City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis (22 page)

“What? Why do I have to shoot the bathroom?”

“Because I told you to.”

“When?”

“No, I mean I am telling you now. This me version of me is telling the you version of now-you to shoot the door. Now. This is me telling you. I am telling you because the innocent parallel version of me told me to, and the older version of you told the middle me to tell other me to tell now-me to tell now-you.”

I rubbed my temples. “I don't even like talking to time travelers.”

“Because of conversations like this?”

“No. Because conversations like this start to make sense.”

“So are you following the sequence of events?” he asked.

I nodded. “Except for how middle-you got to talk to other-you, who you say is innocent, even though he is telling you how to commit a suicide-murder. And what happens to him? Middle-you him, I mean?”

He said, “He appears in the room when you shoot the shower stall door in the bathroom. You did not do it last time, in the first run-through version of the scene, because middle me uses the unbroken door sometime after the shooting to travel into the future and makes contact with other-me, who came back and gave me your letter.”

I said, "So the destruction of the door forms an endpoint, which pushes anyone passing down that particular artificial spacetime continuum path back into the real timespace. It is a way of forming an anchor point where there is not supposed to be one. I shoot the door to force a time traveler back into timespace in that bathroom, at the point in time a few seconds before the door fails. And apparently that's you–namely, late middle you.”

“No, that is going to be me, me. This version of me. I have a destiny card attuned to the shower stall door that other me got from middle me in the future. The youngest possible Jack has to be the one in the room. When I die, it has to wipe out everyone after me in the timestream.”

“You lost me. How did he fool the people thirty years from now? Middle you, I mean. How did he explain that he was fifty instead of eighty?”

“Old me has a walking stick with an age-adjuster built in. Middle me took it, and turned himself into an old man. Then he realized that the old man turned himself into a young man to be strong enough to, ah, do the, ah–”

“Do the girl?”

“I was going to say do the deed. The cane also has a stunner in it that numbs you if it touches a hand, or puts you into a delta wave sleep if it touches your head. Do you know what that is? Magic sleep. I am going to step out of the bathroom once you and early middle me leave the scene, then use it to stun Norma Jean so that she does not wonder why there are two of us in the room. The plan is that I beat old me to death with it, don his medical cape, twist the knob once to turn him into thousand-year-old dust, and twist the knob again to make me look like him…you see?”

“Um…I think I lost track of the order of events.”

“A version of me comes by tomorrow to hire you. You take the case and make sure to shoot the bathroom door to form the anchor point so that I can get into the scene. I kill me and take his cape and his age, and put her gently to sleep so she does not see me. You bring me, the tomorrow version of me, middle me, back into the room. He kills his own past version of himself, me. And you don't interfere. I get erased from the timeline.”

“What prevents middle you from remembering this conversation? I mean early middle you, the one who hires me tomorrow. Since that scene is in your personal future. It's tomorrow.”

“I have a selective amnesia induction field helmet late middle me stole from one of the palaces of old me. A Forgetting Helmet. I was shown how to use it. Tomorrow when I come to this office again, I will bring it with me.”

I frowned. “I think there is a screw loose in this plan somewhere. Aren't you dead at this point tomorrow? You get shot while lying on the floor pretending to be old you?”

“No, the plan is perfect! Tomorrow when I visit you, I will shoo my men out, program the helmet, put it on my own head, and forget everything that came from any visit from later-time versions of me, and I'll forget this conversation. All you have to do is shoot the door and watch me evaporate. Everything will be wrapped up in a nice, neat, Gordian knot.”

I sighed, and leaned back, and stared at the dark gold ceiling, running my tongue over the sickly sweet taste of strawberries sticking to my teeth.

“So will you take the case?”

I leaned forward again. “Absolutely not. Look, you are already going to kill yourself, and you have already killed yourself, but the version of you who is in front of me now has not done anything yet! You are the innocent one!”

Young Jack looked stricken, but tried to control his expression. “Actually. Uh…”

“You can't truly want to go through with this! This plan? This stupid, crazy plan? You're wearing a crucifix, and I heard beads rattling in your pockets. Aren't you a good Catholic boy? We have Catholic priests here. A guy named Maximilian Kolbe, we call him Father Max, lives two levels down and just around the corner. And Joan of Arc runs a revival meeting on the roof. Go say confession, or get baptized, or do whatever you guys do. Clean yourself up. Then marry your damned chippy. If you love her. Don't you love her?”

“Did I explain who she was?”

“Sure. Helen of Troy. One of them.”

He looked surprised. “She is the most famous actresses of all time! Hollywood actress, I mean.”

“Not in my time. Silent or talkie?”

He said, “I thought everyone in Metachronopolis had heard the story. The Time Warden Ceuthonymus drew the film actress Elizabeth Taylor back in time and created an alternate history where she was Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen. It was a joke. So, to top him, the Warden Menoetius drew Marilyn Monroe into a timeline where she was Helen of Troy. And she proved to be a prettier Helen than the original, so other Time Wardens made copies of the time line. Then the Wardens got bored, as they do, and Marilyn was sent to do waitress and hostess jobs, or dime-a-dance gigs. Or worse. After I was drawn in scooped up by the Warden Iapetus, he gave me one as a spare.”

Something very cold and very dark entered my heart then. “Gave?”

“As a reward. She's not really my—not what you would call a sweetheart or demimonde—she did not volunteer, you know.”

“Is concubine a better word?” I asked softly. “The Wardens gave her to you as a harem girl. A slave.”

“Hey, I treat her right! She doesn't act like she minds very much.”

“Then she is a good actress. Sexual knowledge without consent is still rape. Why are you still using this girl? What has she ever done to you? To deserve you?”

He did not say anything, so the silence hung over the room exactly like the thick cloud of smoke from my nonexistent cigarette would have if I had one.

“Never mind,” I said, “I know the answer. Have you ever wondered why you were chosen by the Time Wardens to join their ranks?”

It was pretty obvious he had, because he looked like he was being crushed inward, as if his spine were squeezing and pulling all his internal organs inward into a smaller and smaller knot.

I said in a louder voice, "That is why they are giving you their little gifts? They want you to get used to the idea of using time travel to evade your problems rather than solve them.”

“I am not evading anything! I'm trying to fix it!”

“No. Time travel makes men lazy. If the sweet, sweet worm were not wriggling on the hook of time travel, the fish of your guilty conscience would not rise to the surface to swallow the bait. If it wasn't an option, you would not try to change the past, you would just make amends now, free her now, beg forgiveness from her now, and now straighten out your life. If you could not travel back in time and erase the moment when you dove into the sewer pond, then you would have to clean yourself up, scrape the sewage off your damned soul one painful day at a time.”

I drew a breath, a little surprised at myself at how angry I was. He said nothing, but he lowered his eyes, troubled. It seemed I had said something that struck him right in the middle of his soul. I paused to let it sink in.

“Free the girl,” I said. “Or marry her. Instead of taking everything in her life away from her, give her everything in your life you can give her. Clean yourself up!”

Not looking up, he said in a whisper: “I thought of doing that. I've tried. But it won't work. I know I don't have whatever it takes, I don't have the willpower.”

That annoyed me. His excuse for his behavior was that it was too hard to be decent? “Well, buddy, there is no one else you can turn to for help. In this life, the big fish eat the little fish, and the Time Wardens are the biggest fish there have ever been.”

“You're wrong,” he said softly, still looking down at his hands.

“I ain't wrong. Listen! I have a friend who is a cannibal, an actual maneater. He looks at people just as slabs of meat to be consumed. Men are not souls to him, they are things. Things to eat. How are you better than that?”

He straightened his spine and looked me in the eye, “I can set things right.”

“How? By more time travel? Time travel is cowardly. It's futile. For one thing, if the girl has an even slightly hardened memory, she'll still remember you and what you did to her.”

He gritted his teeth and said, with only the smallest quake in his voice, “Then she will also remember that I am willing to die to set things straight!”

“Says who?” I smiled sourly.

“Says the enemies of the Time Wardens. You see, I tried doing this alone. And I can't.”

There was something really odd in his voice when he said those words. I sat up in my chair.

“The Masters of Time cannot have enemies,” I said slowly. “They would just go back in history and kill their enemy's father, whoever he is.”

“You have seen things go into the mist. Things can come out as well! Men, miracles, messengers! Whole worlds emerge from the mist as they pass from being impossible to being inevitable. That includes the first world holding the original version of this city.”

I squinted as if against a strong light. “What kind of baloney is that?”

“You've got it all wrong. The purpose of time travel is to forgive and heal. It is to make our past crimes fade away, into the mist of nothingness. But it has been turned wrong here, corrupted by these so-called Time Wardens. They are rebels, a gang of criminals, who abused the machinery of time travel over which they were given stewardship. They use their powers to indulge in their past crimes and to evade consequences. So this has become a city of lies built on a foundation of nothingness. But if, one by one, each Master of Time, even before he is elevated to the position, turns away from the evils he has done and will do, and sponge them out of the pages of history, then this city of evasion will become a city of salvation!”

I wanted to believe him. The Masters of Time certainly acted like a gang of crooks.

“How could you possibly know this? Where did you hear any of this?”

He leaned forward, his eyes burning. “Because old me is only one version of me. He is going to turn into a Time Warden, and he'll be no different from any of them. Dressed in a mirror, with a crown and no face, and wrapped in a robe of mist. As cruel and remorseless as history itself.”

“And the other version, he is the one from the other timeline?”

“Yes. He is the one who sent me to you. They have crowns of gold, and their robes are solid black, as black as midnight, because the past good they have done can never be changed. Their city is green rather than gold, and time travel is only used to punish the penitent among them. They do not rule time.”

“Anarchists, eh? They just leave all the flatliners alone, do they?”

“They are not the Masters of Time but of Eternity. There is no beginning to them, nothing that can be edited away. They have followed the tradition of the first Moonshot, expanded into space rather than time, and their version of Luna glitters with cities and cathedrals and tabernacles whose light you can see from Earth. You may have seen that Moon, the Moon in the heavens in the timelines where America did not lose hope. The closer the Emerald Towers come to being real, the less real these proud Towers of accursed gold become, and the clearer and fairer shines the cities of Luna.”

“You know—must know—I don't believe you.”

He smiled and leaned back. “I don't care if you believe me now or not. I think you will, eventually. The other me, the Master of Eternity who comes from a world of a bright moon above towers of shining green above a fruitful world of green grass and green forest–he told me you were the man.”

“What man?”

“The man who sees the downfall of the last of the Masters of Time. I was told to come to you because you are a man who is not afraid. And because—sometimes—you listen to your conscience.”

I shook my head. “You were told a fairy tale. It's some sort of Chronocrat trick. If old you is about to become a Time Warden himself, then my guess is some other Wardens, unfriendly Wardens, who, for reasons you will never know, have decided to sweep your seventh-row pawn off the board before it turns into a Queen. I don't know what version of yourself visited you when, but if you were visited by a time traveler, then you can be sure it was a Warden.”

“He was an honest and decent man.”

“An honest and decent Warden? No such thing. The whole point of giving you the girl, giving you power, tempting and corrupting you, was to make you the kind of man who thinks like a Time Warden. If this anarchist guy who says he is their enemy were real, he would not use time travel. Who thinks of changing the past rather than changing himself when he has a problem?”

“He has hardened memory. He will remember this version of events when he becomes real, but I have to die before he can become real. That is my penance. I suffer, I die to myself, and then I am renewed and reborn in a parallel timeline where my sins never took place. They are blotted out of all history books. All I have to do is die.”

“You are crazy. I don't believe you.”

“I am not paying you to believe me. Will you take the case? Because, if you don't–for the love of God, man! The Time Wardens gave her to me! Just like you'd give someone a pet cat! They'll just give her to someone else if I keep away from her, and I cannot keep away from her anyway. The temptation, it's too much! It's like a sickness. So you know what will happen if you allow me to live. Look, even if you don't believe me, will you take the case for her sake?”