There is a joke…
No, this is relevant. Important. Essential… There is an old joke…
At a time like this? Certainly. After all, from my point of view the world just ended. It’s not as though either of us has anything else to do so you might as well let me tell this in my own way.
So there’s an old joke - a bad one - that certain people of a certain age sometimes tell. Maybe it helps if they have a common bond of military service. It’s not always exactly the same joke…
Yes. I have to tell it. There’s no skipping it. Listen. This is
important.
So the joke goes something like this:
There’s an old man telling tall tales to the youngsters. Maybe they’re pulled up around the pot-bellied stove at the General Store, come in from the rain and cold to pester the old veterans who perch there in their rockers, smoking a pipe or a cigar and sneaking a snort from a pocket flask when they think their wives and children aren’t watching. Every now and then one of them will buy some tobacco, or an apple. The storekeeper knows them all and gives them grudging welcome, keeping their tabs without expecting payment short of the Pearly Gates.
“Tell us about the War, Granpa,” one of the kids will say. And Granpa’s eyes go somewhere away for a bit, and maybe one of the other old men shifts around in his rocking chair. There’s no way he will try the truth; these kids don’t deserve to hear about the reality of war, the blood and death and mud and shit-and-fear-stinks of it all. Maybe later, when they’re grown, if one of them wants to enlist. Then Granpa might have something a bit more hard and practical to say. But not now, with kids rolling like puppies on the worn pine floor and the stove just hot enough and the snowy wind rattling the windows… not now. This calls for a special magic, one that some older folks come to know: a tale, and a tall one, of wonder and magic and foreign places and high adventure.
And so he starts to yarn about soldiers and horses, and he throws in a few Indians for flavor. Another old man ventures that he might want to talk about that runaway train, or a cattle stampede, and that gets mixed in – why not? It’s all as true as the story needs to be, no more and no less. The tale winds on a while and the storekeeper tops up the pan of cider heating on the stove – good cider, with a hard apple bite and a pinch of clove and cinnamon almost enough to curl the tongue. There is a girl – of course – and a fierce villain in foreign uniform. Might be Union blue or rebel brown, Spanish blue-and-white, British khaki-and-red or even German black-and-gray. The villain’s moustache and leer matter more than the color of his clothes, anyway, and his intentions – while never exactly spelled out – are less than honorable. Oh, and there is a scar – a fearsome thing, and a souvenir of a past in which our hero plays a major role.
So there’s a fight, or two if Granpa’s feeling feisty and isn’t ready for his nap. And the heroes are riding for their lives in front of a prairie fire, or a stampede, or trapped with their backs to the wall with all of the evilest Indians or Spaniards or somebody else drawing down their long rifles… and right there, with his heroes trapped in an inescapable trap and facing what looks like certain death…
Right there, Granpa will pause for a bit and fiddle with his pipe, scraping and packing and puffing. Or pour himself another dollop of cider and inquire politely if anyone else would care to have a drop? And this will go on until one of the kids just can’t stand it anymore and blurts out the magic phrase:
“But
Granpa! You can’t stop
now. You got to tell us!
What happened then?"
And Granpa will laugh a little laugh and share a wink with a friend or three and say:
“Why, they
killed us, of course!”
And everyone doubles up laughing, even the older kids – who have heard it all before – and then the littlest ones will join in, not that they understand but just because everyone else is so happy and the moment is just too perfect not to be a part of it.
So… we all died. Except, you see, I didn’t – quite – and like Granpa I think that does make the joke just a bit funnier. The demon that Tesla had summoned from the bowels of the Earth went up like a bomb. It was tied into the planet’s magnetic field in some way, and that went haywire too. There wasn’t much on Earth in the way of electrical devices, but radios and telephones burned, batteries exploded, dynamos melted. The effects must have been worse on the other side of the gate: our side poured out the energy, you see, but theirs took the blow.
I lived because I was inside that steel cabinet and because I had on thick-soled boots. And – to be truthful – because a miracle happened, a tiny ripple of circumstance that preserved my life when all around me was destroyed. It was very strange to wake and not be able to know the date and time, but of course of my implants were dead. It took me a long time to get out of my crumpled, half-melted iron box of salvation-and-prison, and when I did I found… well. I suppose I had best keep it dry and factual if I want to be able to finish this.
I found the cellar was collapsed and half the building overhead had fallen into it. The fury of the collapsing gate had slagged stone, melted apparatus beyond recognition, set the wooden bones of the building afire and brought it down in a heap of rubble and ash. Brittle, blackened bones and puddled metal were all that remained of Frost and Makhearne; both were half-buried under foundation stones. Of Tesla there was only one sign: a shadow burned into a steel plate. If there is a god, I think he must have smiled a little ironic smile when he did that thing.
Snow had drifted down to cover the remains of building, bodies and dreams alike. Tracks in the snow around the building spoke of someone’s presence in the recent past and the indentations of hobnails hinted that some of those observers had been military. I didn’t think they would discover much from the ruins. Given the end of the war and the widespread destruction that had just occurred I thought it might be a long time before anyone spared a second thought for a fire in an abandoned building, even when that occurred in the same town where a group of Americans went missing.
It took me weeks to walk out, circling through Poland and east Prussia. Makhearne had left caches of money and documents sprinkled around the world, so it was a minor matter for me to pass myself off as another refugee until I could establish my bona fides with the Swiss. Phillip Shea would have to remain dead but Frank Robinson could live again, wealthy and cleansed and… free. If I have said the world ended, if I joked that everyone died, well - it was from my perspective no more than the plainest truth. My past life and my love, my mission and my civilization were all gone to that place the light goes when you blow out a candle. Everything I had feared and worked against in this world – everything I had struggled toward, and everyone I had labored with – was dead and gone. That world – my world – had ended and a new world could now begin, a world without Frost’s malign influence and a world in which I could start anew.
And so I began doing the only thing I knew how to do. Slowly I made plans, recruited helpers, built and rebuilt, formed and reformed not an organization but a group of like-minded people. And why, you may ask – indeed, you must be asking, if my literary powers are of any worth at all. Why return to the struggle instead of taking a long and quiet retirement to some remote and beautiful spot? The answer is very simple.
They are still out there, that civilization that can form gates and reach across the gulf of timelines. The first time they made contact a volcano went off in their faces. The second time the entire force of their planet’s magnetic field was shorted out. Every electronic device was destroyed, every wire and magnet vaporized, entire cities set aflame and the industry and economy of a world laid low. It was that bad here; how much worse must it have been in that other place, where the gods of earth and sky combined to forge their powers into Tesla’s thunderbolt? Those others may be defeated or crippled beyond recovery… may have lost all interest in realms beyond their own, or at least sworn off reaching out to us. But I know something of humans: humans are curious, and reckless, and stubborn. I do not believe they will rest until they have had vengeance –
I would not, were I in their place. And I do not believe they ever meant us well; one greets an equal with ambassadors, not soldiers and guns. They must hate us with a hatred more white-hot than any we can conceive. They are still out there… and one day they will come again. If not them then sooner or later another civilization will make contact, or we will reach out ourselves. For this we must be ready, and for that day I labor.
We are forming a new Brotherhood to prepare our people for the coming struggle. Strange new concepts must become familiar to them: time-travel, inter-dimensional gates, fission and fusion power, micro-electronics, nanotechnology, relativity and quantum physics, crystal-matrix ceremetric wafers to power neural interfaces and roll-up display screens. Personal wireless telephones, computers small enough to wear and cheap enough to be ubiquitous, digital democracy and personal information transmission networks, electronic finance and artificial intelligence… the world in fifty years will look nothing like today, and in one hundred years will be all but incomprehensible.
We will make it happen. We will make it comprehensible. We will show the world the possibilities, the promise – and the dangers – and we will both shake and shape the nations to their roots. We are the writers: we are the authors of dreams, the architects of the future, the seers of the infinites of what-may-be, the visionaries and the temple scribes in the service of Tomorrow. Together we will open the eyes of the world, fling open the million doors of possibility. By our efforts we may show our people how to be great… and show them the consequences of failure. The civilization that spawned the Knights Temporal was a magnificent Empire. But we can do better. We
shall do better. We are the writers and we will tell the tale that must be told; we are the authors, and we must be heard.
Otto von Bismarck once said, “There is a special Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.” He was wrong, and his error was not just in fact but false at the very heart. There was never a Special Providence to look after you, nor did you need one. There were only two men, lost and frightened and armed only with a special knowledge, doing their poor best to help you choose the right from wrong. I am very proud that – mostly – you chose the right.
Then there was only me.
And now...
There’s us.
Welcome!
