Time Travel Omnibus, page 841
Maybe he was supposed to bombard her with questions about the period, to try and catch her out in an anachronism. But he had only general knowledge: Prohibition in America, a General Strike in Britain, talking pictures in 1927, the Lindbergh flight somewhere earlier, the stock market crash a year or two later, Thoroughly Modern Millie and P.G. Wodehouse. Not a lot of use. He couldn’t even remember who was Prime Minister in January, 1923. He could get answers from the net in moments, though; knowing things was pointless compared with knowing how to find things out. At the moment, that didn’t help him.
Whoever these women were—or rather, whoever this IRENE D was, for URSULA W-D plainly didn’t count—he was sure that they’d have the answers for any questions he came up with.
What was the point of this?
He could get to IRENE D. Despite everything, he had her. She was in his Room; she was his prey and meat and he would not let her challenge him.
I C U
I C U
I see you.
Irene thought that was a lie, but Master Mind could almost certainly hear her. Though, as with real spirits, she wondered if the words came to him as human sounds or in some other manner.
The parlour was almost completely dark, save for a cone of light about the table.
Miss Walter-David was terrified, on the point of fleeing. That was for the best, but there was a service Irene needed of her.
She did not say it out loud, for “Master Mind” would hear.
He said he could see, but she thought she could conceal her hand from him.
It was an awkward move. She put the fingers of her left hand on the shivering planchette, which was racing inside the circle, darting at the letters, trying to break free.
I C U ID
I C U R FRIT
She slipped a pocket-book out of her cardigan, opened it one-handed and pressed it to her thigh with the heel of her hand while extracting the pencil from the spine with her fingernails. It was not an easy thing to manage.
U R FRIT AND FRAUD
This was just raving. She wrote a note, blind. She was trusting Miss Walter-David to read her scrawl. It was strange what mattered.
“This is no longer Caress,” she said, trying to keep her voice steady. “Have we another visitor?”
2TRU IM SNAKE
“Im? Ah-ha, “I’m”. Snake? Yet another speaker of this peculiar dialect, with unconventional ideas about spelling.”
Miss Walter-David was backing away. She was out of her seat, retreating into darkness. Irene offered her the pocket-book, opened to the message. The sitter didn’t want to take it. She opened her mouth. Irene shook her head, shushing her. Miss Walter-David took the book, and peered in the dark. Irene was afraid the silly goose would read out loud, but she at least half-understood.
On a dresser nearby was a tea-tray, with four glasses of distilled water and four curls of chain. Bicycle chain, as it happened. Irene had asked Miss Walter-David to bring the tray to the ouija table.
“Snake, do you know things? Things yet to happen?”
2TRU
“A useful accomplishment.”
NDD
“Indeed?”
2RIT
There was a clatter. Miss Walter-David had withdrawn. Irene wondered if she would pay for the seance. She might. After all, there had been results. She had learned something, though nothing to make her happy.
“Miss Walter-David will die in 1952?”
Y
Back to Y. She preferred that to 2TRU and 2RIT.
“Of what?”
A pause.
PNEU
“Pneumonia, thank you.”
Her arm was getting worn out, dragged around the circle. Her shoulder ached. Doing this one-handed was not easy. She had already set out the glasses at the four points of the compass, and was working on the chains. It was important that the ends be dipped in the glasses to make the connections, but that the two ends in each glass not touch. This was more like physics than spiritualism, but she understood it made sense.
“What else do you know?”
U R FRAUD
“I don’t think so. Tell me about the future. Not 2001. The useful future, within the next five or ten years.”
STOK MRKT CRSH 29
“That’s worth knowing. You can tell me about stocks and shares?”
Y
It was a subject of which she knew nothing, but she could learn. She had an idea that there were easier and less obtrusive fortunes to be made there than in Derby winners. But she would get the names out of him, too.
“Horse races?”
A hesitation.
Y
The presence was less frisky, sliding easily about the circle, not trying to break free.
“This year’s Derby?”
A simple search (+Epsom +Derby +winner +1923 -Kentucky) had no matches; he took out -Kentucky, and had a few hits, and an explanation. Papyrus, the 1923 winner, was the first horse to run in both the Epsom and Kentucky Derby races, though the nag lost in the States, scuppering a possible chance for a nice long-shot accumulator bet if he really was giving a woman from the past a hot tip on the future. Boyd fed that all to IRENE D, still playing along, still not seeing the point. She received slowly, as if her system were taking one letter at a time.
Click. It wasn’t a monitor. It was a ouija board.
That was what he was supposed to think.
IRENE D: I’m going to give you another name. I should like you to tell me what you know of this man.
OK
IRENE D: Anthony Tallgarth. Also, Basil and Florence Tallgarth.
He ran multiple searches and got a cluster of matches, mostly from the 20s—though there were birth and death announcements from the 1860s through to 1968—and, again, mostly from the Ham&High. He picked one dated February 2, 1923, and opened the article.
TYCOON FINDS LOST SON.
IRENE D: Where is Anthony? Now.
According to the article, Anthony was enlisted in the Royal Navy as an Able Seaman, under the name of T.A. Meredith, stationed at Portsmouth and due to ship out aboard the HMS Duckett. He had parted from his wealthy parents after a scandal and a quarrel—since the brat had gone into the Navy, Boyd bet he was gay—but been discovered through the efforts of a “noted local spiritualist and seeress”. A reconciliation was effected.
He’d had enough of this game. He wasn’t going to play any more.
He rolled back in his chair, and hit an invisible wall.
IRENE D: I should tell you, Master Mind, that you are bound. With iron and holy water. I shall extend your circle, if you co-operate.
He tried reaching out, through the wall, and his hand was bathed with pain.
IRENE D: I do not know how you feel, if you can feel, but I will wager that you do not care for that.
It was as if she was watching him. Him!
IRENE D: Now, be a good little ghostie and tell me what I wish to know.
With his right hand lodged in his left armpit as the pain went away, he made keystrokes with his left hand, transferring the information she needed. It took a long time, a letter at a time.
IRENE D: There must be a way of replacing this board with a type-writer. That would be more comfortable for you, would it not?
FO, he typed.
A lash at his back, as the wall constricted. She had understood that. Was that a very 1923 womanly quality?
IRENE D: Manners, manners. If you are good to me, I shall let you have the freedom of this room, maybe this floor. I can procure longer chains.
He was a shark in a play-pool, furious and humiliated and in pain. And he knew it would last.
Mr and Mrs Tallgarth had been most generous. She could afford to give Master Mind the run of the parlour, and took care to refresh his water-bindings each day. This was not a task she would ever entrust to the new maid. The key to the parlour was about Irene’s person at all times.
People would pay to be in contact with the dead, but they would pay more for other services, information of more use in the here and now. And she had a good line on all manner of things. She had been testing Master Mind, and found him a useful source about a wide variety of subjects, from the minutiae of any common person’s life to the great matters which were to come in the rest of the century.
Actually, knowing which horse would win any year’s Derby was a comparatively minor advantage. Papyrus was bound to be the favourite, and the race too famous for any fortune to be made. She had her genie working on long-shot winners of lesser races, and was sparing in her use of the trick. Bookmakers were the sort of sharp people she understood only too well, and would soon tumble to any streak of unnatural luck. From now on, for a great many reasons, she intended to be as unobtrusive as possible.
This morning, she had been making a will. She had no interest in the disposal of her assets after death, when she herself ventured beyond the veil, for she intended to make the most of them while alive. The entirety of her estate was left to her firm of solicitors on the unusual condition that, when she passed, no record or announcement of her death be made, even on her gravestone. It was not beyond possibility that she mightn’t make it to 2001, though she knew she would be gone from this house by then. From now on, she would be careful about official mentions of her name; to be nameless, she understood, was to be invisible to Master Mind, and she needed her life to be shielded from him as his was from her.
The man had intended her harm, but he was her genie now, in her bottle.
She sat at the table, and put her hands on the planchette, feeling the familiar press of resistance against her.
“Is there anybody there?”
YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
“Temper temper, Master Mind. Today, I should like to know more about stocks and shares . . .”
Food was brought to him from the on-line grocery, handed over at the front door. He was a shut-in forever now. He couldn’t remember the last time he had stepped outside his flat; it had been days before IRENE D, maybe weeks. It wasn’t like he had ever needed to post a letter or go to a bank.
Boyd had found the chains. They were still here, fixed into the skirting boards, running under the doorway, rusted at the ends, where the water traps had been. It didn’t matter that the water had run out years ago. He was still bound.
Searches told him little more of Irene Dobson. At least he knew someone would have her in court in four years time—a surprise he would let her have—but he had no hopes that she would be impeded. He had found traces of her well into the 1960s, lastly a piece from 1968 that didn’t use her name but did mention her guiding spirit, “Master Mind”, to whom she owed so much over the course of her long and successful career as a medium, seeress and psychic sleuth.
From 1923 to 1968. Forty-five years. Realtime. Their link was constant, and he moved forward as she did, a day for a day.
Irene Dobson’s spirit guide had stayed with her at least that long.
Not forever. Forty-five years.
He had tried false information, hoping to ruin her—if she was cast out of her house (though she was still in it in 1927, he remembered) he would be free—but she always saw through it and could punish him.
He had tried going silent, shutting everything down. But he always had to boot up again, to be OnLine. It was more than a compulsion. It was a need. In theory, he could stop paying electricity and phone bills—rather, stop other people paying his—and be cut off eventually, but in theory he could stop himself breathing and suffocate. It just wasn’t in him. His meat had rarely left the house anyway, and as a reward for telling her about the extra-marital private habits of a husband whose avaricious wife was one of her sitters, she had extended his bindings to the hallway and—thank heavens—the toilet.
She had his full attention.
IRENE D: Is there anybody there?
Y DAMNIT Y
LOVE AND GLASS
Michael Scott Bricker
The creature held The Time Traveler’s lungs as the incisions healed beneath the touch of the thing’s organic machines. Like this being, the Morlocks had been children of technology, but they had been fumbling, unsophisticated monsters, so unlike the graceful soul who shared his company at the end of the world. Curiosity had driven The Time Traveler forward, beyond England and the old wars, beyond the Morlocks and his dear, sweet Weena, beyond that desolate beach with its scuttling crabs, and he found himself here, teetering at the edge of human existence under a dying umber sun. It had been foolish to come so far, but his successes had coloured his judgment, such that he had never considered that the machine might cease to function within the confines of some distant future. This business of traveling within the fourth dimension had gifted The Time Traveler with a godlike power, but with it came the ease associated with omnipotence. In Weena’s world, his intelligence had been supreme. Now, in this alien land of ice and desolation, he was a prisoner, and his time machine lay frozen in the sand, cold and dead as the Earth itself.
He had watched from his machine as the days grew longer, and as the rotation of the planet slowed, complex life vanished in favour of that which suited a dying world. Those monstrous crabs had ruled the beach during the twilight years of Earth, when the fat and feeble sun crept across the sky in century-long arcs, but life feeds upon life, and when that sun could no longer support most of the lingering vegetation, the crabs succumbed, leaving only the dull lichen that clung to rocks along the seashore. Those rocks had grown smooth and mirrored from eons of pounding surf, but eventually even the sea lay still, disturbed only by a rare breeze; the final breaths of Earth against its ice-caked surface. It had snowed here before The Time Traveler moved on for the last time, and those delicate flakes had reminded him of home, and of how, so long before, this dim, dying land, had been the realm of Queen Victoria.
Without widespread vegetation, the oxygen started to go, yet The Time Traveler moved forward again, gasping for air as pinpoint stars blossomed through the eternal twilight above. Even as he adjusted the levers of the time machine, frantically attempting to reverse his journey as his breaths grew dangerously short, he admired the beach, and how a group of ice crystals had grown into towers and arches, like a city of glass; empty, silent, and alone. The Time Traveler wondered if he had lost his reason, but when the machine began to fail, all his thoughts were upon his beautiful monstrosity of glass and steel. The machine had become his child, and although he loathed technology, he realized that he was a product of the machine as surely as the machine had been a product of his own mind. The Morlocks were the offspring of the science harnessed here, by the man who might conceivably have fathered them all.
The Time Traveler climbed from the machine as it took its place in the dying Earth, and he kissed its cold surface, then said goodbye to the friend that had sealed his fate. He first saw the creature, then, scurrying along the beach with insect-like precision, and against the endless dusk, the thing glowed with a weird internal energy. Everything about the creature looked exaggerated, from its long triple jointed limbs to its colourless saucer eyes to the nose that dominated its placid face. It stopped, and they shared a moment of mutual wonderment. The Time Traveler’s memories grew fuzzy after that. There had been the electric touch of its spidery fingers, the cool injections, and those tiny machines, crawling over his body like a cloud of miniature crabs. He knew that his lungs would be insufficient in such a world, and just as he was pondering his death by suffocation, or by the hands of that improbable creature, he watched, numb and motionless, as his glistening lungs were pulled from the cavern of his chest. There had been no blood spilled, no pain; only vague nightmares come alive. Something warm and alive took the place of his lungs, and it crawled within him and nested at the base of his throat, where it offered him life in exchange for the shelter of his ruined body.
He named the creature “George” in honor of the old English kings, and like those men of the primitive world, he reigned supreme, like a god who embodied all living things. When he straightened those jointed limbs, George stood a full three meters tall and resembled a shimmering willow tree. That inner light of his had been more than the glow of life, The Time Traveler learned, and after those tiny mechanical crabs had coated his body with a new rubbery layer of skin, he glowed as well. That new flesh kept him warm even in a world that had been forsaken by an aged sun, and as the Earth plunged into a deeper slumber, the two of them glowed more brightly, and they shared not only a physical warmth, but a warmth of understanding.
The Time Traveler thought of himself as a pet, at first. George had kept him alive, he had no doubt of that, and the creature that had terrified him became his salvation. The yellow pills he swallowed kept him strong and freed him from hunger, and George had fashioned a cave of stone and ice for them with a machine that apparently reorganized matter with sound. Through all this, they communicated with actions rather than words, and The Time Traveler wondered whether George could speak at all, and if there were more of its kind. If this world had been the creature’s kingdom, then his was an empty reign, and perhaps, The Time Traveler imagined, George had been the last intelligent being on Earth until the time machine had provided him with an ancient ancestor. As for The Time Traveler’s own intelligence, he felt humbled by the miracles of George’s science, such that his machine, though dead and powerless, was the only thing that prevented him from feeling, at best, like a glorified ape.
The Eloi and the Morlocks had been products of distant centuries, though in most ways, even the English, with all their arrogance and murderous imperialism, had been more advanced. Eventually, The Time Traveler imagined that the species had dwindled with its ebbing intellectual abilities, leaving only those monstrous crabs on the beach. The Earth had been dying since Weena’s time, and George, being the magnificent creature that it was, seemed like an outsider in this place. The Time Traveler tried to explain his machine to George, and although his language was lost on the creature, his love came across, and George wept, bleeding mercuric tears from the bowls of its eyes. This was a creature of heart as well as intelligence, and when The Time Traveler asked him whether he was the last of his kind, George touched his shoulder, and within that touch passed understanding.
