A Time and a Place

by Joe Mahoney

  “You’re at least a thousand years old,” I said. “What could this archive possibly teach you that you don’t already know?”

  “That is my affair.”

  Whatever knowledge the Necronian was after it had certainly gone to a lot of trouble to get it. What kind of knowledge could possibly justify Jacques’ many despicable acts?

  “I had no choice,” Jacques answered my unspoken thoughts.

  “Nonsense. There’s always a choice,” I said, as the rawk carried me out of the forest toward a difficult choice of my own, and I recalled recently calling into question the very existence of choices.

  XXI

  Hail Mary Pass

  He paced by the side of the road, his mother’s motorcycle helmet clutched tightly between pinched white fingers. It was evening and it was raining—those details he got right. Almost everything else about the accident he got wrong. In his version the accident didn’t happen in front of Samuel’s Coffee House, it happened further east. And not once did the motorcycle hit a Chrysler Newport. Sometimes it never even hit a car. Once it hit a bus. Another time a Go Kart. And although present, I did not participate. Doctor Humphrey was nowhere to be seen either. Nor was the man with the umbrella, or Jack Poirier. Because this was Ridley’s nightmare, and none of us was a part of that.

  Watching from across Water Street, I watched my sister die a dozen deaths. If Ridley was aware of my presence, he never let on. Time and again I watched as he chased down the motorcycle, trying desperately to pass his mother the helmet. Usually she whizzed right by him. Once she slowed down only to wave him off at the last instant. Another time he came within a hair’s breadth of succeeding only to stumble and fall on the wet asphalt just as Katerina’s outstretched fingers grazed the helmet’s fibreglass surface. Always she rode on to collide with whatever Ridley’s unconscious dreamt up to kill her, and it all began again.

  I’d been tempted to try to help the boy the first couple of times but there was really no point. The idea of trying to save Katerina by giving her a motorcycle helmet was absurd. And not just because the idea itself was silly. It was not possible to save Katerina by any means. She was already dead. This was just a dream. And it wasn’t Katerina who needed saving anymore.

  I wrinkled my nose as the stench of fresh vomit announced Jacques’ arrival. The Necronian’s carbuncled tentacles glistened in the moonlight as it slithered up beside me.

  “Release him,” I said.

  “He’s doing this to himself.”

  “Let him go, damn it.”

  “Of course. Just as soon as you give me what I came for.”

  “I don’t even know how.”

  Katerina’s motorcycle crested the hill. Ridley leapt into action only to find himself running in slow motion as though knee deep in molasses.

  “He’s torturing himself,” Jacques said. “I’m just—”

  “Shut up,” I said, looking away an instant before Katerina collided with a steam locomotive.

  “Come and see me,” Jacques said, “when you wake up.”

  The Necronian vanished.

  Katerina strolled up alongside me wearing a pair of old blue jeans with holes in the knees and a battered black leather coat. It was the way I usually remembered her. We stood watching her son try in vain to flag the motorcycle version of herself down, his face a study in sweaty determination as he strained against the invisible forces holding him back. He didn’t stand a chance of getting anywhere near his mother and he knew it. Not now, not ever.

  “Watch out for him Barney. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I told my dead sister.

  I woke up shivering in the damp grass of an alien planet again.

  I lay curled up in a fetal position, barely able to unlock my limbs from one another, as though someone had affixed them together with Crazy Glue. I thought about trying to get up, and rolled over onto my back. When I opened my eyes I found stars circling my head at a rapid clip and it seemed prudent to wait until they disappeared, or at least slowed down. There was a pill in my pocket that could make the stars go away, but it would also sabotage my exit strategy and give me bad breath, so I put that thought out of my mind. Above me, a whole other set of stars lit up the night sky. They weren’t real stars either.

  “The T’Klee have engaged the Necronians,” Sebastian reported.

  Sebastian wasn’t referring to Sweep’s people, but rather to her space-faring cousins—the fleet Iugurtha had referred to earlier, I guessed. Evidently Iugurtha was better prepared for this battle than I’d thought. What other tricks did she have up her sleeve? Enough to tip the scales in her favour? Fresh new stars appeared above me as Sweep’s technologically advanced cousins reprised a battle they had lost a thousand years ago. I sure hoped they fared better this time.

  “The T’Klee fleet is preventing the Necronians from firing on the shield,” Sebastian said. “That will buy us some time.”

  “Good,” I said, and looked toward the compound where fires still raged.

  No one stood amid the charred structures. Iugurtha’s soldiers must have emerged from their trances before me and carried their battle with Jacques to the other side of the compound. Weapons fire in the distance confirmed my suspicions. I levered myself painfully into a sitting position, wincing audibly.

  “Are you going to be all right?” Sebastian asked.

  I didn’t know how to answer that question, so I ignored it. “There’s only one Necronian. It calls itself Jacques.”

  It sounded absurd out loud, and for a few seconds I wasn’t quite sure what to believe. Although I remembered it all with striking clarity, the fantastic, episodic nature of what I had experienced suggested that it had all been a dream.

  “I know,” Sebastian said. “I was there.”

  “You?”

  “We all experienced the Necronian’s telepathic attack, Mr. Wildebear. All of us within range, anyway.”

  “I don’t understand. How could you experience a telepathic attack?”

  When he didn’t answer, I said, “You’d have to be actually conscious, wouldn’t you?”

  “I am conscious, Mr. Wildebear. Which is more than I can say for some people I know.”

  “I mean you’d have to have consciousness. You’d have to be alive. As opposed to artificial. Right?” It sounded offensive stated baldly like that. “No offence.”

  The words “none” and “taken” were conspicuously absent from Sebastian’s response. “My consciousness may be housed in a machine, but I’m at least as alive as you are. I passed the Turing test one hundred and twenty-seven times in a row until Casa Terra could no longer deny my sentience. You probably couldn’t even pass it once.”

  “Could so,” I said, wondering what a Turing test was.

  “Some people think artificial intelligence is superior to biological intelligence,” Sebastian added unnecessarily.

  “Okay, now you just sound scary. I grant you your sentience, if it’s that important to you.”

  “It’s not something you get to grant. It just is.”

  “Fine.” I forced myself the rest of the way to my feet. “I hope this great mechanical sentience of yours appreciates that we have more pressing matters at hand than resolving your existential issues. Because if what we just went through was real, then my nephew’s in a lot of trouble and I need to find him.”

  After that I stood swaying in the cool breeze that swooped down from the nearby hills. I was thinking that what I really wanted had nothing to do with Ridley. What I wanted was to lie back down in the cold, wet grass (which could have been a bed of wet nails for all I cared) and go to sleep. Just for an hour or two, that was all.

  I couldn’t do it of course, not even for a minute or two, because the boy was in more trouble now than ever before and there was no time to lose. So even though I was bone-tired and could barely hold my head up straig
ht and my vision was blurry and my good leg felt as though it were encased in a block of concrete and the other leg hurt like hell, I staggered toward the compound to save a boy who, I reflected, didn’t even want my help. Ridley had made it crystal clear that he had no interest in being rescued. He was an ungrateful wretch, really, with zero appreciation for the suffering I was enduring on his behalf. And, most damning of all, he didn’t even like me.

  Well, I wasn’t so sure I liked him either. But I’d promised his mother I’d look out for him and a promise was a promise. Jacques was torturing Ridley this very second, building on psychological torture the boy himself had no doubt been inflicting on himself for the last four years, torture I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. So I’d do what I could for my sister’s miserable progeny even if it killed me, which it probably would.

  Sebastian interrupted my mental diatribe. “I’ve located him,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Near that tower, or what’s left of it. It’s your nephew, I’m sure of it.”

  “How can you tell?

  “Everyone is transmitting unique identifiers and relative locations.”

  “Is he alive?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not receiving his biometrics.”

  All my uncharitable sentiments of a moment before completely forgotten, I limped as fast as I could toward the tower, and almost tripped over a figure lying prone on its belly in the tall grass. Gingerly, I turned it over. It wasn’t Ridley. Neither was the next. Or the next. Reeling with incipient horror, I lurched from one lifeless body to the next, increasingly afraid to look into the faces of these fallen soldiers lest the next one I saw be Ridley’s. But there was no stopping until I found him.

  I needn’t have worried, of course. Jacques needed Ridley alive, as a bargaining chip.

  “Thank God,” I said aloud when I found him, carefully rolling the boy onto his left side, into what I remembered a First Aid instructor once calling the recovery position, wondering briefly if it was supposed to be the right side or the left, and under what conditions it would even matter.

  What did apply was that Ridley was breathing normally. Although his eyes were open they were unseeing, and his hands were making random, awkward gestures in the air, but he had a healthy if rapid pulse and as near as I could tell he wasn’t bleeding anywhere.

  I knew exactly what was wrong with him, and I could fix it, if I so chose. But if I gave Jacques what it wanted, access to the knowledge in my head, what guarantee did I have that the Necronian would honour its side of the bargain? What if it didn’t release its hold on the boy? What about the T’Klee? Would it let them go? We hadn’t discussed that. And exactly what knowledge would I be giving Jacques that the T’Klee had sacrificed so much to keep secret from the creature? Sacrifices that I would be rendering vain. What gave me the right to do that?

  Barnabus, don’t you dare let me down.

  I gazed down at my sister’s boy, my heart in my throat. He looked completely vulnerable without his cockiness to hide behind. Just a little boy, really. What would happen to him if I did nothing? What if Jacques destroyed his mind? How would I ever be able to live with myself?

  “Help!” I shouted, as it occurred to me that I might be wrong, that maybe what was wrong with him had nothing to do with a hideous alien grip on his mind, and all he really needed was conventional medical attention. But no medics were forthcoming. They were all embroiled in a battle on the other side of the compound, if any were still alive. Ridley’s fate was in my hands alone.

  With what felt like my last ounce of strength, I stood and staggered toward the disquieting sounds on the other side of the compound, the noise of weapons fire and Necronian wands crackling and the shouts and screams of both humans and T’Klee. Toward Ridley’s salvation. I intended to end this nightmare right now by finding Jacques and giving the Necronian what it wanted.

  I lurched past the still burning remains of a Necronian spacecraft and half a dozen partially melted cylindrical reservoirs. One of the reservoirs had been breached. Luminescent green goo was leaking out.

  Sebastian spoke up. “You could not possibly be heading in a worse direction.”

  I ignored him, focussing instead on an eerie green aura that lit up the sky beyond the next hill, the significance of which I couldn’t begin to fathom.

  “It’s dangerous here,” he went on. “Nobody here can protect you.”

  “Not looking for protection.”

  “You should be. Aren’t you afraid?”

  I had been afraid before. I was too tired to be afraid now. Too intent on saving Ridley. It occurred to me that Sebastian might have a personal reason for asking about fear. Now that he no longer knew the future, fear would be a part of the equation for him. “Don’t worry. Everything’ll be fine.”

  “You say that but you don’t believe it. You said it because you think I’m afraid. You were trying to make me feel better.”

  “You got me.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “Good for you,” I said, irritated that he hadn’t appreciated my attempt at compassion. “What, are you not capable of emotions like that?”

  “I’ve known fear.”

  “Well don’t be afraid now. I have a plan.”

  “If your plan is what I think it is, it’s not a good plan.”

  “It’s all I got.”

  “Now you’re making me afraid.”

  The sounds of battle increased along with the mysterious green glow and the steepness of the slope. Near the top of the hill I got down on all fours and crawled through grass as plush as a shag carpet until it was possible to peek over the top without revealing too much of myself.

  The nearest combatant was about fifty yards away—a Necronian, holding a wand aloft in one of its slimy tentacles and moving faster than I’d ever seen a Necronian move before. Slender shafts of green light extended from its wand, intersecting with other Necronian wands, creating a neon latticework high in the air above the Necronians’ bloated heads.

  “What’s with the wands?” I asked Sebastian in a whisper.

  “It’s my guess that the enemy uses them to amplify its psychic energy. It probably wouldn’t be anywhere near as powerful without them.”

  I wasted a couple of seconds wondering futilely how to deprive Jacques of its wands.

  Elements of what I was looking at shifted, as though instead of real life I was looking at a video from which several frames had been cut. Afterward it seemed to me that the Necronians were in different places. The first time this happened I blinked to confirm that there was nothing wrong with my eyes. When it happened again it was obvious that Jacques was up to some kind of mental tomfoolery.

  Concealed behind trees, rocks, vehicles, alien machinery, and whatever other makeshift barriers they’d managed to scavenge, Iugurtha’s troops kept up an impressive fusillade against the Necronians (I could not consistently think of them as a single entity). By all rights they should have been mowing the Necronians down. Instead, precious few Necronians fell. Jacques was distorting reality. It could probably keep that up all day. The individual Necronians were not where they appeared to be. Pretty hard to hit that way.

  I watched in horror as the Necronians rooted Iugurtha’s soldiers out one by one and disposed of them without mercy. Iugurtha would not be able to sustain such losses for long. I was not capable of watching for long.

  It needed to stop, right now. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. After several seconds I expelled the air forcefully from my lungs. I opened my eyes and stood, prepared to give myself up, and put a stop to this pointless battle.

  Sebastian said, “Behind you.”

  I whirled. A Necronian had slithered its way out of a partially destroyed Necronian reservoir and was starting up the hill toward me, its multiple tentacles outstretched as though in greeting. My first impulse was to run. A
nd by ‘impulse’, I mean ‘profound primeval urge’.

  I inhaled, hoping that another deep breath would calm me, but the resulting shallow, shuddery breath left me feeling more frangible than ever. No matter. This was it then. I would just give myself up to Jacques and be done with it. I limped back down the hill, past the burning spaceships, hoping that whatever Jacques did to me wouldn’t hurt too much, but before I could make my way into the Necronian’s squalid embrace a burst of automatic weapon’s fire erupted from behind me. The Necronian jerked spasmodically. It took another entire round to put the creature down for good. I looked to see who had fired and was startled to discover several rawk lurking nearby. As near as I could make out in the emerald twilight created by the Necronians’ wands, they were ridden by humans with faces painted to resemble fierce cats.

  One man had not painted his face, though. A skeletal figure with stringy auburn hair and a patchy blonde beard that didn’t even come close to concealing a fundamentally misshapen head sat hunched on the foremost rawk. He was regarding me with feverish eyes that loomed large in an emaciated face. Seconds passed before it dawned on me who I was staring at.

  “Dear God,” I whispered.

  Schmitz’ voice, harsher than I remembered, belied his apparent infirmity. “Nope, just me. Get him mounted, boys.”

  Two of the soldiers dismounted as one and came for me. With Schmitz’ intentions unclear, self-respect seemed to demand that I at least make an attempt to flee, but there wasn’t really anyplace to go. So when Schmitz’ soldiers apprehended me, I didn’t resist. Instead I spent the short walk into their midst attempting to reconcile the Schmitz I knew with the grotesque caricature of a man mounted on the beast before me.