Planetary: Mercury, page 2
Mental projection was safer, and could take place on Earth. The experiments of the magician Nun-Soth of A.D. 16000 involved the first surviving unambiguous record of chronopathy, the power of casting the soul through time as a shadow; but that first, primitive mirror of the mind proved the aperture was two-way. Disaster of another kind struck.
An age of dark conquests followed, when savants descended from Nun-Soth cast their minds back to his era, emerged from the mirror, and overwhelmed the souls and possessed the bodies of the priest-kings, theurgists, janissaries, satraps, and savants of that generation, or anyone else who might have organized a cadre of resistance.
For four thousand years they ruled, but even their ability to foresee the coming night could not avert it. Civilization collapsed. The vampiric thaumaturge Si-Seneg, the Last of the Dark Conquerors, fleeing into the past, not only possessed the bodies of various figures from historic and prehistoric times, but taught the art to disciples in many eras. Twelve ancients managed to obtain or forge working time mirrors of their own, apparently from him, or from what he left. Into the farthest past he vanished, seeking the hour of the origin of life on earth. Of what he found, no record, no rumor told.
The art was lost. Civilizations rose and fell. The remorseless grindstone of Darwinian evolution, oft aided by the unwise meddling with human gene-plasm by ambitious vitalists and necromancers, ushered one humanoid or hominid race after another into being. Five more variant subspecies of subhuman, near-human and superhuman man arose, triumphed, flourished, waned, and vanished.
Not until A.D. Two Million was the art of chronopathy found again, this time by a warlock-scientist named Trismegistus the Thrice-Greatest, a dread and dreaded egomaniacal tyrant, who used the art to make himself immortal. He commanded the peoples of Laurasia, the last inhabited continent above the waves, to worship him as a god.
With all surface metals exhausted by previous eons of mining, the Laurasians maintained a single global commonwealth with weapons and tools of wood and stone, glass and crystal, of subtle properties and great beauty, and tireless and titanic beasts bred to outrun locomotives, or winged leviathans to outfly aircraft.
Trismegistus destroyed any other shadows out of time he found projecting themselves into the savage centuries he ruled. He was a figure of mystery, having obliterated all records of his origin in order to spite future investigators, and prevent interference. His final fate was also hidden.
This maniac also destroyed all future rediscoverers of the technique to come after him, down the corridors of time as far as he could project himself, slaying them before birth.
So again the secret was lost.
In A.D. Seven Hundred Fifty Million, in the time when Earth was like Venus, and the Rodinian supercontinent lay flat, stony and barren beneath the downpour of an endless storm that reached from pole to pole, there arose a posthuman race of philosopher-kings whose minds were too fine and stern for Trismegistus to penetrate, nor any shadows out of time.
The philosopher-kings rediscovered the technique, and cast their minds back through time not to domineer nor possess, but to console, advise and heal. They were immensely powerful, but crippled by their benevolence, so that no evils of the past would they ever undo. The sibyls taught her to despise and ignore their voices.
But even the philosopher-kings, in command of the secrets of time itself, could not conquer eternity. They could not undo nor mitigate the massive changes to the Earth eons of solar evolution ushered in.
A coleopterous race was destined to replace mankind, and to dwell in the cragged and volcano-torn supercontinent of Kenorland, in climes unfit for human life, in soils soaked with poison beneath thin skies hot with radiation. Their minds were difficult to penetrate. Few curious wanderers returned sane. Of their history, only scattered and incomplete records had ever been gathered.
The arachnid denizens of Earth’s final age ruled the melancholy eon three billion years hence when the final landmasses of Vaalbara melted to lava above the boiling world-ocean of Panthalassia. No written glyph, no artifact, had ever been recovered from the windowless and monolithic mirrored towers erected by the spider beings, nor from their hypercube-shaped orbital monuments. Only glimpses and fragments of wars and migrations returned from these future eons, gathered from the eye of lower animals whose nervous systems explorers from prior ages risked loss of mind and life to invade.
No future beyond those days could be seen, not from any coign of vantage on this globe, for Mercury in those days was finally swallowed by the sun.
All eons before that final doom of fire could be inspected by the long-range mirrors Circe had been told one day would be hers. Deep in this gravity well, the space was warped enough to allow a Schroedinger compensation effect to operate, and the links of the chains of cause and effect could be loosened.
Only here was it possible to pass mind and body through time without inevitable catastrophe. Here she was safe, for the chains of causation leading back to her ultimate origins on Earth had been severed entirely. Here, in this world named for the pagan god of magic, an object or an event could spring into being on its own power. Or even a person.
So she was told.
Circe doubted.
Nanny
She held up her damp hand, and told a time mirror to focus on it. “Show me what this hand held yesterday at this hour.”
But the image in the mirror showed her hand clasping that of an older woman. From the wedding ring on the finger, and the color and shape of the nails, she recognized it. It was the hand of Nanny.
The image also conveyed sound.
Nanny was saying, “I have been instructed to tell you this: The monthly cramps are debilitating, extremely painful, and must at all costs be avoided. Future records show your first is due tomorrow, just at dawn; your second two weeks before noon; your third a fortnight later; and another at dusk. Not only will the agony permanently wrinkle your face and scar your psychology, but the release of these chemicals and hormones into your bloodstream will alter your sexual drives and instincts, and making mates best avoided seem attractive.”
She heard her younger self saying in a sharp voice, “But surely these hormones are natural? And as for a mates… what mates? We are entirely alone on this terrible planet.”
Circe pulled the viewpoint out, so that not merely the clasped hands, but the whole scene was in the time mirror.
The image showed her walking hand in hand with Nanny. Nanny wore a black dress with puffed-out, leg-of-mutton shoulders, a stark white apron, a cap of lace. Nanny was masked, as ever, and no part of her face was showing.
Nanny was a golem, but the restrictions on her mind had been eased, so that she could nurse, teach, and play with a growing child. Circe adored the faceless oval of Nanny’s mask, as it was the only source of kindness she had ever known.
The two were walking amid early spring flowers in the high meadows of the mountain range just at the border of the energy dome covering Caloris Basin. Plinths along the hilltops marked where the dome surface intersected the ground. The cratered and airless landscape visible beyond the mountains was as black and pitted as the floor of a furnace.
Circe saw herself, but dressed as she had been in September of last year, seven months ago. Earthmonths, she silently corrected herself with an audible sigh of annoyance. Mercury had no moon, hence no months.
The voice of Nanny from the mirror suddenly said, “Let us sit, and meditate, and enter the first-level betawave trance state needed for chronopathy. Clearing your mind of disturbances will clarify the answer.”
Circe saw Nanny and her September self flourish a cloth and lay it on the lush and flowering grass of the hill. Now they sat, and overlooked the burning land of airless craters beyond.
Circe remembered this scene exactly. Watch 2 of Year 64. It was the beginning of her discontent. She remembered meditating; but she remembered finding drowsiness, not clearmindedness.
Why this scene? The time mirror had mistaken her command, and found the image of her hand as it had been one hundred seventy-six earthdays ago, which was “yesterday” by the mercurial count, not the earthly. Circe was sure this mistake was intentional.
Circe was about to banish the image when Nanny turned her head and looked at her. There was no mistaking it: the narrow eyeslit of the oval mask was clearly looking through the mirror, right at her.
Circe was astonished. Only herself, and other versions of her, could see or manage the time mirrors. They were soul-locked. Servants, even high servants like Nanny, did not have desires and goals of their own, hence no destinies to change, and hence could not use the mirrors.
Nanny stiffened, realizing the blunder.
The truth ignited in Circe’s mind. Circe said, “You are me, aren’t you? All this time, I was raised by myself. My future self. Why am I dressed like a servant? Like a serf? Why am I pretending?”
The younger image of herself in the mirror now turned also, and saw Circe. “Oh, hello! Are you a ghost or a sibyl? What is going on?”
Without turning her head, Nanny calmly raised her hand, summoned the gleaming length of a command wand into her fingers, and before the younger girl could scream, dodge, or blink, sprayed the girl from the tip. It was biomancer fluid. The droplets were evidently programmed not to remold her flesh, but merely to stimulate the sleep centers of her brain. The younger girl sagged peacefully, and lay draped across the grass.
Circe said to the mirror, “I don’t remember you doing that.”
Nanny removed her mask.
She was her, of course. Her face was filled out, and a hint of a double chin clung to her jaw, and bags and lines of weariness underlined her eyes, but no strand of white touched her hair as yet.
Circe said, “I don’t remember you dousing me.”
Nanny said, “A touch of the memory eraser helmet will keep these events from forming a blister in the time stream long before it swells into a paradox.”
Circe said, “Where is my mother? Who is my real mother? Is it you?”
Nanny said, “An awkward question. All will be known in time.” She tilted her wand toward Circe.
Circe, startled, leaped to her feet in the pool, sloshing and splashing biomantic fluid every which way. She called her own wand to her hand. The slim instrument materialized in her grasp. Circe made a defensive gesture. An invisible wall of pressure formed along the bathing chamber flagstones between Circe and the image of Nanny in the time mirror.
But Nanny merely asked her wand, “What is the time interval?”
The Nanny’s wand spoke. “Mistress, the ghost in the mirror is from Sunday, 25 March of A.D. 3010, Gregorian calendar. Age 16. Watch 2 of Year 68, Mercurial calendar.”
Nanny said “I remember that you argued with me, but eventually obeyed as you were told, and kept your fertility suppressed. No monthly cycle, no menstrual flows, none of that. We cannot have you pregnant before you are due.”
Angrily, Circe scooped up a palm of the biomancer fluid, and splashed her groin with it vigorously. “What if I order the fluid to make me a grown woman, and as fertile as Combe? What if I want to be natural? What do you say to that?”
Nanny raised an eyebrow. “Since I do not remember doing that, and since I am still clearly here, I would say that if you try deliberately to change the known future, one or more of me downstream of us, in our future, will cast herself back and see to it that your memory of any deviant events will be erased, perhaps rewritten.”
“You are expecting the version born out of the new events to erase herself and her own past just to put the timeline back on track?”
“Anyone who cannot shed shadows willing to sacrifice themselves to maintain her original self cannot maintain a life as a time traveler. You know that.”
“I am not letting you rewrite my memory!”
“You forget that your memory has been rewritten nearly every day. Basically, there is no other way to train an apprentice chronopath, is there? Without this, your anachronisms, snarls and slips would produce a paradox.”
“I am aware it has been done once or twice before…” said Circe, uncertainly.
“Many, many times heretofore. You are a slow learner, and awkward when it comes to time travel. Strange as this sounds, the art never came naturally to me. I don’t remember this conversation: all this scene will have to be erased.”
Circe said, “Not over my objections. That is worse than rape!”
Nanny smiled. “What could be your basis of comparison? You would not remember the first, and you have never seen and cannot imagine the second. Well, these things are far too horrible to discuss with myself when I am such a tender age. Ah, foolish teens! Admire your life while you can. You are a princess. You want for nothing. The world is yours. All worlds! All you have to do is not make waves, not create a paradox.”
Nanny raised her wand and started to make the banishment gesture, to sever the time image connection. Circe raised her wand in a parry, saying, “Wait! One question. This is something you probably told me already, so there is no paradox involved. Wait, please! You said I was going to have my memory erased anyway. So there is no harm if you answer.”
Nanny waited. “Ask one question.”
“Why must I be sterile?”
“It is temporary. A safety precaution. There is a danger of overpopulation.”
“Overpop—?” Circe blenched, wondering if she had heard rightly. “Are you out of your mind? I live alone on a world with no one but me! My only company is when an sibyl asks me to babysit my ghost. On card nights, do you know how boring it is to sit and play bridge with three other versions of me, all of whom remember who won which trick last time around?”
Nanny said, “Not overpopulation in that sense. The number of possible futures is pared down to one. Your wedding is nigh. You will have a child, a beautiful child. But if something interferes, we do not want a bastard being born before, during, or after.”
Circe said, “When is the wedding? Who is the bridegroom? You might as well tell me, or I will just cast myself forward until I find out!”
Nanny said, “Not to worry. You will be shown. This very hour, you will be called to attend as a flower girl. You will get to see it again many times as bridesmaids, during our blonde period. And then again, as the maid of honor — those were difficult days for me — and then as the bride, of course. Don’t fret about the pain of the wedding night. It soon passes. Just make sure to have them clean the blood off the bedsheets.”
“Why would I dye my hair blonde? I am Etruscan. From the island of Aeaea. In the Tyrrhenian Sea, of the lovely coasts of Italy. On Earth!”
Nanny tilted her head to one side, a dreamy look in her eyes. “Do you remember Earth? Anything about it? A single place? A single face? No, there is nothing. How do you really know Earth exists at all then?”
“What kind of question is that? What about all that history I’ve studied? All those records and artifacts?”
“Records can be faked. The past changes. You are changing it now, or trying to.”
“I know Earth is real!”
“How?”
“Because I hate Mercury! I hate this planet! I know I do not come from here! This is not my home!”
Nanny shook her head. “Teen girls are so vivid. I was so like you before I lost my child.” She laughed lightly, embarrassed. “Oh. Oops. That will have to be erased, won’t it? But I distinctly remember the flower girl dress: pink chiffon with a rose gold sequin bodice. I remember thinking how daring the sweetheart neckline was. The skirt only came to the knee.
“Other things are fuzzy: now I know why. I did it to myself. Story of my life, really.
“But all this wickedness, all these cruel things, will fade like a dream, in time. Nothing in this world is real, save what we recall. Savor the moment. Enjoy your youth. It ends all too soon. If you have only an hour of innocence left, savor it.”
And this time Nanny made the banishment gesture, feinting to pull Circe’s counter-parry out of line, disengaging, and completing the gesture to sever the mirror energy flow between the two points in spacetime. Nanny said she had but fuzzy memories of these days, but clearly she remembered her wand parry well enough to reposte it quite neatly.
Circe lost the image, and the mirror would not summon it up again.
April
Circe looked into the time mirror, sending the focus forward and watching her face age, until she found the closest match to the Nanny’s face just seen. The best match was from somewhere between A.D. 3027 and 3028, which fell between Year 138 and Year 146. That put Nanny at age thirty-three or thirty-four.
The mirror refused to follow the image of that face directly backward.
But Circe cunningly tilted the glass only to capture Nanny’s left hand, the one that wore a wedding band. She played the image of the veined and work-calloused hand back and back.
Her hand was remarkably young, pink-nailed with dimpled knuckles, before the wedding ring vanished. She could not get an exact reading.
She held up her naked left hand, spreading the fingers and peering at the image in the glass. There was no discernable difference. That earliest image of the ring was on a hand that was near-future, or even current.
That meant the wedding was near. Two years away? Or one? Months? Or weeks?
“What if I do not want my futures pared down to one?” Circe muttered angrily. “What if I do not want to turn into what I turn into?”
Circe held up her hand again and flipped the time mirror to point the other direction, into the immediate past. “Adjacent length equals twenty-four hours, tangent is one. Show me.” No trigonometry was needed: this was the simplest possible use of a time mirror.
Nonetheless, the image showed nothing but a blurred and swirling gray mist. “Why am I seeing nothing?”
The voice of the mirror said, “Mistress, there is an intervening glass along the time hypotenuse blocking the view.”
