Nice Way to Start a Week

Publishers Weekly grants all us Phoenixers a starred review of Clockwork Phoenix 3:

Clockwork Phoenix 3

Edited by Mike Allen, Norilana (www.norilana. com), $11.95 paper (316p) ISBN 978-1-60762062-4
Allen’s third volume of extraordinary short stories reaches new heights of rarity and wonder. Marie Brennan sets the bar high with “The Gospel of Nachash,” a fine reinterpretation of the Adam and Eve legend from a fresh perspective. Tori Truslow’s scholarly “Tomorrow Is Saint Valentine’s Day” tells the story of the Great Ice Train and its encounter with the merfolk on the Moon. Gemma Files’s “Hell Friend” and C.S.E. Cooney’s “Braiding the Ghosts” are sinister, spine-tingling ghost stories. Cat Rambo deals with realism and escapism in her futuristic “Surrogates,” where appearances and reality are mutable. Shweta Narayan’s “Eyes of Carven Emerald” eloquently rewrites the history of Alexander the Great to include mechanical entities. Without a wrong note, all the stories in this anthology admirably fulfill Allen’s promise of “beauty and strangeness.” (July)

My own humble contribution to the anthology is ‘Murder in Metachronopolis’, which is a tale of a hard-boiled private detective in the City at the End of Time trying not to take a case from the Masters of Eternity, the time-travelers, who once employed him as a Paradox Proctor, i.e., hired muscle.

For those of you who are interested, here is a passage from the opening, which happens to be section 16. (Sections 1 and 1a are somewhere in the middle of the story. The numbering is chronological, which does not follow the order of events).

He didn’t just sitthere and tell me what I was about to say, like most MastersI’d met. Maybe he was less rude than most; or maybe he wasjust waiting for me to say something to let him know he was inthe right version. Or, most likely, maybe he wasn’t a Master ofEternity at all.

Whatever. “Spill it. Whatever you’re here to say. Say it.Then get out.”

“I’m here to hire you to solve a murder, Mr. Frontino.”

“And you’re pretending to be a Master? Walk back intothe past and look for yourself.”

“It hasn’t happened yet.” Again, the crooked smile.

“Cute. And are you going to stop it if I solve it?”

“Not me. Not that I foresee.” Again, the smile.

“Solve a crime and let it happen anyway, is that theplan? Sorry. Not interested. I’m retired. ’Bye.”

“Retired? But aren’t you the only Private Investigatorin Metachronopolis? You’ve even got a fedora and a trenchcoat!”

“Everyone dressed like that when I’m from. And I’mretired as far as the Bigwigs are concerned. Some Time Masterwants to solve a crime? Step into the past and watch it happenor the future when it’s already been solved. Look it up inhistory book. What do you need mere mortals for? Manpower?Double yourself up a hundred times.”

“There are limits to the powers of the Masters ofEternity. Grim limits. Though, sometimes, where exactly those boundaries lay are . . . misty.”

He seemed to think that was funny. Before things got too humorous, I decided to cut things short. I opened the firing aperture with a twist of the wrist to maximum cone-of-blast and let him see me set the timer. The timer started beeping a countdown.

“I don’t take cases from Time Masters, see? All you guys are the same. The murderer turns out to be yourself, or you when you were younger. Or me. Or an alternate version of me or you who turns out to be his own father fighting himself because for no reason except that that’s the way it was when the whole thing started. Which it never did, on account of there’s no beginning and no reason for any of it. Oh, brother, you time travelers make me sick.”

He drew himself up, all smiles gone now, all pretense at seeming human. My guess was that that was not even his real body, just some poor sap he murdered to have his personality jacked into the guy’s brain. Perfect disguise. No fingerprints, retina prints, no nothing. Just another flatliner dead for the convenience of the Masters of Eternity.

“Why did you retire from the service, Mr. Frontino?”