Read City Beyond Time: Tales of the Fall of Metachronopolis for Free Online

deliberate or not, what is the safest way to neutralize his interference? Safest, quickest, best?”
    That was an easy one. How did Time Wardens solve all their problems? “Eliminate him.”
    “Just him? Remember that you cannot reason with the other Time Wardens. If they were people who listened to warnings about the consequences of their actions, they would not be time travelers in the first place.”
    “If time travel necessarily—you claim—and inevitably—you claim—eliminates whoever does it,” I said, “Then what happens after everything collapses?”
    The bass voice said: “Our research indicates that there is one core timeline, the line where time travel was never invented. The whole unwieldy structure of multiple branching time lines and time loops manipulated by the lords of Metachronopolis is a temporary shadow or reflection of that core line into the surrounding chronic ylem. Our chronocosm is temporary and unstable, like the creation of certain virtual particle pairs in base vacuum, which exist for a brief time before they eliminate themselves. But some of us remember the core line. Surely you recall what your life was like before you meddled with time travel.”
    I shrugged. “My life wasn't so great.”
    “But better than this.”
    I shook my head. “I don't need to listen to any more of this. Look, your whole argument is based on the idea that Time Wardens are all some sort of criminals or infantile maniacs. You're basically saying that they will keep meddling and monkeying with the past until they eliminate themselves. I don't buy it. Aren't some of them reasonable? Don't some of them listen to reason?”
    “That is always our hope, Mr. Frontino. We would not bother talking to you if we did not have that hope. Here.”
    There was a mirrored glitter as he took a card from his robe. Then, with a flick of his gloved fingers, he slid it across the table toward me.
    I did not reach for it. “What is this supposed to be?”
    “Think of it as the Final Destiny crystal. It is a destiny card attached to the core line. Naturally, you can only use it once. Once you are in the core line, time travel is impossible, and you cannot come out.”
    I looked down.
    The surface of the card was completely black, with no image at all inside of it.
    It might have been my imagination, but I thought I felt a sensation of immense cold radiating from the dead-black surface.
    “No thanks,” I said, leaning slightly backward from the absolutely featureless, dark card. “Go back to being a flatliner with a blind future and irrevocable past? Sorry. Let me out of here. Unless you got something more for me to hear?”
    They didn't.
    One of them—I think it was a woman—got up and held a candle near a mirrored frame on the far wall. Except it wasn't a mirror; inside the depth, I saw a picture of one of the bridge-top wintergardens near the Museum of Man, high up near the center of the city, shining with golden towers. The picture surged into my imagination…
    Another question occurred to me, and so I turned around, but there was only a golden bridge-way behind me. The Anachronists were gone.

28.
     
    “Where are the other Time Wardens?” I asked the mirrored figure on the throne. “Or is elevating me to Wardenship just something you decided all on your lonesome?”
    An eerie, bubbling noise like many disjointed voices laughing came from the mirrored mask. “Other Time Wardens? Why should there be
other
Time Wardens? How would you expect us to govern ourselves?”
    That one stumped me. I squinted. “Don't know. I always thought you guys had a leader, or you took a vote or something…”
    Again, I heard the weird blurred laughter. “Why should I tolerate to abide by the outcome of any vote, when I could play the scene again and again until the vote came out as I desired? How much less would I brook the commands of a leader! Why should I tolerate any difference of opinion of any kind whatsoever! If I know a man's