Limited Wish

by Lawrence, Mark

  ‘—tried to kill me with a booby-trapped book!’ Waugh was shouting. ‘I’ll burn the damn thing!’

  ‘No!’ I held a hand out. I needed the book. I wasn’t sure why I needed it, but I was sure that I did. I stumbled forward intending to scoop the book up ahead of Waugh, but somehow tripped over my own feet just before I reached him.

  In the same instant I realised that the idiot friend still had his sword pointing at me. Time fractured. I saw a dozen images of me skewered on the blade. Through the eye, through the neck, through the mouth, through the chest. I was still searching for a timeline where I didn’t impale myself on the sword when it lanced through me.

  It didn’t really hurt. It just looked rather odd, sticking out of my side like that. I took a step back and the sword came with me, pulled from double-barrelled’s numb fingers. All around me other Nicks staggered or fell, overlaid one across the other, each similarly injured, some stuck through the stomach, others with the sword wedged between their ribs.

  I bumped against the wall and slid down it, my legs unaccountably weak. I held the steel blade in both hands now because it was starting to sting somewhat as it waved about. Blood was running out of the wound. Not gushing. Trickling would be accurate. Other Nicks slid down beside me, all of them wounded much the same, as if I were narrowing down to one particular future. I wanted to reach out towards a better outcome. I tried, but the pain had its teeth in me and everything seemed too hard to do.

  My backside met the floor.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. And I don’t remember much of what happened after that.

  CHAPTER 12

  I had wiped away the memory of how Demus died. It wasn’t something I wanted to keep. If in twenty-five years’ time I was still actually going to be Demus, I didn’t want to be carrying those memories with me when I stepped into whatever room I was going to get killed in. It seemed very unlikely now that I would ever become Demus. Our timelines had been split and the recent events that didn’t match his recollections were the proof of it. Besides, right now I found it hard to believe that I would be sacrificing my life to save Mia. I still had feelings for her, but that didn’t change the fact that she now counted among her pastimes swapping saliva with an over-acting wannabe pop star.

  I hoped that however Demus met his end five months earlier, it wasn’t with a large blade stuck through him . . . or me, because I’d tried that now and didn’t like it at all.

  I opened my eyes to a stark white ceiling and fluorescent lighting, all rotating about some central point. Closing them again, I sank back into the slow churn of my thoughts, half-dream, half-delirium. Eva Hayes. Charles Rust. Those surnames seemed too coincidental. I knew Ian Rust had killed a drug dealer and died around the same time that Demus met his own end. The new Rust and the old shared some similarities beyond their delight in other people’s suffering. They had the same eyes, and a snake-like quickness to them.

  A slow blink and the white ceiling returned, and the lights. The spinning of the room was almost imperceptible now. The sound of distant clattering reached me. I retreated again to the darkness behind my eyelids.

  Eva Hayes . . . Hayes . . . a relation of mine? Mother hadn’t known her. A half-sister my father had secretly raised with another woman? It seemed unlikely, but then how well does a twelve-year-old know their father?

  Another look at the world outside. White ceiling, check. Fluorescent lights, check. The clattering had got louder, closer. I turned my head in time to see a metal trolley laden with food trays approaching between two aisles of hospital beds. The large black lady pushing it handed a tray to the man in the bed beside mine, balding, with tufts of grey hair at the sides, and a leg in plaster raised on a frame.

  ‘Beef stew and carrots,’ she boomed. ‘Puts hair on your chest, love.’

  I tried to sit up and failed, collapsing with a groan, my side on fire.

  ‘Hey now! Don’t move!’ A nurse came in from the other side. ‘Lie back, Nick.’ She reached for my wrist and looked at the watch pinned to the lapel of her uniform.

  I lay back as instructed. The nurse, a matronly type, though not I thought a matron, took my pulse. She set her hand to my forehead. ‘So you’re feeling better.’

  ‘The sword!’ I remembered it lodged in my gut, its sharp edge held by the meat of my body, blood spilling out. Foolishly I tried to rise again so I could look at the wound. The pain made me cry out and slump against my pillows.

  ‘Beef and carrots.’ The orderly set my meal on the bedside table with a wide smile.

  ‘That idiot ran me through—’

  ‘All taken care of. Don’t worry about it.’ The nurse loomed over me to check my wound, dark haired, her broad face showing the muted no-nonsense compassion I remembered from the oncology ward.

  ‘Do I get to keep the sword now?’ I hadn’t meant to say that. Maybe it was the anaesthetic talking.

  Nurse Robson – according to her nametag – frowned. ‘It was a sword, was it?’

  My turn to frown. I thought everyone knew a sword when they saw one. ‘How long was I in surgery?’

  ‘You didn’t go to surgery, dear. Dr Patel did your stitches in A&E, then you came up to the general ward for observation. We’re wanting to understand why you were unconscious. Your friends thought you might have hit your head when you fell?’

  ‘I . . . don’t remember.’ I reached down to my side to pat the dressings. ‘I passed out because I had a sword sticking through me!’

  ‘It went through your clothes, Nick, and gave you a nasty cut on your side—’

  ‘It was stuck in me!’ I remembered that more clearly than I wanted to.

  Nurse Robson shook her head. ‘You had twenty-six stitches and lost some blood. You should be good to go in a day or two. The doctor has prescribed some antibiotics as a precaution.’

  She shone a penlight in my left eye, then my right. I saw the sword more clearly than I saw her little light. It had been a foot deep in me. Right through whatever organs you keep below your ribs . . . Liver? Kidneys? I hadn’t paid close attention in biology class, but it was the sort of stuff you got in a good fry-up. The sort of stuff you needed to keep you alive.

  ‘But the sword was stuck in me . . .’

  ‘An inch to the left and it would have been.’ She nodded. ‘Do you have a headache? Blurred vision?’

  I ignored her. I must have found another option at the last possible moment, a future where the blade just grazed me. ‘Can you help me to sit?’

  She bent and started to turn the handle that angled the top third of the bed. More of the ward came into view. Old men lying grey and disinterested, middle-aged men behind their newspapers, listening to hospital radio, chewing grapes, a couple of younger guys. The orderly dispensing the last of the meals. The windows were on the far side, running with rain as the sudden fury of a summer storm lashed them. It looked to be early morning out there. I’d been there all night!

  ‘Visiting time soon.’ The nurse wrote some of her findings on the chart at the end of the bed. ‘The doctors will be around to see you later. The buzzer is that big orange button. Let someone know if you start feeling sick or your vision blurs. You may have a concussion. There’s a bowl next to you if you need to vomit.’

  With that she gave a final smile and left, bantering with a patient here and there as she passed.

  I glanced around. I’d spent more time than I wanted to on hospital wards, and the main thing about them is that they are boring as hell. A good book helps, but all I’d brought in with me was a Royal Navy sword, and now even that turned out to have been in an alternative timeline. A tingle in the fingers of my left hand made me look down. Apparently I did have a book with me. Curiosa Mathematica. Whatever else had gone wrong, it seemed that at least I had successfully drawn the teeth of Lewis Carroll’s little book on maths. Time to see how deep the rabbit hole went. I picked it up and opened it. Just inside the cover someone had written, ‘To Eva, love from Dad.’

  I set my fingers to
the words. Something about the inscription nagged at me. Before I had a chance to figure out what it was I became aware of someone angling toward my bed.

  ‘Dr Pritchard?’

  She gave me a tight smile. When I moved to Cambridge I’d been assigned to Dr Pritchard’s team for my ongoing monitoring. Leukaemia doesn’t like to let go once it has its teeth in you. They talk about remission rather than cure, though sometimes that remission can last a lifetime. But everyone who goes through chemo is monitored and tested regularly for signs that the monster that took a bite of us has come back to finish the meal.

  ‘Nicholas.’ She was an old woman, older than my mother, withered and almost swallowed by her white coat, but with a certain fierce determination in unexpectedly bright blue eyes. Mother told me that Elise Pritchard must be quite a woman to have become a successful oncologist at a time when medical schools routinely forwarded applications from female students to the nursing college. She said I was lucky to have her.

  Dr Pritchard began to pull the green curtains around my bed, wrapping us in a poor illusion of privacy. She drew up a seat in the narrow space between my bed and the curtain. Half a dozen comments and questions dried up on my tongue. Suddenly I really didn’t want to know why she was here.

  ‘I’ve got the results of your last test,’ she said, meeting my eyes with her bright gaze before I could turn away.

  ‘I got stabbed by a sword,’ I said. ‘Well, maybe a sabre, technically. Not sure. And . . . I guess it was more of a cut than a stab. But an inch to the left and—’

  ‘I was going to call you today.’ Dr Pritchard kept her voice low and calm, the eye contact constant, not allowing me to avoid the subject in hand. And when the top item on the conversational list is not the fact that you are lying in bed with a sword wound, then it can’t be good. ‘I wanted to set up a meeting with you and your mother.’

  ‘I’m sixteen. I live alone. I’m legally old enough to get married, have sex, father a child and pay taxes. I don’t need my mother present in order for you to tell me that my leukaemia is back.’ I did want her there though. They say that soldiers horribly wounded in no-man’s-land between the First World War trenches called for their mothers.

  Dr Pritchard pressed her lips into a grim line, her face full of a weary but genuine compassion.

  ‘So,’ I asked. ‘Is that what you’ve come to tell me?’

  She gave a slow nod of her grey head. ‘You’ll need to start chemotherapy again. We should do it today, but I want to give it forty-eight hours to give your body a chance to heal after your accident.’

  ‘Shit.’

  There wasn’t any fracturing of time on this occasion. Either this wasn’t part of the bizarre series of attacks on me, or it was and there simply were no alternatives, no options, no way to dodge this bullet.

  The doctor patted my hand. ‘We’ve caught it early with regular monitoring. The prognosis following a sequence of chemotherapy is good. But you should call your mother, get her to take you home for a while. It’s not good for you to be alone at a time like this.’

  ‘I will.’ I fought to keep my voice level. ‘Thank you.’

  Whatever she’d just said about not being alone, Dr Pritchard knew that right now I wanted some moments to myself. She stood and pulled the surrounding curtain to one side. ‘Talk with your mother and decide if you want the sessions to be here or in London. I’ll come and check on you tomorrow.’

  She withdrew and I craned my head back into the pillow. I’d avoided nearly a dozen deadly events in the past few months, but for all their sudden shock and heart-pounding aftermath, none of them were a hundredth as scary as cancer. The gruelling prolonged torture that kindly Dr Pritchard had in store for me held far more terror than any sword thrust. It was dull, demoralising, depressing, nauseating. I’d seen it work and I’d seen it fail. I didn’t want to end up like that. I had a life needing to be lived. Work to do. It wasn’t right or fair.

  A cold fist knotted my guts about it. I felt sick and sorry for myself, but I’d feel sick enough soon without making myself ill now. I struggled to sit, the pain in my side no less sharp but suddenly unimportant. I stared at my arm on the sheet before me, at the veins, blue beneath the skin, at the treacherous blood within, manufacturing poisons to kill me, spreading the cancer to the organs that it was supposed to serve.

  I wiped some tears away. I didn’t feel strong, or ready to fight, or any of those positive go-get-’em things that you’re supposed to feel. Strangely it was social embarrassment that kept me from crying my eyes out, shouting at the injustice of it, kicking tables over: the idea that the strangers to either side might have heard my diagnosis and even now be listening and silently judging me. How terribly British.

  A bell rang and at the far end of the ward I heard the doors open. The first of the visitors would be bustling through with their cards and chocolates and magazines. They began to pass by my bed, shadows on the curtains, greetings ringing out. ‘Hello, Bob!’, ‘Stan, how you doing?’ ‘I brought you those nuts you like.’

  A shadow darkened against my curtain. The material rustled, a hand seeking the join where someone could enter. A head pushed through. My eyes were still a bit blurry. I squeezed them, thumb and finger, to push the last of the tears out.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hi.’ I sniffed and looked up. It was the girl who wasn’t Helen.

  As one, every buzzer in the ward went off, while overhead the lights all flared then died.

  CHAPTER 13

  ‘The universe is trying to kill you.’ The girl stepped fully into view. ‘And we need to get out of here.’

  ‘Who are you?’ I picked up the book she had left for me and held it to my chest as if it were some kind of shield.

  ‘Eva,’ she said. She watched me with bright eyes and an unsettling intensity.

  I wasn’t sure how I had mistaken her for Helen. Close up they were quite different. Both brunette, brown eyed, pretty, but hardly twins. ‘I know your name.’ I had to raise my voice above the multitude of buzzers. ‘I want to know who you are . . . Why . . . all this?’ I gestured around at the scene we couldn’t see because of the curtains. ‘And why this?’ I held up the Lewis Carroll book. ‘The book that bites!’

  Eva took a seat. Her hands trembled. I cancelled the call button while she gathered herself. All along the ward nurses clattered about, running hither and thither to silence the alarms.

  ‘Well?’ I raised my voice over the excited chatter of patients and their visitors.

  The confidence the girl had worn when she came through the curtain seemed to have deserted her. She looked too pale, as if she were the one who should be lying in a hospital bed. ‘A paradox builds up vast amounts of energy,’ she said. ‘Titanic, world-shattering amounts of energy.’

  ‘As much as I didn’t like being thrown across the room . . . twice . . . I’d hardly call it world shattering.’ I frowned even as I joked. Why was she so familiar?

  ‘The spare energy reduces exponentially the closer you are to the paradox event in time. And if it hasn’t happened yet, it’s even smaller.’ She shook her head as if this were all incidental. ‘Look, we need to leave.’

  ‘I . . .’ I had cancer again. The resurgent memory of Dr Pritchard’s pronouncement closed my throat on the words. Suddenly none of this mattered. The mystery girl, the weird effects, Guilder and his paid goon, Charlie Rust. None of it. ‘I don’t care. You should talk to Demus about it. He’s the one that knows all this stuff. He’s running the show. I just do the sums.’

  ‘Demus?’ She frowned.

  ‘Future me. He’s around somewhere . . . Wait, you are from the future, right? Otherwise this has been the anaesthetic talking and you should ignore everything I said.’

  ‘I’m from a future.’ She stressed the ‘a’. ‘Anyway, I told you, we need to get you out of here.’

  ‘That would be nice,’ I agreed. ‘But I’m hardly dressed for it.’ I glanced down at my hospital gown, suddenly aware that I’
d been undressed while I was unconscious. ‘Also I can barely sit. I’ve got twenty-something stitches in my side.’

  ‘I stole a wheelchair. It’s just outside the curtain.’

  I shook my head. ‘If the universe is trying to kill me then surely a hospital is a good place to be. I’m not leaving this bed without an explanation of why I should.’ I wanted to add that I also wasn’t leaving it without a strong dose of painkillers, someone to carry me and something to wear that didn’t hang open at the back. ‘Start by explaining this!’ I held up Curiosa Mathematica.

  Eva glanced at the curtains, then sighed. ‘The book was something I brought back with me. It allowed the paradox energy to be released more gently. A way of grounding ourselves before meeting, so no serious sparks fly.’

  ‘They felt pretty serious to me.’ I winced, remembering the shock that had thrown me unconscious onto my bed. ‘Wait. You brought it back with you? But Demus said only living things could come back. He turned up naked, for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘I found a way around that,’ she said.

  ‘You?’ I asked, incredulous. I hope I didn’t sneer at the idea, but I admit there was a sneer inside. I’d spent too long being told I was a genius – by Halligan, by the newspapers, even by myself. Demus said that nobody but him really understood his work even years after it was published.

  ‘When has Demus come back from?’

  ‘2011.’

  A muscle twitched in her cheek and her lips moved as if trying to begin a difficult word. She turned her head, then went to the curtain, but not quickly enough for me to miss that there were tears in her eyes.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  ‘Let me tell you about what happens when two timelines are bound together.’ She kept her face averted. ‘They’re paradoxical by definition, since the only reason that they are not the same timeline is that something happened in one that did not happen in the other. The difference could be tiny, trivial – a molecule in a fly’s brain reacts this way, or it reacts that way, the fly lands here instead of there . . .’ She touched two adjacent spots on the curtain. ‘Everything else is aligned and in the two timelines all subsequent outcomes of every uncertain action continue to be the same, except where the ongoing effects of the paradox cause disagreement. Initially it’s easy to move between the timelines—’