mist, an overlap of many possible futures, and then fade entirely. Turn into smoke. That's what happens, right?”

“That is what happens if a ghost, a man's self from his own past, shoots his prophet, a self from his own future. Some ghosts, seeing the prophesied future, can change their minds and change it hard enough that the inevitable turns evitable, and the chances change. So the certain future gets uncertain, changes its mind, and evaporates into mist. But–”

“But what? Surely you don't think I lack the strength of character, the willpower, to—I mean, if I saw my own death, as clear and certain as doomsday itself—if the choice were between the future as a man who gets executed by his own hand on a certain date, and a long life here in Metachronopolis!”

I said, “No one listens to the prophets. They stone them instead.”

“But if I saw my own future, caused my own future? You think I could do that and see that and still not change? If it were a matter life and death?”

“Some men prefer death, sir,” I said, leaning back in my chair and letting my eyes look at the ceiling. I did not want to look at his face. “Even self-inflicted. They find it’s the only way to sooth a raw conscience.”

“What are you saying? What are you implying?”

I brought my eyes down and locked gazes with him, and my chair fell forward so the front legs hit the floor with a bang. “Prove it. Right now. Right here. You say you can change your future, fine, then let's see you change yourself, give up the girl, and never see her again.”

I pointed at the magic picture. The sound came on. Cleopatra was just finishing a song from one of her shows and then said something about world peace. Now it was Helen of Troy's turn.

She was doing a number about diamonds being a better friend to women than men could be. It was catchy.

I pointed at the three other Helens in the view. “Helen of Troy is a popular girl. The most popular, you might say. Which one is yours?”

“What? They all look the same.”

“You've been in bed with this girl. Held her in your arms. Do you talk to her? You cannot tell the difference? Their hairstyles are not the same. They wear different ear rings. You don't know what her bathing suit looks like? These are the details a man would know about his wife. If he loved her. If he lived with her.”

He looked at his shoe, at my pen blotter, at the door, at the dream box, at everything but my eyes. “I have other, ah, responsibilities, Mr. Frontino. The Time Wardens have put me in charge of one of their projects related to my era, investigations of conspiracy theories throughout history. People are depending on me to—and, well, there's Jackie—my people don't believe in divorce, so–”

I whistled for the magic picture again, and focused the view on the man seated behind Don Juan and Casanova. All three men wore the same expression, by the way.