The Book of Feasts & Seasons (20 page)

The whole arrangement looked something like a crystal-poled metal parasol lying on its side taking a ride on a sled, and the saddle straddled the pole, and the cylinder and levers formed an off-center handle.

There were scrollwork and flourishes on the brass, a windrose on the copper disk, and little cherubic faces on the cylinder, which betrayed that this was made in the days when the machines were works of art, and machinists were magicians.

The stranger said, “Unfortunately, the dials are decimal. It is an oddity of the inventor. This dial indicates how many tens of days you have passed through; this one hundreds of days; thousands; tens of thousands. You will have to be clever in your calculations to know the month and the year of your arrival.”

“Or I could my just use my phone,” I said, giving him an odd look. I was sure someone, somewhere on the Internet had set up an application to calculate such things.

The stranger scowled and shrugged. “I am not familiar with such a
gizmo
.” (There was no Latin word for “gizmo” of course, he just said the English word. If that is an English word.)

I said. “The book by H.G. Wells never gives the Time Traveler a name. You say he is real. Who is the inventor? Why is he not ruling the world?”

He threw out his chest and spoke in solemn tones. “The Time Traveler is Nikola Tesla. Anyone reading the book by Wells in that day and age would have recognized the man at once–part showman, part madman, all genius.

“The machine itself was built in Menlo Park some time during the 1870′s, with the help, and, to be blunt, despite the interference, of Thomas Alva Edison, who saw no practical use for it.

“In 1895, a man named George Scherff, Tesla’s legal and fiscal adviser, gave an account of Tesla’s voyage into the future into the hands of Mr. Wells to put it into publishable form, since the account would not have been believed if given as fact.

“The machine was thought lost in the great fire that destroyed Mr. Edison’s great factory in 1914. Mr. Tesla is not ruling the world because a Nazi agent killed him in 1943.”

I frowned at the stranger. “How could a man as bright as Edison see no practical use for time travel? Anyone would see the advantage of being able to read tomorrow’s stock market results or racing form.”

“The machine did not perform well until it was taken to Scotland. America is a young nation.”

“What does that matter?”

The stranger said, “The machine works by a resonance effect. Think of time as a stream, but certain events are rocks in that stream, rocks that make eddies, ripples, echoes. This is why there is no need for you to physically move the machine to the cottage where your wedding night took place. Merely touching your wedding ring to the forward cylinder will attune the crystal. Your wedding ring is an object that carries time with it. Anything used as a memento is.”

I instinctively clasped my hand over my ring, as if to protect it. “It is just a bit of gold. There must be something else involved. Something more.”

He nodded. “Time will never be understood by any era which divides matter from psyche and disbelieves in everything but matter. Is eternity not a psychic reality? Mind and body are one, even as time and space are one. Man alone of all the beasts fears the future and regrets the past. Tesla understood this. The machine cannot be operated by any man who is too perfectly satisfied with his own time. The time traveler must yearn–”

I had been standing with my back him, inspecting, as well as I could, the half-seen shapes and shadows of the machine. Now I turned, and the motion startled him, for he jumped back, putting his hand in his coat pocket as if there were a gun there.

I said, “So that is why you were hovering like a vulture over the graveyard?”

He said, “Think of it as a privilege, Mr. Went. Not everyone can operate the machine. Very few are allowed to even try.”

“Allowed?”

He licked his lips. “There is a certain danger to the operation, of which, ah, perhaps it slipped my mind, and I failed to warn you.”

I uttered a sad, little laugh. “I just buried the only reason I had to live. What should I fear?”

“Well, in that case, there is no need to dwell on–”

“Perhaps I should also tell you that I am not afraid to hurt you if you don’t tell me what is going on.”

“You have nothing to lose. I understand.”

“Then talk!”

“Very well. The time machine’s principles are not difficult to understand, and a working model is not difficult to build. It was, or will be, discovered again in 1968 by Dr. Ann McGregor and then again by Dr. Sam Beckett in 1999; then, after the Great Collapse, by the Revisionists of the Second Era, and, when they have destroyed themselves, the horrible living machines of the Third Era, who attempted to undo the diverse paradoxes and time-snarls their predecessors left behind them. The Nexxial Agents, who travel as amnesiacs, form the Fourth Era of Time Travel, and so on, age after age and civilization after civilization, until the Danellians of the Final Era.”

“I meant, talk while making sense.”

“What do you not understand? If you touch the time machine, if you make any effort to use it, all the events which you will set in motion become, for you, actualized: a real possibility. The events springing from those possibilities become real. And this includes those time travelers downstream of you, unhappy with your actions, who seek to revise them.”

“Revise how?”

“The simplest way, the least complex energy state, as it were, to prevent time paradoxes, is to kill the time traveler just before he starts.”

I said, “And so you’ve never touched the thing? You were afraid someone from the future would pop into existence next to you, and shoot you with some sort of ray gun? Why not go back and prevent your parents from ever meeting? The fact that you are standing here now–”

He shook his head. “Men still have free will. Not until the very moment I use the time machine will I have stepped into the fourth dimension. They would have to stop me right at that moment. There are time-energy considerations involved.” He looked at the brass and copper machine and sighed. “Oh, I have polished it, replaced old wires, kept the jars charged. I have sat in the saddle and toyed with the levers, yes, even powered up the solenoid and heard it hum. When I wanted to remember something I’d forgotten, for example. But actually to attune the cylinder and engage the drive? No. I’ve never done that.”

I said, “You don’t know me. What if I climb on that thing and just fly away? Become master of the world myself? Why take the risk?”

“I must see if it works.”

“What does that mean? Must?”

He spread his hands. “Can I explain the agony of living with this thing in the attic so many years, unable to know whether the machine actually works or not? A machine I am afraid to touch? Perhaps everything I read was a lie. Perhaps it is merely a stage magician’s trick. I cannot live on faith. I have to see it. I have to see it work with my own eyes!”

“So if I jump on this thing, this magic time travel machine, every time traveler from hereafter to eternity might come gunning for me? Fine. You picked me because you know how badly I need to see her again. See her alive, I mean. I’ll play along. But there is one condition.”

“What is that, Mr. Went?”

“Tell me your name.”

“It would mean nothing to you.”

“Tell me anyway. If the Time Cops arrest me, I won’t talk.”

“They will not arrest you or question you. When they act, they kill. My name is Professor Pajo Mandic. I am descended from Tesla’s sister Milka.”

I turned again and threw my leg over the saddle. “You said the machine moves through space as well as time? Guided by what, exactly?”

Professor Mandic stepped behind the machine and turned a crank, so that the large copper disk behind the saddle started slowly rotating. He threw an old-fashioned double-throw switch and the crystal bar between my legs began to glow.

I wondered if my legs were wrapped around something radioactive, even though it was too late to worry about such things now. I also wondered when I had started to believe any of this might be real. But the fact that I was nervous the antique contraption might blow up made the hope that it could carry me into yesterday seem possible.

Professor Mandic said, “Touch your ring to the axis of the cylinder, and engage the first lever. It controls how many days per second—subjective seconds—you will be in motion. The second lever controls how many degrees into the fourth dimension you will be rotated. The greater the angle, the less contact you have with the three-dimensional world, and the less time, subjectively, your voyage will take. If you stay at less than forty-five degrees, you will see the sun like a ribbon of fire, and winter snow appear and disappear in blinks of an eye across a vast panorama. If you find yourself suffering from motion sickness, use that leather sack there. The first time traveler discovered an odd yaw and pitch and sway which made him nauseous. Wait? What are you doing?”

Because it was not my wedding ring I touched to the cylinder then. It was my crucifix.

If I could visit anyone in the world, any time, any place, who would I go and see? I had only this one opportunity. Yes, I wanted to see my wife again. I would have given anything to see her again. It would be like an amputee regaining his lost right arm once again.

But there was someone I wanted to see more. I needed an explanation.

I landed, or materialized, or whatever the word is, at the foot of a cross on which a man hung dying.

The sun was beating down and the flies were crawling on his face, and he cried out when he saw me, such a cry of hopeless pain as I had never heard. Immediately I leaped from the machine and went to him, to see if there was any way I could get him down without hurting him further. He croaked at me, a word I did not understand.

The nails were not driven through the palms of his hands, as it is depicted in religious art, but right through the middle of his forearm, between the radius and the ulna, which looked even more painful. Other spikes had been driven into and through his lower legs, between the tibia and fibula.

He was naked, which is also not the way he was usually depicted in religious art. I could see insects crawling through his pubic hair. He did not have a free hand to scratch them or pluck them away.

Only then did I notice he was not alone. There were many more than two hanging to either side of him. The man to his immediate left had died and hung there motionless, his head bowed, withered like a mummy in the sun.

Perhaps I was still queasy from the gyrating motions of the time machine, or the sudden change from cool night to scalding day, but the sight of so many naked men, all dying, all with bloodstains marking their arms and legs, all gasping for breath, and the stench of their wounds crawling with flies, made me lightheaded. And some of the men had voided their bowels after being raised up, so smears of fecal matter ran down the base of the crosses and their legs.

Worst of all was the sound, the gasping, grating, harsh, and horrible sound. It was all those men fighting desperately to breathe.

Not many people talk about how crucifixion works. It is one of the more painful, humiliating, sadistic, and lingering deaths ever invented by man. The victim is hung by his arms to put pressure on his ribcage so he cannot breathe. The exposure will eventually kill anyone strong enough, but, before that, the pressure of all the body’s weight suspended from the dislocated shoulders, after several hours, or days, weakens the same muscles in the chest used for drawing breath until the victim can no longer breathe.

In order to take a breath, the victim must straighten his legs, which are also nailed by spikes to the cross, and this relieves the pressure for a moment, so he can draw in a ragged, gasping lungful of air. But eventually, his legs lose their strength, and ever so slowly, ever so painfully, he is unable to lift himself. And so, in the end, he suffocates. The fortunate ones die more quickly of shock and exposure.

I stepped around to the back of the cross, not because I had any thought in mind, but only because I saw no way to get him down from the front. The splinters were driven into his buttocks and his back, which was red, raw, and bleeding. The spikes protruded through the wood, but I did not have any carpenter’s tools. I pushed helplessly at the red point of one spike with my fingers, not because it could do any good, but only because I could not stand by and do nothing.

I looked left and right. There were about twenty-four or thirty men nailed there, all told. Some were children no older than fourteen. Some were graybeards already dead, and crows were eating their eyes with stabbing motions of their beaks that looked perversely like a kiss. Perhaps some of the others, if they had been immediately flown by helicopter to modern emergency rooms, could have been saved.

“Hoy! Get away from there!” This was in Greek, which I did understand.

I looked to the left. I saw a group of dull-faced children, bellies bloated with malnutrition, throwing stones at one of the crucified men whose eyes had been torn out by birds, hitting him in the crotch and belly, grinning little dull-eyed gap-mouthed grins when he moaned and thrashed. They scattered at the voice.

The voice came from a little ways beyond them. A man in the iron helm and segmented leather skirt of the Romans was standing near a fire of coals, warming a bit of food on a stick, with an open flask nearby. I remember how impressed I was that, in a place like this, reeking as it did, he could eat his picnic luncheon at leisure. He reminded me of a friend who worked in a morgue and could eat a ham sandwich next to a ripe and newly sawed-open corpse without thinking twice about it. People get used to things, including things they shouldn’t.

There was a second soldier with him, but he was lying down, having propped his shield up with his spear to form an impromptu parasol to keep his head in the shade.

The soldier slowly picked up his javelin (a four-foot length of wood and iron with a wicked tip) and slung across his shoulder his eight-sided shield set with a lightning-bolt motif. “Stay back, you. The traitors’ bodies are the property of Rome.”