Challenging Destiny #25 Read online

Page 5


  I muttered in as unintelligible a voice as I could muster, while he blathered and blustered. He was apparently a Party man. I, too, was supposed to be a loyal Party man, though I could not guess whom he might take me for, if not myself.

  "Now get out there and take care of that clone!” he bellowed. His girth gave him the force of an opera singer.

  I was happy enough to leave my red-faced, roaring bull of a friend, though I had begun to feel like a man trapped in a maze. I wandered through the roses and flowering bushes, trying to look stealthy.

  I found me again at last, hidden among the trees. He extended an arm to draw me through into the deepest, darkest part of the shrubbery. We pressed through waxy green leaves and delicate white petals, the tangles of plant and tree growing so thick I would have been lost if not for the tether of his hand.

  At last we emerged in a glade, the forest having grown so thick here in the last two hundred years it seemed as though I'd stepped into one of my fairy-romances, rather than the future. There, in the dim green light cast by the leaves, he said, “We expected you a long time ago."

  "'We'?"

  "I'm William Morris 7."

  "Does that make me William Morris 1?"

  He shook his head with a sardonic air. “No, he died long after your time."

  We fell silent again. The birds laced the air with their warbling and the rustle of wings and branches.

  Gesturing toward the house, I said, “Who was he?"

  "Our esteemed Delegate is a Party man."

  "Socialist Party?"

  His lip curled. It was a shock, seeing such anger etched on my own young face.

  I asked, “Why has nothing in the house been changed?"

  "It's a museum now. A museum dedicated to you. All the world loves William Morris,” he said, but this time his voice faltered. “We live there, of course. In the basement."

  "'We'?” I repeated, for the second time.

  "All the clones,” he said bitterly. “'Living history.’ Not that there are any of us left now, but me."

  It took him several moments then, to explain what this might mean—the doppelgangers of me that the Party had created out of flesh and blood decades after my last visit to the future. Samples of my genes were apparently present in my handiworks, and they were able to recreate me, again and again, and perpetuate the lie that I had never died—the living embodiment of what the people were supposed to believe.

  "But this isn't the world you dreamed of, Father,” he continued, his voice gentler as we sat upon the green. “They have taken your ideals and twisted them, perverted them to their own ends. The destruction of the earth has stopped, and class divisions no longer exist. All people have whatever they need. But freedom and intellect have eroded under the conformity to Party rules. The Party has organized society, telling us what to think and do. Under the tyranny of plenty, art has withered and died. People grow restless, unhappy and stifled without being able to say why, since they have all they need—except the ultimate freedom to choose their own fates. They fight without cause, and demand things one moment only to repudiate them the next. They act like petulant children."

  He pushed back his rumpled mass of curls and eyed me keenly. “The Party decided that the best way to calm the unrest was to bring back their most popular hero—an artist who understood the needs of working people, and acted nobly on their behalf. But unfortunately for the Party, we William Morrises are not the type of simple folk-artist who might be easily swayed by rhetoric. Each copy eventually rebels and is wiped out."

  A flash of danger shot down my spine. “Why me? If there is some trouble in the Empire, some threat, why not a great political leader—"

  A sad, lopsided smile. “Well, they consider you a rather loveable but harmless buffoon. They only want us to keep the people happy, to distract them with noble sentiments while the world slides slowly into hell. They think all I can do is sit here and write poetry and fairy-romances in hopes that I might again inspire the folk with better deeds and better days. The Party views this with amusement, as a harmless distraction. Even I know it won't be enough."

  As William Morris 7 told me about his world, I had a powerful feeling of déjà vu as I remembered what Bertie had shown me in his novel—the future populated with mindless children, the museums and universities deserted, crumbling and cobwebbed. A garden state inhabited by no one with a will or intelligence greater than that in unenlightened Eden. In this new future I had helped to build, garden groves were maintained to delight the eye, while hidden farms and factories were run by self-operating machines and copies like my William Morris, who were treated no better than slaves. For the originals who remained, there was no useful work to fill the void left by the absence of useless toil. The poor had become rich, without becoming wise.

  "I want to live,” he said, gripping my wrist so hard it hurt. “I've been eluding them here in the gardens as often as I can, trying to call you down the long chain of memory."

  "I think I heard you. An echo, in a dream."

  He nodded as if this were a viable form of communication. Perhaps, since we were such strange kin, it was.

  "But not like this,” he continued. “Not in this soulless world. Not unless we can change things for the better. Spark Hope. Rekindle Dream. Bring passion and beauty back, to replace this mindless passivity. Only with the fire of their imaginations will the people rise to change things."

  His eyes burned into mine. He leaned so close I could feel his breath warm on my cheek. His face grew ruddy with this inner flame.

  His words sounded similar to the ones I had spoken with such passion not long ago—his complaints the ones that had drawn me to Socialism. Only now, the position of society had been reversed. Much of what I proposed as necessary for the ideal world might seem to be attained, albeit not in the manner I'd envisioned. And yet the problems were still much the same.

  I felt a painful pressure spreading out from the hard knot at the pit of my stomach, a sickness greater than the Time Machine had ever inspired.

  "Of course,” he said, “the Party itself has overlooked one crucial fact in my creation. I'm irrelevant now. I have no reason to exist. The people smile and love me, they gush over my designs and weep for my verses, they hound me for my autograph, that useless scrawl. But they don't have it in them any longer to care what the Party does. They lead good lives, quiet lives. They believe themselves to be happy. They have no reason to rebel. They listen to me as the quaint and beloved hero of a long-dead age."

  The leaves shifted, and darkness fell down into his eyes. I stood to go, pushing myself up on legs that did not want to move. He steadied me, but I could not meet his gaze.

  "You're going back, aren't you? You're abandoning me."

  I owed myself an honest answer. “I have to fix this."

  "Take me with you. I could help. We can try again, a different way—reformers in the Age of Change."

  His hand was gentle on my arm. I could feel the strength in that hand, and the weakness in the biceps he held. It was tempting, his offer. A second chance. Or perhaps I should say a third.

  "You wouldn't want to do that,” I said presently. “You'd be helping to put the Party in the position it enjoys today."

  "Damned politics,” he growled.

  * * * *

  There was but one thing for me to do then, Georgie.

  After seeing the future, I knew I could not trust my own failing vision to decide what is best for humankind. I had to step back in time. I had to visit myself in 1894.

  I argued with myself bitterly over this. But the quest had never been about my own happiness. I would have to hold staunch and true to the ideals that brought me here in the first place—to the honor that had carried me through the most difficult passages of my life.

  I landed a few days before the Time Machine would have been assembled in the attics. I had chosen a moment when I knew I'd be alone in my study, with Janey and my daughters out visiting. Bertie had warned me abo
ut setting foot in a year when I already existed; actually meeting myself face to face would be far worse. That close, I might only have a moment.

  I rushed down the stairs. Each step drove a spike of pain through my leg. I forced myself down the hall. The closer I got to the study, the worse it was: I could feel his presence, sharp as the gout.

  And then I saw him—that high forehead, the springy mass of hair and beard, the broad nose. Myself at 60. He stood frozen in front of the wide deal table as I clutched the doorframe.

  "You!” we cried. Our voices blended, a low, rich harmony. We each flung out an arm, pointing. All the hair on my body stood on end.

  "We haven't time,” I gasped. “Bertie's going to offer you something that seems too good to be true. Don't trust it!"

  But my disjointed words could tell him nothing, and already I had a strange, giddy feeling. I could feel myself slipping away.

  We walked closer, paces matched. We clasped each other's hands. All at once, it rushed toward us: a barrage of knowledge and sight, feelings and thoughts and time ... a whirlwind of madness and life. I forced myself to stand though the waves battered my heart. My vision swam. I was dying—but his breath was as choked as mine.

  Sick with the doubling, dying and living—two of me for every breath. We embraced. Time buffeted me till I bent double with the pain. Alone.

  Only myself. I huddled on hands and knees, trying to breathe, to slow my heart. Only me. But I held all the knowledge I'd ever had—past, present, future.

  When Bertie came, I warned him, with all that I knew. By his sad look, I saw I spoke too late. Before he had ever given me his machine, he had tried and failed.

  It was my vision of the new 2120, blooming beside my other memories, that so dispirited me. While I will never abandon hope for the Cause—for all men should treat each other as kin—I can no longer fight in this life with any passion for something that I know cannot come to pass.

  I have decided to leave well enough alone.

  I did not think my heart could break any harder than it already has. But then, I did not think I would ever give you up, if once we found a way to be together. Ned, dear Ned, died in the summer of 1898. And you and I—

  We were inseparable, Georgie. Once loyalties and honor allowed. We knew a sweet period of perfect harmony that only I can remember now. I am so sorry that I never told you, dearest.

  My love that shall never be.

  * * * *

  It had all happened so fast. Georgie stood stunned by the graveside, watching while they rained dirt on Ned's coffin. She had loved him truly, loved him enough that she could forgive him endlessly, despite her common sense. Despite Marie Zambaco, and all the young women who followed. There was a childlike simplicity about Ned, that he could somehow accommodate so much love and so much pain, without any hypocrisy.

  But Topsy's death—that was a blow Ned could not endure. It had been scarcely a year and a half since they had laid their dear friend in the ground. And now, standing over Ned's grave, she could not help seeing that other funeral as well, like a stained glass window shining through its reflection in plain glass. A simple cart had carried Topsy's body to St. George's Church near the Manor, festooned with vines and willow boughs and carpeted with moss. The storms had blown off and on all day, and the mourners walked through meadows that still shone silver with rain. Family and friends, workers from Merton Abbey and Oxford Street, fellow Socialists, and the Kelmscott villagers in their work clothes had all come to see him laid to rest.

  The morning that Topsy had showed her the letter, she'd wanted so badly to believe it. She'd felt his eyes upon her as she read. She could not stop the tears that slipped down her face as she reached the end; seeing hers, his own flowed freely.

  And so they had said their goodbyes; and at the end, it was as chaste and true a love as it had always been. She thought about the last words of the letter, scrawled hastily in postscript—"There will be something else to prove all this to you, that I cannot hang in a bed curtain. Ask Ned."

  But by the time Ned had arrived that afternoon, Topsy's eyes had already begun to cloud, and he raved about things neither of them could understand. Georgie sat by his side, shocked numb by the revelations and her grief.

  The next day, Topsy had slipped away from them, gentle as a lamb. She had sat beside him and held his hand till the last, but Jane was there, and May, along with many of his closest friends, and there was nothing more that Georgie and Topsy could say.

  She didn't know what to think, what to believe. She locked herself in her room. Wretched. She lay on the floor and wept, for her best friend, for all the dreams gone by. She could not tell which hurt worse: that he'd given up this chance, or that he might have imagined it all.

  She had reined in her passion at last, and done the only thing she knew—lived the expected, honorable life. Ned had looked at her blankly when she asked if Topsy had given him anything she ought to see. So there had not been any proof.

  But now poor Ned had died when Topsy said he would. So soon. The finality of the loss of both of them cut her to the bone. She remembered the day, so long ago, when the Morris and Burne-Jones families had gone together to the beach, and buried Topsy to the neck in the shingle. It seemed they'd laughed the whole day long.

  But as she went through the clutter in Ned's workshop, she found a surprising thing. Topsy had been true to his word. And it seemed she would have to forgive Ned one last time.

  In a plain brown wrapper, she found an unknown book from the Kelmscott Press. She lifted the cover and turned the pages reverently. Her fingers rested lightly on the impressions of the type. The drawings were in her husband's style. She recognized some of them—he'd been working on them before Topsy died. The Press had hoped to finish the book afterwards, but Ned had given up, it pained him so. But here it was, and the engravings of Ned's drawings bore the stamp of Topsy's hand.

  The story itself was one Topsy had shown them on several occasions, in different forms. But she had never seen it finished with such confidence. The date on the colophon at the end was 1900—two years from now.

  She had to set the book down several times for sheer emotion. Pacing in the gardens, she felt as though Topsy held her hand.

  Ned had kept this from her because he recognized the same thing she did: these characters were she and Topsy, the story of a love fulfilled. As she lingered on the final page, she felt a fierceness rise in her heart, a fire born of anger and love.

  The book scarcely left her hand as she put on her coat and gathered Topsy's letter.

  When she knocked, H. G. Wells himself ushered her inside.

  Georgie looked nervously about the chaos of the rooms, seeking any odd shape that might conceal the Time Machine.

  "What is this about, Lady Burne-Jones?"

  "Please, call me Georgie. We were both his friends."

  His face changed. He stood straighter, more alert.

  "I have to know the truth,” she said. “What does the future look like now?"

  He offered her a chair. “You're talking about the Time Machine?"

  She nodded, scared suddenly of saying anything more. He might refuse to tell her. She reached into her bag and placed Topsy's last letter reverently into his hands.

  Wells read silently, carefully, turning back a page or two and reading them again. When he was done, he looked up at her. She felt a jolt. Aside from Topsy's that final day, she had never seen eyes so sad.

  "It's bad, Georgie,” he said. “Far worse than what I put into the book. The entire world, convulsed in war, grinding up so many people. The weapons burn away lungs, wipe out whole cities, poison the people and the countryside for miles. Genocide. Mass torture and incarceration. Starvation around the globe. They've cured diseases only to create new ones to use against each other. After so many depredations, Earth will scarcely support the smallest enclave of human life. I've thought about destroying the Time Machine, it haunts me so."

  He folded the letter tenderly and
handed it back. “If Topsy's future is half as good as he describes—"

  He hesitated, letting the words hang between them.

  Georgie stood up. “Yes,” she said breathlessly.

  "Go back and convince him. You're the only one who can."

  "And the Time Machine?” Georgie hesitated. She was not sure how to ask this sacrifice of him, the inventor. She only knew that there must be some way to safeguard the future, once all was done.

  He waved his hand. “Take it. I'm through with time machines. This one has already turned me into a bitter old man, and I'm only 32."

  "And you—you won't miss it?"

  "I can discern how to move through time—a straightforward scientific problem, with a concrete mathematical answer. But I can't discover the right combination to save the world. Topsy was a far better dreamer than I in that regard. All I could see were nightmares."

  That very afternoon, she went to visit Janey at Kelmscott Manor. The two women, while not close, had seen so much of one another through the years that they found comfort in each other's company. With Ned's funeral just past, Janey agreed to let her stay for several days.

  When Bertie showed up that night at Kelmscott Manor, Janey cast a veiled glance at Georgie before drifting off to bed, the folds of her heavy damask robe whispering along the ground. Once she'd gone, Georgie helped Bertie carry the Time Machine up to the attics, piece by delicate piece.

  Once he positioned the last bar and screwed in the final rod, Bertie stood back, admiring his craftsmanship one last time. When he spoke to her, he kept his eyes on the machine, as though afraid it would slip away before he noticed, out of his life and into another story altogether.

  Then he gave her a crimped smile, whose pain she didn't understand until he said, “Say goodbye to him for me, would you? Send him my love."

  At last she stood alone in the attics, staring at the machine that glinted by the light of the lantern. So full of promises.

  Gingerly, she climbed into the saddle. She knew exactly where to go. A place where Topsy still remembered everything he'd told her. A time when she herself had been far from Kelmscott—far enough away that she could stay long enough to convince him. She would bear the pain. If she made haste, she could spirit him away to a future where the cures had become far simpler than the diseases.