|
25: The Society for Historical Observation
We walked with him to a pillar as big as a building, which was guarded by a knot of private police in different uniforms—light blue, with gold helmets and red-and-white checked leggings like Highlands pipers, only they carried black zappers instead of bagpipes. They examined the blond man's and Taylor's bolo badges and then turned to us. "They're with me," Taylor said.
"Very well, Sir. We'll have to issue temporary guest passes to Level Three." Taylor nodded, and the guards took our photos, ran our fingerprints and retinal scans through a central police database, and within seconds handed us our own badges. The lead guard to me: "Sir, that will be good for 24 hours, after which, if you haven't visited a police station to get it updated or some other upgrade action, the badge will signal for your arrest warrant and begin making a loud noise. I know you know all this, but the law obliges me to inform you formally."
The lobby inside had a somber bronzy glow, due to the tinted windows all around. Several spacious elevators were available, and we rode up the socio-economic shaft several levels until we came to the middle of Westminster Tower, the section of the New City in which our mysterious new friend resided. He led us out onto a park-like deck on which the wind blew, and stray yellow leaves rolled under expansive birches. It was an autumnal air, almost a yellow fire in the atmosphere from the huge, interlinking American green ash tree crowns. We passed a group of teenage girls in their school uniforms, who were practicing kickball. An elderly woman was feeding pigeons. Several men in blue lab coats strolled together sipping drinks and eating sandwiches. It was a place I could feel at home, and Taylor no longer provoked my anxiety. Maybe I felt too desperate to mistrust the man formerly known to me as Flash—even if the nickname was more appropriate than ever. Maybe Sparky would have been better.
We came to a row of neo-Gothic buildings built of grayish stones, with ogive tunnels in which quaint lanterns glowed in iron hoops, and narrow Gothic windows in whose leaded glass were inset panes of stained glass. We entered one of a series of heavy wooden doors, passed through a nexus of halls paved in red Spanish tiles, and entered a far corner office whose barred windows looked out through pine trees toward the park, the river, the blue sky. In this cluttered space were electronic devices, ancient paper books, modern reading digital reading devices, viewers, transmitters, even a cache of weapons. "Close the door," Taylor brusquely informed the young blond man. "Sorry about the clutter. It's bug-proof, and we are going to require a very private conversation."
Taylor loaded, primed, and activated a tall silver samovar for tea. The five of us hunkered down as best we could. Taylor took off his hat and coat, parked his cane and a tool belt with weapons and com gear we hadn't noticed before, and sat behind his desk facing us and with his back to the window. Tuttle sat on the narrow concrete window-ledge, looking uncomfortable for a big robust man. "This is Jandy Tuttle," he said, pointing to the blond man. "Tuttle is actually my superior, while I am his supervisor, and no, I don’t think that makes much sense to you. I already know your names, if you'll forgive me. Jandy, meet the three priests from Mars that I mentioned in my recent report."
Tuttle nodded. He had sharp, intelligent eyes that assessed us quickly as he nodded. "What Professor Taylor means is that I am a cyborg, and therefore almost fully human except for certain, er, enhancements, like my arms and legs, which are almost entirely electromechanical. Professor Taylor, on the other hand, has been sent from our city in the far future to write reports, to communicate, and often to offer guidance. We have become good friends."
I frowned. "Pardon us, but we are wondering, well, if you aren't entirely human..."
Taylor's glasses had that twinkle that emerged from his eyes. "Friends? Well, dear me, I'm not a bloody machine." Jovially, he rolled up one sleeve and showed us a little transparent rectangle, a bloody red window, with fine yellow markings on it. "See that? It's blood. Human blood, and it runs in my veins. There are entire sections of me that are organic, just like yours, and those have to be nourished. I eat lightly, but I do eat very carefully to keep the old gray matter in peak trim." He poked himself on the forehead with his index finger for emphasis.
Tuttle said: "You three don't realize it, perhaps, but you've become part cyborg yourselves."
"NO," we said in unison.
"Yes," Taylor said. "When you passed through the Membrane, of which I am sure you are aware because it communicates with you, changes were made to your bodies."
"Ah yes," I said, "now I understand."
Taylor pointed to his glasses. "Technically, a person of long ago with lenses or a gold tooth, or even a cane, was living an artificially enhance life, and thus qualifies as a cyborg in the simplest sense. Now Tuttle is on the other end of that spectrum in so many complicated technical ways..."
Tuttle injected: "...which we don't have time to elaborate at the moment..." He rose to serve us all tea from the samovar which had begun to emit a low, drippy, steamy whistling noise.
"Right," Taylor said.
"I'm curious and can't wait to know. You said something very ominous and final sounding when we surrounded you. You said 'Now everything is changed.' What did you mean by that?"
"Great question. What I meant was that, the minute we interacted mutually, meaning it wasn't just me following you around, but you actually addressed me, the entire framework of our interaction changed. Let me explain. See that on the wall?" He pointed to a plaque, which showed an old-fashioned knightly shield with some heraldic imagery in each of its four quarters. Over the center was a pyramid with an eye over it, and underneath a wind-furled banner with the legend The Society for Historical Observation. "That is also carved in high relief outside this building on a sandstone surface. It is the emblem of our mission. We have stations in most time periods, and in all the important population centers."
"You just observe?" Trini said. "You don’t do anything?"
"Sounds rather benign," Sindi said.
"Oh yes," Taylor told Sindi, "we only observe. We never take direct action. We can't, you see, because it would change the future in unpredictable ways. I should explain that we are from the far future. In fact, we are from the end of time, or just this side of it. If you ride the Temporale vertically—that's the metaphor for traveling along the fourth or time dimension, the X'Y'Z' axes, that your friend Wells so presciently wrote about, although he had help from one of our officers who rescued him from a nasty situation almost a million years after today—you arrive at a place where you can go no further. It's literally the edge of time, and therefore the edge of the world."
"I thought time is infinite," I said.
Taylor said: "Time, all of it taken collectively, is, in the aggregate, limitless, eternal. Likewise, space is limitless, infinite. It's about how is it's structured. You may eventually understand something about how harmonics of the underverse create simple patterns on which the Temporale, and in fact the entire multiverse, is built. But for now, let's keep it simple." He took a breath. "There was a terrible war between two factions of what would later become our city. The war ruptured the fabric of time-space, which...it's hard to reach for this without using metaphors...events continue to move forward, but space and time are collapsing around them, so that the City of N is always in danger of shooting beyond the boundaries of space-time and vanishing, becoming a non-event, a no-longer-event, a was-event.
"In order to prevent that disintegration, we have agents as far back as Earth's Jurassic and even farther back. The danger is that if we kill that proverbial butterfly, it may send a ripple of changes upstream and terminate the City of En. We have become very adept at making minor tweaks here and there. I have seen the City of En standing so close to the brink that annihilation looked like a fog coming up the beach at dusk, when in reality it was a nonexistent tomorrow closing in on the fading reality of our today, its yesterday. A number of times, we've managed to pull something off and pop that envelope back out five, ten years. That is our constant struggle.
"So now you understand. When you saw me on the zeppelin on Mars, or following you on the streets of Victorian London—"
"—I thought it was you!—" I interrupted.
"—Yes, it was I—during those moments your life was to me still nothing more than an observed event. When you became conscious of me, through my carelessness, the corner was almost turned. But when you walked up to me and involved yourself in my event, you also involved me in your event. Now you are part of the Temporale. You are part of what has already been touched and therefore has already set in motion for better or worse whatever will result. We already know it's nothing fatal, or we'd have to go back in time and take extra-ordinary action—"
"—Like crashing the zeppelin so we'd both die?—"
"—Yes, but probably nothing that drastic. Maybe just having the restaurant built at an angle 39 years earlier so that the light refracted differently, and you'd never have seen Balesso's men roughing up Tuttle here."
"So Balesso is involved?"
"Yes. He is behind the Popess' murder in your Mars, and wants to make himself ruler not only of Mars but of Earth. He is a major danger to the City of En because he has come here to rewrite history, to prevent the civil war that destroyed human civilization on Earth after the departure of the Faraos."
"The Pulse," I said, trying to fit our creation myths in with what I was now learning about our real history.
"Yes. The Pulse was a space-time event rigged by the Faraos to cover their retreat from an enemy that need not concern us. The Faraos are out of the picture. We helped clean up the loose ends, though of course we couldn't intervene in any way."
Trini said somewhat bitterly: "Then you knew the Holy Mother was going to be murdered?"
He whispered: "Regretfully, yes."
Sindi was more pragmatic: "So you couldn't stop it. Well, what does the future hold, Mr. Time Traveler? Will the evil Balesso rule?"
The look in Taylor's eyes told us the answer. It wasn't what we had hoped for.
After a leaden pause, I said: "Is there any way to change it?"
"Yes, but you understand the risks. From our standpoint, we'll do nothing anywhere or anywhen to help anyone change anything unless it clearly is going to benefit the City of En."
"That must be some place," Trini ventured.
Tuttle said: "It is. And you're going to glimpse it, because I have to send you uptime to get fully modified as Level Two agents."
"Gods," Trini said, "we didn't know we were Level One."
Tuttle said: "Anyone who crosses the Membrane and gets fixed is automatically at the lowest rung, or Level One."
"How many levels are there?" Sindi asked.
Tuttle shook his head. "You don't need to know."
"And what is your function exactly," Trini asked.
"I'm a sort of combination gate keeper, engineer, train conductor, and policeman. I am a jack of all trades."
"There is no time to waste," Taylor said. "So we understand each other, I hope. We're not altruists. We are loyal patriotic citizens of the City of En, as you are of your Mars. We cannot and will not do anything to help you except what helps us. After careful scrutiny, we feel that Duke Balesso is a precursor agent of the time wars that punched the hole in time-space and left the City of En in its predicament."
"So let's go nuke him and blow his arse away," I said half jokingly, but with a real desire to see something terminal happen to the tyrant.
"It's not that simple," Tuttle said. "Remember this axiom: It's not only what must be done, but how it must be done." He got us ready for the trip, including taking back our temporary New City badges. Very thorough, these people. Makes you feel somehow warm and secure to know the people who are about to stop your body-atoms are completely detail-oriented.
|
