Light came from two high candelabrums, burning real candles and dripping messy wax onto the table surface. The room around me was dim; I had the impression we were in a library. There were no windows, no clocks, nothing like a calendar anywhere in sight. I could hear no noise from outside. It may have been day or night, of any season, of any year.
The robes, likewise, could have been from practically any date or era. They all wore gloves; I saw no rings or jewelry.
“Do not be alarmed,” came a polite tenor from my left. “I know you do not recall this, but you volunteered to have a small part of your recent memory blotted out. It was a condition our anonymity required to make this conversation possible. You wanted to speak with us.”
“And who are you supposed to be?” I asked, straightening up, my fingers pressed against my throbbing temples. “And why the hell did I—you claim—want to speak to you so badly?”
The hooded figure at the other end of the table leaned forward slightly. He had a rumbling, bass voice. “We are the enemies of the Time Wardens, Mr. Frontino…”
24.
I drew my smartgun slowly, so as not to startle D'Artagnan or Ugly Boy in the fancy steel suit. Idiots. They might have stood a chance if Ugly Boy had had enough sense to keep his faceplate down. As it was, I gyro-focused an aiming laser to keep a dot right between his eyes where he couldn't see it, while taking a reading on the energy discharge which killed (was going to kill) me (future-me). I didn't have to actually point the gun barrel at Ugly Boy to shoot him; my gun was pretty damn smart.
The formation readings did not surprise me. The energy signature was exactly the same as that generated by the gun held in my hand. It was not the same make or model, it was the exact same gun.
Of course. Obviously. I was going to shoot myself.
Means I could see. What about opportunity?
The time-depth reading on the spot of mist from which the murder-discharge radiated did surprise me. It was a matter of a few seconds, plus or minus. Something was going to make me shoot me in a moment or so from now.
That left only motive. And I couldn't imagine any motive, at first.
But then I thought: Why not? Why the hell not?
26.
I swung my barrel to cover D'Artagnan.
“OK, fancy boy,” I snapped. “Charade's over. Do I need to shoot you to make the real Time Warden show up?”
“You think I am not a Time Warden?”
I shook my head. I could have explained that I hadn't seen him chronoshift but once, and that, since he wasn't wearing a Time Warden's mist cloak, such shifts would have been obvious. A Time Warden who did not have other selves as bodyguards? Who lived through all his time lines in blind, first-time, unedited scenes? A Time Warden who didn't time travel? But all I said was: “You talk too much to be a Time Warden.”
“You may as well put your gun away, Mr. Frontino, or I will have my…” he nodded toward the cataphract and his sentence choked to a halt. He saw the aiming dot punctuating Ugly Boy's face.
“I don't know if you can see my settings from there,” I said.
He nodded carefully. “Your deadman switch is on.”
“And the change-in-energy detector. Any weapons go off near me, and my Unlimited friend here goes off and keeps going off long after I'm dead. Well? Well? I want some answers!”
The cataphract's launch-harness unfolded from his back like the legs of a preying mantis opening. Tubes longer than bazookas pointed at me. He raised his hand toward me. With sharp metallic clashes of noise, barrels came out of the weapon housings of his gauntleted forearms. I was standing close enough that I could hear the throbbing hum of his power-core cycling up to full-battle mode. The mouths of his weapons were so close to my face that I could smell ozone and hot metal.
My nape hairs and armpits prickled. I could feel my heartbeat pulsing in my temples; my face felt hot. Standing at ground zero, at the point-blank firing focus of a mobile Heavy Assault Battery, really doesn't do a man's nerves much good.
“Well?” I said, not taking my eyes from D'Artagnan. “Things are going to start getting sloppy!”
Even D'Artagnan looked surprised when the frozen image of the Time Warden on the throne stood up and raised his hand. Of course the time-stop had meant nothing to him. He had merely been sitting still, faking it.
“Enough!” His voice rang with multiple echoes, as if a crowd of people were speaking in not-quite-perfect unison. “You have passed our test, Frontino. You were brought here to assume the rights, powers and perquisites of a Time Warden. You may assume your rightful place at my side. There is no need for a coronation ceremony. Here I give the reality of power.”
With a casual flick of his wrist, he tossed a packet of destiny cards at my feet. The pack fell open as it struck the marble floor. Shining mirrored cards fell open, glittering.
These were the real things. The glassy depths held images from history, ages past and future, eras unguessed. There were castles, landscapes, battlefields, towers, all the cities and kingdoms of the world.
The final row lay before me. All I had to do was stoop over and pick them up. If I just bent a little, it could all be mine. Me, pulling the strings for once. Me, the puppet-master, not the puppet. No longer a pawn.
9.
I stood at the window, watching the golden city of glory with eyes of awe. I asked Iapetus. “I still have some questions. May I ask?”
“Certainly, Mr. Frontino.”
“How can it be possible? Time travel, I mean? What happens to cause-and-effect?”
Iapetus' smile was sinister and cold. “Cause-and-effect is a delusion of little minds. A cultural prejudice. The ancient wisdom of the prescientific ages recognized that the workings of the universe were held in the hands of unguessable powers. They called them gods instead of Time Wardens. But it is all one.”
I asked: “So what happens if you kill your grandfather?”
“Nothing truly exists,” explained Iapetus impatiently. “Except as a range of uncertain probabilities. Normally this uncertainty is confined to the sub-atomic level, creating the illusions of solid matter, life, and causality.
“If you killed a remote ancestor,” he continued, “The uncertainty of the events springing from that would increase, since your likelihood of existing in your present constitution would decrease. You might possibly survive having a remote ancestor killed; there is a small chance that some of your genes and elements might pop into existence without any cause. Certain sub-atomic particles do so, although it is unlikely that trillions of particles would leap together spontaneously to form you, but it might happen. Killing your father is remotely unlikely, however, as the uncertainty involved would become macroscopic. Visible to the naked eye.”
“Visible as what?”
“Mist. Photons bouncing from you become randomized in their paths as your exact position becomes uncertain. It looks like a blur of mist stretching between the various points you might affect. Gravitons likewise become uncertain, and the Earth no longer attracts all of your mass.”
But then he smiled and made a casual gesture. “But why dwell on such an ending? Rest assured that if there is any possible timeline which avoids such an appalling end, the Time Wardens will shunt you into it.”
“But won't that shunt itself create more uncertainty? Another paradox?”
“Perhaps,” he said with an airy wave of his hand and a snort of disdain. “But why worry? The results of that paradox can be postponed by means of additional paradoxes.”
“Doesn't sound quite right,” I said. “Like borrowing on credit to pay off bad credit. What happens tomorrow, when all the bills come due? What happens when the loan shark comes to collect? There is always a loan shark.”
“For a time traveler, tomorrow does not exist unless he chooses to walk into it. And, if you are loyal to the Time Wardens, you may, one day, be exalted to that high position yourself, and have all the past and future as your plaything. Well? What do you say?”
/>
27.
The cards lay shining at my feet on the marble floor.
“Well?” came the many voices of the single Time Warden. “What do you say?”
14.
“Am I supposed to be impressed?” I asked the hooded figures seating around the dark table. “So you are the famous enemies of the Time Wardens. Anachronists! The Anarchists of Time! But, really, how can you even exist?”
I glared at them. A faceless bunch of black hoods stared back. In the dark alleys and darker rooms of the lower towers, you hear rumors about Anachronists. Back when I was working on the Helen of Troy case, I even met a guy who said he'd met one, or was one, or something.
“How can you fight them?” I continued. I did not bother to keep the scorn out of my voice. “Use time travel? Then you are Time Wardens yourselves, whether you admit it or not. And if you don't or can't time travel, you're sunk!”
“We are their enemies, but they are not ours. We are in nowise Anarchists of Time. This is but their name for us,” said the deep bass voice. “Our loyalty is not to time at all. We are the Servants of Eternity.”
“Don't dodge the question. How do you fight them?”
“Simple. We do not. Why bother? Time Wardens are creatures of unreason. They deny cause and effect; they act without heed for the consequences of their actions. We need only stand by while they destroy themselves. The only thing we really need to do is warn their victims before they too fall into the same trap.”
“Which victims?”
“You, for one, Mr. Frontino. Drug users often become drug pushers to afford their habit. Likewise, time paradox patrolmen must often become Time Wardens to protect their own personal past from being snarled or destroyed by Time Wardens.”
“Me? A Time Warden? They're going to make me one?”
“Perhaps someday.”
“And that is what you want to protect me from?” I had to laugh. “Why not 'protect me' from becoming a millionaire? Why not 'protect me' from becoming a god?”
The tenor voice from the left spoke. “Say, rather, we want to protect you from playing at God. Don't you recognize that time travel, by its very nature, is, and must be, immoral? That it is, and must be, insane?”
I stood up. “Very dramatic. Look, I don't know what kind of crackpots you are, but if it comes down to a showdown between you bunch of flatliners and the Time Wardens, I think I want to be on the winning side, thank you. So where's the exit to this madhouse, eh?”
I slid my hand into my coat as I stood. I was expecting my shoulder-holster to be empty. Instead, my fingers closed around the streamlined grip of my smartgun with a familiar magnetic tingle. I felt warmth in my palm. The circuits were active.
That stumped me. Why the hell would the self-proclaimed enemies of the Time Wardens let me go fully armed in their midst? One of the robed figure spread his gloves, and spoke in a light, soft voice. Maybe it was a her. “Please, Mr. Frontino. Allow us a moment to explain ourselves. Perhaps we strike you as zealous. That does not necessarily mean that our conclusions are wrong, does it? Let us have our say, then you can judge for yourself. Your powers of reasoning are good. Use them.”
This had not been the way Lord Iapetus had spoken, back when I had been first recruited. I sat.
The one at the head of the table—the bass voice—spoke: “Time travel (and I do not include harmless sight-seeing) means using future knowledge to change the past. It means an attempt to elude the consequences of reality, without caring whether or not you cause the paradoxes that will someday destroy reality. Time travel and morality cannot co-exist. Morality judges the goodness of acts by their intentions and consequences. Time travelers deny consequences are related to intentions, or even that consequences exist at all. Is it right to kill an innocent young girl who will one day become Adolf Hitler's mother? Be careful before you answer. You yourself do not know what tyrants you may some day father, Mr. Frontino. Or become.”
“Maybe it's not so moral,” I said. “But so what? Flatliners can't fight Time Wardens. They're all-powerful.”
There was a murmur of laughter around the room at that. One amused voice said: “All-powerful? They are as helpless as condemned criminals on death row. The Time Wardens are living on borrowed time. They know it. Don't you? You've seen what's at the bottom of their towers, haven't you? Tell us, Mr. Frontino, what is at the foundation of the city of Metachronopolis?”
12.
Some Time Warden or another wanted to reward my squad for the work we had done destroying the technological progress of civilization circa A.D. 2300. It had been a delicate bit of work, since we had to eliminate the society's ability to investigate temporal mechanics—can't have a bunch of flatliners developing time travel on their own, after all—without eliminating the technological progress leading to the development of some of the Time Warden's favorite toys from later eras–including the multidimensional matrix formulations involved in smartguns like mine or cataphract-style armor.
But we had done well, killing all the right people at the right time, and the Time Warden invited us to his tower for a party. Everyone who still had luster to him was there then, including a dozen versions of Keats, each reading a slightly different variation of his completed poem, Hyperion, and an older and a younger version of Agamemnon, who some Time Warden had brought as a joke in order to watch the older version trying to convince his younger self not to go to Troy. There was also a confused version of Thomas Jefferson who was talking to descendants of Shaka Zulu from an obscure timeline where blacks kept whites as plantation slaves in Virginia. Richard the Lionheart and Saladin had been given antigravitic power-armor, and were flying around the party scene, blowing huge chunks in the scenery and unwary guests while trying to get each other. All great fun.
I kept noticing the servants. There were so many people who lived among these towers whose memories were not hardened enough to remember who they were or where they came from. People who had been forgotten by the Time Wardens once they were no longer amusing. Young versions of Cleopatra and Semiramis were both working that evening as cocktail waitresses, trying to earn enough money to keep their rooms in the lower towers. In other worlds, they had once been queens, but their eras were apparently no longer in style among the Time Wardens. They were no longer invited to parties or functions, but they knew too much about the future to be allowed back home. I saw a Cleopatra serving a drink to a Julius Caesar who either came from a timeline where he'd never met her or was just a jerk who pretended he didn't recognize her. Sad.
Since she lived in a bad section of the towers, I walked that Cleo home after the main part of the party was over (more famous parties became part of the Time Wardens' Eternal Circuit, and never ended). Seeing how dark and misty things were at these depths, and since I still had the security all-pass which had gotten me into the Time Warden's tower to begin with, I wondered if I could get past the lower areas and see what was at the bottom of these towers. From the sounds which sometimes came up from below, I had to wonder. I knew it was forbidden, but I was in a pretty dour mood and didn't much give a damn anyway, so…
15.
In a queasy voice, I answered the Enemies of the Time Wardens. “Mist. Mist and uncertainty. There is no bottom. It just gets more and more misty the further down you go…”
I shivered at the memory. The lower bridge had been invisible beneath my feet, swaying, soft and marshy, mutating in shape even as I walked. The gargoyle looming on the railing beside me had worn one face, then, after the mists blurred past, another. It had been dark, with muddled images of tower-roots fading and swaying around me. The thick tower walls were nothing but streams of smoke. From the abyss underfoot, a screaming voice begged me not to pick up the white cards. I shouted back, but there had been no answer…
“The towers don't have any foundations,” I said.
More laughter. A young man's voice came cheerfully from the right, “An apt metaphor for the Time Wardens' whole system of thought, I deem.”
/>
This laughing all the time was beginning to get on my nerves. Maybe because I had almost never heard a Time Warden laugh. Not nice laughter, anyway.
“What do you guys want from me?” I demanded.
“We would like you to withdraw your loyalty from the Time Wardens, not just the present group, but from the whole concept of time travel; to avoid time travel as much as possible; to prepare your memory for a massive shock. Major timeline changes are due once the Time Wardens are overthrown.”
“You are talking about the elimination of time travel altogether?”
“Is there any other position we can take, given our philosophy?”
“Eliminate how?”
“By letting nature take its course.”
“You talk as if it is… inevitable.”
The robed figure shrugged and spread his gloves. “Suppose you are a Time Warden, Mr. Frontino. Another Time Warden has gone back do something which might affect your past, something that may alter the circumstances of your culture and history, or even eliminate your birth. Whether his meddling is deliberate or not, what is the safest way to neutralize his interference? Safest, quickest, best?”
That was an easy one. How did Time Wardens solve all their problems? “Eliminate him.”
“Just him? Remember that you cannot reason with the other Time Wardens. If they were people who listened to warnings about the consequences of their actions, they would not be time travelers in the first place.”
“If time travel necessarily—you claim—and inevitably—you claim—eliminates whoever does it,” I said, “Then what happens after everything collapses?”