Angels and Exiles (37 page)

The last days seemed unbearably rapid. Pieter came back to his house, still shaken and bruised. It seemed to Johann Havel that it was only an instant later that Anna knocked at the door. He recited the words he had never forgotten. Once she had left, promising to return, Pieter asked: “You will let her leave . . . alone?”

“Perhaps,” said Johann Havel—and he hated himself in that instant, but he could not fight against his memories—“perhaps you should accompany her.”

“If she wants me along,” said Pieter sadly.

“Believe me, she will,” said Johann Havel.

Anna returned just before sunset. Pieter offered to accompany her, and the young woman did not refuse. She sat down next to him on the black leather seat, and Pieter spun the pedals.

“Nothing is happening,” said Anna. “Herr Havel! Your machine—”

“ . . . is working perfectly, Damoiselle. Your voyage has already started. Leave the house, and fear nothing. Farewell, Pieter, my son.”

Johann led them to the door. He followed them with his gaze as they went down the Ligeiastrass, with uncertain steps, in the light from the setting sun. His eyes were blurry with tears and he did not see them reach the end of the street.

He went back in, sat down heavily. The hand of Chronos seemed to have loosened its grip, but he was a prisoner of it still.

The Dynast’s men came to see him the next day. They shook him roughly, shouted accusations and smashed objects chosen at random, but Johann did not lose his nerve. He pretended to be afraid and said again and again that Damoiselle Holtz had come to ask him if he could build her a large clockwork animal, nothing more, and that he had not seen her since. In the end, they believed him. When the servants of the Dynast had gone, he took up his tools and repaired the insignificant damage they had inflicted on the time machine, leaving everything else aside.

He waited for Stefan’s visit, and the next day watched him sit down on the black leather seat. “Go,” he said, “and regret nothing.” He buried his face in his hands so that he would not see him get out of the house, on his way to the past.

He felt as if a blade had been pulled out of his belly: a relief mixed with the fear of what would happen, now that the wound was exposed. And yet, he could feel it: the hand of Chronos had still not completely relinquished its grasp.

No one believed the Dynast’s son when he declared that he would die if he did not find Anna Holtz. Young men, even at thirty-two, are liable to childish pronouncements future circumstances will force them to recant.

But Anna was never found. In the end, her parents assumed that she lay somewhere at the bottom of one of the city’s canals, although they kept the secret hope she had managed to leave Wessendam and now lived, anonymous, somewhere in Neuerland. As for Johann Havel, he went a few times to visit the grave in the paupers’ cemetery where lay Anna Havel, dead in childbirth, accompanied into eternity by a child left forever nameless.

Eight years after Anna Holtz’s disappearance, Radulf acceded to the throne. A mediocre, irascible, and ill-loved ruler, his persistent refusal to marry and perpetuate the Dynasty induced anxiety among his advisors; an anxiety that turned to panic the day he was diagnosed with an almost always fatal disease.

Despite their efforts, they could not prevent the news from spreading throughout Wessendam. Eventually it came to the Ligeiastrass and to the ears of an old inventor, who went upon the hour to the Palace of the Dynasts. On his calling card, he wrote
I can show you Anna Holt
z, and this magical formula gave him access to the very room where the Dynast Radulf awaited death.

His face ashen, hastily dressed, not yet shod, the Dynast sat in a large armchair. “If this is a jest, I will have you killed,” he said.

“I can show you Anna Holtz, Majesty; it is the pure and simple truth. Follow me home, but I must insist that we go alone.”

Without a word, the Dynast slipped on his shoes, shouldered a cloak whose hood he pulled down over his face, and motioned for Johann Havel to follow. They took a long narrow corridor, went down two flights of stairs, and found themselves in the Palace gardens. Johann took the lead and brought the Dynast to number thirty-seven of the Ligeiastrass.

In his private workshop stood the time machine, freshly dusted. “This is the machine that Anna Holtz used eight years ago to regress into her own past, so as to flee beyond your reach. I see that you refuse to believe me, Majesty. But I only ask for a minute of your time—afterward, you can judge me mad if you will. Sit down on the seat next to me.” Johann turned the pedals. The horizontal gear creaked and began to revolve; the metal moons, suns, and stars passed more and more swiftly against the night sky. Radulf protested: “What is this—” but cried out suddenly when Johann grasped his arm. Could it be his illness already smiting him? A terrible vertigo had gripped his senses, and it was as if the room’s walls had become insubstantial. Johann forced him to climb down from the seat and led him elsewhere—it seemed to Radulf they were passing straight through a wall. His head spun; he could understand nothing.

They stood against a high window. The lamps behind them cast squares of gold onto the street’s pavement.

“Look well, Majesty, look closely, there she is!”

And Radulf saw Anna Holtz walking, almost running, along the street, holding by the hand a young man whom he did not recognize. He cried out again, this time almost with joy.

“She is here! I have found her! I will give you whatever you ask; but we must catch up to her, now. . . .”

“No. We are twenty-five years back, Majesty. Your place is not here. You will never see her again; she will never be yours, because she never was.”

Radulf pried himself free from Johann’s grasp. “I care nothing for your desires and theories, Herr Havel. I will fetch her, and you are powerless to prevent me.”

“You will come back to your own time. You have no choice.”

“How so? Your time machine did not follow us here, did it?”

“What time machine? That assemblage of gears and pulleys, of gewgaws and canvas? That is not a time machine. It has taken me all my life to learn that time machines do not exist. There is nothing in the world save love, and will, and death. Now come.” And he took the Dynast’s arm again, and, ignoring his desperate imprecations, he took him back through the corridors of time.

Radulf called his advisors and agents to him. As he was about to order Johann Havel’s assassination, he fell silent, hung his head. “To what purpose . . . ?” he whispered. Then, in a voice barely stronger: “I wish to dictate my last will and testament.”

He died a few months later, without acknowledged descendants. The throne of Neuerland remained empty. A shiver of worry went through the houses in the rich districts of Wessendam. The poor, however, felt little sadness or fear. In fact, many of them refused to publicly mourn their last sovereign. The new authorities of Neuerland refused to let that gesture go unpunished, but their repression aroused the people’s anger, and in the subsequent riots dynastic rule was overthrown.

Johann Havel paid these events little attention. For the hand of Chronos had at last released him, and he felt only immense relief, and immense weariness. He took down the sign from his door, for in the final accounting, he had never invented anything, save for his own existence.

He saw two or three more summers, and one day he was found dead in his workshop, seated in an old armchair next to a vast and incomprehensible machine, clutching to his breast a small mechanical elephant.

The flow of time breaks on the houses of Wessendam without altering their appearance. The high brick walls, decorated with baked porcelain, cross the centuries without seeing their colours fade. The thick and rippled glass of the narrow windows, through which the world appears as if submerged in abnormally transparent water, flows only imperceptibly in its lead. When evening comes, the yellow light of lamps casts squares of gold onto the pavement of the sloping streets, as it has always been.

At the heart of the Palace of the Dynasts, which has become the House of the People—for no one can halt the course of History—in a room where relics of bygone times have been stored, stands Johann Havel’s time machine. Its gears and chains have long since been overcome by rust, and the marvellous machine is frozen into absolute immobility.

And yet the time machine is still functioning. For, from within its forgotten room where dust softly gathers, carrying along with it the House of the People, the city of Wessendam and the whole of Neuerland, it progresses slowly, at the rate of one second per second, toward a future of which no more is written.

“Stolen Fires” was originally published in
Edge Detector
x3, 1991.

“Tobacco Words” was originally published in
tomorrowsf
x19, 1996.

“In Yerusalom” was originally published in
Island Dreams — Montreal Writers of the Fantastic
, Véhicule Press, 2003.

“Android Sex Show at 8:00 Nitely” was originally published in
The Stars as Seen from this Particular Angle of Night
, Red Deer Press, 2004.

“Within the Mechanism” was originally published in
tomorrowsf
x25, 1997.

“Ariakin” was initially published in French as “Ariakin” in
Solaris
x133, 2000.

“Hunter and Prey” was initially published in French as “Chasseur et proie” in
imagine
 . . . x72, 1995.

“Black Angel” was initially published in French as “Un ange noir” in
Solaris
x178, 2011.

“The Song of the Mermaid” first appears in this collection.

“Child of the Sleeping Worlds” was originally published in
tomorrowsf
x15, 1995. Initially published in French as “L’Enfant des Mondes Assoupis” in
SOL, Éditions Logiques
, 1991.

“Ignis Cœlestis” was originally published in
Chiaroscuro
, 2003.

“Rose of the Desert” was originally published in
tomorrowsf
x23, 1996. Initially published in French as “La rose du désert” in
Orbite d’approche
, 1992.

“Nausicaä” was originally published in
tomorrowsf
x13, 1995. Initially published in French as “Nausicaä” in
imagine
 . . . x52, 1990.

“Johann Havel’s Marvellous Machine” was originally published in
On Spec
x25, 1996. Initially published in French as “La merveilleuse machine de Johann Havel” in
Solaris
x107, 1993.