The Indescribable Time Traveling Device
By: Matthew Hennigar
Tags: Time Travel, SciFi, Science Fiction

Lee Krasner, “White Squares” (1948)

The space pirate unearthed the indescribable time traveling device in an underwater palace on the twelfth moon of Vlijirakon. Twenty-two years old, he had decided to track down the mythical instrument when he first heard about it while smuggling lamwracks through the Zadar quadrant for Captain Lotharia Durexfer. He had stored aboard his first interstar frigate six years before, so he wasn’t innocent-dreamed enough to believe the ship chef’s stories about the Glyphic artifact — for that’s what it was, a leftover of that learned, invisible civilization — until she confessed that, in her words, ‘strictly speaking, it doesn’t exist.’

‘What do you mean?’ the pirate, who had not yet committed his first act of piracy, asked.

‘The Glyphs made it, so it doesn’t exist in the way that you or I do,’ she explained. Her fibbodios were boiling, so she excused herself to switch off the fark bottom, but the wide-eyed pirate pursued the subject.

‘If it doesn’t exist, how can anyone use it? Or find it?’

Agrippa — since that was the name she’d chosen, not too long ago — turned back to the spice slab. ‘Like I said, that depends on what you mean by “exist.” But you’re too young to understand that.’

‘You mean like Where do I end and the world begin? That kind of koanish clatter?’

‘Sort of,’ she eyed him, ‘but those abstracts won’t ultimately get you anywhere.’

‘For that I need the I-interrogation, right? Self-searching and shadow-silhouetting — all that lethe?’

She smirked. ‘You’re a show-don’t, you know that? Pretty words but let’s see you do.’

The red-feathered tamwinder perched on the ice-flank ruffled its wings, whistling. Tracking his eyes back from the bird, the unamused pirate asked flat-out,

‘Do you know where I can find this thing or not?’

After studying the youth’s face for a last doubting moment, the chef sighed. That afternoon, she tested him: could he detail, with clear-eyed clarity, all of the influences that had sculpted his psyche, determined his decisions, zemwarlay’d him into a life of piracy? Agrippa had concocted a show-do soup she’d recipieved on Alar Eleven to appraise his honesty, but — despite the broth’s live scorflers — the boy didn’t wince under questioning, not once. His was a typical childhood for that system — a heat-fly embryo birth, fifteen rims at Corsair Academy, capped off by a passing mark in the requisite rebellion — and Agrippa learned it with uncaring eyes.

‘One can cultivate complete, accurate self-appraisal, but still suffer from delusion,’ she warned him, ‘If you fail to act accordingly. What do you want from this device?’

The pirate had grown intimidated by the cook’s intelligence. While the rest of the crew siesta’d, they waylaid in the blue-lit mess each afternoon, the pirate watching while Agrippa sizzled enlightenment elixirs in culinary experiments with letheways and welterslops.

‘I don’t know,’ he confessed.

‘And yet you are willing to squander your life searching for it?’ He remained silent, so she went on. ‘Braver than you have tried and failed, losing themselves in abstraction, and precisely because they did not have a good grasp of why they searched –’

‘How could I know why before I find it?’ The thought had occurred to him as he said it. ‘In fact, I want the device so that I can figure out why I want anything. What other purpose could there be to time travel?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Agrippa replied. ‘Traveling through time.’

‘But we’re doing that already. Facts, objects, happenings in the future, or the past — these don’t interest me. I’m not a scientist –’

‘You don’t say –’

‘– I don’t know what I am.’

‘I thought you were a pirate.’

‘I’m a clone — a clone that was programmed to become a pirate. But I don’t want to be one.’

Agrippa’s face remained unreadable. At last she said, ‘I don’t have the map,’ pausing to scan the pirate’s parting lips before adding, ‘but I know where it is.’

‘So you’re testing me to see whether or not I’m worthy, even though you already know I am. So why these meetings?’

Suddenly, he could read her lips, too, and they entwined right then in his bunklet. Afterwards, she gave him the map’s coordinates. He hardly cared about it.

‘Come with me,’ he whispered, but she smiled.

‘No. You must go alone.’

He stole into a void arrow with the morning, paying the docking bay sentry a month’s savings to erase his theft and departure from the metaframe. He had committed his first act of piracy. Agrippa knew he would never return to frigate-bound life. Now his machine plummeted through space at a velocity impossible to measure on devices any older than the vessel itself — unless of course the technology was Glyphic. As for the pirate, he still had to endure the claustrophobic horrors of deep space hibernation. Yet even in his fugitive dreams, which brought him to an island outcropping people’d by spectacularly oversized tamwinders, the pirate remained in his birth dimension. Piercing the black of space, the arrow sluiced to a stop with an 180 degree pirouette, threading the starchapelago of Onomaphlix Seven and arriving at the map.

Suspended light-centuries from the nearest habitable planet, the map’s saber-thin terrace spun barely visible to the synthetic eye. The pirate alighted the arrow on the map’s least cluttered corner, activated his invisisuit, and stepped upon the cobalt surface. In unison the chaos of three-dimensional nebulas, galaxies, and infinity cliffs gyroscoped around and through him, sailing down lazer holoshow cascades of rainbow constellation clouds in neon miniature. Unfortunately, the pirate had no onark how to read any of it. Sifting through the holographics, he read no sign indicating where he could find the indescribable time-traveling device.

‘What the Morph,’ he muttered, sitting and letting his head dangle between his up-v’d knees, holding the nape of his neck with both hands. Had Agrippa been florped? She would not have tricked him. That had been his first time entwining, which he’d confided in her afterwards, leading to their second oneing. Agrippa wouldn’t have lied then. He caught himself: Why was his first instinct to suspect her, rather than his own stupidity? Stung by guilt, he scoured the map’s lines once more. The delicate shower of simulated stars continued. Could their fall symbolize something? His own falls — and there had been many — certainly did. The constellations evaporated upon reaching the shifting tableaux of the map’s nominal surface, which swallowed the starlight like a black hole. Lying down on his stomach, the pirate sidled up to the map’s edge and looked underneath it. Nothing.

‘Isn’t this all supposed to be psychoanalytical?’ he asked aloud. ‘Don’t I need to divine some deep self-truth to see this out?’

A map. What if the fact he can’t read it is the point? No, that’d be too predictable. I don’t know why I want this device. He can only discover why by finding it — right? But if the device doesn’t strictly speaking ‘exist’, how can the map help him? What is the use of a map on a journey into inner space? The Glyphs did not even use maps — they were their own maps, their own dimensions.

Part II

Wild-eyed for a moment, the pirate resolved upon his plan and reboarded the arrow, swinging it over the map to look down on its illegible spectacle. Which direction were the holographic stars falling? Down, but what does direction mean in space? Could the answer to the riddle be that obvious and stupid? Shouldn’t it be? Follow the map: it is moving down. Switching on the druv quartotemers, the pirate aimed the arrow’s point at the map and fired. The four needle-like zangs threaded through the waterfall of colorful constellations before fastening onto the map-plate as the arrow began accelerating. Following and guiding the map, the pirate rolled his eyes while gaining speed.

Was he going in the right direction? He had no way of knowing. But the map showed no signs of having been moved before, which was encouraging. If some other searcher or even wayward object had moved it, then this half-plan would never work. When attempting to reach a destination across intergalactic vastness, setting your course off target by even a quiffle of an harphimer would fling you into outblivion. Knowing this, the pirate gave himself a ten-day limit on traveling before setting the map adrift and returning to the more pragmatic life of piracy for which he had always prepared. Why piracy? The intrepid romance, daring freedom, and assumption he had to become a murderer to attain either — being a clone alone, that kind of mythwit. Yet soon after boarding the Quellcaster — his first outer-Quadrant job — he found that the pirates were for the most part equally as repressed and unremarkable as your typical cusp-world fort adapter.

Thus the pining for some daysway more arcane, elusive, emancipating. Agrippa’s story had provided the challenge, and now he was solo in a cylindrical ship no wider than two of him, subsisting off atom ants and making outrageous use of the raff rejector. Out his zinlow-shaped window he saw nothing. With all that time alone he would have gone quarsane were it not for the audio spunquicks. He listened to dozens all the way through, including a quark of the Library of Triskelia’s holdings on ancient maps that float mysteriously in space, which — it turns out — was quite a bit.

‘I wish I’d listened to these sooner,’ he lamented aloud, adding, ‘then again, if I find this time traveling device, I could.’

Perhaps as cosmic punishment for that remark, not to mention the fact he’d been talking to himself since halfway through the journey’s first day, he arrived. At first the planet Vlijirakon, solemn and regal in resplendent yellow like a calcified sun, appeared to be the map’s destination. The unpopulated planet remained riddled with the forsaken spires, strip malls, and aquedorms of an untenable civilization, which had been destroyed millennia before by an inborn cataclysm. The pockmarks on the surface, along with its holed-out moons, suggested that a planet-wide weapons cruxall had failed spectacularly — as was standard for a society at that stage. Yet a strong sense of deja-true suddenly stole the pirate away from such speculations. He recalled leaving the academy mess twelve years previously to walk back to his hive when his eyes inexplicably dreamt or saw or evoked three to four seconds of the scene before him now: the titanic planet and, slowly orbiting before Vlijirakon’s burnished yellow visage, the chipped orb of one of its moons. Such visions came to him less and less frequently since his childhood, when he had seen scenes from his future almost every day, which first sparked his interest in time travel. Of course, seeing the future had failed to help him predict it, let alone prepare for it or live accordingly. Maybe going back in time, he thought, to trace the causes of events would help him map his own aimless wanderings. He was about to find out.

The pirate had arrived. So far as he knew, there was no record of any civilization ever taking root on this nameless moon, which was mostly covered by a sea that emptied off the broken surface’s cracked edge into its exposed dynamo of a collapsed core, from which the sea sprang back to the surface through an elaborate network of fissures in a delicate cycle. The Zero Distributors must have created it in their aeon-adolescent toying with the laws of physics. Now the moon floated as a synthetic sentinel, unconsciously aware of the pirate’s presence as he pushed the map into the sea and followed it into a different, darker deep. If what the pirate thought about time and free will and the use of the map or any map was true, then even now he should be going precisely towards the indescribable time traveling device, since the whole of time and space had conspired to bring him there. Or, to be precise, the Glyphs had conspired to lead him — why him? it made no difference — here. For the Glyphs to have planted a device on a Distributor artifact was also appropriate. According to certain Academy theorists, the two were one and the same, but the pirate thought that idea was nonsense. Glyphs would have considered the Distributors’ creations completely frivolous and would never have made any themselves. Admittedly that opinion was not his own — he had heard it on a spunquick — but presumably he would soon be able to solve that question, too.

He had reached the sea floor and discovered the lonely palace waiting there. Presumably the risks had paid off: the revolutions of the planet had aligned perfectly with his timing. But this was no reason to feel special — quite the contrary: it is common knowledge that the Glyphs and Distributors have a hand in the lives of everything, in ways noticeable and not. A translucent dark glowered about the seafloor-secured arrow as the pirate disembarked in his invisisuit, sonaring the cragged stalagmites and shifting crevasses that lined his path. The moon’s ever-empty cyclic seas maintained a ceaselessly strong current, sculpting down the palace’s ziggurats and friezes into aerodynamic echoes of their original, ornamented forms. Above the front entrance, through which one had to crawl (as is typical of Glyphic architecture), the map had landed, allowing its constellations to bathe the building’s erosioned phantasfrieze in brilliantly shifting color. The pirate was readying himself for the unpleasant task of crawling into the building and searching through the palace’s seven hundred and seventy-seven rooms when a helmeted figure swam out of a hole in the roof and down to him, holding what could only be the indescribable time traveling device.

‘Yglai!’ the pirate cried.

‘Entai, yourself,’ the figure replied.

‘How’d you find that?’

‘I just swam down to a random ruin on a random moon to pick up this object for no reason.’

The sarcasm was obvious. The pirate squinted. ‘So that’s –’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you used it already?’

‘If I did, would I be talking to you?’

He hesitated. ‘Agrippa?’

She removed the helmet. ‘How’d you guess?’

‘Why’d you come here?’

‘Well, I didn’t want you to have all the fun.’

‘But you didn’t wanna come with me –’

‘I wanted to take the scenic route –’

The pirate betrayed no emotion. ‘But you got here first.’

‘There wasn’t much to see.’

Neither had smiled the entire dialogue — they could anticipate each other’s humor that well.

‘You’re gonna time travel solo, too,’ the clone guessed.

‘It’ll be in there for you, by the time I’m done with it.’

‘When’re you going to?’

‘I’m actually not using this to travel though time. I’m going to find out about someone on the other side of the universe.’

The clone was the first to smile. It was genuine. Only days before, he had twined with her. But he knew that the things he admired about Agrippa — her fearlessness, acerbic humor, generosity — could be his own, while she should never be. A weight fell away while he guessed, ‘You’re in love with them.’

‘That’s what I’m going to find out. What about you — when are you going?’

‘To the beginning of time.’

And now Agrippa smiled. ‘You’re such a romantic.’

‘If I find the cause of everything, that’ll help me figure out the present — and my future.’

‘You don’t trust yourself to figure that out by just living?’

The clone paused, defensive, embarrassed. ‘It’s not that simple.’

‘I know. Just be careful — this thing doesn’t go in reverse.’

And with that, she activated the device somehow and vanished.

Part III

Having been presented with an alternative to crawling, the pirate swam over the ruin, around the glowing map, and through the caved-in southeasterly quarter of the roof to enter the labyrinth of the palace. There was no trick to finding its center. He simply had to try each of its coiling pathways, most ending in walls bare aside from hieroglyphics he didn’t bother to read. Eventually he reached the inner sanctum. So far as inner sanctums go, it was noteworthy. But only because the indescribable time traveling device was inside. The pirate could not begin to describe the device itself, and he also had difficulty finding the language to describe his reaction to it: ‘overawed’ didn’t quite catch the feeling, though neither did ‘befolderdahl’d’ or ‘gezmooch’d’ or even ‘Flumfortled’, for that matter. Instead of perusing his invisisuit’s Thesaurus, however, the pirate approached the device, picked it up, and said,

‘Let’s go to the beginning of my life.’

Suddenly he was gliding — not without discomfort — through the strange ether of an interdimensional gateway. He did not have to move his body at all. The device remained in his hand, his arms slightly upraised from his sides and his legs dangling uselessly below while a mad collage of blurred sensations rippled across him. To say he experienced all of the things that had happened to him since birth would be inaccurate. Rather, the clone stretched out over the geography of his life’s course, with scenes from his childhood running over his feet, adolescence his legs, the flower of his youth girded his waist, middle age rounded out across his belly, and so forth. But consciousness, along with time as we understand it, had little to do with what happened, and once he revisited his newborn self he was already consigned to the knowledge that fully explaining the voyage to anyone — himself included — would be impossible.

But that also did not matter. Suddenly — how much time had passed, if any, for him, independent of the lifecycle he witnessed? — he was out of the interdimensional gate and fully conscious as a spectral facsimile of himself. His body was no longer in the palace on the moon, but he was not inside his body here, either. Instead, his body lay in front of him, as if he were in a lucid dream. He stood in a dilapidated clonosphere on Lodar Nine, surrounded by hundreds of newborns sleeping in pods, looking down at his youngest self, indistinguishable from the other babies in the vast laboratory. He had been born in this pod, an O-Clone I model, and bought by Captain Lotharia Durexfer soon after sprouting, a purchase which he had only just witnessed before going still further back in time to when he was in this room, an unselected clone. Yet that was Lotharia’s first and only appearance in his life — Durexfer had pre-ordered a rebellious lifeway for the clone so that he would eventually work on one of the pirate’s frigates, then disappeared, his work done. The clone had always known about pre-charting, but had not realized how all-encompassing it could be. Had Durexfer planned this journey through time, too? Whether it was the pirate, a Glyph, or a Distributor made no difference — the clone genuinely wanted to trace the forces that had created him, but now that he knew, what difference did it make?

Re-experiencing his past had already reaffirmed what he feared yet knew to be true: his whole life had been spent on a pre-planned track, which is why he had immense difficulty figuring out what he wanted to do now that he had seemingly stepped off it. The training skirmish on Kenflar, when he had mock-mutilated a drunken berserker… the Academy had taught him that the grin after a day’s plundering was the inevitable apex of life, but that’s when he owned up to his disgust with the entire enterprise of piracy. It was an entire worldview, one with which he no longer wanted any part. To see himself as an infant, trapped on the same track he had been steered upon all along, showed the clone that this trip had been necessary, yet returning to the present and charting his own future was more necessary still. But how? He fumbled with the device’s controls. Then he remembered: there was no reverse. He could not simply retrace his route back to the present he knew. But then how could he escape? His youngest self looked up at (though not necessarily to) him. He could not save himself at any moment in the life he had already lived. Instead, the pirate pushed further back in time, beyond himself, beyond what he knew to find some way to be of use.

First, in the form of an undetectable spectral presence (for time travelers cannot interact with the past; they can only regard it from new angles), the pirate surveyed the construction of the building in which he had been incubated, the creation of the zaminlarp that manufactured him, the Academy-night chats of its founders, who believed in the unimpeachable righteousness of clonomatics. This moral universe was only one of many that had flourished and fallen on Silifir Melo, so he pushed back further. He sat on the cornice of the viceroy’s galadahall in Old Entremaltada. Wombat vleptankers, curflonging at his eye level, brazenly screeched at the pomaded revolutionaries flooding through the capitol’s courtyard below. A kaleidoscope of scenes presented themselves, each increasingly remote: Lylie General Mishknot fjording the Bantagla, bevies of sheklas grazing on the Limitless Fields that stretch over the Twinkling Sea, a wedding attended by a species of two-faced humans before their one-eyed neighbors wiped them out in a genocide of jealousy. How had all of this once existed on his home planet without him knowing? His local government — so much as it could be called such — had made a show of transparency in its education system. But no matter. He was starting to see things he recognized from the Academy, since they were ancient enough to be taught: the creation of the planet seen in rewind, the cooldown of a tamed surface giving way to the fiery infernoscape of its earliest cycles. So, it turns out his was not a Distributor Planet? He made a mental note, as if that knowledge would ever be useful. It seemed he cared about that kind of thing, in any event. Learning — yes, if he pursued that, would he somehow be able to return to the present? Would Agrippa be there? Neither could be his goal. And thankfully it turned out he was interested in the lifecycles of planets, not to mention the mythic beings who assembled some of them. Perhaps they could offer not an escape from his life — for there was no escape — but rather destinations for it.

Yet while jumping thousands of light decades and several millennia from one planet to another, questing deeper back in time in search of a fingerprint from the Glyphs, the pirate encountered one in the spectral sphere between dimensions. A lithe apparition of silverblue tendrils and mute eyes solid yellow, his humanoid sidecestor drifted alongside him as he experienced ever-distance eons. Astonished, he moved his mouth to speak, but couldn’t. Instead the Glyph started the conversation in their silent tongue, which sent a deep reverberation through the pirate’s body that he intuitively understood. The ageless being, which instead of being born and then dying merely emerged from and later would return to their species’ mysterious source, was therefore not quite an individual in our own sense of the word. The pirate remains unaware whether or not he was able to respond, or even if he did. But he knows that the Glyph, in its own way, encouraged him to jump straight back to the very beginning of time. So, he did.

Many millennia later, as he sailed at last to the humble home for which he had searched his entire life, the pirate remembered that final bold strike into the beginning of the universe. Only then did he realize that he had operated the indescribable time traveling device by speaking in the untranslatable language of the Glyphs, even though no person had claimed knowledge of it since Anabel herself. The language had never belonged to him, his lips had not even moved, yet he had felt a heart vibration rattle out down his arm into the indescribable time traveling device, and it would then take him when he wanted to go. But he could not force this language, these vibrations, into being. This time, however, was different. When the Glyph suggested that he visit the beginning of the world, the pirate became too self-conscious about the process. If the Glyph suggested it to him, could it still be something he could communicate to the device as his own sentiment? He’d dreamt of going to the beginning of time all along, but it was so impossibly remote — what could it teach him about his own life? He chastised himself for indulging in escapism, yet he did want to see the beginning of the world, as an end in itself, regardless of where it would lead. As soon as the truth of that sank in, the pirate was on his way.

Yet now, the pirate accelerated through time until he reached a seeming standstill that was in fact an unbelievably violent velocity. Along the way, he began to thin out still more than he had been before, when he had simultaneously experienced all of the moments in his life. Now he was experiencing every moment ever. The part of him that was an individual hardly existed, though from this new perspective the astonishing fact is that he ever thought he existed in the first place. For some time, he wasn’t certain when, he had been dimly self-aware, but now the word ‘awareness’ along with all language ceased to hold any meaning, aside from Glyphic, which that civilization had sutured through the fabric of the multiverse. He never fully arrived at the beginning of the universe yet would never fully leave, either, and for a time any other mode of existence back with dimensional beings seemed impossible. In fact, the clone was no longer a ‘he’, but they weren’t a ‘she’ or even a ‘they’, either, and ‘it’ felt far too insufficient.

One was the universe, though thankfully not for long. For one had experienced all that ever was, so they desired solely to create a world of one’s own within the universe as one dreamt it. And what did that look like? What, in short, did one want? Without realizing it, one had begun their quest back to the present, which one could only begin after journeying though the beginning of oneself back to the birth of the universe. For a surreal time one was everything and an awakening person, whom one would choose to mold however one wished. They could turn themselves into any other person, but chose instead to re-endure the failings, missed chances, along with the rare, well-earned joys. So one began, slowly, to be a clone again, albeit with the knowledge that they would shrug off that descriptor soon.

There was so much he wanted to destroy, to raze to waste: the forces that had made him an aimless, apathetic pirate: the Clonocrome Corporation; pirates; specifically, Durexfer. But even while he remained with the universe he did not have the power to erase them from reality completely. Starting off with a blank map was impossible — the palimpsest of history always remained, even at the precise moment when time began. So yes, even in the present which he was helping to create, the things he wanted most to destroy would be waiting for him. Despite his extraordinary self-searching, the meaning of this fact still eluded him.

Part IV

The clone knew when he wanted to go — the moment he had left behind — but not where. To pursue Agrippa would be creepy, not to mention unnecessary. She had her own path, and he his. Yet where did it lead? His own body felt fuller now, more rounded out and defined as he approached his temporal destination, though that only emphasized how malleable his form had been all along. Regardless, he wanted to arrive where he could bring himself the best to bear. It did not matter the status of the station, only the validity of the vocation. Countless presented themselves: Korlop narding on Aklainet Six, filligadling for Etrophlers, posing as the junior Bishigil Inflerploper for Aka Incorporated. This last option was tempting, since it would allow him to have a hand in interplanetary affairs, setting him on a career trajectory that would eventually enable him to free over 100,000 oklas from captivity. Needless to report, he had far more lucrative, selfless, enjoyable, ennobling, enlightening, and healthy opportunities, as well. Yet his privileged position as a participant in the creation of the multiverse had enabled him to see that each moment is the moment of creation, which completely changed the way he approached his new present. He knew the calculus which would chart his life’s path: it was, like the time machine itself, indescribable. All that remained was to attend to a final matter.

Suddenly, the clone was standing between the rainswept skyscrapes of a grey metropolis, caught in the afterflare crowd of commuters. He held the indescribable time traveling device in one hand as he walked across the footbridge that arched over one of the city’s canal-coffined shantytowns. On the other side, above the ruins of the Library of Triskelia, a massive tree housing the Wise Women of Mari loomed. A glass partition separated the outpost’s courtyard from the rest of the city, and the clone was stopped at the only entrance — a nondescript, minimalist groove in the glass — by a uniformed young woman.

‘State your aim,’ she commanded. The WW never asked a person’s name or rank, only their purpose.

‘I’m dropping off a time machine.’

She was mildly surprised. ‘May I see it?’ He held up the device. ‘Very well. You may schedule a meeting with our lead –’

‘Oh, I don’t need to enter. You can have it.’

And he handed her the device. She blinked.

‘This is a priceless artifact. Why are you just dropping it off?’

‘You need it more than I do. You’ll know why, when the time is right.’

And with that he turned to leave, but the woman stopped him.

‘Wait. When did you go to?’

‘The beginning of the universe.’

The guard looked at the indescribable time traveling device in faltering belief, then back down at the man. ‘What was it like?’

The End.