Elsewhere and elsewhen Tyr drifted in a
rainbow ocean,
bumped occasionally by strange somethings in the vortex. He felt sadness... He felt loss... Then he felt nothing at all for a long time.
He came back to himself hearing the honk and roar of traffic... Motor vehicles... He opened his eyes and immediately closed them again.
He was in the Alleyway of Forever. Again.
Dreading what he would see, he opened his eyes again.
he waited for the same newspaper to drift past bearing this universe's version of the day's stories.
The newspaper didn't drift past.
He looked around at the alleyway.
His investigation was interrupted as a door crashed open halfway down the narrow street.
"Hey rube! This ain't no flophouse! What's d'matter wit'
youse? Youse'll get run over by one of dem trucks if you don't skedaddle!"
What the Hel?
A science fiction story in the styles and
idiom of the golden age pulps continuing
the adventures of TYR BLACKHAND.
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by Jonathan Nolan
(c) Pisces All Media 2006 all rights reserved
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THE EARTH-Q NOVELS:
QUEEN OF TEARS
TYR
SISTER TO THE WASTELAND
AMERICAN ZOMBIE
EARTH-Q
GOMAGAUR
THE TYR DISCONTINUITY:
TYR
The Further Adventures:
TYR #1: STONE COLD CERTAINTY
TYR #2: WOVEN
TYR #3: THE GLASS HEADS
TYR #4: PRINCE OF SWORDS
TYR #5: THE TIGER IN THE CAT
TYR #6: THE FINEST IN THE WORLD
TYR #7: PEACE CRIMES
TYR #8: NIGHT ON MARS
TYR#9: SCHARD BOOK I: PARROT
TYR #10: SCHARD BOOK II: SHARK
TYR #11: SCHARD BOOK III: MONKEY
TYR #12: BLACK NIGHT
TYR #13: UNOPERATIONS REPORTS
TYR #14: THE BLOOD OF KINGS
TYR #15: EMPTY
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a novel by Jonathan Nolan
Visit us online:
www.piscesallmedia.com/forum
A Pisces All Media Book
Copyright (c) 2006 Pisces All Media partnership First published in USA in 2006 by Pisces All Media, print publishing division.
All rights reserved.
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Cover art on this book (c) Jonathan Nolan.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form or binding other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Excerpts from online public domain documents and sources are used without permission pursuant to international copyright law as applicable to abandoned, public domain or accessible material placed in the public domain voluntarily or by operation of law.
All characters in this work of fiction are fictitious and no resemblance to other living dead or fictitious people or characters is intended save and except where such resemblance is for the purpose of parody, fair comment or review. No pulp characters were harmed in the making of this book.
Reproduced, printed and bound in Australia
by Lasercolour, Fyshwick ACT Australia
Reproduced, printed and bound in
USA by Zodiac Comics publishing
PISCES ALL MEDIA PUBLISHING
A division of Pisces All Media partnership
PO Box 5200
Kingston ACT 2604
Australia
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This book is dedicated to the Pulps and their writers.
Prophets are never recognized in their own countries.
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This is a mosaic novel set in the same universe as the novel Queen of Tears. The story in this novel takes place in the same world as the events of Queen of Tears, a parallel of our own earth called "Earth-Q".
You do not have to have read Queen of Tears or the original TYR novel to enjoy this book. You will enjoy this book MORE if you have read the other works because all of the Earth-Q novels
interconnect to add to the fictional reality of their shared world. However, TYR and his adventures are usually very isolated from the rest of the continuity and can certainly be enjoyed entirely on their own.
PROLOGUE: FREIGHT TRAIN TIME
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CHAPTER
ONE
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CHAPTER TWO
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PART ONE: THE UNIVERSE NEXT DOOR
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A NARRATIVE OF ROBERT H.
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CHAPTER
THREE
40
A NARRATIVE OF ROBERT H.
43
CHAPTER
FOUR
54
CHAPTER
FIVE
66
A NARRATIVE OF ROBERT H.
70
CHAPTER
SIX 86
CHAPTER
SEVEN
92
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PART TWO: BYE BYE BLACK BIRD
103
CHAPTER
EIGHT
105
CHAPTER
NINE
112
A NARRATIVE OF ROBERT H.
119
CHAPTER
TEN
126
CHAPTER
ELEVEN
131
CHAPTER
TWELVE
136
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
150
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
157
PART THREE: ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS 163
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
165
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
173
FROM THE PALADIN'S WAR JOURNAL
184
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
192
FROM THE PALADIN'S WAR JOURNAL
204
CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
206
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
219
EPILOGUE (OR WHAT WE DID
IN THE WAR, PART SIX)
227
A NARRATIVE OF ROBERT H.
229
CHAPTER
TWENTY 233
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NO TIME, NO PLACE
Disorientation: Infinite.
The spaceship fell towards the lunar surface, gracefully, but not in slow motion as some storytellers would have had you believe.
Tyr regained consciousness in an airless hull, frost on his flesh and his outer layers of skin crinkling and cracking noiselessly in the vacuum. No one else on board was still alive and he looked helplessly at their frozen bodies, one in particular that he could not bear to look at again...
As the spaceship neared the surface, sublunar energies still held inside the MASCON erupted. Soundless colored lightning leaped from lunar surface to spaceship and back, pink-red as it travelled upwards, blue-green as it went from spacecraft back to
MASCON. Had there been any remaining power on
board, that final energy explosion would have
eliminated it, as it was meant to.
Tyr had no choice but to use that hateful artefact one more time... As tempting as it was to simply crash into the Moon on board this hurtling tomb-ship. He couldn't be sure, be absolutely certain, the resulting nuclear explosion would destroy him and the Hand of Fate.
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And the Hand of Fate had to be destroyed.
With this thought in mind he used his remaining willpower on the Hand, all four of the Suit Jewels duller than he had ever yet seen them.
The next blast of lightning from the MASCON came, and this time smaller traceries of energy erupted from each of the Suit Jewels, changing their colors out of their accustomed hues. Tyr experienced a moment of doubt... Then he came to a final decision. There was nothing left for him in this universe. It was time to see what the one next door was like.
He willed the Zoomways to open and threw himself in without even setting a destination.
The spaceship hit the lunar surface and for an instant there was only dust rising... Then the equivalent of a fifty megaton nuclear weapon exploded in Tycho Crater and the whole area was bathed in intolerably bright light. The whole hollow Moon reverberated like a bell.
Elsewhere and elsewhen Tyr drifted in a rainbow ocean, bumped occasionally by strange somethings in the vortex. He felt sadness... He felt loss... Then he felt nothing at all for a long time.
He came back to himself hearing the honk and roar of traffic... Motor vehicles... He opened his eyes and immediately closed them again.
He was in the Alleyway of Forever. Again.
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Dreading what he would see, he opened his eyes again.
He waited for the same newspaper to drift past bearing this universe's version of the day's stories.
The newspaper didn't drift past.
He looked around at the alleyway.
His investigation was interrupted as a door crashed open halfway down the narrow street.
"Hey rube! This ain't no flophouse! What's d'matter wit'
youse? Youse'll get run over by one of dem trucks if you don't skedaddle!"
What the Hel?
Tyr stood shakily and turned around in time to see a large and very old-fashioned black-painted flat bed truck chugging towards him. Taking in the truck, the fashion sense of the driver and what the short order cook who came out of the alley doorway had been wearing, Tyr realized that he was decades back in time.
He shook his head. This was too much. He wanted relief, not total shocking change. He raised his left hand, intending to immediately focus on the Suit Jewels and open up a Zoomway out of there.
He looked at the palm of his left hand and froze.
All four of the Suit Jewels were gone.
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801,996 MINUS 800,067
The Traveller glided through the majestic brindled immensity of the primal Time Continuum, and saw none of it. It was as though his Time Machine were a fragile flivver, an overwrought construct of wood and metal surging on the choppy waters of the Thames, the river's murky and unguessable surface made rainbow by infinite possibility.
He was sightless to it all.
Tears still welled in his eyes. His nostrils still smelled the charnel terminus of his dreams. The battered Time Machine rocked and swayed more than ever before.
Senseless to the difference in his regression to the projected zero hour as compared to his previous excursions, as yet he did not even question or observe what he saw and felt. He was still reliving the sights of Futurity, of that final sunset world of Humanity, the dipolar extreme of human evolution manifest in the under-metropolitan tunnels of the Moorlocks and the sylvan simplicity of the bucholic Eloi.
He had broken his word to those other Temporal Masters he had encountered, and returned to the Ultima Thule of human time. He had presumed much. And he had paid for his presumption.
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Merely by breaking his word, by failing to uphold the gentlemen’s agreements that were the Laws of Time, he had exiled himself forever from that pantheon of Time Travellers to which he once belonged.
He was now perforce to wander alone, a wolfshead of the river of time, trapped in decreasing cycles until he could find a way to extend his range and recapture the Infinity that he claimed as his discovery.
Then had come the final thunderclap of irony.
When he had arrived at the Endpoint of Man, and once again basked in that golden light, beneath the ancient trees that were once simple gardens, no sooner had the rain-on-tomato-vines smell of time travel faded from his nostrils than it was replaced by a sweet stink as of corruption.
With a strangled cry he had stumbled forth from his Time Machine, still smoking and cooling from this, the longest journey he could now undertake. He shambled through the glades of the terminal world, and
everywhere he saw the sweet monuments of the Eloi, the impassive and faceless marble sphinxes, the part-buried doors of the Moorlocks… but no Eloi. In vain he sought for the future woman he now considered his wife.
Unless one amongst the small and gracile skulls he trod upon were hers.
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Somehow, in some way, the river of time had trapped him in the conundrum of a treacherous fork. He was in the same world as he had previously made arrival in, and he could even find the same scorch marks
indicating his previous exploits. And yet everything spoke of subtle differences. The dreaming valleys of Kroiden were despoiled, the Moorlocks no doubt now falling upon each other in cannibalistic delight or else creating some engineered monstrosity such as their long-theorised Food Vats. For their chosen cattle, the Eloi, were no more.
The Time Traveller fingered his armless fob watch. He flicked through the parchment of his diary, seeking clues in his old notes.
There was no sense to the differences. None at all. It was quite plainly not the way things were meant to be.
History, so clear in its effect and inevitable in its certainty had become... Uncertain. As though an actual physical law of the improbable had deranged what had seemed ordered, inevitable...
No.
Finally he sat amidst the splendid armatures of his machine, before the great wheel-like Contrariety Interfacer. And he saw the course he must take.
Just as a terrestrial navigator, when lost in a myriad of tributaries of a river he knows to be straight and mighty elsewhere, must go back along his tracks, so too must the Time Traveller now retrace. All the while evading 20
the Time Masters he once called his only true equals and friends. It was no small or easy task he selected for himself, but for love of the lost and lovely Eloi he would dare this – this and much more besides.
He prepared himself and made the necessary
adjustments to his Time Machine. As he did so, his eyes chanced to stray to a nearby glade in which he had not yet explored. What he saw there gave him sufficient pause to dismount and brace that copse. He entered the dense wall of strange trees with fear, and mounting disquiet of a more specific nature. What he confirmed with his closer inspection caused him to shake with fear and rage – and comprehension.
He saw a crude set of metal tablets, each supported on an easel of bone and metal. Grotesque sigils and signs were everywhere upon the surface, and the easels with their tablets ringed in an area of some dozens of feet.
Within this charmed ring was a flat and singed pad of finely chiselled granite, now glassy as if from some great heat. This was suggestive. As he further inspected the area he saw a final monument, shrouded in the foliage. Lifting aside the new branches that had overgrown it, he immediately recoiled, snapping the branches back over its leering frieze, a strangled cry forcing itself from him.
The monument aped those of the bygone age that predated it in the Kroiden region by a good few millennia. The new tableau was crude, but its meaning clear. It showed a goggled Moorlock, three more like 21
him bearing weapons like fire axes riding pillion to his rear, on what could only be a crude and lumpen parody of his own Time Machine.
He had underestimated the Moorlocks, and badly. He had marked them as proletarian engineers, but they were more. They had the despoliative inventive streak that he had seen level the twentieth through the thirtieth centuries on his forward journeys. Throwbacks, they had inherited the Piltdown monsterism of unsupervised random technology. And they had used it to revenge themselves on their nemesis.
Him.
His own travels, coupled with whatever force had introduced the uncertainty to the march of history, had begotten this apocalypse.
He was the personification of devastation for his Eloi.
The Traveller sat there in the shade of the Moorlock’s experimentation grove for a long time. He realised at last, when he came back to himself somewhat, that the sleeping sun’s golden orb was redly retreating, leaving the senile world to night and the Moorlocks. It was time
– time, he giggled– for him to make his departure.
Time for him to right this wrong.
The Time Traveller began to come to his senses. He realised that his machine, by simply following his purported backward course adjusted to avoid any other 22
wanderers in the river of Time, had moved in space some thousands of miles. Consulting his Para-Encyclopaedical Reference Atlas, he ascertained that it was to the city of New Amsterdam / New York. When he was due to arrive it would indeed be New York, on the cusp between the paroxysms of world wars. He wondered what the Moorlocks hoped to achieve, if this was also their course.
Perhaps, by some manipulation or variation of matters in their past they had slightly tipped the scales in their present. In such a mien would it be possible for them to gain an advantage of him.
Perhaps he had trodden, all unconscious, on the skull of some luckless duplicate of himself. Giggling again, he mused that... perhaps... this was his punishment inflicted by his fellow time travellers – to forever spend his relative span of life commuting from a variable apocalypse to its variable start via the Fourth Dimension, buzzing through the architecture of potentiality like a fly at a windowpane at St. Bart’s. He shook his head, both to negate the image and to vow not to allow such a travesty.
He was a pioneer, a progressive, and above all a scientist. He would choose his fate and stick to it, once it was superior to the present purgatory.
His Time Machine passed through the long golden-yellow Interregnum Age where, whether through
human agency or otherwise, night had been abolished.
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As further turbulence battered his conveyance this time he noticed the phenomenon and was instantly about his calculations, lowering the lever to engage the gears of his Analytical Engine. With the full-mechanised thinking power of the apogeic nineteenth century at his disposal he was able to divine and narrow his temporal trajectory. So as to avoid discovery by natives, he also adjusted depth and profile. He would appear in the new workings of the gothamite equivalent to the premier London Underground. Through the mandates of its construction the New York version of the underground proletarian transportative system was, at all but three points, within a short depression of the surface and readily accessible from the street. He would hie to one of the furthest and deepest of its sections, not yet even complete in this time. In this way he would encounter the era before it, in the form of its constabulary or rowdies, encountered him.
It was a fine plan, and that of a man of usual good sense. The Time Traveller simply had no reliable way to know that he had cast himself Daniel-like into a den of monsters.
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After adventures I hesitate even to reconsider, let alone record, I found myself on Earth, far from my beloved Dreamland Mars, in that most benighted of human settlements – New York. The year was 192-, and the situation politically and militarily to my unaccustomed eyes not too different from when I had last physically been on my mother world’s surface – although on that last occasion I had been lying on the dusty floor of a cavern with murderous bootleggers approaching. There had been the cataclysmic war, long anticipated in the fiction of men such as Robida and Chambers; there had been the inevitable insincere reconciliation. The planet as a whole rumbled on, with human knowledge
creeping forward into advanced territory long since quit by the age-old civilisation of Dreamland Mars. It was hard to take seriously the pronouncements of the armchair scientists of Earth, armed as I was with what amounted to foreknowledge. I had seen something of that cosmos that awaited man beyond the glistening death of the radiation fields of space; the twinkling lights of the close planets were no mystery to me, though no less inspiring for their familiarity.
I continued drinking the watery local beer, openly served here in brazen defiance of the asinine laws passed against the imbibing of alcohol that had come into force in America during my sojourn – elsewhere.
Though I like to think of myself, dear reader, as a man of normal courage, I freely admit to fearing no man, nor 27
do the many deaths I have faced unduly deter me from my chosen course. However, as I sat there, drinking that thin liquid and breathing the stink of the bar into my lungs, I was clutched by such terror that I could barely keep my hands steady and my nerves cool. From my vantage point on a stool I could not see the sky outside, nor would the smoke and clouds of the city allow me a vista such as I craved: that of the red light of Dreamland Mars, now so distant, and with it the face of my beloved princess, my wife, and the mother of our children, now fatherless. I was seized by an
unreasoning panic as of an animal in a net, a depthless plummet into such a fug that for a few heartbeats I could see no future, and contemplated extinction itself.
Instead of any rash action, I heaved a great sigh; I sat and sipped my tepid beer.
Suddenly I became aware of unwanted attention within the bar. My still form was the subject of the gaze of a pair of shabby local hoods, no doubt gangsters in the employ of what passed for a master of assassins or thugs in this borough. I realised then that I was still thinking like a ruler on Dreamland Mars; I would rather be that than be relegated to my current role – that of the abject Earthman. To the best of my knowledge, there were neither “masters” of assassins in earthly New York nor teams of swordsmen hunting them. The “gat”
was king here. Bullet spitting weapons talked the loudest on these filthy streets. Still, I reasoned, the situation was not so different from that to which I was now better accustomed.
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Just as I had once crushed the forces of the Assassins’
Guild of Dreaming Mars, so now would I undoubtedly be drawn into conflict with the local hoodlums. For I am so constituted that I find injustice of any sort intolerable, and my sword will not long stay sleeping in its scabbard when I feel called upon to right some wrong. Soon after such an urge I will give voice to that mighty holler of my long-departed Confederate cavalry career and darken the steel of my old cutlass with the offal of some evil-doer.
Often had my beautiful princess shaken her shapely head, her gorgeous brow gently creased beneath its fine jewelled tiara like that of Athene herself, bedecked as she was with the wonders and treasures of the ghostly desert planet. Often also had she begged me not to stray far from her. Never, had she asked me not to act with deed or word against injustice, as her fierce people expected no less from themselves, or from me, their adopted king. But it is only natural for the woman of your heart not to wish to see you depart, possibly forever, on some new and potentially fatal venture.
Such is the paradox of the life of a fighting man (or woman) on Dreamland Mars.