Dispel Illusion (Impossible Times)

by Mark Lawrence

  Mia, knowing instinctively what to do, dragged me forward and put her arm around my mother’s shoulders, becoming the filling in that most unusual of things, a Hayes hug. And then, by gently extracting herself, she left Mother and me with our arms about each other, a position that, crippled by our own particular version of unbending upper-middle-class Englishness, we could never have reached by ourselves.

  ‘You told me that I had to come here, to Owlscroft Farm, and hide myself behind the left-hand door of the machine shed, and that whatever happened I had to wait until the man who was hurting you and the woman you were married to had his back to me.’ Mother looked up at me reprovingly and wiped something from my face – blood, I think. ‘I told you then that it would be a lot easier if I just had the police here waiting to help you when you arrived.’

  ‘And I told you that wasn’t how I remembered it happening, and that if you did that you would help a Nick Hayes, but not the one standing in front of you.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, you did. I still find it very odd, but you’ve explained the basics of it to me so often over the years that I have to accept it.’

  I smiled at that. I’d explained more than the basics. Mother was an exceptionally clever woman. I squeezed her in my arms and stepped back. We both needed the hug, but we were also both relieved when we were allowed to finish with it. I guess that while ‘British reserve’ is one possible diagnosis, another reasonable one is that, like many clever people, we were both on the autistic spectrum at the Asperger’s end.

  Two new thoughts occurred to me at that point, the first being that I really did need to stop standing up because I had definitely hurt myself falling on to Rust. The second thought occurred to me on my way to the floor. In my last desperate moment I had thought of Mother, and suddenly there she’d been, saving the day. While I still didn’t understand the crazy process that had baked into our strangely knotted timeline the events Demus remembered and brought back with him on his return trip, I felt that somehow I had been offered an inkling. The whole thing was some kind of insane paradoxical feedback loop spiralling around itself, and when the ‘event’ had happened and our timeline had uniquely tied itself into a Gordian knot, this just turned out to be what was frozen in. It didn’t have to make sense. It was what we were given. Like life itself. The parameters within which we had to operate. We had to stick to the letter of that law, but the spirit could be whatever we chose.

  ‘Quick! Call an ambulance.’ Mia was at my side.

  ‘I’ll go to the farmhouse,’ Mother said.

  ‘You don’t have a phone?’ Mia sounded amazed, even as she cradled my head.

  ‘Of course she doesn’t.’ I managed a laugh, and it really hurt. Mother still believed telephones should be anchored to the wall and sit in the hall. I beckoned Mother closer so I wouldn’t have to raise my voice. She got down on her knees, first brushing fussily at the grimy floor. ‘You have to go home now,’ I told her.

  ‘I will do no such thing!’

  ‘There’s a dead body, and you have absolutely no explanation for why you are here. No believable explanation.’ I winced. It felt as if I had broken glass inside my chest, but perhaps it was just my ribs.

  ‘If I leave then that’s just an admission of guilt,’ Mother said. ‘And someone at the farm must have seen something, or will when I try to leave.’

  ‘I think if I didn’t want . . .’ I hitched in a painful breath. ‘. . . want you to follow my advice then I would have told you not to back in 1986. I wouldn’t send you to prison back then any more than I would now. So please go, Mother.’

  Mother bit the side of her mouth, uncharacteristically unsure. She gave a curt nod, patted my hand, and stood to go.

  ‘You were never here,’ I hissed after her.

  By the time she’d left, the world was growing dim around me. ‘I’ll be needing that ambulance,’ I whispered.

  I woke in a hospital bed in a small room with a policeman outside the door. Fragments of being blue-lighted back to Cambridge returned to me. I remembered the paramedics coming into the barn, pulling back my eyelids, asking me stupid questions.

  I summoned a nurse with the call button. My chest had been strapped, and my ankle, too. I had a line feeding fluids into my hand. Internal bleeding, I guessed.

  The pretty young nurse who bustled in a few minutes later sported the name tag ‘Lisa’ and put me in mind of the nurse who tended to me on that first chemo night long ago. I think that one was also a Lisa, about the same age as this one, and too old for me, just as this one was too young for me. I might have spent a life studying time, but it still had the capacity to surprise me. Years crawl by but once they get behind you in a big old stack, it’s amazing how they seem to have done it in the blink of an eye.

  ‘Where’s my wife?’ I asked her before she could roll out any pleasantries.

  The nurse’s face clouded. ‘The police asked her to go with them to answer their questions. She said to tell you she was fine and would be in to see you as soon as—’ She reached out to interrupt my attempt to get out of bed. An unnecessary intervention, as it turned out, since the agonising pain in my side had me collapsing back on to the mattress before she could so much as lay a hand on me. ‘As soon as she can.’

  I sighed and lay back. I would let them fix me. The police would come and do their thing. They did have a corpse with two holes in it that needed explaining, after all. I would say I was the one to stick him with the pitchfork to save Mia’s life, and with no witnesses save me and Mia, along with Rust’s nineteen-year absence and the list of ageing charges against him, it should be enough to close the matter.

  The irony of it all was that having been stopped unceremoniously in his tracks on his journey through time, Guilder had clearly decided that landing in 2011 was insufficient to meet his needs. He had almost certainly failed to investigate the current state of medical science in any detail, on the reasonable assumption that the sort of cure he was looking for would take more like a century. What he didn’t know was that over the last twenty years, medical science had seen an incredible revolution, and that the technology that now allowed us to regrow and repair injured brains might very well also allow for the cure of whatever neurological condition was killing him. But no, he had just sent his snake out after us.

  I had no way of knowing for sure, but I strongly suspected that Demus might have had something to do with the stunning advances in medicine, neuroscience in particular. Not that I was claiming any genius for medicine; simply that if I were to want to ensure that medical science really would be in a position to heal Mia in 2011, then what I would have done was to take the foundations of the existing technology back to 1986 and seed it in the right places for it to grow.

  The whole thing was another example of the mystery of how you could lift yourself up by tugging on your own bootstraps. Was Demus so confident that his trip wasn’t the cause of the advances Mia needed that he didn’t do anything to make sure it happened? Or had he acted, and risked that he would start a new timeline, screwing up his plans?

  I relaxed into my pillow. It wasn’t my problem. I didn’t have to go back. Rust was dead; the year was nearly at an end. All we had to do was wait a little longer and those two time trails beneath the Tower of Tricks would simply vanish. We would be taking a gamble on the resulting paradox not getting out of hand, yes. But right then it was a gamble I felt willing to take. Both the Rust brothers were dead. I had no desire to go back to a time where they were both alive and to let the younger one kill me.

  Even with all the wonders of modern medicine, it still took three days to get me out of the hospital bed and hobbling through the front doors on crutches. Despite my injuries, I felt good. The police had seemed largely satisfied with our almost true account of the incident at Owlscroft Farm, and the world was minus one Charles Rust again after a brief addition. Mia was at my side and the sun was shining.

  I crutch-walked my way towards the car park where Mia had her Clio parked. John always
ribbed us about our cars. In fact, he ribbed us about our lifestyle in general. With his return on the investment into the time travel project, he had upgraded his three already ridiculously expensive cars into a collection of supercars, the insurance on any one of which was more than most people could earn in a lifetime. But the truth was that money was never something that interested me, and simply having a lot of it didn’t change the fact that I really couldn’t be arsed to spend it. The castle over the cave was my only indulgence and we hardly ever got to spend time there. There had been a plan for the four of us to get together at the Tower of Tricks once a month for a weekend of D&D; Mia would write a new campaign and we would recapture the old days. But I think we managed it more like once a year. All of us were always too busy. Even Simon!

  The joke now was that we would arrange to all go into the same retirement home where we could Zimmer-frame our way to the communal hall and catch up on lost gaming time. I told Mia that this had been the time I was going to allocate to catching up on all those great fantasy books I never managed to get round to reading. She told me that they were still publishing great fantasy books, with more coming out each week than I could read in a year. I told her to shut up.

  Plans for better ways to spend my time continued to flow through my mind as we crossed the road to the car park. The vehicle that hit us seemed to come out of nowhere, accelerating rapidly. I thought maybe it was another attack. I thought that Guilder hadn’t given up on us after all.

  They told me later that the driver was a little old lady, eighty-six years old, her foot pressed to the metal, too confused to be able to reconcile the car’s violent acceleration with her strong but incorrect belief that her foot was on the brake.

  The car struck me a glancing blow and sent me spinning to the side of the road. Mia it hit head on, throwing her over the bonnet and windscreen. She bounced once on the roof of the car and then hit the tarmac with her head.

  CHAPTER 17

  2011

  There was never any doubt about what I was going to do. The idea that I wasn’t going back had always been a daydream. A selfish one at that. A lie I told myself to keep from thinking about the day when I would have to do it.

  I had sent Sam Robson back to die a lonely death in the dark rather than risk the world-destroying paradox of having him not go. I was never seriously going to run that risk for the world on my own account. Sure, the world had a lot of shitty stuff in it that wasn’t worth saving, but it also had Mia in it, and my mother, too, I guess, and then there were baby turtles, rainforests, John, Simon, Elton, little children in playgrounds. Not necessarily in that order, but you get the picture. I was just scared, that’s all. Now, though, I was more angry than scared. Angry with time itself, perhaps, and its stubborn refusal to let go of this future in which I now found myself. Its relentless demand that Mia should end up where she was now, in an intensive care bed in hospital, having vital sections of her brain slowly regrown with stem cell technology.

  I sat by her bedside for a week, talking to her, telling her my plan, telling her goodbye. A week where every day the rain beat on the windows without pause, as if the heavens were being wrung out between two great hands. I spent a lot of that time staring into space while my mind turned inward. Boredom, like hunger and the necessary consequences of feeding that hunger, is one of reality’s ways of nailing us down. It’s nature’s way of telling us that however much we aspire to be spiritual beings, and even the atheists among us seek to be in some way greater than the biomechanics that supports them, our efforts are doomed to fail. We imagine ourselves creatures of deep emotion and grand gestures. I had thought that my sorrow would be some vast thing that I would wrestle with, that I would be locked in battle with it as I sat by Mia’s bed, unblinking. But the truth was that boredom soon took over, relegating my grief to a hollow ache that wouldn’t let me go, but wouldn’t occupy my mind either. I sat not seeing Mia, her bandaged head, the tubes and lines and monitors, the nurses and doctors who came and went. I looked inward instead, back along the years, back at the life we’d had and the future I’d reached for just as a falling man will reach for the rung that has already slipped his grasp.

  I think a lot of us dream about a life we know we’ll never have, but we hold it out there as a light to follow, even so. Mine had been a dream about a life with Mia that carried on past my fortieth birthday and ended with us growing old together. Disgracefully old, perhaps. It seemed insane that I had ever thought of forty as old. That at fifteen I had considered Demus, if not ready to give up on life, then at least having had a good bite out of it and in no position to complain too much about facing the end.

  I sat by Mia’s bed as dawn came fingering its way through the slatted blinds, her hand in mine. John and Simon had come and gone several times over the past few days. They didn’t talk about Demus but I knew that they saw him sitting in my chair. They knew where I was going, and when they said their goodbyes it was me rather than Mia who got the full force of them. John shook my hand too hard and pressed his mouth into a flat line with the desperation of a man not wanting to cry.

  Simon and I sat side by side, not speaking, watching Mia, the only sound the slow rise and fall of the respirator. We sat like that a whole morning.

  ‘What were those numbers again?’ I asked.

  He didn’t ask which numbers. ‘4, 17, 17, 6, 1, 2, 11, 3, 5, 3.’

  ‘Thanks.’ I’d forgotten them long ago. Simon never forgot anything. That’s a blessing and a curse.

  ‘You have to wait for John to say “batter up”.’ He took a napkin from his pocket. ‘Here, I’ll write them down for you.’ And in his laborious handwriting, so at odds with his deft touch with the paintbrush, he wrote the words in capitals and then the numbers.

  He handed me the napkin. The numbers were the dice rolls that Demus predicted in order to start convincing us of his story. I’d tried to forget them so as to break the chain between me and him, and eventually I’d managed it. Maybe there was a note of them somewhere in my things. Some scrap of paper that my subconscious had refused to let me throw away, but this was easier. Also, it was a goodbye that Simon and I could share.

  I had other questions, lots of them, and he answered them all, pulling the facts from the vast and incorruptible store of his eidetic memory. Finally, when at last I had run out of things I suddenly needed to know about the past, Simon dug into his pocket and brought out a steel watch. It had an understated elegance to it that hinted at a considerable cost.

  ‘For you,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks!’ I took it from him. ‘It’s . . . great.’

  It seemed an odd gift, given that neither of us had ever cared about fashion or statements of wealth or, in fact, watches.

  ‘It’s kind of antique. It lights up, too.’ He leaned forward and pressed the button that made the dial glow in the dimness of the room.

  ‘Cool.’ I was still a bit lost for words. ‘You just thought a man who travels through time should have a watch?’

  He quoted Galadriel’s line from The Lord of the Rings when she gives Frodo her gift, the one about a light to save him in the dark. Now it was a proper Simon present.

  I grinned and frowned. ‘You know this is just going to end up on the cave floor with everything else I’m wearing?’

  ‘That’s why I chose an antique,’ Simon answered without a hint of a smile. ‘I want you to buy the same one in 1986.’

  ‘I will.’ I nodded solemnly. Now it really was a Simon present. I had to go and get it myself. And pay for it. ‘Thanks, man.’ I stood and set a hand to his shoulder as he got up beside me, ready to go.

  Simon surprised me then. He broke the habit of a lifetime and, as though trying to speak an alien language for which his tongue had not been designed, he opened his arms and clamped me in a hug that felt more like an act of violence, but which was obviously well intentioned. He left with a cryptic quote that I was still nerdy enough to identify as coming from The Search for Spock. The one about weigh
ing an individual’s needs against those of everyone else.

  As he went through the door, I replied with the line from The Wrath of Khan that Spock begins and Kirk completes. A quote that basically says the exact opposite. Irreconcilable logic. A paradox.

  The room was crowded with flowers and cards, many from fans who only knew Mia through her acting, but many from friends too, of whom she had a ridiculous number. The hospital was a private one, a neurological centre that we had funded over the years with a sizeable portion of the money our billionaires had paid us for their tickets back into the past. The cash had also paid for a fair bit of the research behind the techniques that were now reconstructing the damaged portions of Mia’s brain.

  When I presented her consultant, Mr Briars, with a memory stick containing, appropriately enough, recordings of Mia’s memories, he was astonished at our foresight and asked how far back they went. I lied and told him that the earliest recording was from 2002, and that floored him since the technology had been in its infancy at that point. The fact was that I had been recording Mia’s memories since 1986, when Demus came back and gave us the necessary devices. This meant that she should be able to remember her whole life. Her childhood memories would be as fresh to her now as they had been to her when she was fifteen. I had transcribed the early recordings from where they had been stored in my own brain into the data matrix held on the memory stick, a 2048-terabyte monster of a thing closer to the size of a Snickers bar than the normal model.

  Not once had any of Mia’s memories leaked from the store in my mind into my consciousness, but even so, having removed them from my head, I felt an emptiness; a lack of something that I hadn’t even known was there. The memories were no more open to exploration in the memory stick than they had been in my mind. The technology was an ultimate form of encryption: the data and the brain were two halves of the puzzle, each useless without the other. Only when imprinted on to the unique and regrown structure of Mia’s brain would the memories make any sense.