Time Travel Omnibus, page 1131
I am mute, above all, for her. I don’t make a sound, though the longing to explain consumes me. I don’t even move, though my need to hold her is overwhelming.
Instead I focus my mind on Jonas, the flesh sliding off his face.
How is it I can remember a future that’s been undone? And how undone, when I died in the fire without ever having come downstairs to discover an earlier Jonas’s deception and plans—
All of which I do remember, with painful clarity.
But there’s no use asking how, just as there is no one to ask. It must suffice to know that between us, Jonas and I had twisted and knotted, tangled and raveled the timeline. And, just possibly, we had mended it.
If I can keep it intact.
Victoria takes my hand. “If you ever felt anything for me, you’ll explain.”
Four billion dead: an inconceivable number. An incomprehensible abstraction. Victoria struck down? That’s all too believable, and I cannot bear the idea. And so I peer into space, avoiding her gaze.
What will my love think when the body from the warehouse—my body—is identified?
Far more difficult than seeing myself die, I say nothing.
At last Victoria tires of waiting. She stands to leave, shoulders quivering, eyes red and puffy. As the interrogation room door sighs closed behind her, I think about what we might have had together.
And of grandfatherless grandsons.
And the fluttering wings of butterflies.
And the crazily spinning wheel of a whirligig.
THE TIME TRAVEL DEVICE
James Van Pelt
I’d assembled my time travel device out of circuits, microchips, and clever wiring; but the gods or magic or fate controlled it. Perhaps an inventor who loves to read puts too much of himself into his creations. Or perhaps a literatus who engineers cannot separate his own blended DNA.
When I activated it the first time, a blink, a shudder, and a screech wrenched me from my control chair, and I found myself standing in a dark room. Had I gone forward or back? Light leaked through a barred window, revealing a ragged, bedridden man, his eyes sunk deep in his head, gasping in what surely must have been his ending breaths. Beside him sat a second man, dressed in a soiled jacket, writing by candlelight at a small table.
I raised my hand to speak, afraid to break the staggered breathing of the dying man, but I could see them through my hand. I had become smoke, a wraith, and I knew my device had hurled me through time, but only as a spirit. I would, to them, be a mute and invisible observer. I suspected as much when I designed the device. Time travel existed, but I could not interact with the past or the future. The universe preserved its sanctity.
The writer turned from his journal, leaned over the dying man. “You are at Washington College Hospital. Do you know where you are?”
He did not respond. Sweat glistened on his broad forehead, pasting dark hair against his face. The room smelled of death, like still things that had grown moist and gone bad: the death of sheets and mattresses and blankets, death-soaked with mortality’s oozing miasma. Old breaths that went in rotted, lingered in the lungs’ failing chambers, then fled to repoison the room without.
The dying man’s jaw dropped open. He sipped in the dark room’s darkness, then said, “Dr. Moran.” He paused, and I thought he had faded away, then he whispered, “Lord, help my poor soul.”
For minutes, they remained still. The candle burned even and did not waver. The doctor put his hand above the dead man’s mouth. “Goodnight, Mr. Poe,” he said, before he extinguished the candle.
My lab flashed into being around me, throwing me forward, banging my head against the device’s control, scratching my forehead. My heart slammed frighteningly hard. I dabbed blood from a frown-shaped cut in my skin.
My mind reeled. Had I witnessed Edgar Allan Poe’s last moment? Joy overwhelmed me. “I have traveled in time! I have seen the past!” My own wishes had taken me to Poe, as if by magic.
Fiercely, I activated the controls. Again a blink, a shudder, and a screech, and now I appeared in a kitchen where a woman in her thirties cried as she opened her oven door. Towels were pressed against the kitchen door, sealing the room. She had rested the oven’s grill racks against the refrigerator, and without ceremony, she turned the knob that released gas, then thrust her upper body into the space. The air stank. Within minutes, her legs relaxed. Hands that had been fisted at her side, holding her deep in the oven, opened, and she slid backwards a few inches. Pages covered her kitchen table. Poems, they seemed to be, with penciled corrections in the margins.
My chest ached, and I wondered if time travel threatened my health. What did ripping myself free of time’s thorny grasp do?
Four more times I dove into time, each for the death of someone important to me. My device took me only to deaths. Old man Hemingway in pajamas with his shotgun. The awful bang still sounded in my ears as I watched Mark Twain, in his bed, pass with hardly a flinch. F. Scott Fitzgerald collapsed while reading a newspaper. He fell from his chair. A half-eaten candy bar skittered across the floor. The room smelled of alcohol. And finally, fittingly, H.G. Wells breathed his last in bed, like Poe, but his eyes were open, and I thought for a moment that he saw me.
Back in the lab, I wept, clutching my wounded heart. What could I do but mourn them all, lost in time; but I pressed my travel button one more time, stood in a hospital room where a figure lay spider-webbed to I.V. lines and wires. I didn’t recognize him at first. His face was so pale, but on his forehead, he had a frown-shaped scrape. I touched my own forehead.
The dying man’s scratch seemed new, fresh, hardly healed. The blood in my veins felt as if the sands of time had formed there.
The cut couldn’t be more than two days old. I waited for his . . . for my . . . readings to flatline, for my device to drag me home, where I knew I would fall.
The End
THE TIME GUN
Nick Harkaway
WHEN MORRIS WAS shot with the Time Gun, it took him a moment to realise what had happened. The old man popped up from behind a bank of machines which were projecting wavy green lines into mid air and shouted “No, no, no!” and shot him, and Morris felt himself blasted backwards and thought “bugger, I’m dead.” And then he didn’t die, which was a plus.
Instead he flailed back and through a solid object and then through the wall and back and back and he realised that whatever he was falling through it wasn’t physical space, and he thought about what he had been supposed to steal. There had been no mention of this sort of thing at all, just some basic housebreaking and a moderate payoff.
“Go to Lab 5,” Grimmel had said, “and bring us everything you can. All the results, all the theories, every scrap. Paper, too, if there is any. And then set it all on fire.” Grimmel had been very clear the building would be empty, so Morris had agreed to this plan. He was a burglar and an insurance arsonist, not a thug.
So now here was Morris flying back through the air and trying to retro-engineer some highfalutin’ gizmo he’d never heard of and he thought it must be an anti-gravity gun because he was flying, and then he realised he was flying sideways and that meant it was a neutral buoyancy gun and surely no one would bother with one of those. And then he realised that it was some sort of phase thingummajig because he wasn’t physical any more, so maybe it was a brane-gun or an M-theory gun, because he’d seen about those on TV, and then he looked at his watch and it had stopped and when he tapped it the little hand went from three to twelve to nine and he realised that he was flying backwards through time.
A movie star had once told him this was possible, a real movie star, back when he had worked at Pinewood as a carpenter. This guy had said “time travel is real, boy! I’ve seen it! The Prime Minister showed me, because we were buddies before he was shot, they got it out of an alien spaceship in the twenties, long before bloody Roswell, that’s just bollocks, that is, they never had one of those in America.” Morris had always assumed it was a shitload of cocaine talking, but here he was now flying head first through physical objects and his watch was going in reverse and—now that he’d flown through the wall and into the street—the rain was going up into the clouds, and that made for a compelling case. He had to acknowledge that the movie star’s testimony still wasn’t all that likely to be true. He did not believe the British Government had obtained temporal displacement technology from an alien spacecraft and then done nothing with it between the arrival of women’s suffrage and the collapse of the Euro. Although perhaps that sort of time-based calculation no longer made sense to the owners of such technology. It would certainly explain a lot about the way laws got made if parliament was functioning at right angles to time. He wasn’t into that sort of crazy talk as a rule, but the idea seemed to fit the facts.
Morris Ruddle, petty larcenist, watched the world spin back along its orbit all around him. It seemed that his speed—his speed through time—was not constant. Sometimes the people around him looked like people and sometimes they looked a bit carroty, their movements all taking place at once so that they were interwoven strands or worms with a person face at the back (the front, from their perspective).
He wondered if he was getting physically younger. The old man had been yelling some pretty intense language back there, all replete with rage and so on, so Morris felt that whatever he had chosen to do would be fairly unpleasant, but maybe there was a chance that the device he had used was just the first thing to hand and Morris would bounce off, say, 1989 and fall into the world again. He could get really rich, that would be cool, and sleep with sexy people. Much of Morris’s life until now had revolved around the attempt to achieve coitus with people he considered sexy, especially since Maria had left him, but the results were somewhat disappointing. Maybe he’d give his younger self a job, will himself his own fortune, and then jump off a cliff, and the whole shenanigan would never happen—he’d just be Morris Ruddle, rich young dude. That would be cool.
He had noticed that he was not zinging off the Earth into space, which he should have done almost immediately. He assumed that he was either still affected by gravity or by some other attractive force which linked his journey back through time to his own physical life until the moment in the lab. He was therefore unsurprised when he fell into his own house fifteen years ago and saw himself as a poor young dude getting smacked around the head. He reached out and tried to stop it, but he still wasn’t physical, so he floated and fumed at the injustice and the basic, grotty meanness of the beating. It didn’t matter that it was all in reverse, that the hand flew back off his face and arms, that the split lip was brushed away. He knew every moment of it, of every encounter like this. Forwards or backwards made no odds.
“When I’m king,” boy Morris said out loud, and got smacked again. “I’ll have your head cut off,” retrotemporal Morris finished for him, and then shouted it. And then the scene was gone, and he was somewhere else. A supermarket. The kid at the checkout counted items into the bag and said something unintelligible and reversed, and the customer wandered into the aisles to shelve the goods.
Morris wondered if he might just fall back as far as his own birth. Maybe he’d be reborn as himself but with all his memories and he could go through school again but with all the knowledge he had now. He’d still fail his exams, probably, but he’d be very cool and he’d know the future, so that wouldn’t really matter. He’d either shop his parents to the law or cut some sort of deal with them, blackmail them. Deal drugs and get money to hire men to sort them out. There were options, once you knew you didn’t have to take that sort of thing.
But why birth? That was sort of arbitrary, when he considered it. Conception was probably more like it. Maybe when he reached the moment of his conception (yuck!) he’d just fade away, sort of spool himself up and never have existed at all. He considered whether this would count as dying and decided it was somehow worse.
Shit.
He struggled for a while, trying to figure out what he could hold onto which would let him claw his way forwards. He pictured himself climbing up a deep well of time back to the lab. He made pitons in his mind, hammered them into the walls and struggled against the current. It didn’t help.
He passed the moment in question and nothing happened. That was slightly anticlimactic, and also a bit good because it meant he hadn’t vanished into his own past self or disintegrated, but it was also a bit alarming because now there was really nothing to stop him falling and falling. Would he just run out of steam and get bumped out of time in the Middle Ages? The Cretaceous? Into space before there was a planet? The Middle Ages would be okay, he was up to date on his vaccinations and he knew cool stuff about engineering which would seem a little bit magical. A lot magical. He could set himself up as Merlin and live a pretty good life. Maybe he could start a school, find some real genius peasants and one of them could work out how to unstrand him. Maybe being sent back through time like this would give him miraculous powers. He’d be a god back here, a superman, he could joust and throw fire with his hands and rule the world and change everything so that Morris Ruddle would be the inheritor of the entire planet.
He fell through the time of Henry VIII, William the Conqueror, Julius Caesar. He fell on and on back through people who didn’t have names because they didn’t have language. He fell through dinosaurs and fish and amoebae and fire and then sat in space for a really, really, really, really, really, really long time. Or whatever it was when he was flying backwards through time. It couldn’t be time, really, could it, because that was going the other way? Subjective time, for sure. He wondered if he was aging. Would he get hungry or thirsty? Could he starve while he was falling like this? His watch was broken again, which was probably not surprising. It was negative several billion years old, and it hadn’t been an expensive watch to begin with.
He sat there and waited. He got very bored indeed. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he was probably bored for longer than he’d been alive, longer than the entire human race had been alive, longer than every individual member of the human race put together, every animal, ever, had been alive, in total.
But maybe that was just how it felt because he had literally no points of reference at all.
And then he saw the beginning, and wondered if he was going to die now, hitting the beginning of time. He was aware that he might be going a bit mad, because he was so bored, and he was also aware that for the first time ever he wondered whether it would be so bad to stop existing, because he didn’t know what else to do.
He saw the beginning coming at him: the biggest frying pan ever, a slap for being insolent, a car crash. He flinched, and fell and fell and fell. And fell.
He hit it.
The beginning of time was bouncy, like a giant, frictionless bouncy castle or a bouncy bed like the one in the hotel he had been to with Maria before she told him he wasn’t the man for her. He hit the strange, springy surface again and again and bounced again and again. And again and again and again. Now he was bored and jostled by hitting the beginning of time and the universe and matter and all that, and a bit nauseous. Very nauseous.
Great. You could get motion sick from hitting the beginning of time. It was a little bit typical: Morris had never really gotten motion sick except a few times when he was trying to kiss Maria in a taxi, and once on a boat in Spain, also kissing. That seemed to be the only time his brain got confused about motorised travel. Which sucked.
But now, now, here he was, shot with a Time Gun, hitting the beginning of time and bouncing off it and of course he was going to feel like throwing up. He wondered what would happen if he did. Would he bounce around in atemporal vomit for ever? Would an angel come and give him a stern talking-to for messing up the Creation? Where was God, exactly, in all this? Was God behind the squishy meniscus of time? Was that why he couldn’t get through it? Bounce, lurch, bounce, lurch, is God in there? Hello? Bounce, lurch. Bounce. Lurch. Oh, oh, oh, no.
He threw up.
Absolutely nothing happened at all.
And then it did.
It was like dancing rock and roll at your fourteenth birthday party when you spin around and then you accidentally let go and your sister flies across the room and lands on the goldfish bowl and the goldfish lands on the back of the TV and the TV blows up and the goldfish dies and you get hit really hard with a shoe for messing up the house and costing us a fortune but you sort of feel you deserved it because wow but really you didn’t mean to and you never really knew what right and wrong was after that because it all seemed so totally capricious and a bit strange.
Which . . . is the first thing he sees when he slows down. He sees that whole unhappy business and for a moment he knows, absolutely knows in his heart of hearts that he’s going to bounce off the end of time, the opposite end, and then go back, and then forward, until he is misshapen and exhausted and then the final act of the Time Gun is going to be to put his soul inside that goldfish and he’s going to explode himself accidentally and wouldn’t that make it an Irony Gun?
And then he thinks, no, thank God, that’s just crazy talk. And flies forward through time.
Morris Ruddle flies forward through time. It’s better in this direction because everything makes sense and words aren’t backwards. It’s also worse because he can see every crappy choice he ever made and a whole bunch of the ones other people made and he’s sort of getting an education here, getting a bit wise. It occurs to him that maybe with this newfound wisdom he will solve some of the world’s problems. He wanders around a bit checking out how governments work and reckons they don’t. They’re just a room full of confused people making it up as they go along, which is a bit scary. He watches sub-prime loans get out of control and frankly isn’t impressed. It’s as if no one’s paying attention at all except him. He sees wars and executions and a great number of other people having sex and he passes through the moment when he gets hired to steal the Time Gun and he thinks for a moment that he might be slowing down.
