Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych)

by Ian Tregillis

  But I couldn’t help it. I was so goddamn lonely.

  By the third pint I was feeling less constricted, less crushed by the weight of my responsibilities. Even played a few rounds of darts. My game was rubbish. But, God … getting pissed with a few mates, ignoring my worries for a short while … I couldn’t say how long it had been since I’d done that. I’d started spending time in pubs after the trouble started with Liv and our son, John, but that had always been a furtive escape. Not genuine relaxation.

  The barman clicked on the wireless a couple of minutes before six o’clock, giving the valves time to warm up before the BBC news. We suspended our dart game; conversations fell to whispers as the clock chimed.

  “Here is the Six O’clock News, and this is Alvar Lidell reading it. German forces continued to cross the Meuse River today, pressing into France via bridgeheads established at Sedan and Dinant. After four o’clock today, the French Ninth and Second Armies were less than seventy-five miles apart. General Gamelin stated…”

  I finished my pint while the others listened. Didn’t need to hear the broadcast. The Jerries would rout us, then slaughter the Tommies while they tried to evacuate. Hitler would make the French sign their surrender in the same railway carriage where the Kaiser’s men had signed their surrender to end the First World War.

  Nothing I could do about any of that. I’d traveled through time to stop the destruction of the world, but I couldn’t work miracles. The world didn’t spin according to my whims. I couldn’t change the course of the war with a wink and a whisper. I wasn’t Gretel.

  Guess I’d lost track of my pints, because somebody asked, “Who’s Gretel, then?”

  “The gypsy witch behind all of this,” I said, waving my arm and spilling foam on the bar. “We’re all just puppets to her. Fucking Punch and Judy. That’s us.”

  Maybe I had relaxed too much. No matter; they chalked it up to the old duffer being deep in his cups. Which I was, though that was beside the point. They still talked to me, still treated me like a human being. And for that I was grateful. I could have stayed all evening.

  Though it was still raining, I opted to walk back to the warehouse rather than pay for a taxi. Tomorrow’s errand would be expensive. I stripped out of my sodden clothes and immediately began to shiver in that drafty space. So I tipped the contents of my briefcase into an empty barrel, and set fire to the former contents of the Milkweed vault.

  And nearly set myself ablaze. The fire was more energetic than I’d anticipated. The original fragments from Krasnopolsky merely melted, cracked, and gave off the smell of vinegar. Cellulose acetate. But Lorimer had apparently put the reconstructed Tarragona filmstrip onto cellulose nitrate film stock. The reel went up like a bloody Roman candle. Would’ve lost my eyebrows had I been a bit slower on my feet. I’d suffered enough burns for one lifetime.

  A plume of blue-black smoke roiled from the barrel and wafted along the drafts swirling through the warehouse. It stung my eyes. But the flames provided warmth, so I endured the smoke while changing into dry clothes.

  I couldn’t burn Gretel’s battery. Didn’t want to bother taking it apart, either. Reckoned it was a regular witch’s brew of corrosives and Lord only knew what else. Instead, I took the damn thing down to the jetty and hurled it into the Thames. It sailed into the night, then hit the dark water with a splash and kerplunk. And sank, I hoped forever, from the realm of human affairs.

  *

  The next morning, I gathered all the cash remaining from what I’d nicked out of the Anderson shelter and headed to Whitechapel. Fairclough Street was the place to go for illicit, contraband, or otherwise illegal purchases. Stephenson got his American tobacco from the black market here. This was also where Will had bought his morphine when alcohol could no longer numb the pain of fulfilling the Eidolons’ demands for blood.

  I brought my doppelgänger’s ID card. The forgery cost me a substantial sum. It was a solid, though: the fence had a set of blank cards, the real thing, taken straight out of the National Registration Office. Didn’t ask how that had been arranged. He even replicated the date stamps, and smudged them as in the original. I reproduced the original cardholder’s signature easily enough, since it was my own. The cards didn’t record the holders’ date of birth. If they had, I’d have simply told the fence to push mine back twenty years to 1890.

  An hour later, I held an exact replica of Raybould Marsh’s ID card, identical in every detail except the serial number. The forgery was more than enough to keep the coppers happy if I got stopped again. They’d have to check with the NRO to catch the discrepant serial number, but that would only happen if I got hauled in again, or if the Security Service caught me, at which point the ID Card would be the least of my worries. Still, it was with no small sense of relief that I tucked the new card away.

  The previous evening at the pub had given me a sense of comradeship, of being appreciated. But by morning the warm glow had faded and that thick familiar loneliness, cold like dead ashes, had taken its place. So I spent more cash on a decent shirt and tie.

  And wore them both when I returned to Walworth for the third time in two days. I told myself it was simply to return my doppelgänger’s ID card. A quick trip back. I’d wait for Liv to step out, slip inside, put the card back in its spot, slip out again. Not even five minutes. One less thing to worry about later, I told myself.

  No. I didn’t believe it, either. I’d done my best to save the world. Now I just wanted to feel like a human being again. To be in her space again. Just for a little while.

  Didn’t see anybody watching the house. But I was too lonely to care one way or the other.

  I took a steadying breath. Hesitated. Gathered my courage. Knocked. Liv opened the door while I wrestled with whether to abandon this idiocy or to knock again.

  Her eyes went directly to my scars, but just for an instant. She recovered well. “May I help you?”

  This was my first good look at her since I’d arrived. I’d become so accustomed to the faint wrinkles at the corners of her mouth, the age spots that had replaced her freckles. But now the passage of time had been reversed, and she stood before me as the woman I remembered. The woman I’d met at the Hart and Hearth. The woman who’d loved me. The mother of my children. My wife.

  I didn’t know if she could ever be mine again. But I would always be hers.

  Speak, I commanded myself. She won’t recognize your voice.

  “Good afternoon. Mrs. Marsh?”

  She raised an eyebrow. Liv’s way of saying, Yes, what?

  “My name is Liddell-Stewart. I work for the Foreign Secretary. I’d like to speak with you about your husband.”

  Her eyes widened, her mouth fell open. It stabbed me like an icicle in the gut, the sight of her terror. I forged ahead before she drew the wrong conclusion. “No need for alarm, Mrs. Marsh. He’s perfectly well.” Or so I hoped. “I’m not here in an official capacity. I understand you have a newborn at home. So I came to apologize.”

  Liv looked me over. I saw the gleam in her eyes, and braced myself for a cynical retort. And it was forthcoming. “Would this apology include groveling?”

  Yes, this was my wife. But I made a show of being caught off my guard. “I—” I stopped. Shook my head. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Sniveling would also be acceptable,” said Liv. “Or cowering. I’m not particular. Though I do expect a magnificent apology.” Her gaze hardened. “It’s the least you can do.”

  “Ah … As you wish, ma’am.”

  She chewed her lip, mulling things over. Then she stepped back, opened the door more widely. “Come in.”

  And I did.

  interlude: gretel

  She remembers the cipher future with the uncompromised clarity of a demigoddess. Sees every step the other-she takes to lure Raybould into the past. Remembers a quarter-century of prologue.

  But now she stands at the headwaters of an entirely new time line. This universe is one day old. It is a hatchling, too weak a
nd blind to fend for itself. Unshaped clay awaiting the sculptor’s hands. Spider silk and golden thread awaiting the touch of a master weaver. Awaiting her.

  Her Willenskräfte will be the loom that imposes form and structure upon this new time line. Like any youngling, this universe requires order. Purpose. She will impose it.

  Brother comes for her. He delivers a battery.

  The world fades behind a shimmering curtain of gossamer possibilities when she draws upon the Götterelektron. Her first true glimpse of the splinter time line. So beautiful. She wants to explore. Every thread, every tributary, every wispy one-in-a-million. What a delicious thrill to explore these vistas, to race off into the distant fringes of the not-quite-impossible. She can’t resist. She skips ahead—a day, a week, a month, a year—following the luminous paths of potentiality for a peek at the world she and Raybould will create, the life they will have together …

  Demigoddess as voyeur.

  … And sees something entirely new: the futures lose their cohesion, melt into an indistinct blur. Her willpower outraces the birth cries of this hatchling time line! The ripples of creation have yet to perturb the inchoate primordial fog. It takes time to break the perfect symmetry of infinitely homogeneous, infinitely isotropic maybes.

  She pulls back. There is much to do in coming days, many paths to explore in these first hours. In eleven minutes they will meet Raybould, her Raybould, in the park:

  “You came for me,” she will say. “I knew you would.”

  And he will say, “You fucking evil bitch. I didn’t do it for you.”

  No. Not nice.

  “It’s you,” she will say. “You came for me.”

  And he will say, “It’s you.”

  That’s better.

  Raybould sheds little eddies of change with everything he does. Every blade of grass bent underfoot in St. James’, every exhalation of sweet masculine breath while they wait in the car. Tiny perturbations at first, but they will grow.

  Snowflakes will beget avalanches. A fallen tree will divert a stream, alter a tributary, reshape a river, etch a new topography into the vast, wide continent of time.

  When she gazes upon Raybould through the shimmering tapestry of possible futures, he becomes a shadow, a silhouette limned with kaleidoscopic diffraction. The pattern is a framework, the garden trellis through which she will weave the vines of her Willenskräfte. Together they will grow a new axis mundi, a world tree strong enough to warp the universe to her liking. She and he are as Eve and Adam to this new time line. It is their offspring, the fruit of their labors. He, the man who traveled through time. And she, the woman whose vision transcends it.

  She peeks again. But the leaden cloud bank of pre-creation still shrouds the far future.

  No matter. She knows what she will see when the fog clears. The future no longer ends with the Eidolons. She no longer ends with the Eidolons. She and Raybould will be together. Given time, she can make him love her. There will be no Eidolons, no farm, no warlocks, no Götterelektrongruppe to pull them apart. No troublesome war to interfere with her desires.

  Nothing to distract Raybould. No freckled whore. No mewling brat.

  seven

  15 May 1940

  53° 55' 41" North, 8° 14' 6" East

  “It’s impossible,” said Marsh.

  He ducked through a hatchway as he followed Gretel through the cramped confines of the U-boat. She had changed out of her faded peasant dress when the watch officer announced they would arrive in port in a few hours’ time, just a bit after midnight. Now she wore a crisp gray SS uniform clearly tailored for her petite frame. Three diamond pips on the left collar, one on her shoulders: SS-Obersturmführer, roughly equivalent to what the Royal Navy called a sub-lieutenant. So far, Liddell-Stewart’s information was dead on target. But the tab on her right collar was something Marsh had never seen in any briefing: a skull cleaved by SS siegrunen. Marsh reckoned it symbolized the Götterelektrongruppe.

  Kriegsmarine submariners made way for Gretel, though whether that was deference to her rank or revulsion at her wires, he couldn’t tell. It seemed they didn’t recognize the Götterelektrongruppe insigne any more than Marsh did. The gypsy girl and her brother drew no end of wary glances from the crew. As did Marsh, though he earned those by virtue of being a hated Englishman.

  It was frightening to walk among his enemies so openly. He carried the pretense of being a defector, but these sailors would be a fool to trust him for that. In theory, they didn’t dare touch him, in case he truly was important to the Reich. But in practice his only beard was an inscrutable girl with “mongrel blood.”

  That was the most disconcerting thing of all. Liddell-Stewart had grown adamant when he spoke of Gretel. She’ll play innocent. She’ll try to charm you. She’ll even flirt with you. But never forget this: You are nothing more than a tool to her. Never trust her. Yet somehow, for all that, he believed Gretel would protect Marsh.

  Slipping an agent into the Reichsbehörde? Not even at their most wistful, their most brandy-sozzled, had Marsh and Stephenson dreamed of this. The commander had offered the one lure strong enough to drag Marsh away from his family.

  And so his life was in Gretel’s untrustworthy hands. Meaning his slim chance of survival hinged upon how well he understood the girl. So he kept tight on Gretel’s heels as she sauntered through the cramped submarine.

  It wasn’t easy; the walkways were inches wide in places, and crates of provisions had been crammed into every available space. The boat reeked of diesel fumes, boiled cabbage, and other men’s breath. The submariners slathered themselves in deodorant and cologne to mask the reek of body odor. The U-boat had been in port to take on Klaus not many days earlier, but that had been a rapid detour in the middle of a long patrol. Even the officers were unshaven.

  Marsh laid a steadying hand on a cold steel reinforcement rib and shifted his weight as the decking tipped underfoot. The hull gave a long, low groan as the boat sliced up through the waters of the North Sea on its final approach to Bremerhaven. He had a good pair of sea legs, but he’d honed them on surface craft; it wasn’t the same on a submarine.

  Gretel hopped into her fold-down cot. (And it was hers. She was the only person on board, excepting the captain, who wasn’t subject to hot-bunking. A point of much grumbling among the crew, especially the officer she had displaced. Worse still, the boat hadn’t fired any torpedoes on this run, meaning nobody could bunk in the forward torpedo room.) She reclined on her side, one hand resting on her thigh and the other propping up her head. Such informality might have been considered inappropriate, were a ranking officer to have seen this. Then again, so were the braids that hung well past her shoulders. And her gender, for that matter. But the Götterelektrongruppe received special dispensation, and Gretel in particular. Which brought him back to the topic at hand.

  “Impossible? Do tell, Raybould.”

  Crossing his arms for warmth, Marsh leaned against the pressure hull. “If you knew the future, everything slated to happen, it would mean everything is predestined.”

  “How do you know it isn’t?”

  “That would imply there’s no such thing as free will.”

  Gretel frowned as though he’d just said something obtuse. She said, “I have free will.”

  “Right. And so do I.”

  A queer little half smile played on her lips as she regarded him. “Are you certain?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “I knew you’d say that.”

  Klaus stumbled through the hatchway, forehead beaded with sweat. He passed between Marsh and Gretel without saying a word, then folded down the cot he shared on rotation with Marsh and two seamen. His chest rose and fell with long, slow breaths. He’d been ill almost since the U-boat descended into the Channel.

  The hull creaked. Klaus clenched his eyes shut.

  Marsh asked, “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Claustrophobia,” said Gretel. “It’s a side effect of the doctor’s trai
ning methods.”

  “I thought you lot do what you do with those things.” He pointed to the battery on her waist.

  “The batteries are a tool toward a means. Not the means itself.” She fingered the tab pinned to her collar. “We do what we do through acts of willpower, energized by what the doctor calls the Götterelektron.” That explained the insignia she and her brother wore. Divine lightning energizing the Willenskräfte. “But first the willpower must be honed. In brother’s case, it was through the supreme desire to escape his coffin.”

  Marsh had yet to hear a single thing about Herr Doktor von Westarp that didn’t suggest the man was a sadistic, first-class nutter. But he’d see for himself soon enough.

  “In Reinhardt’s case it was the cold.” Gretel shook her head. “Junkman hates the winter so.”

  “What about you? How’d he train you to see the future, if that’s really what you do?”

  Gretel leaned forward. “I’m different from the others,” she whispered.

  “How did you know about Liv? And our girls?”

  Gretel’s expression clouded over. She tried to cover—she did have one hell of a poker face—but she couldn’t hide the way her eyes flicked down to her battery. He’d managed to instill the tiniest bit of doubt in her, but it was fleeting. She looked up, turned an icy gaze at him. Had she looked into the future to put the lie to his trick?

  “Gotcha,” he said. “That’s twice now. Didn’t think you’d fall for it the second time.”

  If before her expression was icy, now it was arctic. Perhaps goading her hadn’t been such a good idea.

  “Would you like me to tell you about your son?” That caught Marsh off guard. And she saw it. “Oh, yes. There are time lines where you and Olivia have a son. His name is John. He doesn’t take after his father.” He recovered, but she pressed the point. “Tell me, Raybould: What first drew you to Olivia? Was it the freckles? Or her voice?”