ADVENTURES IN PARATIME:
an Anthology of the Soon
and Secret Future, Long Past
Daniel Eness
Published by Eortholic Press at Smashwords
Copyright 2012 Daniel Eness
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Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Table of Contents
A Brief Note from the Researcher
Only the Arquebus, By H. Beam Piper
Research Note Preceding The Unmethoding
Research Note Preceding Jiggle Juice and Cleavage
Research Note Preceding After Oil
Research Note Preceding The God of This World
ADVENTURES IN PARATIME:
an Anthology of the Soon
and Secret Future, Long Past
A Brief Note from the Researcher
Amaris,
Using the imagery from the scans of the drop cloths, (thank God you unearthed them! A low, poorly cataloged shelf, you say? Still, that old evidence shed must be a cavern. In any case, I still can't believe it--) I've traced the data sets.
The patterns are fainter - certainly less dramatic - than the ancient pattern from Event Z-A, but it is indisputable: they match. The Piper Event isn't just similar to Event Z-A: it is its echo, its mirror, its child.
The only question is this: is the mirror cracked?
Better put: is the child good?
The enclosed notes are what I've got so far.
Courage,
The Researcher
P.S. As you know, his last note closed rather famously with "I don't like to leave messes when I go away, but if I could have cleaned up any of this mess, I wouldn't be going away." But mysteries? He didn't say anything about mysteries!
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Paratime – the practical application of technology to influence, police and manage alternate realities for the benefit of a society or societies. Coined by H. Beam Piper, Earthling.
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Only the Arquebus, By H. Beam Piper
Researcher Note: Just after Halloween 1964, H. Beam Piper, the now-famed science fiction author and the writer of a "locked room" mystery titled Murder in the Gunroom was discovered dead in his own well-stocked gunroom, an apparent suicide. The manuscript to his unpublished manuscript, Only the Arquebus, disappeared. Piper had told an editor that the story was a historical piece: an account of the zero-sum game played between Ferdinand of Spain and Louis XII of France for the control of Naples.
That was a lie.
Only the Arquebus did involve a zero-sum game. It was historically accurate. The 16th century setting, however, was a ruse - a private joke from Piper to himself. Piper fancied himself a renaissance man from a bygone era. He also fancied himself a hero.
He wasn't wrong.
What follows is the unedited manuscript that appeared anonymously at our offices, wrapped in plain brown paper and smelling distinctly of Serene pipe tobacco smoke.
~~~
Clever. You jam dratted dopes – after all this time -- aw, blast it, can I write more plainly than that and still get published?
Anyhow. It wasn’t suicide, you idiots. It was a fistfight.
Rats, I’ll start over. But I’m not apologizing – not for “idiots” and not for “dopes.” There’s no point in Porto Rican rum, and even less point in trying to make amends with the truth.
Paratime ring any bells? The Terro-Human history? Of course not – because none of it ever came to pass, and none of it ever will. Read those “stories” and you’ll know why it had to go down exactly like this.
No one else was going to bother to save the world.
It isn’t bragging if I can back it up. So sit back and read.
It was 8:30 A.M. the sun streaming through the third story window: Bedtime in Altoona. I’d just gotten off my security shift at the Railroad, changed into my pajamas, smoked the last reserves of my sweet Serene tobacco, its conversation with me downright mellifluous.
The room they thought they found me in was, of course, the weapons room.
At my last inventory, the walls were lined with 138 firearms, not counting the ones in drawers, and a dozen sharpened swords.
A tube appeared in the center of the room, just as I’m cleaning Polly, my $5 Civil War noisemaker. Like a glass elevator, it rose up from the floor, the loose planks creaking, straining to bear its bulk. Out stepped a horse-faced fellow with stubby orange fingers, wearing a purple cowl swept back from his high forehead, and a cape running down below his ankles. Or fetlocks. God knows what he had under that dress.
He also held a clipboard, apparently a clipboard from the future, as it had buttons and spat paper with a stream of print on it.
Great. My first real live alien, and he’s a bureaucrat.
Of course, I shot him.
“Mr. Piper,” droned the bored alien, ignoring the pistol round that had cut into his flowing clothes and vanished. “I’m here to request an end to your literary ambitions.”
I fired another shot, right between the eye.
“Gloop,” said the eye.
“—In Blazes?” I said.
“Your guns are not effective. No, not even the 9 millimeter.” German engineering. Who knew?
I made like a dervish and slid an old Spanish poniard from its sheath, slashing the officious burglar at the throat. It cut the clasp of his cloak, whose collar he clutched against his chest, dropping the clipboard. He huffed.
“Only the arquebus fires at a sufficiently low velocity to both penetrate my flesh and remain long enough to damage vital organs, most of which are located in what you might call my skull.”
I shot a glance at the wall behind him. The ancient arquebus hung on its hooks, its brass ornaments tarnished, its patina allowed to spread unchecked for at least a quartet of generations. I’m not entirely sure I remember how to load it, and I sure as shooting know I don’t have the time.
“In short, your weapons are useless in the prevention of my mission, which is to persuade you to end your campaign against our greater designs for your people. If I can’t do that, my charge is, quite simply, to stop you.”
“Stop me.”
“Stop you.”
“From…writing stories?”
The sword clattered to the floor.
“Don’t be coy, Beam Piper. Both you and I are very well aware that your research into Paratime and your somewhat miraculous foretelling of the Terra-Earth history consist of far more than ‘stories.’ Unfortunately for our designs, you are just getting warmed up, and are, at our best calculations, as close as four months away from having a unified definitive, testable formula to express the truth of your theories to a wider public.”
“Oh,” I said, “You’ve got the wrong Beam Piper. I’m H. You know, as in Horace. I think you are looking for –“
And with that I leaped up, my arms stretched to the low ceiling, where I grasped the exposed steel rafter. Interlocking my legs around my opponent’s neck, I performed a stomach crunch that practically ruptured my own vertebrae. His long noggin drove into the rafter with a satisfying clang!
“—I-Beam Piper!”
His body dropped to the floor a split second before my sweaty fingers lost their purchase. I fell on top of him, losing my wind and all initiative.
He rolled me off like a firelog. I gasped, half-paralyzed from the drain of adrenaline, the other half just plain paralyzed. The dastard was sitting on my sciatic nerve. With a swipe of his stubby hand, he flipped my body over like it was a box turtle, and he the devil’s son.
“Henry Piper,” he said, exasperated, rubbing his skull, his cloak slipping off his shoulders like cheap burlesque. The weirdo’s got pajamas on underneath. My other pajamas. He’s a thief and a cross-dresser. The cloak, no longer touching his slick, greasy body lost its shimmering color and looked more like a painter’s drop cloth than the refinements of a government stooge. He straddled me, pressing down on my ribs with the weight of a mule. I could barely move my left hand. Everything else was pinned.
“Don’t call me Henry,” I said, gasping. “It ruins the joke.”
“Henry Beam Piper,” he said. “I’m here to convince you to reverse course. I can offer you three options.”
“I’m listening,” I grunted, quickly running out of lung capacity.
The glow from the elevator behind him pulsed with light, color and motion.
“Return with me through the portal. A foreign kingdom of riches and a harem of angelic concubines await.”
I’ll admit, I peeked. The red sunlight was a bit harsh, but the clothing was optional and the rum was Jamaican. The women were otherworldly, but thankfully in the two-eyed sense.
“Stay here. Abandon your sorcery and prophecy and live out your days quietly as you see fit-”
“But no writing.”
“But no writing.”
“What’s my third option.”
“Die here, seemingly at your own hand.”
“Right. Like anyone would believe that I, of all people, would do that.”
“They’ll come up with something. Your kind always do. Your ex-wife.”
I tried not to show the bristles on my neck.
“Aw, she’s a doll. They’ll be more likely to believe it was murder, but I guarantee you don’t have technology advanced enough to replicate her abbitoire.”
“Despondency, then, over your writing career. Your agent has recently died, and failed to tell you about a number of sales you’ve made.”
“Oh, that’s plausible. If reliance on an agent’s communications skills is a prerequisite for mental health, the nuthouse would be full of writers and the library would be empty.”
“What’s your choice?”
Well, I thought, they say everybody’s got one. I stuck my thumb where Phobos don’t shine. Old blue eye yowled like I’d dropped a mongoose down his flannel trousers, hot footing it a 4th down and long away from me. Even Frank Gotch would have scooted. So much for vital organs. Apparently Snoopy Gloopy had not anticipated my contribution of choice number four.
Still wheezing, I rolled to the opposite wall.
I went for the arquebus, hoping to awaken its ancient glory. I bet it hadn’t been fired in combat in 200 years. Loading it was going to be a bear. The alien knew this. I knew this.
But one thing I knew that he didn’t is the art of misdirection. Must be a trait peculiar to me.
Most people, and all the Martians I know, are unaware of the startling utility of a well-placed elbow.
Not counting my ex-wife, that is. She knew how to throw one. That’s who I learned it from, a couple of times.
So Mr. Longshanks goes down in a puddle of goo, and I get a hard little boo-boo on my funny bone. I put my knee into his throat, and then, with all the time in the world, a few slow-loaded bullets into his head.
That’s when the trouble started.
Suddenly, the goo starts shifting, and not in the way you’d think space-goo ought to go. It shaped itself, and in not too long, looked like an amateur version of myself.
I had been framed for suicide.
With the gunshots, amateur is all it takes. With half the head gone, what matters is my tell-tale pencil thin moustache. Who are they going to think got offed in my apartment, Walt Disney?
Suicide. What a laugh: I’m not even dead, and I can prove it as easy as I can show you how to fiddle the lock on the paint shop at the Altoona Works so you can cut through to the boiler without having to go back around the long way. But darn if I can explain my own twin, shot to corpse-state in the middle of the floor of my personal armory.
But that isn’t important.
What’s important is that I didn’t do what they had expected me to do: hop on the elevator, travel the stars, and set myself up with a Martian harem to live out my days in interstellar luxury, damning this thankless planet to its fate.
In hiding, I did a few things, worked something out with Salinger: I took his place, he took no one’s, so on and so on. I won’t bore you with the details. I’ll say this: there’s a darn good reason a Quaker named Milhous made it in to the White House. Too bad those Martians took their revenge on him when I never showed up for trial.
That’s why there wasn’t an Atomic War in ’73, and the thousands of years of history that followed after. I derailed the entire Paratime and Terro-Human timeline, rendered all my “fiction” into bunk and ended up making me an exile on my own planet, instead of a minor king on another.
I’m coming out now because I’m 108 years young, and figure it is a matter of minutes before my memory goes for good, if not my ticker. Always figured I’d go out in a hail of laserfire, but, as they say, even picked poison will kill you in the end.
Now, do you still think I’m some sort of doe-eyed copycat of that sissy Hemingway or as short-sighted as that poor kid Howard?
END
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Researcher Note: In datafile 14, you may notice a "jitterbug effect" along the undulating waves of time and space that is first known to have expressed itself a mere five minutes from now.
***
Headaches, two of them. Left temple and base of skull. The hard, edgy kind he might soften at day’s end with effervescent water, drinking it the instant before the white wafers completely dissipated in the glass.
Not before then. Heath had nothing on at hand in the lab office, not even ibuprofen.
The first number was off by one-ten thousandth: headache one.
The second, by two ten thousandths: headache two.
The data set had gotten garbled. Heath had run the numbers a hundred times in the past month, fiddling about, re-checking Orland’s surveys.
The numbers were getting wilder than the recent temperature swings. In a week the city had gone from freezing rain to record heat. The swelter had nothing on the pressure Heath felt inside.
He hated soft science and hated the fact that he had to integrate it with his results to show any meaningful impact.
Autumn Orland, however, he kind of liked.
She was pretty, perky and professional. Not in that order, if anyone ever asked him. He’d worked fifteen years peered rarely with women and never with one so young and lovely. Even Heath’s wife liked her.
In short, he didn’t mind the excuse.
"Dr. Orland," he said, "Got a minute?"
Her hair was undone and in her face. She swept it back. "Sure, Mister Fidget – excuse me, my band just broke." Tossing the broken bit of elastic in the garbage, she ripped into a bag of office supply rubber bands. She bound her hair back into a loose tail.
"It was a new one, too, cheap things. What beans have I failed to count today?"
"Is that what I’ve become to you?"
"What, the gatekeeper who stands in the way of progress?" she said, winking. "Sure, but at least you are friendly about it."
Heath tensed. She wasn’t completely jesting. "The numbers. They really don’t complement the last run. They practically negate it."
"Yeah, about that. We maybe want to look at limiting the sample of the second data set, and expanding the margin of error."
"That’s – uh – not what I was hoping to hear."
She bit her lower lip and shrugged in a subtle apology. "Alexander thinks it is okay."
"So, what? Your data’s softening?"
"No, not really. Just sort of – I guess – retracting on its repeatability."
"Fancy way to say ‘softening.’"
"This is really common. Look at the statistical significance of the first phase. That’s what will justify the development of the drug."
And justify the grant money, she didn’t say.
"The second survey is supplemental," she said. "You’ve always said my numbers help us tell the story, but they aren’t the story."
She casually flipped the ponytail over the front of her shoulder as she cocked her head. Her hair loosed as the new band broke.
#
Alexander Lightman had been Heath’s comrade in science since the eleventh grade. Luck had brought them together as lab partners in high school physics. Alexander, better with girls than Heath, naturally gravitated toward biology while Heath buried himself in the predictable comforts of practical chemistry.
The office was frigid. The new HVAC system was on the fritz, wildly overcompensating.
"Think about that," Lightman said, rubbing his chilly hands, unintentionally looking like a mad professor in his lab coat. "Alzheimer’s. Hope. Because of us."
"You really think this garbage is going to make it through peer review?" said Heath.
"I know this garbage is going to make it through peer review. Our numbers, unmodified, are no worse – better, even – than Komisky’s. That thing sailed through."
"Komisky is discredited!"
"Debated, not discredited, certainly not invalidated, yet. His funding is in the bank and he’s moved on to bigger things. Which is what we’re going to do. Look, we aren’t promising the moon with this."
Heath remembered a time, just weeks ago, when the two of them had promised almost precisely the moon to their CEO. "The hell we aren’t. Our first round was off the charts. The buzz is that we have a freaking cure. I even started to dream it."
"Our results are positive. We can’t afford this one to get desk-drawered. You realize that don’t you?"
"Arguing with results. Great. Who are you?"