The Book of Feasts & Seasons (2 page)

The construction had curious details, such as decorations on some of the brass struts, the imprecision of the rivets, the whirling governor of a small steam cylinder and the chain to spin the gyroscopes, all of which gave it a Victorian look that was unmistakable.

It looked like an amateurish, poorly made thing. And yet a sensation of dread overcome me when I looked at it.

For it did not look well made enough, not slick enough, to be a prop or a joke. It looked like something a British middle class gent of the last century could have made in his garden shed, a man who knew how to putter with tools, and had the idle time to study the mechanical sciences. A man, for example, like Herbert George Wells.

“That is the Time Machine,” I said. And I backed up from the damn thing until a dusty shelf holding old paint cans poked me in the back, and I could back no more.

Ellison nodded grimly. Then, in the airless basement, he told me the rest of the secret.

Because of the invention of the time machine technology here on Earth, our world is the Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail, the paradox planet! Three events make our world unique among all the worlds of the cosmos.

First, on our world and none other, intelligent life arose of itself through time paradox, rather than being created by a natural process of evolution. A time sorcerer named Sise-Neg from the 31st Century propelled himself back to the African plains in the early paleolithic. His method of time travel relied on psychic powers to produce the electromagnetochronic displacement field out of the ambient earth current, rather than use the more solid and trustworthy Moebius coil of Wells’ invention. When the field passed through one of the periodic shifts in the global magnetic field polarization, the ambient current failed, and therefore left Sise-Neg stranded.

Sise-Neg entertained himself in his exile by experimenting on Neanderthal and prehuman eugenics, crossbreeding until he created the Adam and seven sisters of Eve our current knowledge of genetics has detected.

Humanity would have, of course, remained at the hunter-gatherer level for all time had not Martin Padway (who accidentally fell through a time-wake caused by the passage of the million-year chronoliner from the era of the Fifth Men) become stranded in the past. Padway, also called Prometheus, befriending a local maiden of a tribe of Nile-dwelling savages, taught our ancestors the basics of agriculture, fire-making, and writing.

Second, our world is naturally lifeless and has no ability to bring forth life of itself. The existence of microscopic one-cellular life in the primal seas of earth was due to the wreckage of a time machine. The dead body of a time traveler named Stephen Crane collapsed into the primal seas, and the microorganisms in his body, as he decayed, started the evolutionary process. It is suspected that Stephen Crane’s death was arranged by the Nexxal assassins, so that their own time line would come into existence.

Third, in the year 4784 of Isher, a man named McAllister from 1951 was (or will be) accidentally swept up into the operation of a time energy machine which reverses entropy. This is a side effect of a deadly struggle between the Imperium of Isher and the Weapon Shops, both of whom unwisely attempted to use time machine technology rather than face defeat.

McAllister was, or will be, sent see-sawing back in time gathering ever larger amounts of matter-energy into his disintegrating body with each swing. Eventually, once he has gathered all the energy in the universe and brought it to the origin point of timespace at the moment and location of the Big Bang, he will not observe, but will witness the formation of the cosmos.

All other intelligent races of outer space are careful never to interfere with any of the events, no matter how small, taking place on our world, since any smallest change, even something as little as stepping on a butterfly, would not only effect election results and lead to Republican victories, but could abort the events that give rise to the time travelers Crane, Padway, Sise-Neg, and most importantly, McAllister.

The time events that give rise to the creation of life on Earth, the rise of homo sapiens, and of Mediterranean civilization, of course, are all needed in order for McAllister to come into being, and for him to return to the origin and accidentally create the energy-illusion we called timespace.

It should go without saying that the other races of the myriad other worlds, since they were not created by the fumbling and inexperienced meddling with ape-genes by the amateurish Sise-Neg, are immensely older and wiser than mankind, and therefore none of them are foolish enough to experiment with time travel. Their superior brains can detect both past and future events perfectly, and so the temptation to interfere with the course of events or to create a time paradox is unimaginable to them.

We and we alone have that dubious distinction, since we are smart enough to reproduce the time-bypass effect, but not wise enough to leave well enough alone.

It is for their own self preservation that the cosmic minds of the alien stars prevent any interference with our world, and maintain strict radio silence, hiding all evidence of their countless billions of civilizations.

There are, for example, three intelligent species living on the Moon alone, the Va-Gas and U-Gas and the Senelites under the Grand Lunar; and nine races dwell on Mars, including Barsoomians and Malacandrines, Therns and Pfifltriggi, but all are careful to hypnotize astronauts and falsify recordings and readings from probes we send, or to retreat beneath their planetary crusts or the behind the veil of the unseen in order to preserve the illusion that man is alone in the cosmos. We have all noticed how oddly John Glen and other returning astronauts behave. This is a consequence of space hypnosis.

Of course the higher races move among us in disguise, and have contact with the races living in the hollow interior of our world, and call upon them from time to time to use their Vril power, an ultimate form of spiritual electro-gravitic force, to erase memories, sink ships, or cause ‘Tunguska’ type events to abolish the evidence of anything that threatens to alter the foretold events of the time stream.

The meaning of life, and the purpose of the earth, is to give rise to all these experiments and events in the future, in order that the past, and the universe itself, should be created.

All human religion, philosophy, and investigation into the meaning of life is, of course, carefully monitored and curtailed by the superior intelligences of the remote future and the distant stars so that these investigations do not create any events unforeseen or that might derail the established self-creating past and future.

Why, you may wonder, are science fiction writers aware of the true meaning of life, when men of much greater genius and spiritual stature, thinkers and philosophers and theologians, are kept in ignorance of this great truth?

It is not due to any cruelty or love of irony by the superior races of the later eras, but merely to the fact that Wells and Stapledon first stumbled across the secret, and their published results were taken as fiction by unbelieving editors and an incredulous public.

We can be safely told, because no one will believe us.

That is the dreadful secret revealed to me by Mr. Ellison. Naturally, I would not have believed so fantastical a tale had I not seen the time machine with my own eyes.

Even then I was skeptical. The names he whispered, Sise-Neg, Padway, and Crane, I recognized from stories by Alfred Bester or L Sprague de Camp. The time agents of Nexx I recognized from a book by Keith Laumer. So I laughed and demanded that Mr. Ellison confess he was merely having me on. Surely it was a jest! It was not as if these science fiction writers had any sort of records or unpublished manuscripts from Wells or Stapledon that they mined for names or ideas, or that they used the time machine themselves.

He fixed me with his bloodshot eyes and assured me it was merely a joke he was having at my expense.

Nothing else could have so completely convinced me of the utter and horrific truth of what he revealed. Suddenly the closeness of the basement, the rusted and angular shape of the Wells time machine sitting under its cobwebs seemed stifling and oppressive. My head was pounding with drink and whirling with dread. I pushed myself free from Ellison, and ran up the crooked stairs, flung myself out into the cool midnight air, staggering and breathing in deep gulps.

Behind me, there came a flare of red-gold brilliance, brighter than the glare of electricity, flashing through the basement windows and throwing blood-colored wedges of light across the lawn. With horror the words and the warning returned to me. Ellison had said — practically his last words! — that any attempt to investigate these matters would bring instant retaliation from the stars or from our own remote future, deadly retaliation from beings willing to do anything needed to preserve their own existence, and the existence of the sidereal universe.

Back I ran, down the stairs and to the door. As I took hold of the handle of the door I heard an exclamation, oddly truncated at the end, and a click and a thud. A gust of air whirled round me as I opened the door, and from within came the sound of broken glass falling on the floor. Harlan Ellison was not there. I seemed to see a ghostly, indistinct figure sitting in a whirling mass of black and brass for a moment – a figure so transparent that the bench behind with its sheets of drawings was absolutely distinct; but this phantasm vanished as I rubbed my eyes. The time machine had gone. Save for a subsiding stir of dust, the further end of the basement was empty. A pane of the basement windows had, apparently, just been blown in.

One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be that he swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking, hairy savages of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the Cretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian brutes of the Jurassic times.

Or was what I had seen the operation of some fantastic weapon operated by intelligences vast and cool and unsympathetic from some remote location on the moon or beyond Arcturus, set merely to obliterate anyone attempting to operate the forbidden machine?

The meaning of life, it seems, is not something about which is safe for living men to inquire.

And yet I still have, drawn in a few, short, clear strokes in a bar napkin, the diagram for building a time machine of my own. While I sit and type these words, I can hear my children playing downstairs, and I can see the sunlight shining through my study windows, and I rejoice in the goodness of life. It is only at midnight, when no one is near, that I take out the napkin, study the diagram, and vow to myself that someday I must plumb the secrets of time. Perhaps my actions are ones the universe will require to bring the universe into being? Perhaps the star beings will spare me?

Perhaps I, I, will be allowed to see what other eyes have never looked upon? It that not worth any risk? Surely it was not for no reason this diagram on this stained napkin came into my hands!

Always, I remind myself of my wife and children and tell myself to burn the diagram.

And always, with trembling fingers, I fold the withered napkin carefully and replace it in my wallet.

Epiphany

There was no time. That is the first thing to remember. I did not know what was about to happen. That is the second thing to remember.

Imagine a time line. Select a zero point. To one side is an infinity of tomorrow, starting with positive one. To the other is an infinity of yesterday, starting with negative one. But between the positive and the negative infinities, what is there? Less than nothing, less than half of nothing, a pinprick, a dot, a point, less time than it takes to decide to murder them all.

I look into the first moment of negative one: one second ago.

Imagine a frozen moment. The glass of the chapel doors is breaking. Men in tall white hoods carrying shotguns, pistols, hunting rifles are firing. The guests are screaming, falling to the floor. And you, my love, have thrown your tall, strong body over mine, selflessly, lovingly, without a moment to think, without a moment to decide. I am feeling your body shuddering, though not with passion as you embrace me. I yield to your embrace, and then we are falling; you shudder with the impact of bullets and buckshot throwing your blood, your living blood, your warmth, in sprays like Rorschach blots across the dark expanse of the expensive tuxedo I picked out, the dark expanse of your warm skin, and across the white satin of my wedding dress, the dress my many mothers sewed.

I cannot see you as you die. You are on top of me, crushing me beneath your weight. But I see the flower girl, the preacher's daughter, with her little pink pillow falling, her little face that will never grow any older, never see her own wedding day. She is falling, and the gold ring not on your finger is flying in the air, catching the beam of sunlight from the broken stained glass window, the one showing Christ turning water into blood-red wine.

My ring is on my finger, a perfect unmarred circle of gold. A ring is like eternity, like the eternal, infinite return of the cosmos from Big Bang to the Eschaton, from Creation to Big Crunch. It is supposed to be as eternal as a vow of love. It is shaped like a zero.

Imagine a zero moment. For all the seconds of the weeks and months before zero, the negative of time, I can see when we met on the bus, when we spoke, when I asked you why you sat in the back, when you smiled, when you touched my hand to help me down the steps at our bus stop in Atlanta and the driver scowled at you, a look of hatred. During all those seconds, my happiness was complete.

During all that time, during my exile from time, I did not know what was about to happen.

Next comes the zero moment itself: You have placed the white gold wedding band on my pale white finger, but I have not yet done the same to you. I have said the words, the two little words no bride can take back if she says them.

I do
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