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18: Time Travel with Wells and Tatnall
Our first real journey was into the Year 1950. Wells stayed behind.
We had done all the fun little tinkering, like going an hour forward to try and look at ourselves, or a day backward to snap a photo of ourselves coming out of the pond. We had heated discussions about all this, and I convinced my friends to stay away from such frivolities. The Membrane is very sensitive to matters of time, for reasons that will be abundantly clear soon, and it picked up on our experiments. The realization floated through my understanding that, if we maneuvered ourselves into any sort of paradox, the Membrane--or the Temporale itself--would efficiently react by shutting us out, perhaps even letting us die in some entropic Cold Sack inch-seconds away from life and laughter and Little Tim's Christmas Goose. Our goose would be cooked, so to speak.
After much discussion, we picked 1950 as a nice round number. Tatnall had dressed the flying machine up with dark green paint and a bogus pair of axles with grubby farm tyres. The gadget, like our virtual body suits, had plenty of off-side support mechanisms to keep us from bumbling into things on our way uptime or downtime and mutually annihilating. All those practical problems (which, incidentally, Wells' Time Traveler anxiously ponders in Chapter III) had been solved by the Laars eons ago. It was simply up to us to pick safe places to visit.
In the backs of our minds, still, was the urgent cause of House Upholder and the dark Popess of the assassins. Timony had figured out somehow--perhaps he had already journeyed here or to other points in the Temporale--that this train system outside time and space was crucial to the survival of our society on Mars. The average End Times-obsessed muddle-brain took for granted that the universe would somehow mysteriously end all of a sudden, and those of us who'd been good would go to paradise, while the 'others' would perish. Timony had seen past all that and understood that, pragmatically, Mars was running down. Our ancestors had not been able to complete their huge terraplaning job. Even some of the god rocks on the middle slopes had started running down, so that people who could afford it and who traveled much had to carry a spare bottle or two. I conferred privately with Trini and Sindi, and we agreed to remain as long as Tatnall's hospitality was freely offered to us and as long as we felt we were learning something--anything at all to help us save Mars.
One other thing. Wells, being a bit neurotic, stayed away. He did not want to know when or how he would die, although there was no indication he would ever be famous and therefore no notion that the news of his demise would appear on billboards. Little did we know. Tatnall, being a more practical sort, vowed to ignore whatever personal matters he might learn. He was too busy being curious and excited to worry about becoming depressed.
We spent a strangely disturbing, cheerless day in the gray mist among unadorned gray factories, and living blocks outside London where unadorned lives were led, though those living them had decent clothing and round cheeks--there was something missing in their eyes, some discontentment that was hard to fathom. We three understood the English so little, but Tatnall guessed: "There has been some sort of huge war, ended by a terrible bomb, and they all live in morbid fear that their world will end any moment." He said this as we stood at Picadilly Circus watching masses of black and gray cars roaring in circles, and we Martians laughed. It sounded to much like our own world.
Our next trip was to the year 2000, which Tatnall picked as a good round number. Apparently in the paranoia of the popular imagination, this number, which was meaningless since it was just an arbitrary date on a calendar, and there were various other religiously based calendars with different information, even among these people who called themselves Christians, that it was hard to understand what they all got worked up about.
* * * *
A note about their calendar: it was pegged to the birth of their monotheistic God, whose theologies seem hauntingly familiar to us of the Mars clergy of the Holy Fire. The Romans and later the Europeans of this religion conquered much of the world and imposed their Before Christus/Anno Domini and B.C./A.D. standard on the world. With globalization into the 21st Century, cognoscenti began driving a less sectarian and more universal standard, at first Before Common Era/Common Era or B.C.E./C.E. This somehow never really caught on, and Common Calendar or CC seemed much more catchy. Consequently most of the people we would encounter in our time travels used the -C/CC standard, still using the familiar Year 1 of Christ's birth as the peg but pretending it was also about other world events at the time--like the birth of the Roman Empire, which happened in practically the same generation. Satisfied with that, historians would refer to 100 B.C. or B.C.E. as simply 100 -C. By the same token, 100 A.D. or C.E. became 100 CC.
* * * *
People in the late 20th Century had recently invented digitizers, which they called computers, and they thought somehow the world would end because of these primitive and laughable machines in conjunction with their superstitions about this charming but pointless Year 2000.
What I did find interesting was that the first inklings of a technology similar to the Membrane was taking shape as people networked these little toys. Sitting at their keyboards, borrowed from typewriter technology of H. G. Wells' time, and their screens, borrowed from 1950s television technology, and so on, they looked very self-important but reminded me of kids sitting around pretending to talk through tin cans connected with string. We learned that the atomic terror had given way to a new religious terror in which various people wanted to murder each other in the name of their loving deities. I would not have believed this about my own culture until I'd heard of Balesso and the plotters in King City. There is a saying among the Americans, who rule during the millennial period: "The more things change, the more they stay the same."
Tatnall learned that he had been forgotten by history, but that Wells had become famous as the immortal scrivener of great books--including one called The Time Machine. Tatnall, to my knowledge, never told Wells. It would take all the fun out of life, obviously, if there were no surprises. Among those surprises would be the list of Wells' liaisons with beautiful and famous women while remaining married to the faithful Catherine. Nor would it serve any purpose to tell him she would predecease him in 1927 at a young age, while he would live on to died in 1946, having outlived the Blitz. Adrift in the world after the passing of Catherine (or Jane, as they would style her), he looked dourly from the ruins of London during the Luftwaffe savaging of the Battle of Britain. It must have reminded him of the destruction he foresaw in his later imaginative novels, a gloomy vision of the future indeed. In fact, it was foreshadowed on a chilly October night in 1917 when he and several other literary lions were having dinner and brandy at the house of J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan. George Bernard Shaw, J. M. Barrie, H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, and Arnold Bennett were all at the table together, when Zeppelins of the Kaiser's canvas-and-wood air fleet sailed silently overhead and dropped bombs. Barrie and his guests all went up on the roof to watch the dreadful excitement. This was near the Victoria Embankment of the Thames by the Charing Cross Station bridge. Thus, the Blitz in 1941 must have seemed like not only Goetterdaemmerung, but déjà vu. Of all this and much more, Tatnall was aware in 1892, and he mercifully kept it from his friend. Speaking of friends, Conan Doyle was not far away on Wimpole Street by now, composing the first Sherlock Holmes stories while running his opthalmology practice. Like the Time Traveler, Holmes is a creation of reason, the last Newtonian before the chaos of Relativity. My observations, of course, are based on extensive reading and audio, and I was delighted to find a growing wealth of such materials as our path carried us forward in time. It was an excellent way to utilize my stern training under the Abbot, with materials that seem remarkable for their poverty now that I have the wealth of all Earthly (Erdithly, the Martians might say) learning overflowing my lap and rolling around my feet.
The journeys we took forward, eventually with the reluctant Wells on board, told the two Englishmen the dire future of their world. There would be pandemics and terrorism. There would be natural disasters, some caused by man and others just consequences of nature. There would be further wars, further killing, all of it incomprehensible a generation or two later. All this would deeply influence Wells and inform the social reforms he would ever espouse. The journey forward taught us our history, finally, so that we learned what NASA really was, and that there were no godpods but hardy little tin cans tossed from earth with a few brave souls on board risking everything to kickstart a barren Red Planet into becoming a second earth. We learned, surprisingly, that a wave of dark conquerors would sweep in from the galaxy a few centuries hence and make our system a backwater of interstellar trade. More surprisingly these alien rulers would be gone within a few centuries for reasons yet to be understood, but in the meantime they would leave their ruins behind, and mankind would rise anew from the ashes. Most surprising of all, however, was the connection between the far past and the distant future. Of the future there is not much room to write in this book, and the telling of the explorations of Wells' friend Darby Tatnall (The Time Traveler, as the owner of villa and laboratory is named in Wells' novel) are best left to Wells.
Our story takes us where Tatnall and Wells did not go--the distant past.
Victorian London had a few charming moments. The dirt and poverty were appalling. The social inequities were enough to make one cry out in anguish. Some of the people here wore eyeglasses--if they were lucky enough to afford them. Sophisticated eye surgery was unheard of, and a good thing because with the septic conditions in operating rooms it was likely you'd lose both eyes and die of a brain infection. More than once, seeing a face in a crowd, I was reminded of that odious little man on the zeppelin above Olympus Mons, whom I had dubbed Flash. I wondered what alley he lay in, bleeding, after having propositioned some young tough like the one who stole my wallet near the Holy City. It was hard not to make comparisons, but the grime and poverty of London seemed by far worse than anything I'd seen on Mars.
Like most timeless metropolises, London of Victoria's age looked better through a distant glass. I have seen cities whose glittering skyline was a beacon of wonderment, which seemed to vanish as I walked their littered and crime-ridden streets. From ancient Rome to Victorian London, from Paris in the Middle Ages where wolves roamed the streets at night during bitterly cold winters, to Berlin between the last feeble Junckers and the first wild-eyed Nazis where people starved to death, or else froze in their unheated apartments after they had finished burning their books and furniture to keep warm--I have seen it all. I call it skyline syndrome. Nevertheless, I must remark that it was in London, in 1816, that the first feeble gaslight flickered into life, and by the time we stayed with Tatnall, the streets were a picturesque scene that engraved itself on the human psyche, one might say upon the racial DNA, so profound was the effect on the imagination of coming from the countryside into the city, and seeing such a sea of lights. These were not the torchlights to which people had been accustomed since the beginning of human time, but artificial lights. The gaslamp era only lasted a quarter century at most, but it was part of that great transition out of the literally dark ages. Gas was dangerous, causing many sudden fatal explosions, but it had charm. Its softly sighing light was seductive. It did not flicker, as candles and burning wood do. It was steady as burning oil, but brighter. It enabled people to start living at night. It opened new vistas of the imagination in theater, writing, philosophy. It added hours to the day so that people could be more productive. It added new mythologies about cozy holidays, starting with Dickens' publication of A Christmas Carol in 1843. When all is said and done, just as ordinary people will ever continue to be fascinated by the Rome of the ancient emperors, so the British found their moment during the age of Victoria. I resolved to return here again, and to visit the Time Travelers--to see what really happened during their journey 8,000 centuries into the future, which Wells would sanitize in his story.
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