City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis

  “The specialized nerve-ganglia our race uses to probe probability effluvia can sometimes detect the particular time-space reactions created whenever someone lies, Philopater. A lie creates, if only for a moment, a false reality structure. It is an attempt to alter reality.”

  “What the hell do you know about reality! Ach! No, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that–”

  “I know that, in this reality, the doctor told you to tell me whatever you thought would instill in me the will to live. That doctor amuses me, Philopater. Does he think his primitive brain is a match for the special nerve-consciousness training of a chrononaut from the Forty-Eighth century? He need not worry about my will to live. I expect to be rescued from this primitive era in short order.”

  “You shouldn’t have told the nurse you were from the future.”

  “I did not sense that it would create any paradoxes or discontinuities. Her destiny will continue along its maximal energy path.”

  “They’re going to lock you up in a nuthouse!”

  “You disappoint me, son, if your prognosticative neurons are so ill-trained that they cannot distinguish likely from unlikely futures. I’m sorry I was never able to complete your training.”

  “I don’t have any superpowers, Dad,” said Phil heavily. “No one does.”

  “What about the time when you were coming home on the school bus–”

  “Will you stop talking about that already!”

  “How do you explain–”

  “It was a coincidence!”

  “And I’ve told you what coincidences really are. When the Time Wardens meld an alternate line back into the main time-stem, those events and chains of cause and effect which have no explanation in the revised timeline are the consequence of the timelines being soldered together by probabilistic manipulation.”

  Phil sat there and listened, his hands folded in his lap, a sinking feeling in his stomach. He thought: Am I going to spend my last time with my father going over this same dumb argument? Over and over again?

  “Father,” he said slowly, “I want to ask you something. This is not easy. But you know how sick you are. I don’t know how to ask you nicely–”

  “Just say it, my son.”

  “I’d like to talk to our relatives. Can you tell me what your real name was before you changed it? Who my grandfather and grandmother were? They might want to know, if I have to invite them.”

  “I was born Megamedes Hyperion. Your grandparents will not be born for twenty-seven centuries.”

  Phil sighed. He sat very still and quiet in his chair, feeling deflated and defeated. “I’m… I’m sorry, father.”

  “For what, son?”

  “I don’t know. For everything, I guess. For us never getting along. For me never believing you. I'd like to believe in your time travelers, really, I would.”

  “Have you ever tried to believe?”

  “Now don’t start that again!”

  Megamedes reached out with his hand and feebly squeezed his son’s hand. The strength in his voice was absent from his fingers. His grip was weaker than a child’s.

  “We’ve always gotten along, Philopater,” Megamedes said.

  “We always argue.”

  “Well, son. Some people get along at a louder volume than others.”

  Phil laughed. He was surprised at how good it felt to hear his father speak a normal sentence; a sentence that didn’t have a single word starting with “chrono” in it.

  Phil wondered, not for the first time, what his father had been like as a child. Obviously he had read science fiction. Obviously he had been hurt by someone, perhaps very badly, or beset by some problem he couldn’t face. And so he had escaped into glossy colored pictures of his favorite pulp magazines, into the world of bullet-shaped rocket ships, of beautiful women in metal brassieres, of tall, golden towers reaching up from the fields of futuristic utopias towards the conquered stars. A perfect, simple, nonexistent world.

  Phil shook his head. He could try to understand, but he could not bring himself to forgive his father. Other people had daydreams and wishful fantasies too. But other people didn’t abandon their sanity to cling to their dreams. Other people faced their problems.

  His father gently interrupted Phil’s brooding. “Were you in earnest, when you spoke?”

  “What? What did I say?”

  “That you wanted to believe. Are you willing to try?”

  “Dad…”

  “I suppose not, then.”

  “It’s not that,” Phil said. “People can’t believe things by wanting to believe them. Not honest people, anyway. You have to believe what the evidence proves.”

  “Time Travelers can’t leave any evidence of their existence. It would create an anomaly. An anachronism. You know that.”

  “How convenient,” said Phil. The words came out bitter and sarcastic. Immediately he was sorry. Couldn’t he be polite to his own father?

  “Son. Think about it logically. At some point in the future, time travel will eventually be invented.”

  “What if it is impossible?”

  “If it is impossible in this timeline, it will be possible in another. And if the Time Travelers ever will exist, then they always exist, in any time period, forever. Anything that happens in history happens because it is part of their grand design. It has to be. And no one need ever die. Why would the Time Travelers ever let anyone die? At the final moment, just before death, they can come and perform a rescue. We don’t see them because they freeze time and accomplish all their work in an instant. The dead bodies we see, what we bury and cremate, those aren’t the real people. The Time Travelers enter the timestream, take a small tissue cell sample, and construct a clone body. The real people are replaced with unliving clones at the last moment, and then are taken away to the far future. It’s a beautiful life there, Philopater. I cannot leave until the probability has been created that you will be coming after me. I am in pain, and I don’t wish to wait any longer. So, please try.”

  “Why does it matter what I believe? A thing is either true or it's not. My belief doesn’t change anything.” Phil hated himself for continuing the argument. He wondered why he couldn’t help it.

  “It is simple quantum chronodynamics. If a Time Traveler shows himself to someone who doesn’t believe in time travel, the shock will change that person’s life forever, perhaps in some unexpected way. This could have disastrous repercussions along the resultant time stream. But someone who believes already, for them, a time or place will be found where the revelation would have no changes on belief, and hence no changes to history.”

  “But if I build this monument ten years from now, or if my grandson builds it, according to you, the time travelers will find it eventually, and they would have already come back to save you.”

  “Until it is done, there is a probability that it may not be done. They would be unwise to attempt a manifestation into the timestream prior to the point of greatest certainty. So I must lay here, in pain, with these primitive doctors treating me with their backward medical theories, while you drive the point of certainty further into the future every moment you delay.”

  Phil was silent.

  Megamedes closed his eyes. He parted his lips, and spoke softly: “The towers of Metachronopolis, the city we have established at time’s far end, lift their museums and gardens high above a world-ocean that has swallowed all the continents of this era. Suspended in the fluid of those waters are the molecule-engines that can rejuvenate my body at a cellular level. I long to see once more the golden towers shine, their crowns higher than the atmosphere. I yearn to bathe in the waters of the Living Ocean.”

  Phil sat there sadly, unable to think of a thing to say.

  For a time, Megamedes was silent.

  Then he said in a frightened voice, “They haven’t come to rescue me before this because I’ve been doing something wrong. The previous monuments were not made of sufficiently durable materials. I have great hopes for this
new alloy. But they are not allowed to come save me until the monument is complete. If they bring me out of this timestream at a point before I complete this monument, then there will be no monument for them to find, and so they cannot come back to bring me out. You understand? The future version of me who has already been rescued will not be allowed to help me unless the law of cause and effect is satisfied. A paradox could destroy the universe. Everything would devolve into null probability… There would be nothing left. Nothing left.”

  Phil had never, ever in his life before, seen his father frightened. The sight shook him. He knelt down by the bed. He wanted to take the old man in his arms, but he was afraid to disturb the medical apparatus, to upset the tubes and wires.

  “Father, I swear I will complete the monument for you! I’ll finish it. I’ll make sure they find it.”

  Very gently, Megamedes laid his thin hand on the crown of his son's bowed head. “Yes. I see that you will.”

  “It’s not that I believe you, now. It’s just that–it doesn’t really matter to me whether I believe you or not. I’ll do it for your sake.”

  “Have you ever wondered why you get so angry about this, my son? Why this is the one topic you can never let rest? No? Well, go home and think about it.”

  “If I don’t see you again… I love you, Father.”

  Megamedes smiled. “I am proud and well content with you, my son, and I return your good love. Go now, and when you hear that I have died, believe no such report. In truth, I will not have died. Do not sorrow. We shall meet again in the lawns and gardens beneath the golden towers of Metachronopolis, the City Beyond Time.”

  Phil's eyes stung. “Goodbye, Father.”

  “For now. Only for now.”

  Back at the house, Phil found his wife on the porch, fussing with some crates which were piled there next to the porch swing. She had pried some of the boards of one crate away with a crowbar. Beneath the packing-stuff, Phil caught a glimpse of a slab of pale amber metal.

  “It’s the monument,” Muriel explained. “A van from the lab brought it while you were out.”

  “It’s opened,” Phil said, coming close.

  “I know we talked about trying to send it back… but… well, I had to see what it looked like. That alloy. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s beautiful. And what are all these flowing doodles and curlicues? Those lines and diagrams?”

  Phil reached into the crate and drew some of the plastic packing material aside. The crate held a number of alloy slabs. The metal glistened and gleamed in the sunlight, like silver water rippling across gold sand. The effect was breathtaking.

  Each plate contained the curlicues and swirls inscribed into its surface. Between the swirls were line diagrams showing star positions, perhaps to indicate specific dates.

  “Father has some dog-eared notebooks hidden in the attic that are filled with this swirl-writing. It’s supposed to be the futuristic language of the time travelers. Looks like one of those ciphers that school kids make up, doesn’t it? He probably made it when he was a kid.”

  “I think it's nice looking.”

  Phil ran his fingers across the burnished surface. The metal was hard, obdurate. The stuff of his father’s dream. It had cost his father his life’s savings to buy, so that there was no money left to pay for the operation he needed…

  “I hate it,” Phil whispered. “This thing is going to kill my father.”

  Muriel looked at him, her eyes sad, saying nothing.

  Phil shook his head. “I promised my Dad today that I would finish his damned monument.”

  “Really? Then what’s wrong?”

  Phil couldn’t answer. He didn't know.

  Muriel said, “I know what’s wrong. You’re so proud of the fact that you don’t believe him. You think helping him build his monument would be like admitting defeat. And you can’t stand to do that, not after all these years. Not even when it’s his dying wish!”

  “Muriel! For God’s sake!”

  “Am I wrong?”

  “What a terrible thing to say! How could you say that about me?”

  “Am I wrong?”

  “Of course you’re wrong! You’re so stupid sometimes I can’t believe it! Do you actually think… You think I would–” Phil found himself shouting. He turned his back to his wife, lips shut, arms folded, clutching his elbows with his hands.

  The anger drained out of him. He sighed. “Yes, you’re right. At least, you’re partly right. I always thought that someday, one day, he would admit that he was wrong, that he would tell me he was making it all up. Now would be a good time, considering that he's dying. But he still can’t admit it.”

  Her voice was gentle. “So why does that make you so angry, Philopater? He believes one thing. You believe something else. Why can’t you just let it rest at that?”

  “I get angry because…”

  “Because what?”

  Phil shook his head. “When I was a kid, just a little kid, Dad would tell me stories about this golden city at the end of time. It had wide parks and fountains growing along wide bridges arching between golden towers made of invulnerable energy-metal. Towers taller than any towers in our world. So tall the upper floors were pressurized. The sidewalks were made of crystal and glowed with light at night. All the people were young and healthy. Starships were launched from the towertops, and rode on beams of energy, like searchlights, up out into space.

  “I wanted it to be true,” Phil said, “And when I got older, and I found out my father wasn’t telling the truth, I felt betrayed. Lying to a child.”

  “Get over it,” she told him.

  “What? What did you say?”

  “Some parents tell their kids about Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. They grow up. They get over it. You’re grown up. Get over it.”

  “But he still believes in the damn Tooth Fairy! The goddamned time-traveling tooth fairies and their chrono-crystals! If he didn’t believe in them, he would have saved his money and been able to pay for the operation, and he wouldn’t be… he wouldn’t be… he wouldn’t be about to die!”

  Red-faced, angry, Phil drove his fist down into the packing crate.

  When his hand struck the metal of the monument, it gave out a loud, clear, ringing tone, like that of a bell. The note was so clear and pure that Phil stared at his hand in utter surprise, and listened, unmoving, while the echoes hummed and died around him.

  Muriel said only, “He doesn’t want an operation. He wants this instead. You don’t have to agree with him. Just help him. Not the way you and I think he needs help. The way he wants it.” She pointed at the exposed metal. “He wants this.”

  Phil was silent, staring down at the crate.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “Help me drag it out to the site where he wants it put up. Dad picked the spot, up the hill and back from the sea. He even hired a geologist to calculate what would still be above sea level twenty-seven centuries from now. Another waste of money. But that’s the spot. His spot.”

  She nodded silently and squeezed his hand.

  At about midnight, after they'd been working all afternoon and evening without even a break for dinner, Muriel kissed him goodnight and trudged down the hill to find her house and her bed. By the light of a portable gas lantern Phil watched her depart. Then, he turned. Tools in hand, he kept right on working and working, eyes aching blearily, back throbbing, arms leaden. He worked. He would not stop.

  Eventually, he heard birds chirping. Not long after that, the horizon grew pink. The sun came up in a welter of indigo clouds. His head swam with a strange clarity. He had passed beyond fatigue to find a sort of disorienting tranquility of mind.

  It was less than an hour past dawn when finally he finished. The dew was still thick on the grass, the air was still sweet with the early morning chill.

  Phil walked slowly backwards to examine his handiwork. The monument was shaped like an obelisk, a slim, straight fang of gold-white metal, glinting in the cherry light of the newb
orn sun like a rosy icicle. On every face of the monument were swirled and curvilinear glyphs, surrounding simple diagrams of circles and lines.

  A sudden stabbing pressure shot through Philopater’s head, a sense of tension and release.

  Philopater thought: The special cells in my brain must be detecting the shockwave of the destiny crystal opening. They have entered this phase of reality… Then he laughed and lightly slapped himself on the cheek. He rubbed his eyes. “You never get over what your parents tell you, do you?”

  Phil’s phone was in his pocket. He drew it out and took a snapshot of the monument, thinking to show his father what he had done. Then, since the phone was already in his hand, he decided to call the hospital room and share the news.

  The phone rang longer than he expected without answer. He had the sense that something was wrong. The front desk finally picked up the call, but his fears only grew when the front desk transferred the call to the station nurse. The nurse was a young man who explained, in professionally calm, sympathetic tones, that Mr. Hyperion was now in the ER. His father's condition was very serious, but the doctors were doing everything they could possibly do…

  Phil did not remember at what point he ended the call and slipped the phone back into his pocket. He had started running before the nurse had even finished speaking. But the path lead down the hill, and curved along the sea cliffs, where the larches and tall, slim beeches were dropping their colorful leaves into the waters.

  There was a man in white standing on the path.

  Phil slowed abruptly. The man looked familiar, but Phil did not recognize him. His eyes were large and dark, his head was bald, and the white garment, constructed from a metallic fabric, fell from broad shoulder boards in smooth drapes, leaving the man's arms and legs free.

  The man spoke. “The one you seek is not dead.”