Paradox Resolution

by K. A. Bedford

  And so it went. Iris came to see him every chance she had. She talked about the ship repairs. It seemed the ship’s massive time engines might well be stuffed; something about trying to restart the magnetic containment for the singularities. The prospect of getting the whole ship running again, leaping about in time, was receding. Repair efforts were shifting to the construction of, maybe, a reusable lifeboat sort of thing. He heard Iris tell him one day, “We could really use your help here, Spider. Everyone’s pretty much had it. John’s got us working round the clock, and if that’s not bad enough, there’s that Vore thing you told me about. I don’t exactly know what he’s doing to it, but you can feel it howling when you sleep. We hardly ever see John these days. He’s always doing something with the trap controls, God knows. Are you getting it, locked away in there?” He was right there, pounding against the ice; the ice seemed so thin. It was as if he could see the room; his eyes must be a bit open. Now that he concentrated, he could see dim light, shapes, then something that must be Iris’ face. It was hard to tell, but it looked like her hair was longer. In any case, it looked as though there was a lot more of it than there had been. That shocked him, seeing that, no matter how imperfectly. How long had he been here, under the ice, in this place? Surely his body must be healed by now? He could not tell, and he certainly had no motor control as far as he could determine. Iris was talking to him again, very close to his face, right by his ear. “Spider, come on. We’re dying out here. Power’s going. The winter is closing in. We can only use five percent of the ship, it’s too expensive to heat. We really need you. God, I need you, Spider. God, listen to me, how pathetic am I, going on like that. Me, a fully-grown police inspector, ‘needing’ a man — I’m a bloody disgrace to the sisterhood, but I can’t fight how I feel, can I? It’s hard out here. John’s crew, the ones who worked you over, are working us hard, double-shifts every day, trying to restore power, restore the time engines, life support. When you look out the windows, it’s — what’s the word for something between beautiful and terrifying? It’s like that. I run the project schedule, and I can tell you, we’re way behind. Estimated time to a complete energy failure versus estimated time to system resuscitation? Not looking good for us. Did I mention the food’s shit, literally, recycled. It’s lovely, thinking about that every time you eat or drink your rations. I know we have recycled water back home, but this stuff has a texture even you wouldn’t like. Water really ought not to have texture. Grittiness. Things that get stuck in your teeth. The other time machine geeks— which reminds me, I’ve met the kids, the children you were looking for? Vijay and Phoebe? They’re nineteen years old now. Looks like they’re planning some kind of family, ‘once they’re back home,’ of course. You’ll have to imagine me doing the air-quotes there. They’re nice. I don’t understand a word they say. Advanced time theory. Oh joy of joys. Beyond my poor addled brain, that’s for sure…” He wasn’t sure what else Iris said. He was off dreaming again, no longer trying to punch through the thin ice that separated him from the outside world, lost down in the dark deeps, somehow able to breathe underwater. He heard a voice calling to him, from further down. He figured out how to dive, the pressure of the cold dark pushing against his ears, and he could easily make out the seaweed-draped figure of a naked woman with no eyes, hair swirling and tangled around her head. As he maneuvered closer, he saw it was Molly, snared in sea-wrack and long strands of kelp, her skin, even in this darkness, seemed to glow, but not in a good way. He tried to pull back from her, but she managed to snag his foot in seaweed, and pull him closer.

  “Al, you’re here. Thank God. You have to help me.” It sounded like Molly. It had Molly’s voice. Though, as he drew near, he could see her mouth wasn’t moving; the voice he heard was in his head, with him. He tried and tried to get away, but she kept pulling at him. Now he could see her eye-sockets, like small fleshy mouths, themselves (he imagined, in the dark) lined with sharp teeth.

  “I’ll help you, but you have to let me—”

  “Come closer, Al. I need you to do a little job for me. Can you do that for me, Al?” She had hold of his head now, and they were face to face, down in the deep. He shivered and shook. With growing amazement, he realized she was going to kiss him. And the horrible thing was, he liked the idea, and he wanted to kiss her, too. There was no way this was Molly, his Molly, but, maybe, in his mind, it was close enough. He’d always wanted Molly, even during the worst times, but now, yes, even like this, he still wanted her. They kissed, embraced, bound together with long cold strands of kelp. She told him, inside his mind, that he had to get Stapleton to stop torturing the Vore. She and the Vore had become an item. “The Vore is howling in pain. Can’t you hear it? It’s screaming across the universe. And there are other Vores coming to help it. They’ll be here soon, and they will liberate it, and destroy everything around it. They’ll destroy me, Al, because now I’m part of it. It’s up to you. You have to stop Stapleton. You have to get him to release us, no matter what it takes. I’m counting on you.” She reached down with one of her weed-draped hands to touch him, to take hold of him—

  Spider snapped awake, blinded by the room’s light, silently screaming, his mouth dry, voice hoarse; throat burning. He tried to get up, but was weak, almost helpless, covered in stick-on sensor pads. He tried to move, and fell off the bed, and tumbled onto the cold steel floor, still feeling Molly’s tendrils wrapped around and around him, binding the two of them together in the cold abyssal darkness at the floor of his conscious mind.

  Chapter 20

  Spider managed to get up, climbing the structure of the bed. It was hard, and he was weak, but much of the pain he remembered was gone. At last, he got back onto the bed, exhausted, breathing hard, clutching at his chest. Remembering Molly. “The Vores are coming,” she had said. “Bloody Hell.”

  Looking around, he took in the salient details of his “room”. He and the bed were in what looked like a utility storage room. There was room for the bed, a chair, and not much else. The door was open. He could hear noises from beyond, and saw people rushing about, all of them in shapeless blue overalls, all of them thin, even emaciated, carrying things, pushing trolleys. There was a constant industrial din in the background, and there was a voice talking over some kind of public address system, but softly. It took him a moment to recognize that it was Stapleton’s voice, but he couldn’t quite make out what the guy was saying, only that he was saying it a lot. Spider, who realized he was hungry, his stomach growling and dyspeptic, tried calling out to the passersby. “Hey, I’m awake! I’m up! I need a little help. Hello?” This got him nowhere. His voice was weak. Swearing, he slid off the bed, taking his time, doing his best to hang on for support. His legs almost went out from under him, and he gasped, trembling, standing there, clutching at the bed frame. The bed, he noticed, had been cobbled together from stray bits of steel. The whole thing could have collapsed out from under him at any moment.

  Disconnecting himself from the monitor leads, Spider shuffled out the door into a long, drafty corridor, and propped himself against a wall, breathing hard, sweating. Someone came up to him, a nurse. “Mr. Webb! I was just coming to—”

  “I appear to be up,” Spider gasped, and felt exhausted. His knees shook.

  The nurse helped him back to his bed, checked him out, examined his eyes, waved fingers about, asked how he was feeling, if he knew who he was, and if he knew where he was. “Yeah.” He stared at her, annoyed. “This is ‘Colditz’, isn’t it?”

  The nurse winced at the name. “That’s what the geeks call it, yes,” she said.

  “Look, I need to see my ex-wife, Molly Webb. She’s here, right?”

  This appeared to surprise the nurse. “She is here. She arrived with everyone else.”

  This interested him, despite the state he was in. “Let me guess. She was none too pleased.”

  The nurse allowed herself a small smile. “She said she thought she was goin
g to the Louvre. Something about an exhibit?

  “Right. Good. Can you please tell her I’d like to see her.”

  “Okay. Um. Will do. Is there anyone else you’d like to see?” The nurse leaned on the “anyone else”, as if trying to give Spider a hint.

  Spider still remembered his dream, could still taste Molly’s mouth. The Vores are coming. “Well, yeah, now you mention it. I need a word with John Stapleton. Got a bit of unfinished business I need to discuss with him, you know, if he’s free.”

  “You want to speak to John Stapleton?”

  “Yeah. He’s an old pal.”

  “The John Stapleton.”

  Spider was baffled. “The Canadian physicist bloke. Big fella. Tall. Got a stupid little beard thing. Last I heard he was your Big Cheese around here. That’s him on the PA all the time, isn’t it?”

  “He’s busy with the Guest, Mr. Webb, but I will pass a message up through channels. He has been inquiring after you, while you—”

  “How long was I out?”

  “Thirty-four days.”

  Thirty-four days? He looked down at himself. Other than understandable weakness from being bedridden, he seemed okay, if a bit thin.

  “Yes.”

  “But I’d been beaten to a pulp.”

  The nurse did her best to provide a smile. “There was nothing serious.”

  Spider flexed his fingers and toes, touched parts of his head and his teeth. “Nothing serious?” He was sure he remembered John Stapleton’s goons tracking him down, and kicking him senseless. That was right, wasn’t it? He didn’t dream that, did he? He remembered being in the Time Machine, with Iris up on the “handlebars” just in front of the status lights on the control panel, and he remembered pushing the lever forward to start the Machine off on its leap into the future, but after that, things got a little murky. Something about Dickhead, and vengeance. Such a strange word, that, “vengeance”. Like something people did in old movies. And there was Stapleton himself, and… He struggled to recall anything. Something about running through a field, in the dark? Spider shook his head, as if that would clear out some cobwebs. While he couldn’t, at least right now, remember any clear details about this so-called beating that he mentioned to the nurse, something about it sounded right. And he had been out of it for, what, more than a month? Or at least that’s what she was telling him. For a moment he did stop and look around, taking in the cramped surroundings, that droning voice in the background he could not quite hear clearly, the coldness, the smell of something not quite right, something stale in the air.

  The nurse brought him a steel bowl full of a dreadful cereal-based gruel, body-heat-warm, and a steel cup half full of room-temperature water. The cereal glop had a mouth-feel something like melted ice-cream, but there was a hint of some ‘texture’, he thought, a grittiness, a sensation he associated with broken dental fillings in his mouth, and he remembered Iris talking to him, while he was out, telling him about this stuff. Putting the thing together with the memory helped make it real, and helped make those memories of Iris telling him stuff real, as well. He began to feel more “here”, wherever here was. He hadn’t been dreaming; he’d been awake, just not fully conscious. He could remember a fair amount of what Iris told him. They were on a crashed timeship. Engines stuffed. Winter closing in. Only five percent of the ship in use. Right. Everybody buggered from working round the clock. Yes, he thought, looking around. That made sense. He looked at the food, and the water, nodding to himself. And the water! He tried some, hoping to get that grit out of his mouth, but it had a smell to it that reminded him of the urinals in his old primary school boys’ toilets. Not that it smelled like urine, or even stale urine, but there was something in the water’s smell that caused his mind to leap to this image. He imagined the nurse telling him he’d get used to it.

  Then, a knocking at his open door.

  “Iris!” he said, delighted to see her, and waved her in.

  They swapped greetings, tried with great embarrassing awkwardness and elbows to hug — neither Spider nor Iris had ever been huggers, much — and Iris finally settled for kissing Spider on his grizzled cheek, close to his mouth. Astonished, his cheek burning, he looked up at her, and saw Iris blushing, then looking away for a moment, hands over her face, swearing under her breath. After an awkward moment, Iris got him to shift over in his narrow bed, and she hopped up and perched on the side of it. She sat there, smiling at him, smiling like sunrise, and he felt a great warmth filling his heart that he had not felt in… He could not remember when he last felt like that. His cheek tingled. He smiled back at her, unable to help himself. It was lovely to see Iris, even if she looked terrible: lean, hungry, dark rings under her tired eyes.

  “So how are they treating you?” she said to cover the moment of embarrassment.

  “Good. No worries. Of course, I’ve been out cold most of the time, so I have no idea, really—”

  She turned back to him, looked at him, and her stoic mask dropped away. She said, “God I’m glad to see you awake.”

  “Um, it’s great to see you, too,” he said, even though he kept thinking about how it felt kissing the Molly-thing.

  “I thought you were gonna die on me,” she said.

  “I wasn’t going to die, Iris.”

  “You were gone so long. The ship’s medic, Jameson, he was telling me not to get my hopes up. He said if you were going to come out of it, you would have after just a few days. The longer it went, the less likely…” She stopped, and discreetly dabbed at her eyes with the heel of her hand.

  “I was right here the whole time.”

  “Yes, but you—”

  “I remember you talking to me,” he said, by way of changing an awkward subject. It was upsetting seeing Iris like this, so not in control and not brimming with her usual brisk and daunting confidence. That in itself told him everything he needed to know about the sheer grinding awfulness of the situation here in Colditz. It scared him, but he wasn’t about to let on to Iris that he felt that way.

  “You remember that?”

  “Sure, at least some of it.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. You talked about the ship, and John, things being shit, all kinds of stuff. I thought I was dreaming.”

  “Silly Spider!”

  “I remember looking forward to your visits.”

  “Oh, God,” she said, hands over her face again. “You remember everything I said to you?”

  “I don’t know. There was a lot of stuff, and I was fading in and out, you know…” He was lying. Spider remembered Iris telling him she loved him. He remembered her pleading with him to come back to her. And, looking at her, he wished he had been here for her.

  “I’m sure you hallucinated a lot of it,” she said. “I wasn’t here all that much. I’ve been busy.”

  “Oh, I know. Of course. Lots to do.”

  “That’s right,” Iris said, nodding, as if she couldn’t run far enough from those moments of weakness when she confessed things she wanted kept hidden.

  “I understand, Iris,” he said, intending multiple meanings.

  She allowed him a small smile, as if accepting his gracious exit. “No worries.”

  There was one small problem: just as he remembered Iris’ visits, he also remembered Molly, or at least the Molly-thing, down in the deepest ocean trenches of his mind, calling to him, enfolding him against her cold body, telling him about the Vore, that it was in pain, and its buddies were coming to “liberate” it. “Iris,” he said, feeling awkward, knowing this would not go over well.

  “Spider,” she said, looking glad for a change of topic.

  “I gather Molly’s here. Yes?”

  “Molly? Your Molly?” She looked confused for a moment. “Yes, of course. She’s been asleep almost since she got here, more or less like
you. Can’t get her out of bed, won’t do a bloody thing to help out. Just lies there, talking in her sleep. A pain in the arse.”

  “She turned up with all the other time travelers?”

  “It was a side-effect of the system John and his people used to capture the Vore’s worldline. Future-bound time travelers, anywhere on Earth, departing between the two threshold dates, and who happened to be between, wait a minute; let me get this right…” She thought a moment. “Yeah. Between point-of-origin and destination, while the thing was running, all their worldlines intersected here, so all kinds of folks, but mostly hotrod geeks, they all turned up, all at once, along with the Guest. You’d be surprised how many time travelers got caught. Anyway, the Guest was shunted into its ‘quarters’, and everybody else, well, we all did our best to fit in. John’s crew, the few who were left, did what they could to make us comfortable. Wasn’t easy, what with the lack of power, resources, the endless freezing hell outside, the food situation inside — and of course, you two snoozing away, needing constant care.”

  Spider felt mortified, thinking about it, but put that aside. “Okay, about Molly. I need to see her.”

  Iris did not look pleased, but put her best professional face on. “You can see her, sure, but, you know, she’s—”

  “Asleep? I know. Thing is, she spoke to me, while I was out.”

  “She did? How the hell did she do that?”

  “That’s what I need to find out. I need to find out if she was just dreaming, in which case what she said is just dream-bullshit, or whether she was telling me something that needs addressing.”