Great bridges, elfin-graceful, arched across the miles from balcony to balcony of the gleaming structures, with giant statues placed at even intervals, sentry-like, along their tremendous length. The balconies were thickly grown with hedges and arbors, and the bridges were like parklands suspended in the air, with figures dimly glimpsed strolling among the greenery. Or flying.
I thought they were seagulls at first. They rose from the clouds below. Bright figures rose and soared past the window, comet-swift, and I saw that they were manlike beings, robed in cloaks of light which fanned out like angel wings to either side of them. Up along the wind they fled, swifter than rising sparks, handsome men, and women with faces like young girls, heads thrown back and eyes alit with pleasure. They were dressed in the costumes of all ages.
Among the flock were monsters and animal-headed people, like the gods of ancient Egypt, jackal-headed or hawk-headed, like satyrs and chimera.
The air was alive with fliers, darting from window to window, or from minaret to minaret, balcony to balcony, bridge to rooftop garden.
And, dimly through the glass, I heard the air was filled with music.
Iapetus' voice rang with pride: "Many histories have many strange beginnings, but time travel is inevitable in every time line, and, from time travelers, Time Wardens grow, and all come here, their mighty monuments and towers to build. Yes! Metachronopolis has many beginnings, but all timelines lead to her!”
I was impressed by the sights. "When do I get my chance to sign up?" I said softly.
Iapetus opened the window. I smelled the scent of wind-blown petals on the far gardens, and heard the flourish of trumpets, and the tolling of deep bells. "In a sense," he said, "You already have. Examine your memory.”
He took a gun out of his pocket and shot me in the leg. I fell screaming, blood pumping through the fingers I clenched onto my shattered knee…
And then he hadn't. Never had. No gun, no wound.
The shocking memory of having been shot, horribly wounded, was already beginning to fade, like a bad dream.
But I didn't let it fade. For one thing, it was impossible for me to have two separate and distinct, mutually contradictory memories of the same event.
For another, I wanted to remember the look on Iapetus' face as he shot. Just for a second, as he raised the strange pistol, he wore a look so inhuman and expressionless, that I would have called it cruel, if he hadn't seemed so cavalier and nonchalant…
“Deja Vu is a milder form of the same phenomenon,” he continued in the same bored, dry tone. “Some people have a naturally hardened memory. Our training can increase the talent. A talent utterly useless except when there is a Time Warden nearby, manipulating the chronocosm. Then it is precious. Useful to us. Our instruments show you have a strong natural hardness of memory; a stubborn streak. Being able to remember alternate versions after a change does not make you a Time Warden, of course. But, still, it's better than being a flatliner. We call it pawn memory. I trust you see the humor? Pawns cannot leave their own files, their own timelines, so to speak, unless a major piece is near. And, yes, some pawns reach the final row.”
I was not sure I liked the idea of being anyone's pawn. But then I wondered what this final row might look like.
20.
So of course I recognized the place. Highest tower in the city, biggest, brightest. A vast floor of shining black marble, inset with panels of mirrored destiny crystal, stretched across acres toward wide balconies, which looked down upon the titanic gold towers far below. The place looked like it was open to the air on every side, but between the tall pillars there must have been panes of invisible glass or some sort of force field to maintain the pressure at this altitude. The sky above was so dark blue it was almost black.
I think I saw the curve of the horizon.
Standing near one of the thrones that formed a semicircle embracing the floor, was D'Artagnan. Standing near me was a cataphract in power armor, circa A.D. 4400, the era of the Machine Wars. The cataphract had his faceplate up, and I could see the cold, no-nonsense look in his eye. His armor was throbbing on stand-by; I could hear the idling hum of the disrupter grids and the clicking of the launch-pack warm-up check from here.
There was a whine from his elbow servo-motors when he folded his arms, putting his fingers near the control points on his chestplate.
I was fast with my smartgun. I didn't think I was that fast. I put it back in the holster, slowly, like a nice little boy who didn't want to get flattened.
At his nod, an aiming monocle clicked out of its slot on his helmet visor and fell over his eye. Little red dots danced up and down upon my chest, just to let me know he was thinking of me.
I turned to D'Artagnan. “Cute trick with the destiny card,” I said.
“You didn't want to be here. Well, now you are.”
“What's the big idea with the tin can here?” I said, hooking a thumb at the cataphract.
“That should be obvious, Mr. Frontino. We want you to solve a murder, not to prevent it. Even highly trained paradox proctors get uncertain about their oaths if ever they look into the circumstances of their own future deaths. They always wonder, can't the universe stand just one more small strain? Surely one more tiny fold in the fabric of time won't unravel the whole web? And what does it matter to me anyway, if the chronocosm dies, so long as I myself survive?”
He chuckled, then added: “If that's what loyal knot-cutters think, well, what are we to expect from one who is retired? Especially since he did not ask our permission to retire, did he?”
I turned away. I wasn't sure what I would say, so all I did say was: “And where's the body?”
“I have composed a null-time vacuole to bracket the event,” he said, drawing a mirrored destiny card from his doublet. “You may examine it at your leisure.”
First clue: why was D'Artagnan bothering to say so much here? Time Wardens are only talkative in virgin time. When they've been through the same scene a dozen times or so, they usually get right to the point. He had been acting the same way last night, when he interrupted my beauty sleep. Was there such a thing as a Time Warden who didn't like to time travel?
Clue two: why me? Why these high-pressure tactics to herd me into this thing? They had other paradox-killers. Plenty. One of them was looming behind me right now, dressed in his happy mechanical-man suit.
D'Artagnan slid the destiny card into the crystal material of the nearest throne arm. The throne itself was made of a block of the same "substance" as the card: an area of frozen time-energy. (I've always wondered why they make their chairs that way. I guess nothing else is good enough for a Time Warden to warm his butt on. On the other hand, no one could monkey around with any of these throne's histories, not made of what they were, or go back and have had built bombs or bugging cells inside them or other nasty gimmicks.)
And the strip of the floor leading from the throne to where I was standing was also made of the same substance. I imagined the new scene too clearly to deny it. And I was there.
21.
I imagined a single, still moment of time.
Everything was "lit" by the weird non-glow of null-time. Any object grew bluer and dimmer the longer you stared at it. I was used to the effect; I kept my gaze swinging back and forth as I stepped into the scene, always moving. D'Artagnan and the cataphract stepped in behind me, the motorized legs on the power-armor humming with understated strength.
There were only two figures frozen in the moment of the murder scene. One was motionless on a throne, armored in ice and cloaked in mist; his face, a mirror. The other was a tall guy, not so good-looking, trenchcoat scarlet with motionless flame, stylish fedora suspended in mid-air to one side of his head. He was in the middle of getting shot, impaled on an energy-blast.
Yours truly. Of course. And to think that one of my goals in life had been to leave a good looking corpse.
I looked at the blast first.
It originated off to the left. Near one of the pillars, about shoulder
-high, a small puff of mist was frozen. Trailing out from it, motionless, like a worm made of flame, was a line of Cherenkov radiation, and knots and streamers of cloud where the atmosphere couldn't get out of the way fast enough to avoid being vaporized. Little glowing balls like St. Elmo's fire dotted the fiery discharge-stream, where ionized oxygen molecules were being turned into ozone. An even brighter crooked line paralleling the discharge-path indicated where atoms had been split by the force of the passing bullet.
At the other end of the discharge-stream was me, also ending. I looked at myself hanging in mid-air, caught in mid-explosion and mid-death. My smartgun was leaping like a salmon trying, too late, to get into my fingers. It hung, frozen, a few inches above my out-flung hand. Not smart enough this time, it seemed.
I (the me version of me, that is) stepped through clouds of blood and flying steam to get a closer look at me (the becoming-a-corpse version of me). The exit wound was enormous, as if half my chest and all of my left arm had been drawn in hazy red chalk-smudges by an Impressionist artist.
The smell was terrible. I know the textbooks say you're not supposed to be able to smell anything in null-time. But, I figure, if my eye can move through a cloud of frozen photons and pick up an image, then my nose can move through a nimbus of blood-cloud and sniff roasted flesh.
There was no visible entry wound. Of course. The bullet must have been ultra-microscopic, perhaps only a few molecules wide, in order to be small enough to slip through my smartgun's watchdog web. And it must have been traveling fast enough, a hefty percentage of the speed of light, to be quick enough to get me before my smartgun could react.
And the bullet was programmed, somehow, to drop velocity and transfer its kinetic energy to my body in a broad, slow shockwave as it struck.
Somehow? A time-retardation wave could do it. The relative velocity would change once it left the field. Just another application of the same technology which made my smartgun.
Heck. I could have this done this myself, with a smartgun just like the one I had. I already thought of two different ways to reproduce this effect just with the programs I presently had loaded.
I straightened up and backed away, brushing anachronistic drops of blood off my coat.
23.
After I was done looking at the figure on the throne, I turned and addressed D'Artagnan. “I need to take a reading of the time depth and energy signature of the discharge wave with the sensors in my smartgun. I'm going to draw it nice and slow, so your steel gorilla knows I'm on the level here. That all right with you?”
D'Artagnan spread his hands. “That's fine.”
For the first time, I noticed a slight blur of mist around his fingers as he made the gesture.
He had time-doubled. It looked like a Recursive Alternate Information shift, but I wasn't sure. There was an alternate line out there somewhere where he had done something else with his hand. Maybe he had touched a control or given a hand signal to the cataphract. Or, if it was actually a Recursive Anachronism shift, he might have handed something forward or backward to himself.
Or he might not have done anything at all. With a Parallel Displacement shift, a Time Warden, standing a few seconds away, pacing us, could have handed him something.
I drew my smartgun slowly.
25.
And I was thinking: Why not?
Why the hell not? Hitler's mother-to-be, Klara, age sixteen, looked up at me with eyes as wide and trusting and innocent and hurt as any you'd ever dream of seeing. She hadn't done anything wrong. Maybe she would have said something, but the slug had torn out her throat. She got blood all over my pants and shoes when she fell toward me. It had smelled then much the way it smelled now.
Stalin's mother, Ketevan Geladze, on the other hand, was already pregnant, a pretty blond with a cheerful smile and coke-bottle-bottom-thick eyeglasses, when the Time Wardens decided to abort her future. They had me shoot her in the stomach twice more after she fell, burnt and screaming, just to make sure her helpless baby would be dead.
Why not? They can all make it undone again. Or so they told me.
And then one Time Warden or another took a dislike to the atomic wars of the 2020's. Einstein was a little boy playing with mud-pies in a backyard garden when my misplaced scattershot tore off his arms and legs and left him blind, bleeding, and screaming in pain until I could reprogram and fire a particle beam to put him out of his misery.
When I asked to be allowed to go back and do that assassination again, maybe cleaner, the Time Warden's representative told me that chronoportation should not be used for frivolous reasons. He sternly warned me that paradox weakened the fabric of timespace.
Why not?
I won't even tell you who I had to kill to let a curious Time Warden explore the alternate line where Christianity never rose to dominance in Europe. At least that one was done with a clean shot to the head.
Why not?
If I could set out to kill pregnant women and innocent girls and little boys and the nicest guy I'd ever met, why not set out to kill me?
22.
I looked around to see who I had been (was going to be) talking to, when I was (would be) shot.
Only one of the thrones was occupied. There he was in all his regalia. A Time Warden. His armor was made, not of metal, but of destiny crystal, gleaming like ice. From his shoulders depended a cloak of mist, created from a single thread vibrating backward and forward across several seconds. The cloak of distorted time fell from his shoulders in streamers of vapor, dripped across and down the chair arms where he sat, and hovered in curls around his ankles.
I could not see his face. His crown was projecting a forcefield like a mirrored helmet to protect his head from the radiation of the murderous discharge in front of him.
Clue three: why did the Time Warden's armor have time to react to the assassin's bolt when the victim's smartgun did not? Coincidence? But I didn't believe in coincidences. What people call coincidences are sloppy, makeshift arrangements by the Time Wardens to put frayed or broken timelines back on track.
And I sure as hell didn't believe in Time Wardens any more.
5.
Iapetus leaned past me and opened the window. He paused a moment, allowing me to savor the smell of the high gardens, the deep chime of distant bells, to hear the calls and cries of delight from the winged fliers.
He spoke: “There need be no further interview nor testing. Any Time Warden dissatisfied with your future performance would have already retroactively informed me. The choice is now yours.”
He straightened his back and looked at me. “The rewards of loyal service to the Time Wardens are many…”
1(a).
This time around, I didn't say anything to her. I bit back the angry confession which sprang to my lips. There are some things which, once said, can never be taken back.
Instead, I put my hands on her shoulders, and drew her closer. “Babydoll, there's no other woman. There is no one else…” I lied smoothly.
This time, my past didn't catch up with me. I could always outrun it, always stay one jump ahead of the game. I smothered the pang of guilt I felt at the thought as I lowered my head to kiss her.
6.
“…including material rewards, without limit…”
10.
While I was waiting for the croupier, and the manager, and the manager's assistant, to collect my winnings into a large suitcase, I stepped into a telephone booth, with a copy of tomorrow's stock market under my arm, to make a call to my broker.
I yawned while the phone rang. It all seemed so tedious, so safe. Maybe this time around I would walk into the ambush the thugs hired by the manager were planning.
7.
“…as well as the knowledge that you are doing good and useful work to preserve both past historic treasures and the integrity of the timespace continuum…”
11.
The Roman legionary stood there, shaking and sweating, eyes rolling wildly, unable to move, locked i
n the grip of my paralysis ray. I would have preferred to shoot him, of course, but orders were not to chance future archeologists puzzling over slugs found in one of Caesar's troopers. I could tell the Roman wanted to scream when I pulled his short sword from its scabbard, put the point under the belt of his armor, and pushed.
He fell down the steps of the Library at Alexandria, and I kicked the torch he'd been holding down after him, safely away from the precious scrolls and papyrus.
There was blood splashed all over my coat and trousers.
I was doing good work. Important work. Why did it make me feel sick to my stomach?
A whole squad of legionaries led by a centurion trotted around the corner at a quickstep, shields and pilum in hand. They let out a roar when they saw their dead comrade, and shouted vows of vengeance to their gods. Then they lowered spears, formed ranks, and charged the stairs.
I laughed. Did they expect me to wait around for their vengeance? For the consequences of my actions to catch up with me? They would never catch up.
A twist on the barrel of my smartgun opened the paralysis induction beam to wide-fan. The soldiers fell, and then they waited, helplessly, for me to slaughter them. I tried not to look them in the eyes as I moved from one to the next with their comrade's gladius in my hand.
8.
“…and, since the Time Wardens are all-powerful, no one can oppose them or stop them. They have no enemies…”
13.
When I woke up, I found myself slumped in a heavy, high-backed chair of dark red leather, placed at the end of a long conference table of black walnut. Nine hooded figures sat around the length of the table.