Time Travel Omnibus, page 1116
My finger tracked to a projected five late Devonian minutes and I raised my eyebrow.
“Hold your breath,” said Ellie, and kissed me lightly on the cheek.
I walked the tops of glaciers when they ruled the world, huddling and hurrying in my too-thin clothes. I lurched from them into a desert that spanned the horizons, that could have been anywhere, save that in this time it was near everywhere. The sun tried to kill me; elsewhere it was pelycosaurs at my heels with their razor teeth. For one minute I walked the streets of Pompeii where the ash had yet to fall. The eruption would never come to this fragment, and yet its work had already been done. The locals were gone, removed entirely, not a living thing remaining. The enemy had been there. We had lost another crumb of our past.
I held my breath and ran through the uncertain Devonian, crushing liverworts beneath my feet, a pelting figure from a lost future dashing through the ferns and towering hands of fungus.
Ellie had plotted my escape well. She always did have the best head for it. Me? The only things I was really good at were running and hiding.
We had retained a lot of the Permian, snapped-off pieces of it scattered like stones across the broken substrate of time. Some of those fragments were years long, even centuries. They were harsh, dry times, the age before the dinosaurs, populated by starving monsters; each shard a memento of a time when all life on earth was sliding inexorably towards an extinction that would claim very nearly everything that lived. The world would know only one greater disaster, and that was ours. It was fitting that Doctor Comoy had made his home there, cycling between a dozen bestial, inhospitable fragments and taking his laboratory with him. Nobody else was permitted to set up in residence along the course of his peregrinations in case they got in his way. He was not a man fond of company, or of the human race much. He was its only hope, though, so it had no choice but to be fond of him.
Permian One was his migratory home, where he and his staff and guards were trying to start the clocks again. It was the hope of every lost, scattered, desperate soul who crept in and out of the fragments and scurried from era to era. Doc Comoy will fix it.
I believed. I thought I believed. I had lived all my life to that mantra. We will remake the world again, glue the fragments back into a whole. Somehow the misanthropic genius would save us all, give the universe CPR, turn back time.
I hadn’t been to Permian One in six years of personal time. My faith had sat at the back of my mind, comforting in its presence, never needing to be unsheathed. When I had talked with Marcus, the doubter, I had taken Comoy’s side, always. Of course he would succeed in fixing it all. What other alternative was there, that was worth the consideration?
I found his prefab compound exactly as before, that set of metal boxes that they took down and put up each time he moved his base to another piece of doomed Permian time. I went in, seeing the faces I remembered, his subordinate scientists, his guards, all their grim and drawn expressions, harried and weary just like before. Just like before, all of it. I think that was when it broke. My faith had sat back there for so long it had corroded into nothing, and when I tried to test it, it just broke.
Doctor Comoy himself was in his high chair, a cherry-picker affair that lifted him up and down the bank of screens that displayed the secrets of the universe, or at least those few pieces of it that we could still access. He was an old man now, older than last time, skin like sun-cracked leather, liver-spotted, pouchy about the eyes, sunken in about his cheeks. Old, he looked old but, other than that, I might as well have just left a moment before. Here was the saviour of the human race, the engineer of time.
I had the utter conviction, then, that nothing was being done, no progress was being made. Doc Comoy, after jury-rigging together the calculations that allowed the dozens of refugee bands to limp from timepiece to timepiece, had achieved nothing. In all of my life he had just been marking time.
I did not voice it. I could not have brought forward the maths to prove it. I could not shake the belief, though. I had a new faith, and it was pure nihilism.
I got out the problem, my band stranded in Warsaw’s darkness. I needed an exit, and I needed it yesterday. We had to get them out.
This small service he could provide, this prolonging of the end. His great computers and his greater mind gave me the path they must follow, and my own to get back to them. Even as I looked at the sequences, though, I was doubting them. Was this why even our precarious hold on time was breaking down? Was this why the enemy was winning?
Was Doctor Comoy fallible in everything? Were we just now seeing the inevitable disintegration of a system that he had not thought through?
I left Permian One. I had two hundred and fifty million years to cover and no time at all to do it in. I wove my way in and out of history, dodging cavemen and dinosaurs, revolutionaries and the Golden Horde. In my mind was the distant candle flame that was Warsaw, so soon to be snuffed out. I was always a runner, and I ran. Nobody could have made better use of time than I. I did not stop for man or beast or cataclysm.
And I was late. I was too late. Was I slow or were the calculations wrong? Perhaps it never had been possible, just as the long-term survival of all that we knew was only a dream. I arrived in Warsaw, but it was a different Warsaw. The fragment had ended and begun again, all the pieces, Jews and Poles and Nazis, reset on the board. And no Ellie, no Marcus, no Scarrows or Nguyen or the rest of them. I was too late.
They might have got out. Knowing the end was coming—of the ghetto and of time, one and then the other in a great wave of pain and fear and utter oblivion—perhaps they calculated an exit. Ellie was always good at the figures, after all. There were fragments they could have made—or Doc Comoy’s calculations said there were. Unless it was a lie.
Or perhaps the enemy had come and wiped them away, shot them and removed them from the ruptured track of history. Or the Nazis had stormed the ghetto as they always did, and Ellie and the others had been just more corpses amongst so many, so very many.
Or the end had come, the real end, where time’s frayed edge caught up with them, and when the fragment began again they were gone, erased from time and space, made as if they never were.
In the ghetto, I knelt down and wept, screamed out my frustrations to the sky and shrugged off the attempts of those doomed and desperate people to comfort me.
I was alone, and Doc Comoy’s escape route was consigned to history. I sat there in the ruins and the ashes, amongst that other fugitive people, and did my own maths—not elegant Ellie maths, but my hamfisted imitation. I had to get out.
Even with nothing to get out for, a part of me wanted to live. Life has its own momentum. Ask the people in the Warsaw ghetto: no matter how bad it is, everyone wants to live.
It took me two years of my life, and I walked from one end of time to the other, but I made it back to Permian One. I hid in the Rome of the Medicis and cowered back from the wise, cold eyes of Neanderthals. I did what I did best: I ran, from the Mughals and the Zulus and the Iceni and Tyrannosaurus rex.
When at last I found the jump into the Permian fragment that the doctor was using, I saw it was true. Nothing had changed at all. He was older—they were all older, the clocks of their bodies marching on in ignorance of what had happened to wider time—but that was all. Oh, they were all busy, and there was the great impression of things being done, but I knew I was right. It was all a show, even if Doctor Comoy himself believed in it.
“They’re gone,” I told him, and from his expression he either did not know who I meant, or did not care.
That was when the enemy arrived.
I had never seen them properly before. I did not do so then, quite. They were humanoid, armoured, but what they were armoured in was proof against mere light as well as more violent measures. They shifted and warped and flickered and yet, at the same time, they were the most definite, concrete things in that complex. They were death, after all. There’s nothing more real than death.
Like death, they were patient hunters. They had been stalking me for a long time, following me from fragment to fragment, effortless in their transitions, whilst I scratched and strained at the mathematics. They had tried to hide from me, but I was too much of an experienced fugitive. I had known they were there.
I led them to Permian One. I led them to Doctor Comoy. It wasn’t as if I was doing anything else with my time. None of us were. That was the problem.
I had not known whether they were people at all, before that. They were the enemy, from before time broke, but I had thought they were no more than machines following the last orders of history. Until one spoke, I chose to believe that they were simple annihilators, the things that come at the end of the day, to close the shutters and put out the sun.
“Doctor Robert Comoy,” one of them said—impossible to tell which one, but it was a woman’s human voice, strong and stern. “You and your accomplices will be taken into custody for trial and disposal. Any attempt at escape will be met with force.”
The old man on his ridiculous high chair goggled down at them. “What are you doing?” his frail voice demanded. “Can’t you see I’m trying to put the world back together?”
“We are already restoring time,” the woman returned flatly. “The only thing standing between us and a unified timestream is the interference caused by the presence of you and your people. We cannot repair time with your vermin running riot amongst the pieces. You will either come with us and be rehabilitated, or you will be removed.”
Removed. She said it as though it had a capital letter: excised from time. Even then I could not have said whether it was true. Were they able to put the egg back together again? Were we the problem, rather than the solution?
Perhaps there was no solution.
Doctor Comoy was spitting, trying to force out words that were too big for the gape of his mouth, but then someone started shooting. Someone always starts shooting. Give a man a gun and he will want to use it. Perhaps that mentality is what caused this mess in the first place.
The enemy opened fire in return, beams of energy scorching and scouring whatever they touched. I wanted no part of it. Ellie and Marcus and the rest were gone, and I was on nobody’s side but my own.
I had my calculations already made. While they were fighting, while the enemy were triumphing over Doc Comoy and his wretched little Permian dream, I fled.
It had taken me long hours of patient calculation, but once I knew the enemy were content to follow me, I realized that I had time, for the first time in a long time, to get it right. There was a fragment of the Eocene, that dawn age after the extinction of all the old dinosaurs, that was three years long, and I stepped from the burning confusion of Comoy’s compound into a bright new day.
The enemy would hunt me. If what they said was true then I would gum up their works just by daring to exist. The Eocene was a big place, though, and running and hiding are what I’m good at, after all. As long as the enemy leave me fragments, I will find a hole to shelter in. I’ve the whole of my life ahead of me.
And when I’m old, when I’ve seen it all, that pitiful miscellany that is all that is left, perhaps I’ll go back to that cluttered London, if the enemy have left it. I’ll stand amongst the groundlings at the Curtain and listen to Will Kempe’s final routine, his farewell speech to all of creation. I’ll laugh out the end of the fragment into painless extinction, and let them save the universe.
But not yet. Not when I’m still using it. I’ve got a long way left to run.
MY UNCLE GAVE ME A TIME MACHINE
Nir Yaniv
August 29, 2001, 23:04
Today, for my birthday, my Uncle Haim brought me a present. He always tries to be cool, with his funny moustache, which looks fake, and those glasses which make him look like someone from a really old TV show, from the seventies or something. And he always tries to bring me presents that won’t be just like any other present, and generally, as he says, breaking the rules. Two years ago, when he got back from America, he brought me a chemistry experiment kit, and I almost got my face burned off. Mom didn’t respond well to that. Last year he brought me a snake, and Mom almost kicked him out of the house. I can really see why Dad ran away from her.
Anyway, I think Uncle Haim learned his lesson, because this year he brought me a record. A vinyl record. A very strange one, and not by any band I ever heard of. It’s not as cool as the snake, but still it’s not bad, really, because I don’t have too many records for my old and totally retro turntable, and I don’t think anyone else has a copy of this record. But I didn’t want to show him that I liked it, because then he’d nag me about it. And also Mom would be pissed if she saw that I liked something that he brought me. So I just said “thank you” very nicely and went to my room.
Oh, and Mom bought me a small and really slick electronic journal, which isn’t so bad either. Last year she bought me a laptop computer, but that was because I kept nagging her for a whole year. This year I didn’t have the energy for it. The journal doesn’t look too new, but that’s probably because she didn’t have much money left after buying me that computer. Never mind.
August 29, 2001, 23:14
This record looks pretty old, really. It looks like it’s been played a million times already. It’s totally grooved. The name of the band is silly, Pita Morgana. What does that mean? The name of the album is also stupid, The Universe in a Pita. Someone probably had a fixation on Pita bread. Or is it an inside joke? Anyway, I listened to two songs already, and it’s some kind of weird rock. Reminds me a little of The Police, when they just started, and still liked to shout a lot, before they started making white reggae music. There’s a guitar and a bass and drums and a singer, and that’s about it. But the lyrics, those are kind of . . . weird. Mom shouted at me through the door to turn down the volume, but Uncle Haim calmed her down. I locked the door, just for safety. Twice. And I put the key in my pocket. Sometimes he’s really ok, Uncle Haim, when he’s not being such a nudnik. I wonder where he got this record from.
August 29, 2001, 23:40
I listened to the whole album. In the middle of it there’s one really cool song called My Uncle Gave Me a Time Machine. It goes something like this:
My uncle gave me a time machine, it is a jolly day,
A silly greeting card he added, on the wrapping lay,
And the machine a button has, upon which you may press
To move time in reverse
Like a video, I guess,
So cool, yes yes!
(Funny, but I took the gift wrapping back out of the trashcan to look at it. He did put a silly greeting card there. Nudnik he may be, but he’s got a sense of humor. Sort of.)
My uncle gave me a time machine, and now I’ve got to know
Is it really working, or is it just for show?
Now I shall investigate
Whether Time has a fixed state
I’m gonna press the button, mate!
And then, right after the singer says that, the song starts going in reverse. Cool! It goes backwards faster and faster, and somehow turns around again, like a fast forward, which slows down, and then comes the third chorus:
My uncle gave me a time machine, and it works like cheese & mutton
Now I know that I must never ever press the button!
Remember, children, it’s a crime,
To go like that and travel in time,
And now I feel ready and prime,
To press the button again—
Cuz I LIKE traveling in time!
The rhyming could be much better, right, but then the reverse starts all over again, but messier and noisier than before, and goes faster and overturns and then there’s an ending like in a rock show, when everybody just hits the instruments ’til they’ve had enough. Not bad at all!
August 29, 2001, 23:38
I listened to it again. It’s the best song on the album. And I just noticed another funny thing. On the back of the sleeve, like in every other album, there’s a list of all the songs with their playing times, like, Zero Gravity Shower: 4:12, Dark Side of the Sun: 3:56, etc., but near the playing time of this particular song there’s a small dash, which I think could be a minus sign. Someone there really put some effort into that joke.
August 29, 2001, 23:35
I listened to it again, and then I noticed something weird. My wristwatch doesn’t match the cuckoo clock. I keep them synchronized, and the cuckoo always runs ok, especially when you consider the fact that it’s been hanging on the wall since Grandpa and Grandma lived here, which is a really long time. Now that I’m checking, the clock of the electronic journal doesn’t match the wristwatch either. Something’s weird here.
August 29, 2001, 23:28
That song is really addictive. I listened to it three more times, and I still haven’t had enough. I looked at the times of the entries I just put in the journal, and they seem to go backwards, with each entry written previous to . . . eh, to the previous one. But when I sat and looked at the journal’s clock, it seemed to be going forward. Either the journal is fucked up, or I’ve got some kind of time machine here. Ha ha. Someone’s knocking at the door, but I left it locked. Nudniks.
August 29, 2001, 23:20
This isn’t funny. Either I’m hallucinating, or this song is actually taking me back in time. Two minutes and something every time. I knew Uncle Haim wouldn’t bring me just a regular record. I knew it. How do I know? Because the computer’s clock doesn’t agree with my wristwatch either, and in fact all the clocks in the room agree with each other, except for the wristwatch. I’m going to listen to this song some more, just to make sure.
August 29, 2001, 23:04
Oh yes, for sure. Done deal. That thing is a time machine. But what can you do with a time machine that moves you two minutes back in time? I think I’m going to make an experiment, break the rules, like Uncle Haim says. Who says that I have to play the song on a turntable? I’ll sample it to my laptop computer. I have this software that can take any sound and do whatever I want with it. I’ll make it play the song over and over at high speed, and we’ll see what happens. Cool!
