“Who, grandma?”
“Yes.”
“Sure! The old bird’s still going strong. Shit, it’s only sixty-five years ago!”
“Do you like her?”
Sniper slammed his hand down on the table, leaning forward to glare at Patty. “Just shut the f—”
He stopped. The waiter, stepping up to the table, began setting plates down. There was something odd about the waiter’s movements, something jittery and unnatural. Patty looked around. It was happening to other people nearby too.
Looking to see what Patty had seen, Sniper noticed it too and his scowl turned into a big, handsome smile.
“This is gonna be so good!” he shouted.
Chapter 3: The Splash
“There is a new batch of your pamphlets from the printer.” Nadya Krupskaya led the printer’s worker into her husband’s study and instructed the man to set the heavy parcel down on the edge of the desk. It was a cloudy April day in 1902 and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin smiled as he watched the man put down his package and go.
“Our friends back home say it is already being widely read,” he told his wife, who lingered in the doorway.
“It is an excellent piece,” she agreed, looking at him through her over-large intelligent eyes.
“If that doesn’t shake up the party, nothing will. You deserve to be proud.”
His birthday had been celebrated just a few days ago, right there in Holford Square in the London borough of Pentonville. The big brick terrace was yet another stop in their years of wandering about Europe. Lenin was now thirty-two years old. Nadya, a year older. His wife of just four years was one of his greatest admirers. They had married during their exile in Siberia. Some said that they had married for the cause, and there was some truth in that, but it was a long way from the whole truth.
She stepped forward and, taking a knife from the desktop, cut the string and folded back the wrapping paper to reveal the pamphlet, the title, “What Is to Be Done?” in thick black ink on the cover. They were both confident it would be hugely influential in the Party, pushing his followers closer to Lenin’s vision of the revolutionary vanguard he dreamed they could become.
“I thought I’d go over to the British Museum later on, my dear,” he said, picking up a copy and turning it over in his hands, checking the quality. He held it to his nose and sniffed. “I finally had a reply from that overly officious Museum Director, granting me a ticket.”
Nadya smiled indulgently. The British Museum had one of the most respected library collections in the whole of Europe. Her husband had heard much about the famous Round Reading Room and was eager to visit it. She watched him turning the pages of his brilliant pamphlet and admired his broad brows and sensuous lips. That such a bookish, scholarly man should also be so handsome and passionate was her secret delight.
“What will you do there?” she asked, just to hear him speak.
He looked at her. “Oh, I shall finish my comments on the programme of the Northern League, but that won’t take long. There is much work to do on Iskra of course, but…” He smiled impishly.
“Today I wish to spend my time coming to grips with the size and extent of this fabled collection.”
He turned to look out of the window at the grey skies and the leafless trees in the gardens. “I expect I shall be disappointed. Nothing could be so splendid as to live up to the reports I have been hearing. But if nothing else, I shall have a good walk in the mild English spring.”
Nadya gave him a wry smile. “It’s not Saint Petersburg, that’s certain, but don’t let yourself get wet. And don’t get lost. You think yourself indestructible and infallible, but you are not. And the Revolution needs you.”
He turned back to her with a sigh. “There are many who would disagree with that, my dear Nadezhda Konstantinovna.”
“Fools,” she announced firmly, raising her chin.
Lenin smiled fondly at her, and she at him.
* * * *
They let Luke stay at the hospital, and he was grateful to them for that. A young policeman sat in the waiting room with him, looking barely older than Luke was. Yet the policeman carried a handgun and a stunner on his belt and had an air of responsibility and gravity that made Luke feel insubstantial and foolish.
The policeman said he had to hang around to hear the doctors’ verdict on Spock. So it wasn’t all altruism. But Luke was grateful all the same. He didn’t want to leave his friend. But even if he wanted to, he couldn’t now. The reality of being held against his will by an armed man slowly penetrated the gloom that beset him.
They hadn’t let Luke into the intensive care unit with Spock. A nurse had prevented him, barring his way, and then she and the policeman had led him away to answer their questions.
“What was your friend taking tonight? Does he have any allergies? Is he on any medication?”
On and on. They could have got most of it by scanning his med chip, but they asked anyway. Then it was the police officer’s turn. “What’s his real name? Is that his full name? Where does he live? How do we contact his parents?”
“Why don’t you just scan him?” Luke was tired and anxious.
“You kids fix up your chips,” the police officer said wearily. “Damn chips lie more than the kids do.”
After he’d been through it all on Spock’s behalf, Luke had to explain who he was, why he was there, give them his parents’ netID, give them a DNA sample.
“So your name is really Jason Kennedy,” the policeman said.
“Luke is just my nickname,” he explained. “Like Luke Skywalker.” Suddenly it seemed silly to him to call himself after someone in an old vid story. Childish. He put the whole infantile nonsense behind him in that moment. “My name’s Jay,” he said. “You should call me Jay.”
The policeman shook his head, his contempt for the whole splash scene summed up in that one gesture.
They had found a tab of tempus on him, two more on Spock and a small stash of assorted goodies in Spock’s luggage. It hardly added much to Jay’s worries. His concern was all for his friend.
“You did the right thing, bringing your friend here,” the policeman said. Jay nodded in acknowledgement. What else could he have done? “I’ve heard of kids just left by the side of the road when they take some bad dope. People want to save their own necks.”
“Is that what happened? It was the tempus?”
“The lab will tell us for sure, but I reckon so. We’ll want to know where you got it.”
Jay remembered an alley outside a club in Canterbury just three nights ago. “It’s powerful stuff, man,” the dealer had told them. “Just in from the States.” Spock had haggled for it.
“You must see some awful things,” Jay said, thinking how sick he’d felt seeing Spock twitching and flailing in the back of his car as they raced down foreign roads looking for help.
The policeman shrugged. “Not so much. Ommen is a quiet place. A good town. Until you bring your splashparty and your drugs and all this.” He waved a hand toward the doors through which Spock had been taken.
“Can you see if he’s all right?” Jay asked. “He looked so bad.”
“They said they will come when they have news.” The policeman’s tone was not unkind, but it was not entirely sympathetic, either. Perhaps he resented being told to hang around at the hospital. Perhaps he just didn’t like stupid kids who OD’d on party drugs. Jay stared at the floor and steeled himself for a long wait.
* * * *
“Mrs. ’t Hooft?” Hal said, when a woman in her thirties opened the front door to them.
“Ja?” she said, looking a little nervously at the four strangely dressed youngsters on her doorstep. If Hal had it right, this pleasant-looking woman was his own great-grandmother.
“Is your daughter, Lotte, at home?”
“Who are you?” Her English was heavily accented.
“I am a relative of yours from the United States,” Hal explained. “These are my buddies.”
; She regarded the young man with a puzzled frown. “A relative?”
“Is Lotte at home, please?”
The woman was looking more ill at ease. She began to say something that was obviously going to be a brush-off, was already pushing the door closed, when a small child in a pink frock came rushing up to her mother’s knees to peer at the strangers. Patty realised with a shock that this was the target. Hal’s grandmother was this little six-year-old girl with her blond hair in pigtails and scuffed, round-toed shoes on her little feet.
“No, Hal,” she said, before she knew what she had done. “Don’t do it.”
Hal turned to Patty, but Sniper stepped in front of him, cutting him off from her view. “Shut up, bitch, or I’ll do you as well.”
“What is going on?” the woman asked, frightened now. She spoke to Lotte in Dutch, urging her to get back into the house so she could close the door. “I am calling the police.”
“Hal,” Sniper growled. “Get on with it.”
But something had given Hal pause too. Patty could see him, staring down at the little girl, not moving or speaking.
The woman started to close the door again, and suddenly Sniper shoved Hal aside and pushed violently at it. Woman and child were knocked back. The little girl screamed and her mother tried to grab her. Sniper stormed into the hallway, pushing the woman to the ground, drawing a pistol from the leg pocket of his suit. Patty, without pausing to think, launched herself at Sniper’s back. Too late. Sniper fired before she reached him. Two huge explosions came in rapid succession, and the child twisted away from them in a spray of blood. Patty hit Sniper squarely in the back with both hands, and she and the big German flew toward the child’s bloody body. The gun went off again, blowing a hole in the plaster of the hallway wall. The child’s mother began screaming.
Patty was filled with fury as Sniper and she hit the ground, sliding in the wet blood. The small limp body lay beside them. Patty wanted to tear the flesh from her former lover’s body, pummel his face, trample him, destroy him utterly. A part of her knew he could not be so easily hurt, that he would rise up like the powerful monster he was and wreak his vengeance for what she had tried to do. But that didn’t matter to her, she just wanted to make him suffer for what he had done. And she would, whatever it cost her.
And then the world went crazy.
Patty had heard them talk about timesplashes. Most of the bricks she knew liked to brag about them all the time. They said that causality went haywire, that spacetime became fluid, that just walking down a street was like going white-water rafting on acid. None of what they said had ever meant much to Patty until that moment.
Sizes were all wrong. Distances varied unpredictably. The body of little Lotte kept slamming into the ground right next to her, over and over again, with blood flying from her chest and face. Sniper pushed Patty away from him, snarling, and she took far, far too long to hit the wall. He was up and out of the house before she realised that the wall had crumbled to dust. She had rolled straight through it into another room. She heard Hal and T-800 whooping with excitement, but she couldn’t get up. Gravity changed so rapidly beneath her that she no longer had any effective sense of balance. She crawled back into the hallway to find Lotte still falling down dead again and again while her mother was frozen in a silent scream. Hal and T-800 had disappeared. Frightened and nauseous, she kept crawling until she was through the door and out of the house. Gravity was more normal out there, but not much else was. People and cars moved backward or forward at random. Some were shortened, some stretched, all in different directions. She clambered unsteadily to her feet. Huge, slow waves moved across the ground and through the buildings, radiating outward from where she stood. Hal, T-800
and Sniper were in a group, looking around at the chaos and laughing like schoolkids. She staggered over to them, finding the ground spongy and vague, sometimes slapping her foot hard against it, sometimes missing it and stumbling dangerously. The others saw her approaching and pointed and laughed. Everyone still had their helmets in their hands except Patty.
“You killed her, you bastard!” she yelled at Sniper, still furious.
“You left your helmet behind, stupid,” he yelled back and laughed nastily. “You can wetnurse her,” he told Hal. “I’m going to have some fun. Just look at this!” He slapped T-800 on the shoulder and they ran off together, shrinking to little dots after just a few paces in an unsettling distortion of perspective. Hal clearly wanted to go with them, but he waited for Patty, as instructed.
“Is this it, then?” she asked, angry and contemptuous. “Is this all…” She stopped in mid-sentence as the sky turned black and then seemed to bend and fold.
“Whoa!” Hal breathed, scared and excited both at once. “I’ve never seen that before.” Even as he spoke, the sun returned and the blackness was replaced by blue. The folding remained, however, and they both stared at it anxiously.
“Are we going to die?” Patty asked.
“Er, no. I don’t think so.” He sounded distracted and didn’t take his eyes off the sky. “We shouldn’t. The local distortions don’t really affect us. We’re still part of a different spacetime event. You’ve got to watch out for falling off a cliff or whatever, though. Your body can still get hurt.”
As he spoke, a nearby lamppost softened and keeled over like a strand of cooked spaghetti. The lamp smashed when it hit the road, and shards of glass vibrated in and out of the impact as if they couldn’t decide which way to explode.
“That kind of thing can kill you too. Go get your helmet and we’ll try and catch up with Sniper.”
“He killed that little girl,” she said, remembering.
Hal tried to take her by the shoulders, but he missed. “He had to. I should have done it myself. You have to create the paradox that makes the splash and killing your grandmother is a surefire way to do it. Holy mother!”
A truck veered and swerved out of control, heading toward them, its wheels skidding through concrete that had suddenly become liquid. As it moved, it grew enormous until it was taller than the houses around it. Hal seemed frozen to the spot so Patty grabbed him and yanked him out of its way. They would have made it to safety, but it wasn’t necessary. The truck sank into the liquefied surface up to its windows and wallowed to a halt.
Hal seemed to think their near miss and the driver’s predicament were wildly exciting.
“What’s the matter with you?” Patty demanded, slapping his arm. He was shorter now than she was but even as she noticed, he grew again and she shrank. “This isn’t funny. People are getting hurt.”
“Not really,” he said, dragging his attention back to her. “It all sorts itself out. You know the theory. All this crazy shit is just the timestream responding to the paradox. We made one hell of splash here, girl! Yee ha!”
She frowned at him in exasperation. “Just stay here while I get my helmet. Don’t go away. You won’t leave me, will you?” Hal assured her he wouldn’t, and she turned back to the house. One corner of the building seemed to have melted, and the lawn outside bulged as if large animals were moving beneath it. A multicoloured radiance surrounded the house, pastel lights moving in slow waves as though high-energy particles were sleeting down through the building’s own magnetic field. None of it looked safe, but it was the thought of what she would see in the hallway that held Patty back.
Hal’s hand on her shoulder made her jump. “I’ll go,” he said, and set off without waiting for her to comment.
She watched him walk across the undulating lawn toward the open door. There were things in front of the doorway, vague, wavering shapes. Patty couldn’t make them out, but the closer Hal got to them, the more substantial they became. By the time he was at the door, he was standing behind four people dressed in jumpgear. He turned to look at Patty, and she could see from his body language he was as confused and surprised as she was. The four people, even with their backs to her, were obviously Patty, Sniper, Hal and T-800.
Hal stepped away
from them, almost tripping as the lawn rose and fell under his feet. The farther he went, the more insubstantial the group at the door became. Patty rushed forward to meet Hal.
“What the hell is that?” she asked.
“It’s us!” Hal was over his initial alarm and was now grinning excitedly. “This has never happened before. No one’s ever seen themselves in a splash.” The group at the door, transparent but clearly recognisable, intent on what they were doing, showed no sign of being aware of Hal and Patty behind them. “Look. The other me is at the front. He looks like he’s talking to someone. It’s like an echo from ten minutes ago.” He shook his head in amazement. “This is so cool! Watch this.”
With that, he ran back across the lawn to the door. Patty tried to grab him, but missed. She daren’t run after him and she didn’t want to shout in case they heard her. Hal seemed to have no such compunctions. He ran straight over to the echo of Patty, the whole group solidifying as he closed on them, and tapped her on the shoulder. She turned around to face him, open mouthed with surprise, looking quickly from the Hal in front of her to the Hal talking earnestly in the doorway behind her. Watching herself from the street, Patty felt the skin between her shoulders crawl. She could feel this other Patty’s shock and confusion, could imagine every thought she must be thinking. Hal was pointing at echo-Patty’s helmet. Slowly, dazedly, she raised it and handed it to him. It looked solid and weighty in his hand. Grinning, he turned and pointed behind him to where the real Patty gawped at them in astonishment, but echo-Patty seemed unable to see her. Calling his thanks, Hal left Patty’s echo and returned with the helmet. The other Patty watched him go, slowly fading away as he left her.
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