Rhona’s Tavern and Spacetime Portal

by S. L. Myers

The two boon companions walked through the snowy woods along the cobblestoned road, the night lit by hissing gas lampposts. Ahead, just seen through the scarecrow trees, a neon sign glowed bright green—RHONA’S TAVERN. The modest two-story brick establishment was the only structure on the icy, tumbling, carbonaceous asteroid trapped in the bubble of frozen time.

The two were deep in a conversation very few in any time or place would have been able to understand, talking over and with each other in a mix of Common Tongue circa 5345 New Era, and in the woofs, squeaks, and chirps of the Deinonychus, circa Early Cretaceous period.

The man and proto-raptor turned off the road and followed the narrow, winding path leading to the tavern. They stopped on the stone landing near the oak and wrought iron door with its leaded glass and waited for the defense systems to finish their scans.

A click. The heavy door swung out, and the two friends stepped in, blasters raised, ready for anything, everything.

The interior was a replica of an old English pub, from the oaken beer casks to the worn floorboards and sturdy but mismatched tables and chairs. In the corner, a fusion cast-iron stove silently powered the weapon systems and temporal installations. A hearth large enough for five people to stand in was prominent in the center of the main wall. Its plasma fire popped and hissed, the flames invisible but throwing a cheery light.

The woman standing behind the long bar of polished mahogany had a pulse rifle aimed at their heads, and after a few tense seconds, she relaxed and laid the hefty weapon on the gleaming counter.

“An old man and a dinosaur walk into a bar,” the old man said, flashing a wide smile while holstering his weapons, the feathered raptor doing the same. “Let me know if you’ve heard this one, Rhona.”

“Hamish, I’ve heard them all.” Rhona pressed a button and reset the gluttonous amount of firepower aimed at the door, both inside and out. She came around the bar, wiping her hands on her static apron. “Any problems finding the time and place?”

“Right where you said,” Hamish said.

“The protocols?” she asked.

“To the fractal. What’s the issue?”

“A temporal void was detected several dimensions over. It’ll need checking out.”

“Easy-peasy. A hop, skip, and a jump.”

“Let’s hope.” Rhona gave the old man the once-over. His dark face was angles of polished mahogany, and his hair a wiry white corona that stood straight up from his trim head. He wore a skintight, violently purple bodysuit and cowboy boots of elephant hide stolen from some barbaric age. Dual custom-made biometric blasters hung from his narrow hips.

He was even more gaunt than when she’d last seen him. But despite his extreme age, he moved with the ease and agility of a young man. Not for the first time, she wondered what held Hamish Spacer together and how much it cost.

“How are you, Ham?” she finally asked.

“Older and richer.” He leaned in and gave her a dry peck. “You look bone-tired, Rhona. You should get out more, visit a beach or something. Get fucked.”

“I get out plenty,” she said testily. “And watch your mouth.”

Ham glanced around the plasma fire-lit tavern. “I like the new place. Quaint. How’s business?”

“The same. Always some gazillionaire needing a new life.” She turned to the proto-raptor. The smallish female was covered with dark, iridescent feathers except for the pointy face bristling with seventy pointy teeth. The dinosaur had extensive weaponry and shielding strapped everywhere and a speech assistor at her throat.

“Still working with this grifter, Numi?” Rhona asked.

“He’s still paying me,” the little dinosaur rasped.

Rhona knew the two couldn’t be separated for all the money in all the universes. She went behind the bar and glanced at the screens. “Where the hells is Brains?”

“He’ll be here.” Hamish pulled out a stool while the raptor kicked aside two others and stood in their place, perching a bony elbow on the counter.

“What can I get you two?” Rhona asked.

“Old Crow Bourbon, neat,” said the old man. “The three-thousand-year-old bottle, if you still have it.”

“Not to worry. Numi?”

“Korelian shitsky for me.”

Rhona leaned close to the little raptor and looked into her nictitating eyes. “Why do you always order the whiskey if you don’t like it?”

“Maybe she just likes the taste of shit,” Ham said. He and Numi laughed at some private joke, the raptor’s little nostrils flaring.

Rhona rolled her eyes and turned to the heavily bottled shelves, catching her reflection in the bar’s mottled mirror—a rumpled and careworn alewife, graying hair caught in a scarf, a static apron tied around a middle made thicker from various killing devices. Ham was right. She looked tired. More concerning, she looked older. A stir of worry in her stomach. How much time had objectively passed since they’d last seen each other?

She brushed off the thought as she took down a dusty, squat bottle and poured several fingers into a rocks glass, sliding it over to Hamish. “Brains is now officially late.”

“He’s always late.” Hamish took a deep swallow of the bourbon and wiped his lips delicately with his fingertips.

“Since when?” Rhona poured out a fiery liquid into a reinforced glass.

“Since always,” the old man said. “What’s the problem?”

“Your memory, that’s what. He’s never late.” She gave him a side glance as she placed the unstable alcohol in front of the feathered theropod.

The curtain behind the bar twitched open, revealing several racks of humming machinery. A slender young woman came through with a tray of sandwiches. Her strawberry blond hair was braided around a pretty head. She wore a simple white blouse with long woolen skirts tucked into her apron ties on one side.

“Put the tray on the counter, Lottie,” Rhona said before the girl could bolt.

The young woman stepped warily forward, her eyes fixed on the raptor. She set the tray at the counter’s edge and darted away, the curtains swinging.

“Fresh,” Ham murmured to Numi, who nodded agreeably. Although she likely had a different idea of ‘fresh.’ “Who’s the sweetie pie?” he asked Rhona.

Rhona looked sharply at him. “Our newest constant. Arrived a few days ago.”

“She doesn’t look local,” Ham said. “Where’d you find her?”

“Early nineteenth-century London. A barmaid in a public house.”

“Faraday’s farts, Rhona, our constants get more primitive with each iteration. I know you like to train them from the ground up, but this girl’s never even seen a lightbulb.”

“They’re being eliminated too quickly. Thought I’d go back a bit further.” She let out a long sigh as she rubbed an aching temple. “But acclimating her is proving a challenge.”

Hamish’s ancient face took on a clever look as he shifted forward on the stool. “I could take her under my wing, train her up with the sensitivity of an older, more experienced…”

Rhona dropped her reinforced hand on his arm, the fingers of iridium-alloy digging into his ropy forearm and leaned close. “She’s a tenth of your age, old man. And if you so much as touch her or make her feel uncomfortable in any way, I’ll break your arm in a time and place you’ll never see coming. And it’ll stay broke.” She squeezed the arm, her eyes never leaving his. “Do you understand?”

He made a play at a smile. “You know me, Rhona, it was just talk. It’s not like she’ll be around long anyway. Not worth the investment in time.”

Rhona slowly released his arm.

Ham maintained eye contact for another moment and then pulled his arm close, massaging it. “What’s so special about this one, anyway?”

“She was costly.”

“How many temporal lines?”

“All of them.”

“Planck’s sweaty balls, that must have been a massacre.” Ham looked over the sandwiches on the tray and picked one up. He next spoke around a mouthful of bacon, lettuce, and tomato. “She’ll be a powerhouse while she lasts. Does she know?”

“Of course not. It’s enough right now for her to deal with being in a different timestream.”

“What if we have to jump?”

“She’ll go. Not ideal, but—” Rhona popped straight, eyes on the monitors, the pulse rifle in her hands. “Brains is at the door. Why didn’t the sensors pick him up?”

The oaken door swung out, and a boy in a lab coat over dinosaur pajamas walked in, a shrieker in each hand. His enlarged brain was visible through the transparent skull. The boy flickered, and a shrill alarm started to blare.

Ham, Rhona, Numi, and every blaster, laser, vaporizer, and disintegrator hidden throughout the tavern targeted the boy as he split into two boys, then four, eight, sixteen.

“Who’s the breach?” the exponentially multiplying boys cried out, spinning, weapons wheeling in all directions.

“Brains, you leptonian moron, you are!” Ham yelled.

The boys’ eyes all widened with fear. “The coalescing tachyons—” Eighty streams of death incinerated the youths, just as several streams from an unobserved portal behind the grandfather clock incinerated everyone else in the room.

“About time.” Rhona watched the boy on the monitor as he strolled down the snowy path, kicking at stray lumps of ice. Each snowflake assessed his state; each sensor proclaimed him clean from coalescing tachyons. She picked up the rifle and pressed the button. The oaken door swung out.

The boy walked in, a lab coat over dinosaur pajamas and a shrieker in each hand. His cybernetic brain pulsed against a cranium of glass.

“You’re late, Brains,” Rhona said sharply, placing the rifle back on the counter. “You could have mucked up the quantum membrane’s integrity.”

“Sorry, Rhona, you hid the place too well. Amazing you have any kind of a customer base.” The boy holstered the guns and stopped next to the raptor. “Hey, lizard breath. I brought you a treat.” He pulled out a crumpled stasis bag from a pocket and eased out a flattened rodent. The second the rat hit the air, it started to inflate, its hind leg and an ear quivering as it returned to life.

Numi’s jaws snapped the rat out of his hand and shook the returning life out of it. She tilted her head back, and the limp body slid down her long throat. A final swallow and she burped up a spray of animal hair.

“Brains, you glass-headed imbecile.” Rhona ran a sterilizer over the polished counter. “I told you to stop bringing in outside organisms. They could contaminate the bubble.”

“You worry too much.” Brains went around to the casks and drew himself a foaming tankard of ale. He’d bartended for Rhona for years and knew his way around a bar.

“Worrying is what keeps us alive, thank you very much for nothing.”

The boy took a long appreciative swallow and wiped off the foam mustache with his arm. “So what’s the rush, Rhona?”

“An indeterminacy sensor was triggered. Likely just a magnetar hiccup.”

“Want me to run some probabilities?” he asked.

Before she could answer, a young woman came through the swinging doors—a glimpse of blinking gadgetry behind her—carrying a tray. Strawberry blond hair was pulled back from a pretty face. She wore a simple white blouse, a modest skirt, and a static apron tied around her slim waist. Eyeing the brains of the boy, she deposited the tray of sandwiches and headed back through the doors.

“Who’s the new sweetmeats?” Ham asked, eyeing the still swinging doors over his tumbler.

Rhona’s hand of adamantine bone fell on the old man’s scrawny arm and squeezed enough to ensure his full attention. “That’s our new constant. I like this one, so if you’re thinking of—”

“I was just yanking your chain, boss. You know me.”

“I do, and if it happens again, I’ll remove that stick arm of yours and feed it to the plasma fire.” She released his arm and went back to sanitizing the bar.

Hamish massaged his arm. “You have anger issues, Rhona.”

“I have idiot issues.” Suddenly, a high-pitched alarm blared, and Rhona had the pulse rifle in her hands just as the room was bathed in a brilliant green light. The time scavengers were incinerated long before the eighty streams of death could activate.

Brains clunked the empty tankard hard against the countertop with a satisfied sigh. “What’s the emergency, Rhona? I almost had that bit of negative reality figured out.”

“Sensors flagged a superposition of zeta particles. Probably just a rogue black hole, but it’ll have to be checked out. Would make a perfect training run for our new constant.” Rhona pressed a button under the counter. “I have a good feeling about this one.”

A young woman walked through the sliding door and stood stiffly next to Rhona, her bright red hair pulled into a ponytail. She wore a simple white blouse tucked into smart-jeans and clutched a large tablet with the title Open Pit Temporal Mining Procedures. She gave them a shy smile.

“What’s your name, dear?” Ham asked.

“Lottie, sir.”

“Where do you hail from, Lottie?”

“Southwark, sir—London. Non-spacetime travel era, like.”

“How long with us?” he asked.

“Three months this Lord’s Day.”

“Any spatial adjustment problems?”

“A bit wobbly, now and again.”

“How do you like it here?”

“Me da’ had a pub in Borough Market, so this ain’t so different, see.” She smiled nervously and glanced at Rhona.

“The interrogation is over, Ham,” Rhona said sharply. “Time for Lottie to get back to her studies.”

The girl nodded and hurried out, the door hissing closed just as the barroom was bathed in a lurid green light from a swirling portal. An oscillating cylinder flew out and incinerated everyone inside.

“So where’s the fire?” Brains asked, licking off his beer mustache. “I was so close to approximating the scaffolding of time.”

Rhona stood behind the bar, arms folded. “A decoherence has occurred in the quantum matrices. There’s a temporal leak somewhere near.”

The raptor dropped her rat, and Brains pulled out his interdimensional slide rule.

“Bohr’s big ass, Rhona,” Hamish said, glancing around the small tavern. “How much of this is even in the same timeline?”

She shrugged. “It’s just a tiny crack, or we wouldn’t be here. You’ll have to jump, find it, and fix it. Brains, start calculating the cosmic ley lines.”

“Already on it.”

“What about the constant?” Ham asked. “You’ve been mum on this one, Rhona.”

“I have a good feeling about her, didn’t want to jinx it.” Rhona pushed the call button.

A young woman in a standard silver temporal suit stepped through the aperture between the bar and the storied quantum supercomputers, the iris whirring shut. Bright red hair grazed her shoulders, framing an eager face.

“Lottie, time to meet your team.” She nodded at Ham. “This antique is Hamish Spacer, our flogistics guy. There’s nothing he can’t acquire in any dimension or age. You need it? He’ll find it. A real bloodhound.”

Ham put the tankard down and saluted her with his one good arm. “At your service, lovely lady.”

“Brains is the data cruncher.” Rhona indicated the boy busy with various instruments in back. “He computes the cosmic ley lines, the quantum flux-tubulars, and everything in between. His maturation has been stalled at just that age where the brain is most receptive to processing new information without all the baggage of the mature mind. It’s not without its disadvantages. You’ll be doing more than your fair share of babysitting during jumps.”

She turned to the dinosaur. “This improbable creature is Numi. Our muscle and natural sensor. Her finely-honed prehistoric instincts are quicker than any manmade technology. Nothing gets past her.”

The feathered raptor looked over, a rat tail hanging from her toothy mouth for a moment before being sucked down her gullet like a spaghetti noodle with a snap of her jaws.

Rhona didn’t have to explain Lottie’s role—a singular being in a multiverse of duplicates. A constant in a flux of branching timestreams. She was their homing beacon.

As singulars, constants were immune to the quantum entanglement discontinuities inherent with spacetime travel. Jump more than a few timestreams without one, and you risk being stranded in the wrong time forever.

Over the years, the team had had hundreds of constants—men and women, young and old, and few lasting out the month. Rhona was the architect of their constants. She found them, zipped through spacetime eliminating their copies, and trained them. The more timelines and eliminating, the more potent the constant.

“Did you warn her about the assassins, Rhona?” Ham asked.

She glared at the old grifter. “Lottie knows what she needs to know. What she doesn’t need is you throwing her off her game.”

The plasma fire suddenly flared up as three frothing portals opened in the ceiling. Lottie dived through the aperture just before the other four were blown to smithereens.

“—incessantly try to kill you, dear,” the old grifter was saying. “Unfortunately, a constant burns brighter than anything in the timestreams. While they last.”

The young woman cried out and ran back through the holographic doorway just as a swirling green miasmic portal opened in the tavern’s center. Teams of silver-suited doppelgangers jostled within, weapons out—and everyone in the room was disintegrated.

“Curie’s tits, Rhona,” Hamish said, glancing around the plasma fire-lit tavern. “That felt weird. Are we sure this is the same timeline?”

Numi gripped the sides of her triangle face, the deep-set eyes unblinking. “Am I even Numi?”

“I’m running probability algorithms right now,” Brains said from behind his instrument panel, his child’s hands racing across the keyboards. “So far, no evidence of time splintering.”

Rhona turned to the boy. “Boson integrals?”

A green eruption and instantaneous combustion of everything inside the taproom.

“Fermion integrals, Brains?” Rhona asked.

“Not good. Our stream appears vulnerable.” He studied a wall of screens.

“Then you leave now. Suit up.”

A green dimensional rupture and total implosion.

“Our stream is leaking temporal fluid,” the boy said, studying the data from the supercomputer. “There’s a rupture in the quantum membrane.”

A hundred death rays from a hundred micro portals vaporized everyone inside the bar.

Brains jumped up, his chair tipping and clattering to the floor. “We’re leaking buckets of time!”

“Everyone suit up. You leave now!”

“Rhona,” Ham said quietly. “We’re already suited.”

“Lottie!” Rhona screamed, lunging for the pulse rifle just as the alarm started up and six portals opened and fried everyone to carbon.

Lottie walked through the force field, her image wavering for a moment. She wore the new liquid-mercury temporal suit. Licks of red hair framed her intelligent, composed face. She walked over to the long table where Rhona was tinkering with a beefy-looking weapon. “How goes the Obliterator of all Matter?” she asked.

Rhona glanced up, pushing strands of gray hair from her exhausted, shiny face. “It’s done. I pity any team who goes after you guys now.”

Lottie picked up the surprisingly light firearm and looked it over. “Great job, Rhona. Now go suit up.”

The woman spun in her pneumatic chair. “Do you mean it?”

“Absolutely.” She smiled at the older woman. “You’ve earned it.”

“You don’t have to tell me twice.” Rhona jumped up and ran through the force field.

“The good Lord willing,” Lottie murmured.

A moment later, Ham and Numi stepped through the plasma-fire hearth, chatting and laughing, their helmets retracting.

“Just in time, you two,” Lottie said. “Did you find it?”

“Right in that abandoned warp minefield like you said. Almost lost an arm scooping it out of that gunk.” Ham held out a phasing, pulsing donut-shaped object. “But what in the fractals is it?”

Brains looked over from his holographic instrument panel. “It’s a zero-probability tokamak with non-elastic properties.”

“Thanks for nothing, kid.”

“In layman’s terms, it’s a perfect homing device because it doesn’t exist. It’s made from negative reality held together by artificial time. Can’t be altered, duplicated, or destroyed, and it always returns here.”

“So it’s a constant?” Ham asked.

“Exactly.” Brains zipped up his flowing, shiny suit and took the buzzy torus from him. “Apparently, I’ll invent it in another five hundred years. It was Lottie’s idea to extrapolate out my current research and build a sensor to find it in the future.”

Rhona joined them in her newly minted liquid suit, beaming. “Ready, boss.”

“Hamish?” Lottie asked her husband.

“Chronometric gravitonic ore identified, Luv.”

“Brains?” she asked the cleverest boy ever created.

“Interdimensional ley lines mapped.”

“Rhona?”

“Weapons synchronized.”

“Numi?”

“Arrgggggeeelll!”

Lottie pulled the lever, and the plasma fire swirled and morphed into a green miasmic portal. “Let’s go, team.”
Numi leaped in first. Brains next, tucking the spinning bit of manmade time into a pocket. Ham sent her an air kiss as he rolled in backward. As Rhona approached, an alarm blared, and she turned, her face twisted in horror.

Lottie shoved Rhona through the gateway to safety as she brought up the multi-barreled antimatter disintegrator and fired round after round at the rapidly multiplying green seething portals, grenades and death rays thick in the air, bottles exploding, mirrors smashing, wood splintering, the portals flickering out one after the other, the teams behind them incinerated to crisps until the breaches stopped and she stood alone in the razed tavern, her suit smoking and her hair singed.

She ran a hand through the smoldering hair, smoothed over the holes in the liquid suit, and slung the weapon over her shoulder. Then she stepped through the churning hearth to join her team for a little profitable time scavenging.

Outside, in a frozen bubble of time on some forgotten chunk of space rock, the snow fell slowly, and the scarecrow trees swayed gently. Stars carpeted the sky, and a dying sun dipped on the horizon, throwing long shadows over the snowy landscape. In the growing evening, the modest brick building’s sign blinked on. LOTTIE’S TAVERN.

Host Commentary

It’s only the Blinovitch Limitation Effect if it happens in Doctor Who. Anywhere else it’s sparkling temporal distortion. And what a sparkling temporal distortion this is! I’m reminded, in the best of ways, of both everyone’s favourite Gallifreyan and the abjectly terrifying British comic series Indigo Prime: Killing Time.

That’s a story about what happens when two people paid to prune time find themselves extremely pruned in return and is officially the Horror story I Was Too Young To Read. Possibly even now.

The common ground, the constant if you like, between that story and this one is the way that characters’ actions both innovate and damn. A temporal pincer movement, to borrow a phrase from Tenet, where you invent the means of saving yourself in the future to save yourself in the past. Ted Logan remembering to hack his way out of the police station in the future in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is another great example.

But that damnation runs two or three different ways here. There’s the damnation Rhona inflicts on Lottie and so many other Constants, cheerfully pruning them out of existence to power their enterprise. There’s the social damnation of being eternal retail staff, the cheerful barmaid at the end of the Universe. There’s the damnation of certainty too, of knowing where your story goes or at worst hearing an echo of it every time you wake up.

But there’s also something more than that, the quiet revolution of revolution itself. Change not as a force to be feared but as an inevitable progression, the one piece of linear time you can’t escape. You can check out, and you can leave, but sometimes you end up owning the bar.

But wider still is the fact this story can be read in wildly different ways. It’s an endless cycle of violent death. It’s a horror story. It’s a science fiction time travel adventure story. It’s an elaborate revenge story. It’s a story about things working out in the end. It’s all of these things and more, Myers trusting us to land in the middle and swim to the side we want to. No certainty, just hope, in the face of an endless ticking clock. Nicely done everyone.

Onto the subject of subscribing and support: Escape Pod has long survived on donations alone, and even though there’s ads now, subscribing through our Patreon remains the best way to ensure we can keep bringing you one story, told well. And, if you subscribe at the $7 tier, you can get rid of the ads again! So if you’d like to support what we and the rest of Escape Artists do, please join our Patreon at patreon.com/EAPodcasts through your browser, to avoid paying the app store fees. Prefer another method? There are details for supporting us via Twitch, Amazon Prime, Ko-Fi and PayPal on EscapeArtists.net, or you can reach out directly by email at donations@escapeartists.net with any questions and someone will get back to you.

The legal bit: Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license. That means you can share it, and please do!, but you cannot sell it and you cannot change it; if you want specifics, check creativecommons.org. Our music is by Daikaiju.

Oh and one last thing, Columbo style. Escape Pod is proud to say that we have partnered with Sleepphones headphones to provide a special Escape Pod branded set of headphones.

SleepPhones® headphones are soft headphones that you can wear while you sleep. They’re comfortable, slim and essentially ‘headphones in a headband’. So you put it on, unplug and surround yourself in an ultimate sound experience – without disturbing, or being disturbed by, the person next to you. SleepPhones® headphones were designed by a family doctor and provide wearable comfort that’s literally music to your ears and they’re available with both standard 3.5mm audio jacks and Bluetooth.

They’re easy to clean, comfortable and now you can get them with our logo on the headband! And you can get a 10% discount off your order of the Escape Pod branded sleep phones if you use the coupon code EscapePOD (all one word.)

Follow the link in our shownotes to Sleepphones and remember the code ESCAPEPOD to get 10% off!

Escape Pod is part of the Escape Artists Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, and this episode is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license. Download and listen to the episode on any device you like, but don’t change it or sell it. Theme music is by permission of Daikaijiu.

We’ll see you next week. Before then, we’re sending you off into the week with this quote from Tim Travers and the Time Travelers Paradox:

“What the fuck about this day has led you to believe that anything could be impossible?!”

We’ll see you next time, folks. Until then, have fun.