Eric Rosenfield
Saul gets a message from his future self in the past again.
On a whim, he buys a yellowed, coffee-stained travel guide to an Eastern European nation that no longer exists, at a used bookstore and finds his own scratchy, semi-faded fountain penmanship on the inside back cover.
He’s always doing this, leaving messages to himself in the random places where he remembers discovering them. It’s in some kind of cypher and he won’t tell me what it says, but I think he’s just being self-important. It probably says to remember to do the laundry or something. He would do that, too, break the barrier of the space-time continuum just to make sure he’s got the right novelty t-shirt on in the morning. Like he wants people to think he’s on some secret mission to protect the timeline, but it’s obvious he really came through time to be a tourist and lay girls from the past. Sometimes we go to clubs and I watch him on the make. He says in the future people have no body fat and no hair and everyone is naked all the time because the temperature is always perfect. He underwent body modification to fit in here. He likes girls of our time better; girls with love handles and tan lines and razor burn and fashion sense. He doesn’t stay with anyone very long, doesn’t want to get attached. I think he can only really relax around me because I spurned him when we first met, because he doesn’t have to bring off anything.
He spends a lot of time at home alone. Often he practices some funny kind of Tai Chi that involves full-body movement and sudden, abrupt changes of direction.
Sometimes I fly off to work and he’s sitting in the easy chair in the living room, just staring out the window, and when I get home he’s still there, like he hasn’t moved an inch. Sometimes after I peel off the spandex and get into civvies, I sit there next to him, saying nothing.
Sometimes we have tea.
* * *
I meet Janet during a minor apocalypse. Dalcor the Unnamable raises the great demon-god Funthrchrup from his long slumber, who proceeds to devastate Cleveland with a host of winged man-lizards. Battling atop the BP tower, one of them kicks me in the sternum and sends me careening into the air. A beautiful heroine with raven black hair and a costume festooned with cartoonish frowny-faces catches me easily in mid-arc and presses me to her, circling the building.
“Throw me,” I say, and with a laugh she chucks me straight at the creature. It reaches out with its long talons, but they scrabble harmlessly against my rock-hard skin and then my fists rip through its middle. The rooftop cracks beneath me as I hit and roll, coming up into a stance five meters away. I adjust my tiara like I haven’t a care in the world, despite the blood and gore now dripping off my body. My old mentor, Captain Zeus, would have been proud.
The woman lands next to me. “Nicely done.”
There’s a roar like a dozen jet engines and we look to the sky. On the horizon and gaining fast, nine figures in familiar primary colors race in from the east.
“MegaForce,” I say breathlessly.
“Well whattaya know,” she says. “I guess someone cares about Cleveland after all.”
When man-lizard bodies are strewn over parking lots and public spaces and rooftops, their guts sprayed across walls and over shattered automobiles; when Funthrchrup has retreated, sealing a massive lava tube behind him in the remains of West Side Market; when Dalcor the Unnamable has been imprisoned in his own Sphere of Terror which is then loaded into a paddy wagon with one hand by Doc Hercules; that’s when I realize I haven’t asked her name.
“I’m Pallas,” I say as we gaze upon the wreckage from a nearby rooftop.
“I know,” she says, looking up at me with her big brown eyes. “I read that article on you in Heroic Times.”
“Oh, that.” I blush. I’m a little annoyed with the tone of the piece. Called “A Gay Superheroine Comes of Age,” it made me out as this poster child for homosexual crime fighters instead of just a crime fighter who happens to be homosexual. I’m more than a sexual orientation in spandex.
“I thought it was great.” She puts out her hand. “I’m Lady Killjoy. Why does everyone make that face? It’s a perfectly good name. Anyway, you can call me Janet.”
“Nice to meet you, Janet.”
“So, Pallas, I’ve worked up a hunger. You wanna see if my favorite Chinese place in Shaker Square is still open?”
“It probably is,” I shrug. “I’ve seen restaurants stay open through worse apocalypses. I guess you can get used to anything.” And then I look down at myself. “Actually, can I take a rain check? I’m kind of a mess.”
Janet puts a hand to her mouth, laughing, “You know, in all the fuss I completely forgot that you’re covered in demon blood.” She shakes her head. “You ever think about how weird this job is?”
“I try not to.”
* * *
After finding the message in the used book, Saul starts building a machine in the basement. He won’t tell me what it does.
He gets deliveries in small crates. Who knows what’s in there? He’s absurdly wealthy from past investments, so it could be anything. He keeps the basement door locked. I hear clangs and bangs, humming and buzzing and whirring. Sometimes he mumbles about having to fabricate whole industries by himself. He’s stopped going out. I can tell he isn’t showering or changing his clothes because he has the same novelty t-shirt on day after day. It reads I traveled through time and space and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.
He finds this shirt hilarious. I suspect in the future he’s from something’s gone very wrong with people’s senses of humor.
The only other thing he seems to be doing is practicing his Tai Chi for several hours each day, jaw fixed, lips pressed, almost going white.
* * *
Janet and I finally go out on a date. We have barbecue in Brooklyn, digging into enormous tin plates of ribs and sausage atop picnic tables while a Dixie band jams in the corner. We’re laughing, sexily sucking barbecue sauce off our fingers when my wristwatch alarm and her belt transceiver go off at the same time. We look at each other, check our devices, throw down some money and bolt outside. We find an alley and I start to change, but she shakes her head, puts her arm around my waist and takes me into the sky.
We change huddled in a crevice folded away in the Manhattan Municipal Building’s ornate top, trying to pretend we’re not enjoying the view and the closeness of each other’s bodies.
She carries me through the clouds to a field in Pennsylvania, where a pitched battle rages. Ferion catches us up on what’s going on as we battle robot minions with blazing red, perfectly circular eyes. Dr. Annihilation has discovered ancient temples of the great Neanderthal civilization secreted away around the world, each with a hidden object of power. It’s said that if all the objects are united by one person, they will grant god-like abilities, puissance to reshape the universe.
So nothing too unusual.
Dr. Annihilation used an antigravity bore to pull the Neanderthal temple from where it was buried, miles below ground. It rises over us in rippling waves of stone, punctuated by half-submerged faces in frozen, eternal screams. I shiver; an unnamable terror numbs my gut.
“I didn’t know Neanderthals had temples in America,” says Janet.
“The most advanced civilization in the history of the world,” says Ferion. “Wiped out by an invasion from another dimension. Tragic, really.” Ferion is an extraterrestrial, the last survivor of a doomed race. His bald head ends in a long beak like a pick-axe and his eyes are on either side like a bird, so he has to face sideways to see you. It’s a little unnerving.
Raising the temple tore through tectonic plates and Earthquakes rumble around us. As we fight, we get reports over our com lines of heroes from all over the country helping quake victims in Philadelphia, Scranton, Atlantic City. In the end, thanks mostly to a heroic effort by MegaForce, we manage to return the temple below ground, but Dr. Annihilation escapes with the Sword of Dread Whispers, the first object of power.
Both sweaty and exhausted, Janet flies me home. A little nervously, I ask her if she’d like to come in for tea. We make love for the first time, and then shower and make love again, falling asleep in each others arms.
* * *
The next morning, we find Saul eating oatmeal in the kitchen.
“Pallas.” He nods at me, and then says, “Janet.”
“Have we met?” asks Janet.
“Yes, but it hasn’t happened for you yet.”
She raises an eyebrow at me. “Time traveler.” I shrug. “You get used to it.”
Saul’s in good spirits, bubbling with smiles and humming softly to himself. He’s wearing a shirt that reads Free Hugs. I haven’t seen him like this since before he got the message from his future self. I ask him what’s going on.
“I finished my project.” He grins, his spoon clattering in his almost empty bowl. “In the basement. Want to see?”
We follow him downstairs. “Did I ever tell you about my first time machine?” he says as we go. “No? Well, in the future, there’s laws against making them, of course, risk of damaging the time line, creating splinter realities, yadda yadda yadda. So I had to build mine on the sly, from whatever parts I could scrounge together. The machine I created was perfect except that the chronal energy had to be contained within it. That meant it could act as a gate to any time period, but there would be no way back. A one-way trip.”
He flips on the light at the bottom of the stairs and reveals a dizzying electronic mass, a hulking beast of machinery asleep on its side. “It was fine with me, though, I was so desperate to get out of that boring, decadent time period. I never wanted to come back. So I went all the way back to the 23rd century. It’s quite an era, maybe the most exciting in human history. Though when I got there, standing naked and steaming in a parking lot the size of a small town in your time, I found myself looking at a note placed in the window of the car right in front of me.”
He flips a switch and a hundred little lights come on like a starscape. The room fills with hisses and whirring.
“It told me that in the car’s trunk I could find clothes, a money card and identification documents and that I had a bank account and a nice house in the suburbs of Crystal City. In the house I found blueprints and instructions for how to construct a new time machine out of contemporary technology. It was my first message from a future me in the past.”
He shrugs and approaches the machine, “Since then I’ve jaunted around the time line, living in any era that catches my interest. I’ve lived in ancient Persia, Mayan cities, in the Tang Dynasty, Atlantis, the Holy Roman Empire and the cloud cities of Midas 5.” He grins at us, “And now it’s time for me to move on again. But I guarantee I will see you both in the future. And the past.”
He hugs us each of us, and I chide him about not giving me time to find a new roommate. He assures me there’s several months rent stashed under his mattress. Then, with a wave of his hand, he slips into a sliver of light in the machine so narrow I hadn’t even noticed it, and then he’s gone. After a minute the machine shuts itself down, goes dormant.
“Well, crap,” I say, gesturing around me. “What I am supposed to do with all this now?”
Janet raises a mischievous eyebrow. “Ever wanted to visit the future?”
“Don’t even think about it,” I say.
“C’mon,” she says, “we’re superheroes. What’s the point of us if we don’t do the impossible?”
The controls are easy enough to figure out, so easy that we suspect Saul knew what we were going to do and that gives us a certain confidence. We can set the destination to whenever we want.
Holding hands, we leap together into the 23rd century.
* * *
When we return, Saul is waiting for us.
“Have a good time?” he asks. It’s subtle, the kind of thing you’d only notice if you’d known him a while, but I pick up an odd sadness in his eyes as he looks us over.
“That was amazing,” says Janet. And it was, two weeks of surfing on nanoparticles, flying jetpacks in low Earth orbit, holographic interactive narratives and safaris with formerly extinct animals in reconstructed biospheres. “I can’t believe they made a Jurassic Park Park.”
“Thanks for leaving instructions for where to find the time machine in our hotel room,” I say.
He shrugs, “Of course. You don’t think I’d let you go off there without a way back.” He looks the same age but there’s something different about him. Something in his demeanor, his tone of voice, even his dress sense. He seems older. Wearier.
“Couldn’t keep yourself away from our little corner of the space time continuum?” I ask.
He smiles and puts an arm over each of our shoulders. “What can I say? I missed you guys.”
* * *
Janet dies fighting Dr. Annihilation, who seizes the Gauntlet of Maniac Energy and uses it to punch a hole clean through her head. I cradle her body, blood pouring over my costume, while the villain leads the heroes away on a chase from which he will narrowly escape. It’s become clear to everyone that this is no minor apocalypse, and has been upgraded to a Class 4, and real fear is setting in among the superhero community for the first time in a very long while.
When I get home from the morgue, body bruised and coated in dried blood, Saul is waiting for me in the living room. He wears a black shirt with nothing on it. On the side table next to him is a glass of amber liquid. Whiskey, probably. With a surge of adrenaline I rush over and haul him into the air.
“You knew,” I say. “You knew what was going to happen and you didn’t tell us.”
He shakes his head, eyes shining. “There was nothing you could have done. The timeline is fragile, I can only risk changing things so much. That’s why they made time travel illegal in the first place.”
“Oh, I see. You can fix your own problems, treat time and space like your personal playground, but when it comes to anyone else, when it comes to really risking anything for someone . . . well, you can just jump through time and run away from it all, can’t you? You can just go downstairs—”
And then I remember what’s downstairs. I can fix things myself. I’ll make it so the whole damn apocalypse never started. I throw him onto the couch, race down, and flip on the lights.
The room is completely empty.
I stand there, shaking until I hear him behind me. “I have to protect the timeline.”
“I want you out,” I say without turning to face him. “You move the hell out of my house.”
“I understand. It’s time,” he says cryptically. “Goodbye, Pallas. It was truly an honor being your friend.” He goes upstairs and I hear the front door open and close. Later I discover he hasn’t packed anything.
* * *
The battle against Dr. Annihilation continues, each object making him more powerful. He gets the Boots of Sonic Hysteria that let him move almost as fast as he could think, the Breeches of Chronic Fortitude that make his skin as hard as steel, the Visor of Fathomless Vision that let him see every point in the Universe simultaneously. He leaves behind him a wake of dead and maimed heroes. This is now a Class 5 Apocalypse and every hero on Earth that’s part of the Network has been put on alert.
Finally, a bit of luck. Deep in the Astral Plane, Mister Magickus corners an elemental spirit and gets it to tell him where the final object is, the Brooch of Emphatic Harmony, which only functions, it seems, to allow all the other objects to work together, making the wearer of the entire suit of armor virtually omnipotent.
MegaForce gathers all the heroes still left and willing to fight in their headquarters and explains the plan, organizes the effort to get to the final temple in the ruins of Atlantis deep beneath the Pacific Ocean, find the Brooch and destroy it. Those of us who can’t breath under water are given diving masks and shuttled down in submarines.
We have enough time to set up artillery, traps and ambushes, fortify the ruins like some high tech garrison. Then the Doctor arrives and starts cutting through our defenses as if they didn’t exist. Battle boils over the ancient sunken city with its crumbling minarets and baroquely carved, coral-covered buildings. Hebor, King of the Sea, in his element for once, has summoned armies of whales, sharks and giant squid to our aid. The water turns pink with their blood. Sirius, the Living Dynamo, hits the Doctor with a blast of energy that could level a city, cracks his Chestplate of Ferocious Magnitude and sends him into a deep crevasse.
There’s a moment when we think we might have won. That it’s finally over. Hebor is about to dive into the crevasse to be sure when everything starts to shake.
Coral topples, domes crack. The ground comes up to meet us, and we’re pinned to it. Hebor’s voice crackles over our intercoms. “I can’t believe it,” he says. “He’s raising Atlantis.”
It takes minutes that seem like hours. Shattered spires crumble and topple in the water resistance. Finally, the city breeches the surface, greeting the sun after millennia, the water spray arcing a rainbow behind its dead, broken buildings. Those who weren’t directly over the city have been left behind. Gaia recovers first and moves from person to person, touching us delicately and using her powers to break up the nitrogen bubbles in our systems, to keep us from getting the bends.
“Why?” someone croaks out. “Why would he do it? Just to surprise us?”
“The Great Temple,” says another voice. After a moment, I recognize it as Leoparda, a anthropomorphic feline heroine. “It’s opening.” We rush as fast as we can to the central courtyard around which the city is built, where its main temple rears up over us like a cornered elephant.
“It’s air sensitive,” says Memorio, a member of MegaForce with a brain twice the size of normal, who wears a special helmet to keep his neck from snapping. “That’s probably why Atlantis was sunk in the first place. To make it impossible for anyone to get the Brooch.” It makes sense. From the clues we’ve found in the other temples, a narrative emerged of the Neanderthals becoming dangerous with their Objects of Power, threatening the whole Multiverse. The pandimensional aliens were not the malicious invaders we’d all thought they were, but rather a Police Force who’d destroyed the Neanderthal race for the good of everyone.
A crack splits wide, a squat building carved with tentacles sags and tilts into the water and from the resulting fissure leaps Dr. Annihilation. We run at him but with a mighty leap he soars over us and lands at the door of the temple. Sirius stands in the doorway, having gotten there at super speed moments before. Fists are raised, the air crackles with energy. They move so fast I can’t follow, but a moment later Sirius is on the ground and the Doctor strides over him into the vaulted room. The mother of pearl that covers the inside of the dome within sends rainbow shades across his armored body. The brooch sits atop a pedestal under blue light from whatever weird, Neanderthal light source illuminates the room. He raises a hand to the Object and we catch our collective breath.
A crack of light splits open the air in the chamber and from it erupts Saul. He’s wearing a shirt that reads I’m With Stupid and an arrow points to the left, which happens to be towards the Doctor. The Doctor stops, inches from the brooch, confused. Saul hits a button on a device in his hand and seven little flying spheres launch themselves into a circle around the room. I recognize them from my time in the future: true 3D holographic cameras, capturing 360 degrees. Another sliver of light and a second Saul appears. He strides forward and Dr. Annihilation tilts his head, as if he can’t believe a kid in jeans and t-shirt is about to take him on. His shirt reads I Can Only Please One Person Each Day. Today is not Your Day.
The villain throws a punch like a speeding train but Saul has already dodged it. He throws another, and it meets empty air. Those long rehearsed moves that I’d thought were Tai Chi turned out to be a very specific fight sequence, recorded and rehearsed for years until absolutely perfect. Saul knows every move Dr. Annihilation makes before the villain does himself.
The Doctor draws his sword. Saul ducks and then leaps as the sword comes at him again. He strikes with the side of his palm directly into the crack Sirius made in his armor. The villain stumbles back, one step, two, and with a sweeping upward motion Saul plucks the Sword of Dread Whispers out of his hand. He strikes low, at the knees, and when Dr. Annihilation lowers his arms to block, Saul switches direction, comes up and plunges the point of the blade directly into the crack in the chest plate. The Doctor collapses to his knees and then, hands wide, gazing down in disbelief at the weapon protruding from his body, rolls onto his side, dead.
I feel like applauding. The heroes, shocked still during the brief fight, rush forward. Saul steps over the corpse and reaches the doorway. He looks directly at me and winks, and then fiddles with something on the wall beside the door. Just as the fastest of the heroes are about to reach him, the door slides closed.
“What the hell just happened?” someone asks.
A few moments later, the world ends.
* * *
“It’s not right,” says Nightsweeper, a founding member of MegaForce. “What gives you the right to decide? Why bring them back and not my parents? Why not thousands of other people who died before their time?”
We all stand in the central hall of the MegaForce Headquarters. In the center stands Saul. His shirt reads Vote for Pedro.
“What are you saying?” asks Ferion. “That he should put them back in the ground?”
“That’s not happening,” I say, Janet held close. I still can’t believe she’s real. She’s here. I want to cry and sing at the same time.
“It’s okay, baby,” she says to me softly.
“You don’t understand,” says Saul. “I took a big enough chance bringing back people who’d been killed by Dr. Annihilation. The timeline is fragile. I did what I could.”
He’d donned the armor. Worn the brooch. Remade reality. The world as we knew it came to an end and started again, but our friends are alive. Our friends are alive, Atlantis sits on the bottom of the sea and the armor itself is obliterated. The other version of himself recorded the whole thing and went though time to begin the long process of memorizing every move, learning how to defeat Dr. Annihilation far off in his future.
“I don’t think even you—or anyone—can fully grasp the repercussions of this, Future Man,” says Nightsweeper. Future Man. It’s the superhero name Saul almost never uses, took on years ago during his first, tentative interactions with the superhero community and always seems a little embarrassed about. “You changed reality itself.”
“I know exactly what I did,” says Saul. “Exactly. Oh. Oh, god.” And then he clutches his chest. A red stain soaks a long, ragged line down the front of his shirt.
Nightsweeper rushes forward to catch him before he fell. “Future Man!”
“It’s okay,” he says, blood trickling from the side of his mouth. “It’s the crack in the armor. Using it caused too much chronal radiation to seep into my body.” He laughs, choking, “The funny thing is it would have killed Dr. Annihilation too. But not before he wrecked untold havoc on the cosmos.”
I run up as Nightsweeper lowers him carefully to the ground. I fall to one knee and he takes my hand.
“Hi,” he says. “You were a really—” He coughs, throaty and harsh. “—great roommate.”
“No,” I say, “you can survive this. We just have to get you far enough into the future and they’ll know how to heal you.”
He shakes his head. “I’m afraid it’s all over for me. It’s okay. This is where my story ends. I’ve always known it. I’ve been running away from it for a long time. Like you said, running away from everything my whole life. You helped me see that.” He puts a hand up to my cheek and smiles. “But you’ll see me again soon. Be nice to me, okay?”
The life goes out of him.
* * *
A few days later, a younger version of Saul appears at my front door as we’re moving Janet’s things inside.
“Hello,” he says as I approach, “this is going to sound strange but I got a message from my future self living in the past that I should come here for a place to stay.”
“Of course,” I say. “Come in. Make yourself at home. We have a room that’s just become available.”