“What?”
“Cut out part of the memory. Essentially, remove the Ghost in the machine.”
Iris came over. “What the hell are you saying, Spider?”
“I know it’s weird. It’s rare, it’s weird.”
Vjay said, “Who the hell is this Schwartzmann guy?”
“Time travel theorist from the old days. When the Email-From-the-Future turned up with the instructions on building Time Machine 1.0, this guy Dr. Robert T. Schwartzmann, PhD, led the skeptics who insisted the whole thing was an elaborate hoax. He maintained you couldn’t build a working time machine based on the theory provided. There was no closed timelike curve; no rotating Gödelian universe; no Wigner’s whatsit — none of that crazy shit. The prospect that you could change the past he particularly hated, what with the whole Timeline Preservation Conjecture, and all of that. ‘Causality must be preserved!’” For this quote Spider affected a comedy voice, then went on, trying to explain. “Schwartzmann and his mates just didn’t like it — and they were wrong. The man’s been a laughingstock ever since, and he continues to insist time travel is just an illusion, that it’s all in our heads, and one day we’ll wake up and—”
Heavy footsteps, directly overhead.
“Oh, shit,” Vijay said, looking at the ceiling. As they stood there, shivering, staring up into the darkness, they heard industrial machinery clunking into place.
“Vijay,” Spider said, getting to grips with the situation. “Listen to me. It’s like this. We have to make more than one trip. We can’t all go at once.”
“But—”
“Listen. If we pull half the memory to ‘kill’ the Ghost, there won’t be enough translation capacity for all four of us. You and Phoebe, you go first, okay? Then, when you get to safety, send the machine back to us, and I’ll send Iris through, and then I’ll follow.”
“What.” This from Iris, now in his face, so furious she was whispering.
“It’s how it has to—”
“I’m not going without you!” It was remarkable, Spider thought, how Iris could get so much furious determination into such a quiet utterance.
“I’ll be coming right behind you, it’ll only be a few seconds, tops, and I’ll be there, okay? It’s just I don’t want to take the chance the machine chokes on the idea of sending us together.”
“You’re sending them together!”
Spider was glad it was dark. He figured Iris’s gaze at this point would turn him to stone.
“They’re relatively small and skinny and all undernourished. Look at Vijay, he’s skin and bone! Now look at me. Even with all this, this…” He gestured around impatiently at the greater environment. “Even with all this, I’m still a big-boned lad, and I can’t take the chance that the machine refuses to take us both.”
“You can’t make that choice on my behalf—”
“For God’s sake, Iris, someone has to be in charge. Listen, listen — can you hear them out there? They’re coming. They’re going to open up this whole section at any time. We have to do this now!”
Vijay, not needing to be told twice, picked up Phoebe and struggled to bring her to the lifeboat. Iris said she’d come this far, and now she wanted Spider and herself to work together. “Don’t you want that, too?”
Spider knew exactly what she was asking him, and it terrified him almost as much as the prospect of imminent frozen death. He did his typical thing, and temporized, and made a show of pulling half the scanning memory out of the translation engine.
Vijay entered the destination date on the control panel. Green lights lit up the panel and the whole unit came alive. Spider gave him a thumbs-up. Vijay saluted him, and hit the go button. The lifeboat howled, glowing, started to look oddly blurred—
And before Spider could say anything, they were gone, as if they had never been there at all. By now, even as Spider stared at the empty space, they would be home, powering down, the machine ticking. Come on, Vijay. Send her back!
The machines above were cutting into the hull overhead.
“We are not done with this, Spider. You listening to me?”
“Yes, I’m listening to you. But I can’t take the chance of us going together. It’s too—”
The expression on Iris’s face shifted, and she looked at Spider differently. “It’s too what, exactly?” she said.
“It’s too risky, is what exactly. All right? It’s—”
“Too risky?”
“That’s right. I can’t—”
“Can’t what?”
He stared at her, listening to the machines overhead, and still waiting for the lifeboat’s return. This was not the time for a discussion like this, he was thinking. “Iris, we can talk about this later, once we’re home safe and sound.”
“No, no, no, you don’t.”
“Where’s the bloody lifeboat, Vijay? Come on, kid. Send it back!”
“We’re going together,” Iris said, with forbidding certainty.
“No. Just no.”
“No? That’s it? Just no?”
“I just said goodbye to Molly, okay?”
“Fucking Molly again!”
“No, it’s not that. It’s… God, Molly’s gone. She’s out of my life. But now I—”
Mildly mollified, Iris said, “Yes?”
He knew what she wanted him to say. He wasn’t stupid. He knew exactly the thing she was trying to get him to say, but as much as he wanted to, in the present circumstances, he couldn’t. “I just can’t take the chance, Iris. You’re too pre—”
“Who the hell says you even get a say?” Iris was saying before she heard what he’d just said, at which point she stopped, glared at him. “I’m too what?”
With no warning, no hint of its return, the lifeboat was back, as if it had never gone, filling up the lab with its home-made bulk — except for one little detail. Acrid electrical-fire smoke was pouring out of the lifeboat’s translation engine bay.
“Oh, no, no you bloody don’t…” Spider said, climbing up on the lifeboat to inspect the situation, but it was indeed as bad as it looked. The lifeboat was dead. He glanced back at Iris. She didn’t have to ask. Taped to the control panel was a photo, showing Vijay, Phoebe (awake, smiling, in a hospital bed, lit by sunshine), Vijay’s dad, Mr. Patel — and an old man, scowling, sitting next to the bed, who Spider guessed was Phoebe’s father.
“There’s a photo,” Spider said, coughing, woozy from all the smoke.
Iris came over; she’d been trying not to cry. “They made it?”
“Looks that way,” he said carefully climbing down from the burning machine, “Fried the unit doing it, but yeah.” He felt crushed, and huddled with Iris in the corner, staring at it.
The cutting was coming close now; it sounded like they were through the infrastructure, and had started to work on the ceiling above. The whine and scream of the cutting machines was harrowing. Iris stared at Spider, the fumes from the lifeboat filling the lab. Spider held a blanket over his nose, staring at the machine, knowing it was dead, and knowing they, too, were finished. Iris held him. “You gave it your best shot,” she said.
“Go back to hammering on the walls.”
“You think there’s a point?”
“There’s always a bloody point!” he said, shouting but not meaning to. He was just feeling so frustrated, so useless. To come this close and then fail at the last moment — it was a hard thing to bear. He was boiling with bitterness.
Iris continued to hold him, and he held her. She said, “You did good.”
“I got us fucking killed!”
“We’re not dead yet,” she said, in the most reasonable tone in the world, even as the first shower of sparks rained down from the ceiling.
By the flickering light of the cutting torch and that
fall of sparks, Spider stared at Iris. “I’m sorry,” he said to her. It was killing him that he couldn’t save her.
“Shh, no need for that,” she said, and touched his lips with her finger.
Spider saw sparks reflected in her eyes. “It’ll be quick.” He wondered what it would feel like, the remaining air in the room, and all this filthy smoke, rushing up through that hole and out.
The cutting torch worked its way around to where it started, and a roughly circular piece of ceiling crashed and clanged against the burning time machine and hit the floor. The smoky air in the room did not immediately leave. Spider felt his guts in knots; he was shaking with anger and sadness. Any minute now… Such an odd feeling, facing one’s imminent death.
“Hello? Hey! Hello?” This was Iris, letting Spider go for a moment, and going to see if she could see anything up there, through the hole. “Spider, have a look at this!” Bright light shone down into the lab through the smoke, lighting up Iris’s face. Seeing her like that, Spider’s heart filled with warmth and happiness, in crazy defiance of the circumstances, or perhaps because of them. He went to join her, wondering what she could see up there. Iris was yelling, “We need some help down here! Oi! Hello!”
Under the broken and stripped hull of the timeship, the ground shifted, and sent Spider and Iris sprawling in the darkness. The remains of the ship tipped to one side, creaking and shaking, its torn spaceframe twisting, buckling. Spider got back to his feet and helped Iris, called up into the light, “Hey, if you guys up there can hear us? We’d like some help.” Distantly, he could hear something like an alarm klaxon, and thought he might be able to hear voices shouting to one another.
A ladder appeared out of the light, and dropped to the floor of the lab; its legs hit the floor with a resounding thunk.
“Is that for us or for them?” Spider said.
Iris took his hand again. “Maybe they’re waiting for us.”
“Not exactly welcoming, are they?”
Iris was coughing, her eyes watering. “Come on, I can’t take much more of this.”
“It’s almost certainly trouble,” Spider said, even as he felt the floor beneath his feet trembling again.
The ladder, from what Spider could see, appeared to be made from aluminum. The rungs were spaced apart in such a way that it looked entirely suitable for human-shaped users. Either they’re human, too, or they’ve got a special kit for dealing with different types of aliens, Spider thought, and then paused a moment, his mind boggling that he could think such a preposterous, crazy thought in this context without his brain exploding. This ladder, he thought, would not look out of place in Dad’s shed. In fact, now he took a close look, it might have come from Bunnings. And that, once the thought appeared in his head, gave him far more pause than any development so far. He’d been working on the assumption that the shipbreakers were, if not aliens, then some kind of way-far-future humans, or post-humans. But what if they were just regular guys? What kind of sense did that make?
A voice out of the smoky light above. “Did I hear someone calling for some help down there?” A male voice, far off.
“You speak English?” Iris called up into the opening.
Something moved to block the light from above, and soon a figure in a dark outfit started climbing down the ladder, coughing as he descended through the smoke. Spider rushed to help, coughing himself, and Iris rallied round, too, helping the new arrival down the ladder. Between the smoke from the burning time machine and the light streaming in, it was hard to see who or what was coming down the ladder, except it was obviously human, and wore a dark suit. For a brief, crazy, even desperate moment Spider found himself wishing it was Soldier Spider, his far-future all-action alter-ego. Except, of course, Soldier Spider was dead at the End of Time, a long way from here.
It was not Soldier Spider, as Spider soon learned. Even as he saw the man’s ample backside in those trousers, Spider knew who it was, and all the rage, the bitterness, and black furious anger filled him afresh, as if it had never gone away, and far from helping the man safely traverse the ladder, Spider reached up and grabbed the back of his ill-fitting suit jacket, and yanked him down, so that he fell from the ladder to the floor, where he landed with a terrible thud, complaining and shouting. “You!” Spider said, hardly able to speak. “You!” He was pointing and coughing now. Iris shouted at him, but he was hardly even aware of her.
Dickhead McMahon lay there on the floor, trying to get his breath, rubbing his elbow, staring up at Spider and Iris. He smiled that enormous smile that was bigger than his very considerable head. Iris helped him to his feet, and maneuvered him clear of Spider. Once upright, his suit adjusted and his hair tidied back into place, Dickhead thanked Iris, winked at her, and turned to face them both. “Spider! It’s been so long!” he said, arms out as if for a hug.
Spider kept his distance, shaking and not only from the cold, breathing through his blanket. “I saw you murdered. John Stapleton, he killed you, he took your head off, you … you time-traveled your head into the break room fridge at the shop. You, you were dead, Dickhead!” It beggared belief. It was impossible. Or so he thought. Until he stopped, watching the bastard, the way he seemed quite unperturbed on hearing this news. This was not the garish future Dickhead from The End of Time. This Dickhead appeared younger, energetic, and perhaps still idealistic. “Ah, right, yes. Stapleton. Hmm. I’ve been getting some worrying notes about him from my future self. Man seems like trouble, has done from the beginning, I should have seen it myself, I’m normally much better with people than this, you know, aren’t I good with people, Spider? I was right about you, after all.” He stopped a moment, thinking. “Stapleton, you say? Took my head off? Bloody hell, that’s not kosher, is it? Why not a simple knife in the guts like a decent person? What kind of murderer takes a man’s head off? That’s, my God, I swear to you, Spider, that’s not on. I hope you’ve dealt with him.”
Spider glanced at Iris. “He’s been taken care of, yeah.”
“Good, very good. Still, thanks for the tip. He’s just up there, you know, in the ship, waiting for me, taking care of things while I’m down here sorting you two out. Bloody Stapleton, eh? Those Canadians, you can’t trust ‘em, can you? You mark my words, Spider, they’re bloody trouble.” Dickhead popped his watchtop and jotted some quick notes. “Stapleton. Must kill. Right, yes, okay!” He furled the watchtop and looked back at Spider and Iris. “You two look like you’re about ready for a rescue, I must say. We’ve been patrolling the timeline, looking for scrap to help with the effort. There’s a war on , you know, and all that, and we’re always short of vital gear. Metals, paper, components.”
“Dickhead, for God’s sake, I think my eyes are starting to freeze,” Spider said, hardly able to speak. He was looking at Iris, who could barely stand, and knew she desperately wanted to go up there, where it was warm, where there was food, and shelter, but she would not go without him. He’d tried to explain to her about Dickhead, and he thought she understood. But this situation, he knew, was different. It was not like they could refuse whatever the hell Dickhead was going to want in return for this rescue. He had them in a spot, and Spider hated that, hated having to depend on Dickhead’s kindness — again.
Meanwhile, Dickhead had noticed Iris’s state, and was chumming up to her. “Hello, my dear, I’m assuming you’re the illustrious Inspector Iris Street of the Western Australian Police Service? Yes? Yes, I thought so. Lovely to meet you, heard lots about you, all good of course,” he said, chuckling, doing his best to appear “charming”. “I’m Dickhead McMahon, please just call me Dickhead, everyone does,” he said, and managed a laugh despite the choking smoke. He held out a hand for Iris to shake, but she declined the offer, looking to Spider like she might keel over at any moment. Why couldn’t the bastard see how serious this was? Dickhead went on, as if this was a chance meeting on a sunny day, perhaps in a lovely park. “W
ell, this is a pretty pickle we’ve got ourselves in, isn’t it, Spider? And here I am to bail you out once more. Getting to be a bit of a habit.”
Spider managed to clear the screaming burning noise in his head long enough to say, in a somewhat coherent state, “What do you want?”
“What do I want? I want you, my good man! Like I’ve always wanted. I want you, at my side, my Numero Uno, my second-banana, my right-hand man, right where you belong, I’ve always thought so, haven’t I, Spider?”
“So it seems,” Spider said, thinking about the ascendancy event Dickhead would host in years to come, and how it was important to make mass-murder look “appealing”, because otherwise nobody would want to participate. That was the role Dickhead had in mind for him, the role currently held by Stapleton, the guy Dickhead went to when Spider wouldn’t cooperate.
This made Spider think. If he went along with Dickhead on this, went up the ladder — Stapleton would presumably find himself kicked out of an airlock, and thus would never stage a mutiny in the future, never set about to capture the Vore, never travel back to Spider’s own time. Hmm, he thought. Perhaps we’re at one of those nodal points in time where a change of events is actually possible.
Seen in this light, Spider thought, he was just about obliged to go with Dickhead. Except, what would happen to Past-Molly? Would she still become Future Molly? Did some events truly want to happen, or did it just work out that way sometimes through the sheer inertia of cause and effect? He imagined a great bristling sheaf of possible timelines spraying out from this point, all of them different, except for one grim detail: they likely all led somewhere Spider did not want to go.
Dickhead was talking again, this time to Iris. “…Very slow to make a decision is our Spider, have you noticed, Inspector? Always off in a world of his own, full of plots and schemes and conspiracies and nonsense. Well, the time to put aside childish things is past. It’s time to take on adult responsibilities, I’m sure you’ll agree. Ah, Spider. Yes, it certainly is warm and cozy up there. Why don’t you come up and let me show you around? You’ll be so much more comfortable than, well, here. The singularities are eating the planet’s core, Spider. Our studies show this whole continent will buckle and fail within days, so you really don’t want to stay here do you? I’m all about the future, Spider, and you can be a part of it, and of course your good self, too, Inspector. I’m sure I can find a challenging position for someone of your esteemed talents in the Zeropoint hierarchy, you mark my words!”
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