The Time Traveler's Almanac (107 page)

Eeasawn won the chariot race. (Pukz 111-114) I reached the semifinals in spear-dueling, fighting with the sword I picked up during the battle in my left hand. (Pukz 115-118)

Twice I severed a spear shaft, as Kastawr taught me. (Pukz 119 and 120) I was as surprised as my opponents. One must fight without effort, Kaeneus said, and Kaeneus was right. Forget the fear of death and the love of life. (I wish I could now.) Forget the desire to win and any hatred of the enemy. His eyes will tell you nothing if he has any skill at all. Watch his point, and not your own.

I was one of the final four contestants. (Pukz 121) Atalantah and I could not have been happier if I had won. (Pukz 122 and 123)

*   *   *

I have waited. I cannot say how long. Atalantah will surely come, I thought. Hahraklahs will surely come. I have eaten some of the funeral meats, and drunk some of the wine that was to cheer the king in Persefonay’s shadowy realm. I hope he will forgive me.

We drew pebbles from a helmet. (Pukz 124 and 125) Mine was the black pebble (Pukz 126), the only one. No one would look at me after that.

The others (Pukz 127 and 128) were chosen by lot, too, I believe. From the king’s family. From the queen’s. From the city. From the palace servants. That was Kleon. He had been wine steward. Thank you, Kleon, for your good wine. They walled us in, alive.

“Hahraklahs will come for me,” I told them. “Atalantah will come for me. If the tomb is guarded—”

They said it would be.

“It will not matter. They will come. Wait. You will see that I am right.”

They would not wait. I had hidden the dagger I won and had brought it into the tomb with me. I showed it to them, and they asked me to kill them.

Which I did, in the end. I argued. I pleaded. But soon I consented, because they were going to take it from me. I cut their throats for them, one by one.

And now I have waited for Atalantah.

Now I have waited for Hahraklahs.

Neither has come. I slept, and sat brooding in the dark, slept, and sat brooding. And slept again, and sat brooding again. I have reread my diary, and reviewed my Pukz, seeing in some things that I had missed before. They have not come. I wonder if they tried?

*   *   *

How long? Is it possible to overshoot my own period? Surely not, since I could not go back to it. But I will be careful just the same. A hundred years – a mere century. Here I go!

*   *   *

Nothing. I have felt about for the bodies in the dark. They are bones and nothing more. The tomb remains sealed, so Atalantah never came. Nobody did. Five hundred years this time. Is that too daring? I am determined to try it.

*   *   *

Greece. Not that this place is called Greece, I do not think it is, but Eeasawn and the rest came from Greece. I know that. Even now the Greeks have laid siege to Ilion, the city we feared so much. Agamemnawn and Akkilleus are their leaders.

*   *   *

Rome rules the world, a rule of iron backed by weapons of iron. I wish I had some of their iron tools right now. The beehive of masonry that imprisons me must surely have decayed somewhat by this time, and I still have my emergency rations. I am going to try to pry loose some stones and dig my way out.

*   *   *

The
Mayflower
has set sail, but I am not aboard her. I was to make peace. I can remember it now – can remember it again. We imagined a cooperative society in which Englishmen and Indians might meet as friends, sharing knowledge and food. It will never happen now, unless they have sent someone else.

The tomb remains sealed. That is the chief thing and the terrible thing, for me. No antiquarian has unearthed it. King Kuzikos sleeps undisturbed. So does Kleon. Again …

*   *   *

This is the end. The Chronomiser has no more time to spend. This is my own period, and the tomb remains sealed; no archeologist has found it, no tomb robber. I cannot get out, and so must die. Someday someone will discover this. I hope they will be able to read it.

Good-bye. I wish that I had sailed with the Pilgrims and spoken with the Native Americans – the mission we planned for more than a year. Yet the end might have been much the same. Time is my enemy. Cronus. He would slay the gods if he could, they said, and in time he did.

Revere my bones. This hand clasped the hand of Hercules.

These bony lips kissed the daughter of a god. Do not pity me.

The bronze blade is still sharp. Still keen, after four thousand years. If I act quickly I can cut both my right wrist and my left. (Pukz 129 and 130, infrared)

PALINDROMIC

Peter Crowther

Peter Crowther is a British journalist, short-story writer, novelist, editor, publisher, and anthologist. The founder of PS Publishing, he is also the recipient of the World Fantasy Award, the HWA Bram Stoker Award, and the British Fantasy Award. His work has been widely translated, and his short stories have been adapted for television on both sides of the Atlantic and collected in several collections. “Palindromic” was first published in the anthology
First Contact,
edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Larry Segriff, in 1997.

What seest thou else

In the dark backward and abysm of time?

William Shakespeare,
The Tempest

It was on the third day after the aliens arrived that we made the fateful discovery which placed the future of the entire planet in our hands. That discovery was that they hadn’t arrived yet.

There were three of us went over to the vacant lot alongside Sycamore … that’s me, Derby – like the hat – McLeod, plus my good friend and local genius Jimmy-James Bannister and Ed Brewster, Forest Plains’ very own bad boy … except there was nothing bad about Ed. Not really.

We went up into that giant tumbleweed cloud thing that served as some kind of interstellar flivver – it had been at the aliens’ invitation, or so we thought: our subsequent discovery called that particular fact into some considerable dispute – purely to get a look at whatever this one alien was doing. Jimmy reckoned – and he was right, as it turned out – he was keeping tabs on what was going on and recording everything in some kind of ‘book’.

Not that he – if the alien
was
a ‘he’: we never did find out – was writing the way you or I would write, because he wasn’t. We didn’t even know if he was writing at all until later that night, when Jimmy-James had taken a long look in that foam-book of theirs.

Not that this book was like any other book you ever saw. It wasn’t. Just like the ship that brought them to Forest Plains wasn’t like any other ship you ever saw, not in
Earth vs The Flying Saucers
or even on
Twilight Zone
– both of which were what you might call ‘current’ back then. And the aliens themselves weren’t like any kind of alien you ever saw in the dime comicbooks or even dreamed about … not even maybe after eating warmed-over two-day-old pizza last thing at night on top of a gutful of Michelob and three or four plates of Ma Chetton’s cheese surprises, the small pieces of toasted cheese flapjack that Ma used to serve up when we were holding the monthly Forest Plains Pool Knockout Competition.

It was during one of those special nights, with the moon hanging over the desert like a crazy Jack o’Lantern and the heat making your shirt stick to your back and underarms, that the whole thing actually got itself started. That was the night that creatures from outer space arrived in Forest Plains. Then again, it wasn’t.

But I’m getting way ahead of myself here …

So maybe that’s the best place to start the story, that night.

It was a Monday, the last one in November, at about 9 o’clock. The year was 1964.

Ma Chetton was sweeping the few remaining cheese surprises from her last visit to the kitchen down onto a plate of freshly-made cookies, their steam rising up into the smokey atmosphere of her husband Bill’s Pool Emporium over on Sycamore, when the place shook like jello and the strains of The Trashmen’s
Surfin’ Bird,
which had been playing on Bill’s pride-and-joy Wurlitzer, faded into a wave of what sounded like static. Only thing was we’d never heard of a jukebox suffering from static before. Then the lights went out and the machine just ground itself to a stop.

Jerry Bucher was about to take a shot – six-ball off of two cushions into the far corner as I recall … all the other pockets being covered by Ed Brewster’s stripes: funny how you remember details like that – and he stood up ramrod tall like someone had just dropped a firecracker or something crawly down the back of his shorts.

“What the hell was that?” Jerry asked nobody in particular, switching the half-chewed matchstalk from one side of his mouth to the other while he glanced around to put the blame on somebody for almost fouling up his shot. Ed was never what you might call a calm player and he was an even worse loser.

Ed Brewster was crouched over, his shoulders hunched up, watching the dust drifting down from the rafters and settling on the pool table, his girlfriend Estelle’s arms clamped around his waist.

Ma was standing frozen behind the counter, empty plate in her hand, staring at the lights shining through the windows. “Felt like some kind of earthquake,” she ventured.

Bill Chetton’s head was visible through the hatch into the kitchen, his mouth hanging open and eyes as wide as dinner plates. “Everyone okay?”

I leaned my pool cue against the table and walked across to the windows. By rights, it should have been dark outside but it was bright as a night-time ballgame, like someone was shining car headlights straight at the windows, and when I took a look along the street I saw sand and stuff blowing across towards us from the vacant lot opposite.

“Some kind of power failure is what it is,” Estelle announced, her voice sounding even higher and squeakier than usual and not at all reassuring.

Leaning against the table in front of the window, my face pressed up against the glass, I saw that the cause of that power failure was not something simple and straightforward like power lines being down between Forest Plains and Bellingham, some 35 miles away. It was something far more complicated.

Settling down onto the empty lot across the street was something that resembled a cross between a gigantic metal canister and an equally gigantic vegetable, its sides billowing in and out.

“Is it a helicopter?” Old Fred Wishingham asked from alongside me, his voice soft and nervous. Fred had ambled over from the booth he occupied every night of the year and was standing on the other side of the table staring out into the night. “Can’t be a plane,” he said, “so it must be some kind of helicopter.” There sounded like a good deal of wishful thinking in that last statement.

But wishful thinking or not, the thing descending on the spare ground across the street didn’t look like any helicopter I’d ever seen – not that I’d seen many, mind you – and I told Fred as much.

“It’s some kind of goddam hot air balloon,” Ed Brewster said, crouching down so’s he could get a better look at the top of the thing – it was tall, there was no denying that.

“Looks more like some kind of furry cloud,” Abel Bodeen muttered to himself. I figured he was speaking so softly because he didn’t feel like making that observation widely known because it sounded a mite foolish. And it did, right enough. The truth of the matter was that the thing
did
look like a furry cloud … or maybe a giant lettuce or the head of a cauliflower, with lights flashing on and off deep inside it.

Pretty soon we were all gathered around the window watching, nobody saying anything else as the thing settled down on the ground.

Within a minute or two, the poolroom lights came back on and the shaking stopped. “You going out to see what it is?” Fred asked. Nobody responded. “I guess
some
body should go out there to see what it is,” he said.

Right on cue, the screen door squeaked behind us and we saw the familiar figure of Jimmy-James Bannister step out onto the sidewalk. He glanced back at the window at us all and gave a shrug. Then he started across the street.

“Hope that damn fool knows what he’s doing.” Ed Brewster was a past master at putting everyone’s thoughts into words.

The truth of the matter was Jimmy-James knew a whole lot of things that none of the rest of us had any idea at all about. And anything he didn’t know about he just kept on at until he did. Jimmy-James – born James Ronald Garrison Bannister (he’d made his first name into a double to go partways to satisfying his father and partways to keep the mickey-taking down to an acceptable minimum) – was the resident big brain of Forest Plains. Still only 22 years old – same age as me, at the time – he was finishing up his Master’s course over at Princeton, studying languages and applied math.

Jimmy-James could do long division problems in his head and cuss in fourteen languages which, along with the fact that he could drink anyone else in town – including Ed – under the table, made him a pretty popular member of any group gathering … particularly one where any amount of liquor or even just beer was to be consumed. He was home for Thanksgiving, taking the week off, and there’s a lot of folks owes him a debt of gratitude for that fact.

Anyway, there went Jimmy-James, large as life and twice as bold – though some might say ‘stupid’ – walking across the street, his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets and his head held high, proud and fearless. There were a couple of muted gasps from somewhere behind me and then the sound of shuffling as folks tried to get closer to the window to get a good look. After all, we’d all seen from the
War Of The Worlds
movie what happened to people who got a little too close to these objects … and we’d all pretty much decided that the thing across the street was about as likely to have come from anyplace on Earth as it was to have flown up to us from Vince and Molly Waldon’s general store down the street. Nobody actually came right out and said it was from another planet but we all knew that it was. But why it was here was another matter, though we weren’t in any great rush to find out the answer to that question. None of us except Jimmy-James Bannister, that is.