He turned back to find Caitlin trying to contain her excitement. She was nodding her head in time with the bass, and there was a wild look in her eye. There she was again — his Caitlin, just like the time in the pub when she’d made him stay for the gig — sassy and confident.
‘No!’ shouted Josh over the music. ‘No dancing! We’re on a mission.’
A wide grin spread across her face. ‘Undercover!’ she shouted back, taking Josh’s hand and pulling him into the tent.
When they reached the centre, the music switched to Beautiful Stranger, by Madonna. The bodies around them were hot and glistening with sweat. Caitlin writhed to the music, pushing her body against his as the beats pulsed through their bones.
For a moment he forgot everything: the sea of bodies around them, the horrors he had witnessed in the maelstrom, the search for his mother.
There was nothing but the sound and the sensation of her against him.
She danced around him like a cat, sinuous and seductive, an enchanting display that was attracting the attention of the crowd. Josh grabbed her around the waist and pulled her in tight.
‘You’re getting noticed,’ he whispered.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and bit his ear. ‘You’re not jealous are you?’
Two guys in starched tuxedoes were making their way through the crowds towards them.
‘Time to mingle,’ Josh said, leading her away from the dance floor.
The song was coming to an end, and the next track was a badly misjudged tempo change by the DJ. Everyone began to separate and move off, creating a sudden obstacle for the bouncers and giving them time to disappear into the masses.
They slipped in and out of the jostling crowd until they reached the bar. Josh instantly recognised it from the polaroid; this was the right place, but there was no sign of his mother.
‘Right place, wrong time.’ Caitlin shrugged as she helped herself to the punch. ‘Guess we’ll have to mingle a bit more,’ she added, downing the glass of bright red liquid in one go.
The music grew louder as the next track got faster and people began to drift back onto the floor. Josh watched the procession of drunken dancers, looking for any sign of the younger version of his mother, but there were too many.
Then a thought struck him. ‘Wait here,’ he said, and walked off towards the DJ.
There was one song that had dominated his early childhood, something that had been seared into his memory by the countless number of times he’d had to listen to it. A song that she used to play over and over again.
When he returned, Caitlin was sipping champagne and chatting to a couple of very tall guys who looked like they were captains of the rugby team or something equally sporty. They were the bouncers Josh had been trying to avoid — Caitlin seemed to have them wrapped around her little finger.
‘Josh, meet the Davreau twins.’ She introduced them with a convincing upper-class accent.
They shook hands cordially.
‘I was just explaining how you were looking for your sister,’ she added with a wink.
‘Yeah, Martha. Martha Jones.’
The slightly taller of the twins looked like he was deciding whether to kick them out or make a move on Caitlin when the unmistakable beat of Josh’s request kicked in — The way you make me feel, by Michael Jackson.
‘Sorry guys, this is our song.’ Josh grabbed Caitlin and pulled her towards the crowd.
‘No, it isn’t,’ protested Caitlin, shrugging off his hand.
‘No, it’s hers,’ Josh explained. ‘She called it my birthday song, used to play it every year,’ until she forgot what day it was, he thought to himself.
‘Ah, good idea,’ Caitlin admitted with a drunken smirk.
It was a popular track, and the entire ball seemed to have gravitated to the dance floor. Josh and Caitlin worked their way into the middle of the crowd and danced casually as they scanned opposite sides of the room.
There were so many different people it was hard to focus on any one face for more than a few seconds before they disappeared back into the throng.
Caitlin leaned in. ‘Can you see her?’
Josh shook his head.
The lights were pulsing to the music, creating flashes of light and dark moments, the scene changing with every beat.
Josh used the music, reaching back into his memories to all those times his mother had danced around him when he was small. The same silly dance around the kitchen table as he tried to blow out his candles. Swaying her hips with hands raised high above her head as it rocked from side-to-side like some kind of mental patient. Not something that the debutantes in this place would ever have the lack of grace to do.
He stopped looking at their faces, studying the way they moved instead. It took no more than a minute to find her, less than two metres away — the same distinctive moves, two hands waving around in the air.
He smiled at Caitlin and nodded in the direction of his mother, who was surrounded by a group of girls that matched the ones in the polaroid.
She was so happy rocking out to her favourite tune that Josh held back; he couldn’t bring himself to spoil the moment. She was full of life, having a good time with her friends as they copied her ridiculous dance moves. This was not the woman he had known — this was another life, one that she’d given up to have him. He felt a pang of guilt as he considered what was to come and was having trouble coming to terms with the idea that someone in this tent was probably his father. This would be the closest Josh had ever been to knowing who he was, and now he wasn’t sure if he wanted to. All those years of dreaming about what he looked like, studying his own face in the mirror, trying to separate her features from his. Then later, the gradual realisation that he would never know, and hating her for not telling him, not keeping him.
So many conflicting emotions surrounded this mysterious nobody, and they had haunted him his entire life, yet as Josh studied the men around her searching for some hint of paternal bonding — he felt nothing.
They shadowed her for the rest of the evening. It was fortunate that she was so drunk because they were terrible spies. As the evening wound down and the revellers slowly drifted away, his mother’s group grabbed the last of the champagne and their shoes, then wandered out into the cool night air. Josh took Caitlin by the hand and followed close behind.
The colonel was loitering outside like some kind of embarrassing dad at a school disco. ‘Where have you been?’
‘Mingling,’ Caitlin said with a giggle and waving her shoes in the air. She’d been rather over-indulgent with the free drinks, and Josh could tell the colonel wasn’t impressed. But he guessed that finding out your parents were still alive after eight years of grieving was a good enough reason.
‘So I see,’ growled the old man.
‘We found her.’ Josh nodded to the group of women zig-zagging slowly towards their halls singing: The way you make me feel at the tops of their voices. ‘Any sign of the sperm donor?’
‘I don’t think he’s arrived yet.’ The colonel tapped his almanac. ‘We stay with your mother and wait.’ He strode off in pursuit.
‘What are we going to do when he does appear?’ Josh asked Caitlin, who was walking unsteadily beside him. Her hand slipped around his waist, more for balance than affection.
‘Since we don’t have a seer, I guess we tag him. Get something we can trace. There’s never really been a case of a future intervention before, so we don’t have a precedent. Oh shit!’
He moved away from her. ‘Are you going to throw up?’
‘No, you arse! Do you know what this means? You really are the Nemesis!’
‘Paradox.’
‘Whatever. I never thought about it before, but this is epic — I mean really off-the-scale huge. Do you know how many people want to believe you exist?’
Josh felt like he’d had this conversation before. ‘Believe me, this isn’t the first time you’ve asked me that.’
‘That freaks me out too!
All the things you know about me. Did you and I — you know, hook up before? You came a hell of a long way to find me.’
For some reason, Josh felt slightly embarrassed by the question. He’d come to think of her as the same person, not realising that she would think of herself differently, and it was true there were subtle differences, probably because of the way she had been brought up. Without the colonel’s influence, she was less feisty, and maybe a little more reserved — he loved her no less for it.
‘It’s complicated, and you’ve had too much to drink for it to make any sense.’
‘Ah, you’re blushing — we did, didn’t we! I knew it!’
She was getting louder, and the colonel looked back with a fierce glare that silenced both of them.
The lights of the common room glowed warmly through the leaded windows. Josh watched his mother and her friends finishing off the last of the champagne. There was no sign of any men, and he was beginning to wonder how exactly this was going to play out.
The colonel was staring intensely into the lens, pacing around the garden like a water diviner.
Caitlin was sat on a bench watching the old man. ‘I still can’t believe he’s Daedalus. He’s not how I imagined.’
‘The book was his memory,’ Josh replied casually, distracted by the vision of his beautiful, vibrant mother having such a good time with her friends — it was so different to the memories he had of her.
‘Have you ever tried to travel into the future?’
‘Not really.’ He came and sat beside her on the bench, feeling her shiver as he put his arm around her. ‘But I have seen what it might look like.’
‘And?’
‘It was different — you were all on some kind of power trip. The world had been totally messed up by constant wars, and even the Order were fighting with each other. Everyone was scared.’
‘Of me?’
‘Of you, of everything. They were living in a permanent state of fear. They were all slaves to their tech, and it was killing them. It was as if they had lost something.’
‘But you changed it.’
Josh thought about the figure he’d seen in the aperture just before Johansson had detonated the bomb.
‘Do you think someone could create a suit that would work like your parent’s ship?’
She laughed. ‘Did you see how much power that thing needed? Most of the ship was a field generator. I can’t see how you could miniaturise that kind of technology into anything small enough to run in a car, let alone a suit.’
The colonel came crashing out of the bushes.
‘I’m picking up a convergence half a mile east of here. Whatever it is, it’s creating a huge temporal distortion in the chronosphere.’
Caitlin jumped up. ‘Time to meet the father-in-law!’ she said with a smile.
Josh didn’t know which was scarier, her last comment or the fact that he was about to meet the dad he’d never known.
90
Dad
They followed the incandescent glow of the colonel’s tachyon into the night. He moved quickly and quietly towards the ‘waypoint,’ as he called it.
Josh could feel the air charge with static as they approached. Ahead of them, he could see there was a strong magnetic field changing the nature of the space around it.
‘Stay back!’ ordered the colonel, going closer.
Ripples of energy coursed through the ground, the trees and plants, distorting everything until their structure seemed to collapse and break down into atoms. Through the centre of the swirling morass of molecules stepped a figure in a mirror suit, his face obscured by an elliptical helmet with two F’s on the side.
‘Timesuit,’ was all Caitlin could manage before the stranger fired a weapon at the old man.
Josh pulled her behind a tree and clamped his hand over her mouth.
They could hear the hiss of the night air as it condensed on the superheated surface of the suit. An eerie calm descended as the stranger waited for the portal to collapse and the atomic structures of the surrounding fauna to stabilise. Josh watched them recombine into twisted caricatures of what they’d been before.
There was a series of clicks and whirrs from the servos on the suit before Josh heard footsteps moving away from the site. He counted to ten before looking out from behind the tree, and saw a dark silhouette of a man running across the lawns. The suit was still steaming, standing empty over the body of the colonel.
Josh let go of Caitlin and ran over to the colonel. He checked the old man’s pulse, then took the lens out of his hand.
‘Look after the old bugger,’ he said, kissing her gently. ‘And don’t follow me. Okay?’
She nodded and knelt down beside the colonel.
Josh slowed when he reached the lights of the college. There was no sign of the stranger. He’d tried to keep him in view, but the guy was fast, and once he’d cleared the lawns it was impossible to see where he went.
Keeping one eye on the lens Josh walked into the entrance hall, allowing the alternate worlds to overlay his vision. There weren’t as many as he’d expected. The stranger had gone straight up the stairs and onto the second floor in most of them. In one, where Josh had rushed ahead, the guy had waited for him to make the first-floor landing and taken him down. Not one of the scenarios showed Josh who the man was, and there was a part of him that wondered if it would be better not to know.
He followed the path that kept him safe. The lens showed him the man entering his mother’s room, and he could feel the rage building as he tried not to imagine what was about to happen next.
This was not going to be some casual one-night-stand.
The vision was blurred, a ghost-like trace, but he could see that his mother was comatose, lying on top of the bed still in her party clothes, the stranger standing over her with what looked like a knife.
Josh stood outside the bedroom, his heart hammering in his chest, one hand on the door. This was the moment he’d dreaded: to know what happened was hard enough, but knowing that if he did something about it — it could mean the end of him.
If he didn’t allow this to happen, then he would never have existed, and maybe his mother would never have gotten ill. He put the lens away. Whatever was going to happen next, he didn’t want to know what the other options could have been.
Josh took a deep breath then kicked the door open.
In the semi-darkness he could just make out the man on top of her. Something flashed in his hand as Josh entered, and then they were fighting.
He grabbed the stranger and slammed him against the wall. Blind rage took over, and he smashed his fists into the man’s body. Surprise had given him the advantage, but his opponent was unusually strong and Josh found himself struggling to hold him.
And then he saw his face.
It was a much older version of his friend Lenin.
There was something wrong with his eyes, and in the moment that Josh hesitated Lenin knocked him off his feet and across the floor.
Lenin took out a gun and pointed it straight at Josh. There were sounds, like a scanner, and Lenin scowled as he rechecked the settings on the device.
Josh leapt to his feet and took him out at the waist, knocking the weapon out of his hand.
The two crashed against the bookshelves and onto the floor, his mother’s mementoes tumbling down on top of them as they grappled with each other.
Josh struggled to keep Lenin down, his punches seeming to have little effect on him. The cold look in his eyes showed no sign of recognition, no emotion, and he was like a machine, an immensely powerful robot.
Lenin got his hand around Josh’s throat and pushed him back off his chest until he could stand, then in one swift motion he threw him across the room onto his mother’s desk, which collapsed on impact.
In the few seconds that it took Josh to come to his senses, Lenin went over to the bed and picked up the blade he’d dropped. Josh watched in a daze as Lenin pulled up his mother’s clothes and drove the ste
el into her stomach.
‘No!’ screamed Josh, grabbing Lenin’s gun and pointing it at him.
‘Josh?’ Caitlin called from the corridor.
‘In here!’
As Caitlin came through the door, Lenin jumped off the bed and crashed out through the window.
Josh went to follow him, but Caitlin held him back.
‘Don’t,’ she said, holding his arm. ‘We aren’t supposed to interact.’
‘He stabbed her!’ Josh yelled, waving the gun at his mother’s limp body.
Caitlin looked concerned and went over to check her.
‘She’s unconscious, but still breathing, and her pulse is fine.’
Josh came over and examined where he’d seen Lenin drive the blade into her. There was no blood, no sign of any kind of wound.
‘I saw him,’ he said in disbelief.
‘What did it look like?’
‘I don’t know, like a knife — I guess.’
There were noises from down the hall as the students came out of their rooms to see what the commotion was.
‘We have to go,’ Caitlin pleaded. ‘In a minute there are going to be too many questions to answer.’
She went over to the window and looked down.
‘It’s only one floor down onto the lawns… think you can make that?’
Josh looked at the comatose body of his mother.
‘Come on, she’ll be fine.’
No, she won’t, thought Josh, following her out of the broken window.
‘Where’s the old man?’ Josh asked when they got back to the clearing. The timesuit was gone, and so was the colonel.
‘With my folks. They turned up after you left. My mother took some photos of the suit and then sent me to stop you from killing yourself.’
‘I had to do something,’ he said, and sighed. ‘I thought he was going to kill her.’
The Infinity Engines Books 1-3 Page 65
