John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“By traveling into the past and changing things, you mean. By manipulating history.”

He gave a tuneless whistle.

“Listen to me, Haven. I’m sure you don’t need me to explain to you about the grandmother—”

“Let’s not presume , Waldy. Let’s not get impatient. We’ll have to review those calculations first.”

“Why not use Enzie’s exclusion bin? That’s what you’ve been after all along, isn’t it?”

His smile tightened slightly. “We overestimated your aunt’s abilities, I’m afraid. She may not have chosen to share this with you, Waldy, but that contraption of hers never worked. Not even a little.”

“Is that right?” I said, thinking of the hours I’d spent in that dark nowhere place and of the series of visions I’d seen. Enzie had told Haven one lie, at least. There was reason for hope.

Haven shook his head. “You saw for yourself that Enzian’s ‘bin’ was no more than a painted packing crate. We’ve since determined that anything — any confined space at all — can be used, if it falls within certain parameters.” He grinned at that, as if he’d made a joke. “What exactly those parameters might be — the ideal, specific ratio — has eluded all of us so far, your daffy aunts included. But it didn’t elude old Ottokar.” He let out a sigh. “What an extraordinary man he must have been.”

“It didn’t elude him? How could you know that?”

The slyness crept back into Haven’s face. “Your great-grandfather made one successful jump forward, remained for three-quarters of an hour, then returned to the instant and location of his death. We have reason to believe that he manifested himself at this very corner, in fact, at twelve forty-seven CET on June eighth, 1970.”

My head felt hot and light and full of noise. “What ‘reason to believe’ could you possibly have?”

“Enzian told us. She was very clear-cut.”

“But how could she have known?”

“Isn’t that obvious, Waldy? Because she was there.”

I said nothing to that.

Haven regarded me fondly. “See if you can follow me, pal. Ottokar was walking home from his mistress’s house — in a postcoital daze, I’m assuming — when a man who could have been his doppelgänger passed him on the street. Seconds later, before he could act, he saw this same man run down by a car. Your great-grandfather slipped in among the crowd that had formed around the accident, and realized, to his amazement, that the man on the ground was himself. Not only that, but the victim was dressed in the clothes that he himself had on, with an identical mustard stain on the lapel. Ottokar realized at once what this event signified. It meant that he had, as he’d suspected and hoped, hit on the secret of chrononavigation that very morning in his workshop. But far more than that: it proved that he would manage to break free of the chronostream, not at some point in the future, but on that very day. How else could his body occupy the same t- coordinate twice, in precisely the same suit of clothes?”

“Hold on a second. I don’t see how—”

“Ottokar rushed back to his cellar and lost no time in putting what he’d learned into practice, first using his sons’ pet cicada as a trial subject, then experimenting directly on himself. He was not as astonished by his rapid success as he might otherwise have been: he’d seen the proof with his own eyes, after all, less than an hour before. When the moment came — and it came quickly — to put his discovery to the ultimate test, he boldly cut the chronologic ties that bound him. Thus began an extended, random odyssey through the chronosphere: not unlike that of the protagonist of ‘Everywhen,’ my personal favorite among your father’s works.”

“A hack job,” I managed to stammer. Haven shrugged and continued.

“Your great-grandfather must have known, when he finally returned to Masarykovo Square at thirteen hundred CET on the day of his departure, that his duration was about to conclude. But I choose to believe, as he saw Herr Bachling’s Daimler bearing down on him, that he found solace in two certainties.” Haven held up two fingers. “Firstly, that his discovery had been borne out by his own direct experience; and secondly, that his legacy was assured. Half his notes — the three most precious pages — were still in his mistress’s possession; and he’d entrusted the rest to his twin granddaughters, with his very own hands, on June eighth, 1970, at twelve forty-seven, Central European Time, at the very spot where you and I now stand.”

I thought hard for a moment after Haven had finished. He reclined against the wall and indulged me. Everything I did that day seemed to delight him.

“What you’ve just told me makes no sense at all,” I said.

“‘Sense’ is a quality of human consciousness, pal. ‘Time’ is a quality of the physical universe, as our consciousness perceives it. To make any true progress — to attain the slightest degree of freedom — one has to be willing to part ways with both.” He snuffled. “I’m disappointed in you, Waldy. Saint Augustine knew as much in 397 C.E.”

Even as I scoffed at this — even as my mind fought to reject his account as impossible — I recalled the trip Enzie and Genny had taken to Znojmo. It was suddenly clear to me that the beginning of the change in my father — his withdrawal from the world, his growing fear of his sisters, and even his mental decline — could be dated from my aunts’ return from Europe. If they’d told Orson what Haven was telling me now — and if he’d swallowed it whole, as he may well have done — what chance did I have to resist?

But at the same time, Mrs. Haven — in some neglected, underventilated shaftway of my brain — I was having none of it. It was Waldemar, in his sick and wounded egotism, who’d first thought of warping the chronoverse; his father may have lusted after knowledge of time, but never after influence over its course. I already knew that my aunts had told Haven one lie. Who was to say they hadn’t told a second?

“I’m going to point something out to you, Waldy, and you aren’t going to like it.” Haven set aside his paper. “We’re not so very different, you and I.”

I took another step backward. “Your wife said something like that to me once.”

“Ah,” he said slowly. “My wife.”

“You’ve missed her.”

“What’s that, pal?”

“You’ve missed her,” I repeated. “She’s halfway to Vienna by now.”

His lips gave a barely perceptible twitch. “My wife is in the honeymoon suite of the Hotel Zrada at present, in the company of certain men in my employ.”

I let out a small, sharp cough and doubled over.

“How are you feeling, pal? Would you like to sit down?”

I shook my head.

“Good boy. Now here’s what’s going to happen next.” He gestured to Little Brother, who stood just a few steps behind me, breathing musically through his nose. “My colleague and I are going to search you, right here on the street, and you’re going to cooperate fully. Then we’ll return to the Zrada to collect my dear Hildy and the papers you entrusted to her care. At that point, we — my wife, my associates and myself; not you, of course — are going to get on a plane.” He smiled at me and shrugged his boyish shoulders. “Where we go in that plane— how we go, for that matter, and when — will depend on what those documents contain.”

“Those ‘documents,’ if you want to call them that, were written in 1903. What are you expecting to find in them, Haven? A set of directions?”

I’d meant this mockingly, of course, but his smile only sharpened. A set of directions was exactly what he was hoping to find. I felt a powerful urge to lie down in the street.