“Bad news?”
“Yes and no. She has decided she wants a divorce.”
“I see what you mean.”
“How are you feeling now?”
“Like a bag of shit.”
“When I heard what they did…” Patel said, referring to the stun-gun attack.
“Not my first time.”
“Even so.”
“Whatcha gonna do if you don’t hear from the children?”
“The matter is out of my hands now.”
“Yeah, but what are you gonna do? You can’t just sit on your thumbs.”
“Inspector Street has cautioned me not to leave the State, or the present. They are, she said, ‘checking things’.”
“Did you give her your file?”
“I did.”
“Right thing to do.”
“Oh, shut up,” he said, tired, worn down, not meaning it. It was the kind of thing, Spider thought, a friend would say to another friend, which, all things considered, was odd.
Spider nodded, and rubbed at his face. “I could murder a coffee.”
Patel went out and returned a few minutes later, with a coffee for Spider, and a chai for himself, in paper cups with plastic lids. “These things make me feel like a baby,” Patel said, detaching the lid. “I think I’ve outgrown sippy cups, what do you think?”
Spider’s coffee, a simple flat white, smelled good but was burnt. He sucked it down regardless. “Thanks,” he said.
“Do you realize, Spider,” Patel said, “they’ve even confiscated the Time Machine from my office.”
“The cops?”
“The company. I led the effort to track it down and get it restored, but it was always company money, and it was always company property.”
Things moved fast in the Bharat Group, Spider thought, sipping coffee. It was too bad, really. For a while there, Spider had had his eyes on the Machine as a possible solution to his need for some kind of unit with which to go after the children. “Don’t suppose you’ve heard from any future versions of yourself?”
“Whatever I’m doing in the future, I’m not sufficiently disturbed to consider warning myself here. Or, possibly, I’m unable to warn my present self. I just feel so, so cut off, like I’m missing a limb.” Patel sat, hunched forward in his chair, fiddling with his gold wedding ring. Spider could feel the heat pouring off the man, his brain churning constantly, trying to figure out how he was going to get out of the very deep hole he was in. Spider also had the sense that Patel wanted to ask him to get back on the team, at least in his capacity as a private investigator, looking for the children, but could not bring himself to say so, and Spider did not feel particularly much like making it easy for him. The fact was, he thought, the man, when presented with the choice of saving his boy (and the girl), or losing his precious Kali, was prepared to sacrifice the children. That right there was not on. That was the kind of thing that made Spider want to go out and find the damned contraption specifically so that he could blow it up, to stick it to Patel, to tell him, “It’s just a machine! It’s not your flesh and blood. It’s not you. It’s not your immortality. It’s just hardware.”
“Guess you’re feeling pretty helpless,” Spider said, deliberately trying to nettle his former boss. That’ll teach you for getting me burnt coffee, he thought, full of mischief.
“Yeah, helpless and without much to go on. I do have the coordinates for a nodal point located four years in the past, when I was still living in Mumbai. It was the day I first had the idea for building Kali. I remember that day very well, I wrote of it in my personal log. If I was going to go and visit my past self, that is the day I would visit.”
“What if that version of your past self tells you you’re full of shit and to bugger off?”
Patel looked at Spider. “At this point, the way I feel right now? I would pull out a gun and shoot the smug bastard.”
Spider was so surprised he damn near choked on the dregs of his coffee.
Later, back on the freeway, heading to Midland so he could visit Mrs. Ng’s Lucky Happy Moon Motel to see if his personal effects had been returned there, Spider was pedaling in cruise mode, his legs still aching from residual stun-gun effects, when he got a call from Iris. The autopsy findings on the body from last night were in. Spider told her where he was heading. Iris said she’d meet him there.
“God, what happened to you?” she said as he limped towards her on the path outside Mrs. Ng’s.
“Bad day, Iris. Getting stun-gunned was kind of the least of it.”
“Somebody zapped you?”
“You said you had autopsy findings?”
“Yeah, and something else.”
“Do tell.”
She produced the evidence bag containing the D6. “Hold this a minute.” Iris reached into a pocket in her raincoat and pulled out two pairs of vinyl gloves; she put her pair on with practiced ease, took back the D6 in its bag, and handed Spider a pair of gloves for himself. He had noticeably more difficulty pulling them on. It was as if all his coordination had left him. He’d never felt clumsier. At length, and with a little help from an exasperated Iris, he got them on. Iris filled him in on the autopsy results. “Guess what we found in Stapleton’s brain?”
At first, frustrated over the business with the gloves, and not in a mood for stupid games, Spider suggested, “green cheese?”, “kittens?”, and, “psycho death-kittens?”
She made a face at him. “Remember I showed you the report from McMahon’s head?”
It took Spider a moment to realize she was talking about Dickhead. He remembered that conversation very well. He remembered the paranoia he felt, knowing he was reading a document he had no right to read. “Yeah, it was full of some kind of artificial structural stuff.”
“Same stuff in Stapleton’s head.”
“You’re kidding me?”
“People in high places, Spider, are exceedingly concerned, you might say.”
He finished with the damned gloves at last, and flexed his plastic-covered fingers, which rustled quietly. “Some poor bastard’s had to get the PM out of bed again, yes?”
“No, he was already up this time. But yes, not happy.”
“Two people with some kind of weird hardware in their heads?”
“Did McMahon have any Canadian business interests?”
“Not that I know of, but who knows? I mean, this is Dickhead McMahon we’re talking about. Looking at him, you think he’s just some mid-level corporate drone in a cheap suit and a bad but expensive haircut. Then you turn around and he’s the Emperor of Bloody Time Itself, fiddling about with the threads of history to make things go his way. The way he supposedly saved my wretched life last year.”
“That was a hell of a scar you got.”
“Still itches sometimes, at night.”
“So you don’t know about his offshore business interests, is what you’re saying.”
“I can tell you all about his End of Time business interests, no worries, but Canada? No idea.”
“Okay, hmm,” Iris said, and made a note on her handheld.
“What am I doing with this?” Spider said, holding up the bag with the D6. “Isn’t it kind of really not on for you to be wandering about with bits of evidence like this?”
“Open the bag. Take it out.”
He stared at her, surprised.
“That’s why you’ve got the gloves.”
It took some fumbling, but at length, Spider got the bag open, and dropped the D6 into his gloved hand. Up close, out of its bag, and in daylight, it looked even more like a D6 that had seen some heavy-duty gaming in the course of its short life. Some of the white-spotted dimples had lost their paint; the edges and vertices were worn and scratched. If Spider were still a gamer, he would never have al
lowed the use of a D6 in this condition: it wouldn’t produce reliably random results. “Okay, then,” Spider said. “I have the D6. I have the wicked power of pseudo-random number generation right here in my hot little hand.”
“Roll it.”
“What?”
“Roll the damn die.”
“You came all this way to talk to me, and this is what you’ve got?”
“Don’t forget the machine shit in Stapleton’s head.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, frowning at the D6 in his hand. “Where do you propose I roll this thing? I’m pretty sure you don’t want me rolling it on the pavement, getting evidence all contaminated and everything.”
Iris reached into her shoulder bag, and produced a Tupperware lunch box, which she opened, and removed from it a bundle of plastic cling wrap, and a banana peel, already going brown and blotchy. She shook the box out, emptying it of sandwich crumbs, and handed it to Spider. “There you go. Knock yourself out.”
The thought of Iris eating lunch was enough to make Spider`s own stomach grumble. So far today he’d only had some Vegemite toast, a few coffees, a shot from a stun-gun, and not much else. “What sort of sandwich was it?”
“Just roll the bloody D6!”
It rattled around the plastic box, and came up showing the number three: three dimples arranged in a diagonal pattern across the upper surface of the D6. “Oooh, a three!”
“Roll it some more. Maybe, say, five times. Make a note of what you get.”
So Spider got busy. He got a one, a five, another one, a two — and a “B”. It was a capital B. Much of the white paint had been chipped away from the dimpled surface, as with the numbers. He stopped, staring at it. “That’s…”
“It’s…” Iris peered into the box. “Yes, that’s a B.”
“Yes, I can see it’s a B, Iris.”
“Good. Full marks for observation.”
“But it’s a B!”
“Yes, and?”
“D6s, in my experience, such as it is, generally produce numbers between one and six, on a more or less equally distributed basis. If you have two D6s, and you add their results, you can get a very nice normal distribution curve, where—”
“Spider, you’re babbling.”
“What the hell is a B doing in there? Is this a trick? Have you fiddled with—”
“Yes, it’s a trick. No, I had nothing to do with it.”
“No, I don’t believe it! It’s rigged.”
“Okay. Roll it some more. See what you get.”
Spider did some more die-rolling. It was just like the old days, rolling up damage from a fireball in D&D, say, when he was an unpopular fat kid in high school, playing the game with other social misfits in the school library at lunchtimes and he didn’t have much money so he only had the one D6, a white one with nice black dimples. Rolling 10D6 damage with only one D6 could take a long, tedious time, he remembered. Now, rolling the thing in Iris’ plastic lunch box in front of the Lucky Happy Moon Motel, Spider felt a little self-conscious, but mostly he was baffled out of his mind. Then Spider rolled an “F”.
“Oh, hold the phone,” he said, staring into the lunchbox.
“What’d you get?”
“An F. I got an F.”
“What about the other rolls?”
“Just numbers.” He stared and stared at that F.
“So that’s a B and now an F.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What does that tell you?”
Spider tore his gaze away from the F and looked at Iris. “Do you propose letting me in on this game at any point, or what?”
“Last night, when I finished all the paperwork on everything, back at the station, cataloguing all the physical evidence, not that there was much, this D6 in its little plastic bag was the only thing left on my desk not filed away. And it was showing the letter ‘D’.”
“D, you say?”
“Kind of appropriate, in a way. Remember when Perth detectives were called ‘the d’s’?”
“Yeah, dimly. But…”
“Listen. It was showing a D, like I said. The letter D. And it was all chipped and worn, like everything else on this D6—”
“Suggesting it was a result that had come up many times before, as part of the die’s normal operations. Like these other letters.”
“Exactly. Yes. So I picked it up, real carefully, keeping the D in sight at all times, and I had this thought. The Rule of Seven.”
“Opposite sides add up to seven.”
“Yes.”
“So you…” He picked up the D6, showing the F, and with great care turned it around so that he could see the opposite surface. And was so shocked, he dropped it back in the box, and very nearly dropped the box itself.
“What did it show?” Iris asked.
“Minus five.” It looked just like the usual five-dimple X pattern, as worn as all the other results, but with a small minus sign near the center dimple.
Iris nodded. “F is twelve, and minus five plus twelve gives you seven.”
“You seem very calm about all this, Iris.” He was holding the D6 again, looking at every surface, and only seeing six distinct sides, numbered from one to six. There was no trace of letters, and certainly no trace of negative numbers. How the flying hell was this innocuous little thing doing that? Was it that strange little device you could barely see deep inside the D6, in its murky heart? He remembered that Iris had told him that the thing itself appeared to be some kind of portable drive, but that it showed up on her watchtop interface as using an unknown format and could not be read. What did the weird business with the numbers and letters have to do with whatever it had locked inside? Was there a password? Something you had to enter based on a sequence of these numbers and letters? It didn’t make a lot of sense — at least, he thought with a tiny shudder, in this universe. What if this was the sort of artifact someone like Dickhead might use to influence the strings of time? He didn’t like to think that something as ordinary-seeming as this could secretly be one of the keys to the universe. And, thinking that, he put the D6 back in Iris’ Tupperware box, and gave it to her, not wanting anything to do with it. Whatever the hell it was, it was bad juju. That much, if Stapleton’s fate was any guide, was only too clear.
Iris said, “Other than his wallet, this D6 was the only thing Stapleton was carrying.”
“Well, good for him,” Spider said, watching Iris put the thing back in its evidence bag, certain that now that he’d handled the thing, even with plastic gloves on, it would soon be just one more thing in his life giving him grief.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought — until I started thinking about it.”
“Oh, shit, that’s never good.”
“Two guys, both dead, both with all this hardware in their heads. Two guys who just turned up, out of nowhere, in bad shape.”
“And then some.”
“You know, Spider, and this is just between you and me—”
At that, Spider put his hands over his ears. “Oh, no you don’t. I’m not hearing it. Whatever it is, I’m not listening! La la la la la la la! You can’t make me hear it, I don’t want to know!”
Nonplussed, Iris waited for him to finish. “Spider, shut your gob and listen, all right? This is important. You’re my consultant. There could be money in this for you.”
That got his attention, with the greatest reluctance. “Uh-huh.”
“Last night, after everyone went home, it was just me in the section, like always, right?”
“Please don’t tell me you got a visit from a future version of me with dire warnings.”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Good,” he said. Because, he remembered only too well, the last time a version of himself from the future came back to visit
Iris, his Future Self ended up sleeping with her, much to Present Spider’s aching chagrin.
“So I was sitting there, playing with the D6, just like now. And with gloves on, of course. Rolling numbers, writing them down, seeing what I got.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I got all the numbers, from one to six, you’d expect to get. But I also got the letters A to F, and a bunch of other numbers, from minus one to minus five — and zero.”
“Zero? As in—”
“As in a side with no number on it. No dimples. Blank and smooth, like, well, like a very smooth and blank thing indeed.”
Spider felt things moving around in his head, trying to take all this in. He was tense, on edge, absolutely sure this harmless little red cube was nothing but trouble. To take his mind off this conviction, he worked through the numbers. Between the regular numbers, the minus numbers, the letters, and the zero, he came up with 24 sides for that harmless little D6. “So it’s a hypercube,” he said, not happy.
“Yes, and there’s more.”
“Oh, lovely.”
Iris leaned in close to him. She said, very quietly, so only he could hear, “I had a hunch, Spider.”
“Uh-oh.”
“I took my glove off, and, very carefully, went to pick up the thing.”
“You could be charged with tampering with evidence, Iris.”
“Spider, listen to me.”
“How do you know the killer didn’t plant that on Stapleton’s body?”
“Will you shut up?”
“Iris, you can’t do shit like that!”
“Spider!” she said, grabbing him to make him pay attention to her. “Listen to me! The thing burned me when I tried to touch it.”
“It did what?”
“It burned me.”
“How bad? Are you okay?”
Iris showed him a distinct red mark on her right index finger and her thumb. “I ran it under some cold water, it was fine.”
“Good. You had me worried—”
“Yeah, the thing is—”
Paradox Resolution Page 13
