“Better feckin’ be.”
“I’ve always liked a good curve myself.”
“Yeah, but you’re looking for an entirely feckin’ different gender.”
“True.”
This is apparently enough to pique Hermann’s interest. “It is inefficient, your way. An inelegant means to procreate.”
“The feck?” Kayla looks at him with something close to open disdain. Felicity’s up in the cockpit chatting with the pilot so nobody checks Kayla’s attitude. I probably should, but honestly Hermann has it coming.
“You strive for something greater than yourself, for something worthy of preservation. But it is all random. It is all chance. You have no control over your variables. You have no idea if you will produce perfection or a mewling useless grub.”
“Oh,” Hannah brightens. “I thought you’d rejected your creator’s philosophy? Eugenics still OK with you is it?”
Hermann grunts from the depths of his hood. “Eugenics is just a variation on a theme. Biology is inefficient to the point of being useless. I am talking about design, mechanics. Our creator’s purpose was warped, but his tools for advancing himself, his race, they were correct.”
Volk shakes his head. “Why do you seek to antagonize always, Hermann? They are our friends.”
“They are convenient allies for as long as it suits them.” Hermann sneers. “Betrayal is the natural state of the biologic. History has taught us that.”
“Build a baby?” ask Kayla. “Hell, you find me the doctor and you sign me up.”
Hannah shakes her head. “Nah. That’d take all the fun out of it.” She smiles.
“Aye to that.”
It would probably be smarter to hold my tongue, but I do at least have the certainty of death by bomb, not by Kayla-wielded pointy thing, so I wade in. “Don’t you think,” I say, “that you should, maybe, try to patch things up with Ephie before you just have another child? I mean, all other healthy-relationship concerns aside, she’s a reality-bending demigod who is likely to take badly to you trying to quite literally replace her.”
“She can shove it up her arse.”
I look around for allies. Which is when I realize I am short on them.
“Where did Clyde and Tabitha go?” It seems like a good enough way to change the course of the conversation.
Hannah’s grin broadens. “They headed off to find the ‘bathrooms at the back of the plane’ about half an hour ago. Imagine they’re quite enjoying the inefficiency of biology at this point in time.”
I blanch. Betrayed on all sides, I head to the cockpit to find Felicity.
AND ANOTHER TWO HOURS
When Clyde does have the audacity to show his face up at the cockpit, he is thankfully alone. I don’t think I could meet his eye if Tabitha was right there as well.
“Arthur,” he says, “if you don’t mind, I would love a brief word. Well, in all honesty, knowing myself, as I think some king once advised someone… Or maybe it was just a line in that Matrix movie. The one with all the leather and slow-motion. Oh God, now it sounds like high-end pornography. But it was a big Hollywood blockbuster, I swear. But anyway, well, demonstrating in fact that, this being me, it may not be a brief word. But not a completely protracted word. Perhaps a word as brief as I’m likely to make it. Or a medium word. Not a word like ‘antidisestablishmentarianism,’ but also not a word like ‘and’ or ‘to’. A sort of middle ground.”
Felicity turns her head to hide the fact that she’s smiling.
“Go ahead,” I tell him.
“So, the whole earlier incident with you sort of insulting Hermann and him losing his temper, and you saying that you knew you weren’t going to be killed by anything except the bomb.”
“Yes,” I say. It seems like the one silver lining to all of this. There’s nothing to worry about right up until the end.
“Not actually true.”
Clyde tears away the silver lining, bunches it up in a ball, and proves it to be kitchen foil.
“You see, it’s not as deterministic as that. You’re supposed to be killed by the bomb as far as reality is concerned. However, you could still be killed by something else. Totally a possibility.”
Oh crap. I start to sag again.
Felicity shakes her head. “We’re sorting out the bomb thing.”
“Erm…” Clyde looks dubious, then shrugs. “Yes. Of course. But the thing is, if you do die, Arthur, it’ll actually be worse than, you know, regular usual death. Well, caveat that. I mean, firstly, unlikely to be a regular usual death given our line of work. Probably an abominable snowman crushing your head into your chest cavity or something awful like that. And secondly, I mean, for you there’s a probably a pretty definable upper limit for how awful dying can get. At a certain point it’s just dying. Not that… I mean, I don’t want to undersell how awful you dying would be. It’s very awful. It’s just, well… the experience for the dying person pretty much standard, I imagine. A singular experience. At least looking at it from a biological point of view. But I’m not talking about you. Actually trying to talk about everyone else in the world. Which may or may not bother you, but I’m hoping that, given your choice of profession, you are the sort of fellow who cares about his fellow man even in the act of death. Because, well you see, as mentioned, you’re supposed to die by the bomb.” His eyes flick to Felicity. “At least at this moment in time. So, if, say, before we sorted that out, the whole abominable snowman, head-chest cavity scenario were to play out, or some variation upon that theme, well that would violate reality and the future echo. And that in turn would lead to a paradox. I mean, why would that future echo have occurred if that wasn’t what killed you?”
I am suddenly very aware that I’m thousands of feet up in the air in what amounts to a tin can manufactured in the fifties, and that no one has given me a parachute. “Paradoxes not a good thing then?” I check.
“Depends on the scale. I mean at best you’re looking at minor amounts of reality changing. Not many accounts of when that happened as it’s hard to detect, writes itself back into history, but you know, sort of loss of a nation and its population. Elimination of a genetic line. Shifts in the turning points of history. Standard time-travel disaster sequence.”
“That’s the best case?” I check.
Felicity tries to jump in. “Isn’t this all a moot point?” she asks. “We’re going to sort this all out.” She makes it sound like the threat of me dying, tearing reality apart, and scattering the pieces about like confetti is on a par with keeping a library book out too long.
“Well the worst-case scenario,” Clyde barrels on ignoring Felicity, “is a self-perpetuating paradox. One that’s so problematic that resolving it leads to more paradoxes which then need to be resolved. But then the resolution of those leads to further paradoxes, et cetera, et cetera, so on and so forth, down the dominos all fall, everyone watches it on YouTube and is very impressed, and then reality collapses in upon itself, is no more, and not only is everyone dead, but they never existed in the first place, and neither did anything else.”
I chew on that for a bit. “That is a pretty bad worst-case scenario.”
Clyde nods. “Sort of why no one really messes around with reality magic. Leave it to the Dreamers and other professionals like that.”
Felicity shakes her head. “This is a totally moot point.”
But it strikes me that Clyde is worried enough about the event that he just had sex with Tabitha in the back of a crowded plane just so he could get it in one more time.
And yet, what else is there to do? What does this change? My death is imminent one way or another. Just keep on fighting the good fight, until it’s not good anymore.
“You’re right,” I say squeezing Felicity’s hand. “Moot point. Doesn’t matter at all.”
27
TRIBHUVAN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
The plane brings us down in a broad flat bowl of land. The city of Kathmandu spreads around us. For a moment, standin
g in the plane’s doorway, the peaks surrounding it don’t look that large. Then my sense of scale adjusts. I gawp.
Hannah pushes past me and I remember I am a hardened government agent. I shut my mouth.
“OK,” I say as my feet meet solid ground once more. “Due to the whole lying in a bloody heap thing the other night, I am a little behind on our next steps.”
Tabitha grunts as if the typical-ness of this has just aged her an extra five years. “Car rental. Drive two days. Catch a bus. Drive a day. Get off the bus. Hike two days. Arrive. Get papers. Do it all backwards.”
“Five days?” I ask. “We can’t get a helicopter or something just to whisk us up and dump us there?”
Hannah reaches over and pats my stomach in a way that might possibly be OK if we were in any way friends. “Too much time behind a desk?” she asks.
“Too much time elapsing while Friedrich and his bunch of screw-loose nut-jobs work on creating the bomb that is going to kill me,” I snap at her. Again, diplomacy seems like a waste of time given my agenda. Hell, if everything goes as the future has apparently dictated, there won’t be an MI37 for Hannah to end. I can say to her exactly what comes into my mind.
Hermann and Volk are clanking down the Hercules’ back ramp. “For once he speaks something resembling the truth,” Hermann barks.
Felicity, standing behind me, puts a hand on my arm. “It takes the time it takes. We can’t commandeer the military here. It’s Nepal. But it’s OK. We’ll sort everything out.” There’s a sort of Zen calm to her as she says it. As if this place is already rubbing off on her. Or as if she’s in some sort of mental shock and not dealing with reality at all. I might be more worried about resolving these sort of long-term issues if I had any faith in there being any sort of long term to worry about.
As it is, I suppose I get to spend five days with my girlfriend traveling through beautiful countryside in a foreign land, to a place in the Himalayas seen by only a handful of other people. There are worse ways to spend your final days, I suppose.
FIVE DAYS LATER
We round a bend in the trail and suddenly a valley is exposed to us—lush untouched vegetation filling it, a warm green blanket dotted through with spikes of vibrant color. Epic mountains rise, thrusting majestically up into the sky. The serrated teeth of the world. Clouds skid and collide with sheer rock, roiling up in thick rolling banks of white. It is an epic view.
It can also kiss my arse.
“We have to be nearly there,” Felicity pants, leaning heavily on a makeshift walking stick which has already given her three splinters and me five.
“There is no end,” I tell her, desperately trying to stop the backpack from digging any deeper into my flesh. “This is karma. We must have done something awful. Some decision we made in the past is responsible for the drowning of a million kittens.”
“Green fucking hell,” Tabitha mutters.
“Well, it is quite a beautiful view,” Clyde hazards.
“I will slap you,” Hannah says. It is one of our rare moments of agreement, but considering our decreasing ability to talk to each other without using curse words, I don’t tell her so.
Volk offers no comment. Hermann manages a sneering chuckle. I would offer to slap him as well, but ever since I discovered that my early demise could cause the destruction of all reality, I’ve found myself becoming less antagonistic with people who could potentially backhand me into oblivion.
The first day in the car was mostly OK. Even if the air conditioning was broken. And the radio. And the suspension. Looking back on it, even that was OK. There was a sort of camaraderie in hating that car. And Volk and Hermann were towed in a trailer behind us so I didn’t have to put up with the latter’s snark.
The second day was not so good. If we had been able to sleep better perhaps. In a hotel that had mattresses for example. And fewer lice. But the camaraderie became rather bitter that day. Clyde kept saying nice things to Tabitha of course, but considering their mutual grunting had been audible through our hotel’s paper-thin walls, it didn’t hold much charm.
The bus was a definite step down. The suspension may have actually worked until Volk and Hermann clambered on board. But it was the chickens, I think, that were my breaking point. Not only was the noise deafening, but Hannah was allergic to them. She spent the entire fifteen hour ride either telling us about the fact or producing a volume of snot which seemed untenable given her size.
And now the hiking. We started almost with a sense of excitement. We were finally leaving mechanized hell behind us. Apart from it turned out that slowly broiling to death in our own sweat in a chicken-filled, allergen-contaminated hell-bus was infinitely preferable to slowly broiling to death in our own sweat in a forest filled with insects the size of our thumbs. All of us bleed openly from the bites. And on top of that, someone appears to have jammed a small semi-detached bungalow into my backpack.
How Clyde and Tabitha were up to having noisy sex in their tent last night, I have no idea. If I didn’t have to listen to it, I would almost admire their stamina. As it is, I would gladly spay them both.
And to top it all off, Volk and Hermann are immune to both the insects and the exhaustion. They just keep grinding on.
Volk at least offered to help carry some of our equipment, but Hermann just watches and sneers. I keep expecting him to call us “weak fleshy things” or something like that.
As we contemplate the view and the shittiness of the hiking, Kayla comes jogging back. Her unique physiology puts her in a class closer to the Uhrwerkmänner when it comes to weathering the journey, but she is somehow less smug about it. Possibly because Hannah seems to be suffering as much as any of us.
“About another hour, then you’ll be right on top of the feckin’ thing.” She’s been scouting ahead. On her own she probably could have been at the lab in two days or less. Why Lang chose to put himself through this every time he wanted to get some research done, I have no idea.
“Oh thank God.” Hannah collapses onto her knees. “Tea break. I demand a tea break.”
“Come on,” Kayla chides. “Another hour and you can rest all you feckin’ want.”
Hannah clutches her hands together. “Mercy,” she mock begs.
I look at Felicity. She shrugs. “Just another hour,” she says.
I groan but she’s right. Resting will just make starting up harder. I want this done with. “Come on,” I say. “Just a little bit more.”
This is not a popular suggestion, but we push on.
Kayla falls into step with us. “Bit of a militaristic-looking sort of place for a feckin’ research lab,” she says casually. It doesn’t sound like casual fact.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“You know,” she says, “sort of imagined something quite feckin’ dull. Square and shite. Maybe a little sort of European mountain home or some Heidi bollocks. But it’s like a fort carved out of the stone. Very feckin’ impressive.”
“He was a Nazi,” Hannah points out.
“Yeah, but his feckin’ mountain castle wasn’t,” Kayla objects.
“Tainted,” Hannah says with a shake of her head.
“Can we go back to the part where his lab is actually a fortress,” I say. “Does that not strike anyone else as odd?”
Felicity looks over to Clyde and Tabitha. “Did the notes say anything about the lab itself?”
“No.” Tabitha doesn’t even look up from her plodding feet.
“Just mentioned the place by name. The Ort wo gute Dinge sterben,” Clyde elaborates. “Bit of a mouthful. Though I do have to say that his prose style really does obfuscate a lot of his meaning. Not one to use three words if fifteen and a complex metaphor involving pineapples will do the job.”
“He likes to rhyme,” Tabitha comments, as if this is possibly his greatest crime against humanity.
“Could be a reclaimed space,” Hannah suggests, moving back to the more relevant matter of the fort itself. “Old space, moves in, takes i
t for himself.”
Kayla nods, but I’m less sure.
“That seems remarkably free of paranoia for you,” I comment. Felicity flashes me a look, but I am tired, aching, and need to let off steam. Sniping at Hannah seems like a viable option.
“Oh,” Hannah says blithely, “I’m all for nerve gassing the place before we step inside.”
“Oh good.” I nod. “Because two crimes against humanity make a right.”
“Anyway,” Felicity cuts in, attempting to stamp out the argument before it can really catch fire. “Let’s just all be on the lookout for trouble, shall we?”
FIFTY MINUTES AFTER THE UTTERANCE OF FAMOUS LAST WORDS
We spot the trouble less than two hundred yards from our goal. This particular iteration is female, about five foot two tall, stands in the middle of the trail, and wears nothing more than a small skirt.
“Tour guide?” I hazard.
Felicity grunts, staggers to a stop, and drops her backpack on the ground. “I am too tired for this shit,” she says.
The woman before us is wiry, and muscled in the same way as Kayla. Her nut-brown skin has a healthy, ruddy glow to it. Dense black tattoos twist over her arms, across the top of her chest, down between her breasts, and then spread over her stomach. Something between script and tentacles.
Her face has been painted, a stylized pattern. Black is smeared around her mouth and nose. As if she has been feasting on coal dust. The rest is white except for black dots that make exaggerated eyebrows. White dots drip down from her chin. Her eyes float, cataract-white in the white make-up.
“OK,” I say. “Not to go all judgmental about a book based on its cover, but she doesn’t look totally friendly.”
“Couple of beers in you, you’d feckin’ love her,” Kayla suggests.
Despite her exhaustion Tabitha still has her laptop out and open in under three seconds. Her fingers fly across the keyboard. “Shitty face painting database,” she mutters. “Take much longer?”
Broken Hero Page 18