The Time Roads

It was a bright, cold November day. For once, I had an hour of leisure from my duties. A restlessness overtook me, and so, trailed by my guards, I wandered far from my usual paths, away from the public galleries and audience halls, through a series of ever-narrower corridors into an unused wing of the palace, and to a pair of high metal doors, with a heavy bar across them. My curiosity piqued, I ordered my guards to remove the bar. Leaving them behind, I entered the vast chamber that lay beyond.

Inside, it was dark and empty. A puff of stale air met my face, laden with the scent of something old and forgotten. Memory pricked at me.

We had lately added electric illumination to the palace. I pressed the switch, and light flooded the room.

It was empty—a cavern filled with dust and shadows. But my skin itched, a

nd I took another few steps forward. My first impression was not entirely correct. Off to one side, empty shelves stretched from floor to ceiling. And there, in the nearest corner, a few scraps of crumpled paper, also coated with dust, were scattered about, as though someone had tossed them aside years before. Ahead of me, however, the room stretched unimpeded by any obstacles. It was amazing, I thought, that such an enormous space could exist within Cill Cannig without me knowing it.…

It was then I saw a pale square of light, as though someone had focused a lantern onto the tiled floor. I bent down to inspect it.

The air shimmered. Startled, I plucked back my hand.

And stopped.

There, in the center of that patch of light, lay a miniature balloon and a pile of loose papers. The balloon had once been an exquisite work of art, I saw at once, constructed of gold and silver and set with tiny ruby and emerald jewels on the jet-black basket and over the perfect red sphere of the balloon itself. But the wires connecting the balloon to its basket were bent, and the carriage itself was misshapen, as though someone had set the object too close to a hot fire.

I set the balloon aside and took up the papers, which were even stranger. They looked as though they had been sewn into a book, but the edges near the binding were torn, and the rest had turned brown, obscuring the rows and rows of neat handwriting. Curious, I picked up the top page.

June 18th, 1900. Cill Cannig, Osraighe. To Áine Lasairíona Devereaux, Queen of Éire, and my patron and benefactress in these investigations into the nature of the future …

An electric shock traveled through me. I snatched up another page. Here were formulas and schematics for a strange machine, one that resembled nothing I had ever seen before.

Except I had.

I read on, with each paragraph offering another of those electric shocks. The pages were from a journal, written by a scientist detailing his research. It was all fantastic, and yet, not entirely so. As I read about balloons and time travel, about batteries and energy sources based upon work from scientists in Mexica and the Dietsch Empire, I recognized terms from my father’s discourses about philosophy, about a certain young scientist with theories about time fractures and travel between the present and the future.…

Time fractures.

I released a long-held breath.

And remembered.

Breandan. Breandan, what have you done?

Except I knew. Or thought I knew.

My hands shook as I set aside the paper. I glanced upward to the darkened ceiling, half expecting a rain of papers to descend upon me, describing an unknown past and future. Memory pricked at my brain, reminding me of days and months I had forgotten.

(Forgot. Or never lived.)

I took up a second page from the middle of the set. Glanced over a description of a failed experiment. Once more the name Breandan Ó Cuilinn made my brain ache with half-remembered events. He had demonstrated a machine to my father. That much I was certain. But the rest … a balloon, a diary of experiments conducted here, at Cill Cannig?

I took the balloon and the papers back to my private chambers. It was strange, but their presence gave me a stability I lacked and had longed for this past month. Over the next few weeks, I compared Breandan’s journals against papers from other nations and other universities concerning recent findings about time fractures. I also pored over newspapers, searching for more clues about inconsistencies in present times. The more I investigated, the more I remembered from that other time, that other past. Someone had closed the fractures over Osraighe and Awveline City. Murders were undone, the past rewritten. Because of that, Lord Ó Cadhla’s daughter lived, and Breandan had died.

(Perhaps. Or if he lived, it was in a different time. In a different world from the Éire I knew.)

And what if I could travel into the past, forbid Breandan to make his fateful journey? Would he listen to me, a stranger? Or would he nevertheless press onward, to be the first of all scientists to breach the walls of time?

He would go. No matter what the risk.

I knew that because he had done so already. He had launched himself forward to a future that had vanished. No, not vanished. According to the many treatises I had read, his future had jumped to a different path, severed from mine.

Now I understood the choices my father had faced when my mother died. It was not merely an acceptance of death. It was the knowledge that our duties and our path lay with Éire, not with any other person who happened to share our lives.

I picked up the miniature balloon and ran my fingers over its delicate tracery of wires, over the perfect sphere, now marred and blunted by its impossible passage through time. I would keep it, and its companion record of the vanished past. Ah, but that was all.

Wherever you are, Breandan Ó Cuilinn, I thought. Wherever you travel. Fare thee well.