City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis (2 page)

And then there was me. Why hadn't the Time Wardens shut me down long ago? No one knows why they do anything.

I pulled on my trousers and tucked in the tails of the shirt I hadn't bothered to take off when I sacked out on the couch. I whistled a command code toward the wardrobe and serving-beams draped my trenchcoat around my shoulders. Not that I expected to be cold in my own apartment; the fabric is woven with defensive webbing and detection-reaction cells. It's my own shabby version of a knight's shining armor.

Then the wardrobe slapped my hat onto my head. It must have thought that if I needed my coat, I needed my hat, right? Like I said, this was a low-tower apartment, and the circuits here were kind of dim.

I walked over slowly to where the Time Warden had been standing. Something was shining on the floor.

The card lay between my feet, glittering like a lake of deep ice. Distant shapes, like drowned buildings seen at the bottom of a clear lake, hovered in the cloudy reflection. I reached down…

Perhaps I wasn't thinking. Perhaps it was what flatliners call a coincidence. Only I don't believe in coincidences. I know there are Time Wardens.

I had actually bent over and was reaching my hand down toward the damn thing when my smartgun emitted its shrieking chronodistortion alarm. It jumped out of its holster and into my hand. The grip tingled where the energy field had to grab my fingers and fold them around the stock.

By then it was too late. My eyes had focused on the image floating deep below the mirrored surface of the card. This one was attention-activated.

Whenever a human brain pays attention to any event, the possible timelines radiating from that point multiply, since that observation affects the human's actions. There are circuits that can detect these multiplications, though I'd never heard of one being focused through a destiny card.

You look. You're trapped. Very neat, very tidy.

It was a picture of a wide, high place surrounded by pillars. Of course I recognized it. The Pyrtaneum of the Time Wardens. And then I was there.

“Welcome to the crime scene, Mr. Frontino.”

Second beginning. This one brighter than the others:

I recall my first view of the city.

I thought it was a job interview. I had no other work, no future, and the best woman I had ever laid eyes on walked out on me the night before. I wasn't in a great mood, but, at that point, I was willing to listen to anything.

Almost anything.

“Time travelers?” I said, trying to look chipper. I was trying to think of a polite way to say goodbye and get lost.

He didn't look crazy. (The real crazies never do). Mr. Iapetus was a foreign-looking fellow in a long red coat of a fabric I didn't recognize. He had dark, magnetic eyes, high cheekbones, and wore a narrow goatee.

His office was appointed with severe and restrained elegance. To one side, a row of dark bookshelves loomed; in the center was a wide mahogany desk, polished surface gleaming; to the other side, heavy drapes blocked a hidden length of window. I did not think it odd at the time to see bright sunlight shining from the carpet at the lower hem of the window drapes. But it had been raining outside when I entered the lobby just behind me.

Mr. Iapetus was standing by the window. He took up a fold of drapes in his hand. “I believe in what you might call the shock therapy method of indoctrination. It helps make the tedious period of disbelief more brief.”

A wide yank of his arm threw the drapes aside. A spill of blinding sunlight washed around me.

Blinking, I saw I was high up, overlooking a shining city. I had been on the ground floor when I came in. Now, I was miles up in the air. And glory was underfoot.

“Behold Metachronopolis, the city beyond the reach of time!”

Towers made of gleaming gold, taller than tall mountains, rose in streamlined ramparts all around me, like swords held up in high salute. Far underfoot, in the canyons and gulfs between the towers, cloudbanks drifted, stained cerise and gold from the light shed by the towers.

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.

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.

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.