Review
"COMPLEX AND . . . INTERESTING."
--Science Fiction Chronicle
--Science Fiction Chronicle
Book Description
The time has come . . . to reinvent time.
Oklahoma native Ben Culver possesses a sudden, strange power. Much like a sleepwalker, without awareness or intent, he begins to travel through time--into the past, into the future, and into serious trouble. Maude and Lucas Hawthorn, owners of an exclusive time travel agency in Kansas, hope to find Ben fast, before someone turns the sacred space-time continuum into cosmic Swiss cheese.
For Ben has unwittingly provided the means for the evil genius Kaffer to escape from his pyramid prison and accomplish his diabolical goal: wipe out the Whispers--the Hawthorns' time-jumping friends who are searching for their origins back in the very roots of time. And it is there, deep in time, that the Hawthorns must discover the secret of Ben's uncanny abilities, stop the timemonger, and save the world from the lost realities and alternate universes that threaten to end it forever . . .
Oklahoma native Ben Culver possesses a sudden, strange power. Much like a sleepwalker, without awareness or intent, he begins to travel through time--into the past, into the future, and into serious trouble. Maude and Lucas Hawthorn, owners of an exclusive time travel agency in Kansas, hope to find Ben fast, before someone turns the sacred space-time continuum into cosmic Swiss cheese.
For Ben has unwittingly provided the means for the evil genius Kaffer to escape from his pyramid prison and accomplish his diabolical goal: wipe out the Whispers--the Hawthorns' time-jumping friends who are searching for their origins back in the very roots of time. And it is there, deep in time, that the Hawthorns must discover the secret of Ben's uncanny abilities, stop the timemonger, and save the world from the lost realities and alternate universes that threaten to end it forever . . .
From the Back Cover
"COMPLEX AND . . . INTERESTING."
--Science Fiction Chronicle
About the Author
Dan Parkinson is the author of The Whispers and Faces of Infinity (Books One and Two of The Gates of Time), and the Timecop novels (Viper's Spawn, The Scavenger, and Blood Ties), as well as many westerns and a number of successful TSR fantasy novels.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Anywhen, Inc.
Eastwood, Kansas
The Present
Lucas Hawthorn had seen missing-persons posters before, but never one quite like this. have you seen this person? the big print demanded. or this house?
The two photographs below were of excellent quality, printed in full-color graphics on 20-pound rag bond: a head-and-shoulders of a young man with unruly blond hair and startled blue eyes, and a good-quality snapshot--like a Realtor's-book presentation--of a neat, small house on a town lot.
Maude peered over his shoulder, studying the pictures thoughtfully, then raised her eyes to the young woman across the kitchen table. Nancy Culver might have been in her twenties, a pretty girl with blond hair and skeptical blue eyes. "I suppose you've done the usual things," Maude suggested. "I mean, like talk to some of your brother's neighbors about any unusual activity, or maybe if they noticed which way the house went? Houses generally don't move around very much."
Nancy Culver nodded. "Of course I have. They're just as baffled as I am. Ben has always been a little weird, and he's disappeared before--a time or two--but this is the first time he ever took his house with him. The people next door are pretty upset about it."
"Sudden disappearance can be upsetting," Lucas assured her.
"They aren't upset about Ben," Nancy corrected. "They're upset about the hole where his house was. The whole house is gone, right down to the flashing under the foundation, and the water main ran wide open for two days before they noticed it. It filled the hole with water, and their cat keeps jumping in. They've filed a complaint with the city, I think." She sipped her coffee, gazing around at the interior of the Hawthorns' house. "This is an unusual arrangement," she said. "What did you do, replace the front wall?"
"That whole corner of the house," Maude indicated. "There wasn't anything left so we just restructured the whole thing. Do you like it?"
"Storm?" Nancy asked.
"Zen-gun attack," Lucas said. "A rogue time loop from a thousand years in the future tried to wipe us out."
"Lucas short-circuited it with a harpoon gun," Maude added. "So it left us alone and burned a warehouse in Topeka instead. That was in 1887."
Nancy Culver blinked at them. "Yeah," she said. "Sure."
"Try explaining all that to an insurance adjuster." Lucas grinned. "They finally put it down to storm damage from lightning. Anyhow, we changed the roofline and put in bay windows. So, anyway, you're looking for your brother. How did you happen to come here?"
Nancy stood, frowned, and moved around the table to peer through the open double doors adjoining the kitchen. There should have been a dining room there, but it didn't look like any dining room she had ever seen. "What's that?" she asked. "A steel floor?"
"That's the TEF chamber," Maude explained. "The thing on the tower over there--like a cone in a rat's nest--is a temporal effect focalizer. It's what bumps things around from time to time."
"Bumps things ..." Nancy glanced around at them. "You mean like it--it jostles things, now and then?"
"That's another way of putting it," Lucas agreed. "It's future technology. It uses electromagnetic analogy to reverse gravity and light. That's what makes time travel work. This one's primarily an accelerator for Whispers migrating to the past. A booster waystop. But we use it for historical tours. How did you happen to know about Anywhen, Inc., Miss Culver? Did someone refer you to us?"
As though making up her mind, Nancy pulled a business card from her purse and placed it on the table. "I guess this was a referral," she said. "It's your card, isn't it?"
Lucas picked it up. It was one of their own cards--anywhen, inc. with a logo, fax and phone numbers, and the cheery slogan, have a nice time. He turned it over. Scrawled on the back was a handwritten note: "When you see Ben, tell him Molly said hi."
He read it again, then looked up. "So?"
"So, that note was in my mailbox yesterday morning. Somebody left it for me when I was out, I guess."
"Who's Molly?" Maude asked, reading the card.
"I haven't the vaguest idea. But whoever she is, she left your card in my mailbox, referring to Ben, two weeks after Ben and his house disappeared. That's why I came here. I'm hoping you might know what's going on."
Lucas and Maude looked at the card again, and at each other. Both of them shrugged. "Not a clue," Lucas admitted.
"Do you suppose her brother went somewhen instead of somewhere?" Maude suggested. "We might be able to get a handle on that, if he did." To Nancy she said, "Tell us about Ben."
Nancy shook her head impatiently. "To start with, he's thirty-two years old, going on maybe fourteen. He's irresponsible, unreliable, and unpredictable, and lately he's been almost impossible. He misses appointments, goes to sleep in sales meetings, and acts like his mind is a thousand miles away. He's been like that for months, and I can't find out what's wrong. And he collects the strangest things! His broom closet looks like a closing-out sale at a museum."
"What kind of things?"
"Just ... things. Weird things. Swords and statues and vases, some kind of a spear, a little coneybob thing like that one you have..." She indicated the dining room that wasn't a dining room.
Lucas's brows went up. "A TEF? He has a TEF? Where'd he get it?"
"Where does he get anything?" Nancy shook her head. "I don't think he goes anywhere, and I know he hasn't spent any money on mail order. But things just keep showing up in his house and all he'll say is he hasn't been sleeping very well."
"Where would anybody get a TEF?" Lucas muttered.
Somewhere a little bell sounded. Nancy glanced toward the open doors of the steel-floored transfer chamber, and her eyes went wide.
In the empty room, something was happening. It grew perceptibly darker in there, and abruptly it was full of people ... or almost people. They were more like shadows, dozens of them thronging together, almost filling the room--little, bald people with very large eyes.
The room grew rapidly darker, seeming to slow as it darkened until for the barest instant there was no light or motion at all. Then in that same instant a blaze of unbelievably intense glare filled the space, gone almost before the senses could register it.
And the room was as it had been before--an empty room with a gleaming steel floor and a little tower in one corner, supporting a maze of electronic components and a semitranslucent cone of all colors and no particular color.
Again the little bell rang.
"What--what was that?" Nancy gasped.
"Whispers," Maude said casually. "They were just passing through."
Lucas sat staring at the TEF chamber. "I know where we might get a lead on your brother," he said. "How do you feel about four-dimensional transference?"
"What?"
"Time travel. How do you feel about time travel?"
She looked at him with cynical blue eyes. "Look, I don't judge anybody's fantasies. If you folks sell time travel, that's fine with me. But don't try to sell me. I don't believe in things like that!"
"That's all right, dear," Maude said soothingly. "Most people don't, until they've tried it."
"Our best bet is L-383," Lucas decided. "The Whispers are pretty careful in accounting for TEFs. If anybody can help us find your brother, Teal Fordeen can."
Time Loop L-383
Though the Hawthorns had tried to explain to her what was about to happen when she and Lucas entered the room with the steel floor, Nancy Culver was unprepared for it. She knew there would be a light show or fog machine or something, but she wasn't a gullible kid. Special effects didn't impress her at all.
Not until now.
The first shock was the sheer suddenness of temporal transference. It just ... happened, so quickly that her senses barely noted the shift. The second was what lay before and around her when it did.
A closed temporal loop isn't easy to describe, because there is nothing to compare it to. It is unlike any other phenomenon. A closed loop is, essentially, a section of duration brought around to meet itself, thus forming what in three-dimensional topology would be either a simple closed curve or a torus. These terms are analogous, of course, because the essence of a durational phenomenon is not spatial. It is temporal. A closed loop--like a T1 conduit--occupies fully all four of the prime dimensions.
As related to its fixed-sequence--or atemporal--surroundings, a closed time loop isn't exactly anywhere, except for its intervals of passage from one time vector to another. Nor does it remain anywhen, in normal circumstance. To exist at all, a temporo-spatial phenomenon must be in constant motion along the linear coordinates of at least one dimension.
At "present," L-383 was hovering in 180-second resonance in the vicinity of the southwest Kansas high plains. This temporal rhythm--from a minute and a half ago to a minute and a half from now--was the normal idle mode of the loop. It wasn't going anywhere. It was just being there, instant by instant in 180 seconds of real time.
If there had been such a thing as an ordinary loop in durational time, L-383 would have been it.
But what confronted Nancy Culver a moment after entering the TEF chamber at Waystop I was not ordinary ...
Eastwood, Kansas
The Present
Lucas Hawthorn had seen missing-persons posters before, but never one quite like this. have you seen this person? the big print demanded. or this house?
The two photographs below were of excellent quality, printed in full-color graphics on 20-pound rag bond: a head-and-shoulders of a young man with unruly blond hair and startled blue eyes, and a good-quality snapshot--like a Realtor's-book presentation--of a neat, small house on a town lot.
Maude peered over his shoulder, studying the pictures thoughtfully, then raised her eyes to the young woman across the kitchen table. Nancy Culver might have been in her twenties, a pretty girl with blond hair and skeptical blue eyes. "I suppose you've done the usual things," Maude suggested. "I mean, like talk to some of your brother's neighbors about any unusual activity, or maybe if they noticed which way the house went? Houses generally don't move around very much."
Nancy Culver nodded. "Of course I have. They're just as baffled as I am. Ben has always been a little weird, and he's disappeared before--a time or two--but this is the first time he ever took his house with him. The people next door are pretty upset about it."
"Sudden disappearance can be upsetting," Lucas assured her.
"They aren't upset about Ben," Nancy corrected. "They're upset about the hole where his house was. The whole house is gone, right down to the flashing under the foundation, and the water main ran wide open for two days before they noticed it. It filled the hole with water, and their cat keeps jumping in. They've filed a complaint with the city, I think." She sipped her coffee, gazing around at the interior of the Hawthorns' house. "This is an unusual arrangement," she said. "What did you do, replace the front wall?"
"That whole corner of the house," Maude indicated. "There wasn't anything left so we just restructured the whole thing. Do you like it?"
"Storm?" Nancy asked.
"Zen-gun attack," Lucas said. "A rogue time loop from a thousand years in the future tried to wipe us out."
"Lucas short-circuited it with a harpoon gun," Maude added. "So it left us alone and burned a warehouse in Topeka instead. That was in 1887."
Nancy Culver blinked at them. "Yeah," she said. "Sure."
"Try explaining all that to an insurance adjuster." Lucas grinned. "They finally put it down to storm damage from lightning. Anyhow, we changed the roofline and put in bay windows. So, anyway, you're looking for your brother. How did you happen to come here?"
Nancy stood, frowned, and moved around the table to peer through the open double doors adjoining the kitchen. There should have been a dining room there, but it didn't look like any dining room she had ever seen. "What's that?" she asked. "A steel floor?"
"That's the TEF chamber," Maude explained. "The thing on the tower over there--like a cone in a rat's nest--is a temporal effect focalizer. It's what bumps things around from time to time."
"Bumps things ..." Nancy glanced around at them. "You mean like it--it jostles things, now and then?"
"That's another way of putting it," Lucas agreed. "It's future technology. It uses electromagnetic analogy to reverse gravity and light. That's what makes time travel work. This one's primarily an accelerator for Whispers migrating to the past. A booster waystop. But we use it for historical tours. How did you happen to know about Anywhen, Inc., Miss Culver? Did someone refer you to us?"
As though making up her mind, Nancy pulled a business card from her purse and placed it on the table. "I guess this was a referral," she said. "It's your card, isn't it?"
Lucas picked it up. It was one of their own cards--anywhen, inc. with a logo, fax and phone numbers, and the cheery slogan, have a nice time. He turned it over. Scrawled on the back was a handwritten note: "When you see Ben, tell him Molly said hi."
He read it again, then looked up. "So?"
"So, that note was in my mailbox yesterday morning. Somebody left it for me when I was out, I guess."
"Who's Molly?" Maude asked, reading the card.
"I haven't the vaguest idea. But whoever she is, she left your card in my mailbox, referring to Ben, two weeks after Ben and his house disappeared. That's why I came here. I'm hoping you might know what's going on."
Lucas and Maude looked at the card again, and at each other. Both of them shrugged. "Not a clue," Lucas admitted.
"Do you suppose her brother went somewhen instead of somewhere?" Maude suggested. "We might be able to get a handle on that, if he did." To Nancy she said, "Tell us about Ben."
Nancy shook her head impatiently. "To start with, he's thirty-two years old, going on maybe fourteen. He's irresponsible, unreliable, and unpredictable, and lately he's been almost impossible. He misses appointments, goes to sleep in sales meetings, and acts like his mind is a thousand miles away. He's been like that for months, and I can't find out what's wrong. And he collects the strangest things! His broom closet looks like a closing-out sale at a museum."
"What kind of things?"
"Just ... things. Weird things. Swords and statues and vases, some kind of a spear, a little coneybob thing like that one you have..." She indicated the dining room that wasn't a dining room.
Lucas's brows went up. "A TEF? He has a TEF? Where'd he get it?"
"Where does he get anything?" Nancy shook her head. "I don't think he goes anywhere, and I know he hasn't spent any money on mail order. But things just keep showing up in his house and all he'll say is he hasn't been sleeping very well."
"Where would anybody get a TEF?" Lucas muttered.
Somewhere a little bell sounded. Nancy glanced toward the open doors of the steel-floored transfer chamber, and her eyes went wide.
In the empty room, something was happening. It grew perceptibly darker in there, and abruptly it was full of people ... or almost people. They were more like shadows, dozens of them thronging together, almost filling the room--little, bald people with very large eyes.
The room grew rapidly darker, seeming to slow as it darkened until for the barest instant there was no light or motion at all. Then in that same instant a blaze of unbelievably intense glare filled the space, gone almost before the senses could register it.
And the room was as it had been before--an empty room with a gleaming steel floor and a little tower in one corner, supporting a maze of electronic components and a semitranslucent cone of all colors and no particular color.
Again the little bell rang.
"What--what was that?" Nancy gasped.
"Whispers," Maude said casually. "They were just passing through."
Lucas sat staring at the TEF chamber. "I know where we might get a lead on your brother," he said. "How do you feel about four-dimensional transference?"
"What?"
"Time travel. How do you feel about time travel?"
She looked at him with cynical blue eyes. "Look, I don't judge anybody's fantasies. If you folks sell time travel, that's fine with me. But don't try to sell me. I don't believe in things like that!"
"That's all right, dear," Maude said soothingly. "Most people don't, until they've tried it."
"Our best bet is L-383," Lucas decided. "The Whispers are pretty careful in accounting for TEFs. If anybody can help us find your brother, Teal Fordeen can."
Time Loop L-383
Though the Hawthorns had tried to explain to her what was about to happen when she and Lucas entered the room with the steel floor, Nancy Culver was unprepared for it. She knew there would be a light show or fog machine or something, but she wasn't a gullible kid. Special effects didn't impress her at all.
Not until now.
The first shock was the sheer suddenness of temporal transference. It just ... happened, so quickly that her senses barely noted the shift. The second was what lay before and around her when it did.
A closed temporal loop isn't easy to describe, because there is nothing to compare it to. It is unlike any other phenomenon. A closed loop is, essentially, a section of duration brought around to meet itself, thus forming what in three-dimensional topology would be either a simple closed curve or a torus. These terms are analogous, of course, because the essence of a durational phenomenon is not spatial. It is temporal. A closed loop--like a T1 conduit--occupies fully all four of the prime dimensions.
As related to its fixed-sequence--or atemporal--surroundings, a closed time loop isn't exactly anywhere, except for its intervals of passage from one time vector to another. Nor does it remain anywhen, in normal circumstance. To exist at all, a temporo-spatial phenomenon must be in constant motion along the linear coordinates of at least one dimension.
At "present," L-383 was hovering in 180-second resonance in the vicinity of the southwest Kansas high plains. This temporal rhythm--from a minute and a half ago to a minute and a half from now--was the normal idle mode of the loop. It wasn't going anywhere. It was just being there, instant by instant in 180 seconds of real time.
If there had been such a thing as an ordinary loop in durational time, L-383 would have been it.
But what confronted Nancy Culver a moment after entering the TEF chamber at Waystop I was not ordinary ...
