Dickhead hardly heard any of it. He tuned out after the first sentence, looking around into the darkness, listening, watching. “You hear that?” he said, looking off to one side. “You hear that?”
“Hear what? All I hear is you sweating.” Which he was, even though the ‘conditions’ were those of a winter’s evening in rural France — exactly what Dickhead’s obsession with France was about, Spider had no idea, but suspected some version of what used to be called the “cultural cringe” — and Spider wished he had a jacket. Dickhead, meanwhile, was sweating. His thinning hair damp and stuck to his bulging forehead; the collar of his t-shirt wet. Dickhead was bursting out all over with the cold, dank funk of ‘oh shit, I’m gonna die!’ “You sure you can’t hear that? Yes, there! Right there!” Dickhead said, turning and pointing off behind him.
“I see nothing. I hear nothing. Just, you know, some crickets, a few lonely frogs, and you going on and on.”
A tiny crack, as of a snapping twig, somewhere off in the cold, dark distance.
“Okay,” Spider said. “That I heard.”
“There! You see! There! Get up. We can’t stay here.”
“But it’s comfy, sitting out here in the middle of a field in the middle of the night, chatting with an old pal,” Spider said. “I thought you could order up some food, some wine, it’d be like—”
Dickhead was up. He pulled a pistol out of the waistband of his sweatpants. Spider watched him efficiently check the magazine, work the slide, and flip the safety. Spider felt a twinge of dread; something might actually be going on. He got up. “Plan?”
“Kill the fuckers before they kill us.”
“Sound plan.”
“Come on.”
They set off, away from the dim light surrounding the desk and chairs, and into the darkness. Spider, with his boots, managed okay; Dickhead, in thongs, had a harder time of it. After a moment, Dickhead paused, and with a quick motion, stepped out of the thongs. He was now barefoot, and made better progress across the field.
Spider, trying to keep Dickhead in view in the moonless dark, slogged on. He was reasonably fit from all his cycling, so he expected to go a while before fatigue set in, but the soft ground was proving more challenging than he expected. Then, Dickhead stopped, turned to Spider, and said, “If the worst happens, okay? I need you to be ready. Promise me, Spider. Okay? Promise me.”
“Promise you what?”
“Spider, you owe me, remember? You owe your life to me. This is when you pay up. If I go down, you have to, you know…”
“I have to what? Eat your bloody heart and bury you in a cairn of stones?”
“You have to avenge me.”
“Avenge you? Avenge you?”
“Spider. Promise me.”
“But—”
Then everything went silent, bugs, birds, frogs, the slow tick of the simulated universe overhead. Dickhead stood up straight, his eyes huge, frightened. He looked back at Spider, and mouthed something Spider couldn’t quite make out. Spider felt foolish, clomping about in a field like this at night. If anything, he felt more at risk from Dickhead’s gun than from any unseen enemies — but out of nowhere there was a high, fast swooping sound, Dickhead said, “Oh, fuck,” and turned to Spider, gushing blood from his throat. Spider could not actually see any wound there; the blood, nonetheless, was coming out. “Help me, promise me.” Dickhead mouthed, stricken, clutching at his throat, as if to hold it together. Before Spider could react, before he could even move, John Stapleton and two goons in black stepped into faint view. One of the goons relieved Dickhead of his unfired gun. Dickhead stood rooted to the spot, still gushing blood darker than the night, the metallic stench unbelievable and hot. “But—” Spider said, stupidly. Stapleton reached out, grabbed Dickhead’s huge head. He said to one of his goons, “Make sure you get a good shot of the head, okay?” and the goon produced something Spider guessed, in stunned panic, was a camera. But as Stapleton first slid Dickhead’s severed head sideways, then lifted it by the hair clear off his hemorrhaging body — Dickhead’s body stayed rigid for a long, horrible moment, then collapsed at Spider’s feet — the head disappeared out of Stapleton’s hand. Gone. Just like that. Spider thought he saw, in that moment, before the head vanished, Dickhead flashing a wink at him. It occurred to Spider that right now, even as he stood there, quaking with fear, Dickhead’s head would be popping back into existence in the break room fridge, ready for his Past Self to find it when he went to get some milk for his coffee.
Stapleton, standing there with his arm up, as if he were still holding Dickhead’s enormous head, looked ridiculous. Gobsmacked, he stared at his hand, then he turned to his two goons. “Did you see that?”
Of the goons, one said he had seen the head vanish; the other said he was trying to get the camera settings right and missed it, but, “whoa, you — where the fuck did he go?”
“If I knew that…” Stapleton said, lowering his hand, and turning to Spider. The observant goon leveled Dickhead’s pistol at Spider’s head. Spider could smell the gun oil on it. He could just make out the huge hexagonal barrel, blacker than black. He felt his bladder wanting to let go, but he just stood there, knees on the edge of failing. His mouth dry. Tongue, thick and useless. He wanted his heart to settle the hell down, and he was breathing much too hard. Only too well he could see Dickhead’s headless body lying there in the dirt, still gushing blood in nasty spurts. He decided, at length, that the better part of valor indicated the sticking up of his leaden arms, and even that proved harder than he’d ever have thought.
His arms felt like bags of cement, but he got them up.
Stapleton stepped over to Spider, furious. “Where’d he go?”
“Buggered if I know,” Spider managed to say.
“Pardon me?” Stapleton said, surprised at Spider’s language.
“I said, ‘Buggered if I know.’ As in, you know, haven’t a bleeding clue. Don’t know. Not in the loop.”
“You were obviously working with him.”
“I wouldn’t say that.”
“You must know where he went.”
“Must I?”
“Where did he go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where?”
“Fuck off! I don’t bloody know!”
“You’re lying.”
“Why would I lie in a situation like this? I ask you.”
“You were his friend. You must be in on his plan.”
“I was not his friend!” Spider said, with considerable emphasis that surprised even himself.
“So where’d he go?”
“I told you, I don’t know. Don’t. Bloody. Know!”
Stapleton fidgeted with a gadget that appeared, in the dark, to consist of two small knobs which he kept pulling apart and letting snap back together. Spider heard a faint sound as the two knobs came together. Some kind of monomolecular wire, he guessed. “You don’t know. Right. Okay. Sure.” Stapleton nodded, glanced at his two goons, each of whom looked like the unfortunate result of breeding industrial refrigerators with sides of water buffalo meat. The goons nodded, going along with the boss. The one with the camera appeared to have sorted out his technical difficulties and was now filming the scene, moving around to find the best angle to shoot from. Stapleton said to Spider, “He was your boss, is that right?”
“Past tense. Yeah. Yours, too, I gather.”
“I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“He was also your boss. Zeropoint. End of Time. Fun with Vores. Dodgy woo-woo with angels. You remember!”
“He told you—”
“No, mate. You told me.”
“I told you?”
“Sure. We had a big meeting.”
“I don’t seem to recall such a meeting. I’m pretty sure, in fact, this is the
first time I’ve ever—”
“My past. Your future,” Spider said, interrupting.
Stapleton quit fiddling with the knobbed device. It zipped back together, and he dropped it into a jacket pocket, all the while watching Spider. “What’d we talk about at this meeting?”
“Oh, well, everything. It was great! You whomped up this whole virtual environment, and you planted it in my head, see—”
“I planted something in your head…?”
“No, you will. Stay with me here, John. Now—”
“Who the hell are you, anyway”
“Look, I’m just passing through. I’m not from here.”
“Nobody’s from here.”
“Yeah. You, for instance. Calgary, Canada. Early twenty-first century. I know.”
Stapleton was clearly irritated at Spider’s knowledge. “What else did I tell you?”
“Everything, mate. Bloody everything. Went on for ages, pardon my saying so.”
“Why would I come and find you? I don’t even know you.”
“Ah, but you will eventually know me, and to know me is to love me,” Spider said, and smiled.
“Let me hit him,” said the goon on the left, the one without the camera.
“This is the Zeropoint flagship. We have the best security. We—”
“Don’t look at me. Dickhead dialed me in. Wasn’t my idea.”
“Fucking Dickhead,” Stapleton said.
“Yeah, I know. I couldn’t agree more.”
“Okay, so tell me what you know, starting with your name.”
Spider’s arms were getting heavy and sore. “Look, could you get your minion here to lower the bloody gun? It’s a bit off-putting. Not exactly conducive to a nice chat.”
Stapleton gestured; the gun went away. Spider took the hint, and sketched out the key points. “First thing, my name’s Spider. Spider Webb. Yeah, I have heard that. I fix time machines for Dickhead, or I did. Long story in itself. Broken time machine comes in, fixed time machine goes out. Rinse, repeat. One day, just recently, you came looking for me, in my time. Stuff happened, and I wound up with this D6 of yours—”
“A D6? You mean, what? A six-sided…?”
“Yeah, like you’d use for gaming. A D6.”
“What was I doing with a D6 in your timeline?”
“Anyway, not an ordinary, everyday gaming randomizer. This one was also a portable drive, and had twenty-four sides. Multidimensional. Kinda nifty. Liked it when it came up blank. Oh, and it had some nano-shit on it, targeted to my DNA. Thanks for that. A lovely surprise. Turns out that what’s on the portable drive in the D6 is the installer for this whacking great huge virtual environment you hacked together, a diner in Calgary. Nice place. Magic coffee. So I’m wandering around, and eventually come across you. We get chatting. It’s nice. You tell me how you met Dickhead. One Monday night in a bar in Calgary, early 2000s. You’re a frustrated, bored physics professor. Overworked. Clueless undergrads. Then this loud Australian turns up, somehow charms everyone, including you. He drugs you with something, and later you develop crazy time travel powers, and Dickhead puts the hard word on you to join up with his insane crusade here, in the future, at the actual, for-real, End of Time. You and your wife Ellen sign up — because hey, why the hell not? — and off you go. Only, you find out that Dickhead is more Jim Jones than anybody ever suspected, and pretty soon things deteriorate to such a state that he orders you to organize the poisoning of all the Zeropointers. Everybody. Millions of people. Big job. Starting with the crew of this ship, the flagship. Apparently this is called the ‘ascendancy’ event. Woo. Sounds like a lot of bullshit to justify mass-murder, you ask me. Since you’ve just murdered Dickhead, I’m guessing there’s a lot of dead acolytes just outside this room, and now you’re trying to decide what to do next. My big tip is this: there’s about to be a shitload of heavily armed time machines coming to say g’day. You probably don’t want to be here. Might be an idea to take poor old Dickhead’s body with you when you go. Mind you, at the time you were telling me your story, you weren’t the murderer. You guys supposedly were the conscience-stricken pacifists who couldn’t hurt a tiny wittle fwy, so you rounded up your like-minded buddies and left, with Dickhead’s loyal troops in hot pursuit. Cool. Big chase and running battle ensues across time. Very exciting. Is any of this sounding familiar?” He hoped it was, because his bladder was killing him, and his mouth was still dry.
Stapleton looked at Spider with interest. “I told you all of that?”
“Yeah. Talkative bloke. Like you had stuff to confess, only what you confessed was a bunch of bullshit, pardon the, um, French.” He flashed a phony smile.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
“And what makes you think I was — will be — lying?”
“What, apart from my standing right here while you’ve murdered Dickhead?”
“Why would I tell you all of this, bullshit or not? Why would I do that?”
“Because, moron, you want to get me on side, seeing you as, oh look, another tragic victim of evil Dickhead’s megalomaniacal ways, so I will do a job for you.”
“What job?”
“Long story. Involves my ex-wife.”
Stapleton burst out laughing. His laughter sounded weird out here in the cold night. “Your ex-wife. Now who’s bullshitting?”
“Yeah. My ex-wife. Molly.”
Stapleton appeared not to be sure whether Spider was telling the truth or having a lend of him. He conferred with his goons, both of whom thought the thing to do here was simply to kill Spider and move on, because time, they said, was short. Dickhead’s own goons would be on the move at any moment, and they had to get away if they were going to get away at all.
Spider, meanwhile, had begun, very slowly, taking subtle care, to edge away from the guys. Exactly how he might get out of Dickhead’s Display Room, he didn’t know, but he figured there was an entrance somewhere. He just had to find the edges of the room and work his way around until he found something that might be a way out. This was likely going to be complicated by Stapleton’s goons, and possibly Stapleton himself, having some kind of facility with infra-red or night-vision. It stood to reason they might have such a thing, considering the way they had approached Dickhead. So, Spider thought, not much of a plan, but better than just standing here waiting for Stapleton to kill him when he was of no further use. Then there would be the additional, extra-credit, problem: once he got out into the corridors of the ship, there’d be a cold, hard vacuum. Dickhead’s people had arranged to open the whole ship to space before the time marines appeared, making sure any stragglers who didn’t take their poison did in fact die. This Display Room was probably the only pressurized area on the whole ship.
Stapleton turned back to him. “You’re coming with us. Eric?” he said to the goon who had the gun, and gestured that Eric should secure Spider.
Eric nodded, very efficient; a huge building of a guy, and as he took a step towards Spider, Spider headbutted him, not that successfully, but well enough to put him off-balance. Spider took off, running as fast as possible across the open field; getting up a decent turn of speed despite his heavy boots and the soft soil. It was hard to see where he was going; there was no moon, and the near-infrared starlight was so weak as to be worthless. At full-tilt in pitch darkness, breathing through his mouth, his heart in his throat, banging away much too fast, Spider started to cover some serious ground. God, the wall had to be around here somewhere. Meanwhile, he could hear the goons and Stapleton following behind. Stapleton was calling out to him. “You might as well give up, Mr. Webb. You’re in a sealed box, in total darkness. You’re only going to hurt yourself.” Which, Spider thought as he pelted along, gasping for breath now, his lungs starting to burn, was rich coming from him. Once they caught Spider, they’d likely kill him.
So he ran on, his arms pumping, doing his best to keep his legs going, trying to keep to a straight line, reasoning that it was the quickest path to the edge of the room.
And still he couldn’t find the wall. This is getting ridiculous, he thought, getting seriously short of breath now, wheezing, slowing down, getting a stitch in his side that hurt like mad. He did remember the time he was told that Dickhead had really great ships, millions of them, which of course was preposterous, but now Spider was starting to believe it. Previously he’d figured this Display Room was not much bigger than a large master bedroom in a house back in his own time. Instead, this place was enormous, bigger than a bloody gymnasium; it must be the size of an arena. He was slowing, just about out of breath, thinking he was one dead Spider. Thinking, they couldn’t be far behind. He wished the Room was set for a bright summer’s day, the way it had been last time, with thousands of triffid-like sunflowers looming everywhere. They’d be great to hide amongst.
He was thinking, knowing he was done for, of Molly, bloody Molly. What the hell was he going to do about her? He thought, too, of Iris, who had disappeared. Where was she? He realized, stopping now, leaning over, hands on his knees, gasping, that finding Iris was important, that he was more concerned about Iris than about Molly. Whatever the hell Molly was doing, it was likely her own choice. But Iris? He was responsible for her. He had to find her. He wanted to find her; he missed her, he realized. He missed her something fierce, and that gave him pause, too, the depth of his desire to get back with Iris. Behind him, not far away, he heard Stapleton and the goons coming, making no effort to sneak or conceal their movements, so he took off again, running badly, hurting, hurting all over, his chest burning, his head aching, his heart protesting. This whole plan was not going so well, and wasn’t that just typical of the day he was having? Everything gone wrong. Bloody everything, and nothing sorted out. He swore to himself. Still, he thought, getting desperate now, staring ahead of him, straining to find the wall, maybe he’d find the Time Machine around here somewhere. Maybe it had crashed, and Iris might be stuck, trapped under the wreckage. Maybe, in fact—
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