“I can’t believe the little bastard burned you!” He stared at it in Iris’ evidence bag, looking all innocent. He was starting to think of it not as an ‘it’ but as a creature, dangerous and far from tame.
“The thing is, it was only when I tried to touch it with unprotected fingers. When I tried the glove again, it was fine.”
Spider took this in. “So it was like it knew you were the wrong person to handle it.”
“Yes,” she said, nodding, “it was exactly like that.”
“But that’s crazy!”
“Crazy, sure, but you saw it yourself.”
He was still watching it, hanging there in the bag, full of extra-dimensional menace. “Did you try to pick it up again, without the glove?”
“I did, with my other hand, and got burned again.” She showed him her other index finger and thumb.
“Shit!”
“But you know what’s weird, really weird?”
“Because all of this isn’t quite weird enough?”
“It was — and hear me out here, okay? — it was like the thing reached into my head, during that moment of contact. I could feel something in my mind, like that feeling when you know someone’s behind you, watching you, and you turn around. Only on steroids. Something reached into my head, figured out I wasn’t the right person, so it burned me.”
Spider stared and stared. “Iris, are you—”
“For God’s sake, Spider.”
Iris was the coolest, most composed person he knew. Nothing rattled her. But this little plastic cube was freaking her out, and that freaked him out. “Ditch it.”
“I can’t ditch it, Spider. Evidence.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know.”
Then Iris said, “Spider.”
“What?”
“I need you to do me a favor.”
“You want me to do you a favor?”
“Stapleton was looking for you.”
“You think.”
“He had your name and address on that bit of paper.”
“So you’re thinking…?” He was pretty sure he knew what Iris wanted from him, and didn’t like it.
“I think the D6 wants to meet you.”
“Out of all the possible people out there.”
“I know, but would you try?”
“You want me to contaminate evidence?”
“We know Stapleton was a time traveler. And we know he didn’t have a time machine, or at least not one we could find. Even the chrono-forensics guys couldn’t spot one.” Spider knew those guys used tools that would reveal a ghost-moded time machine, if they stumbled across one. “They searched out to a five-k radius. Nothing.”
“He had Australian money. He might’ve got a taxi.” Spider was staring at the D6 in its bag. There was no way on God’s green Earth he was going to touch that thing. Not with his naked skin, anyway.
“The thing that reached into my head, I’ve been thinking about it, trying to remember the sensation, what it was like.”
“I’m not doing it, Iris.”
She looked at him, and could see for herself that he’d made up his mind. She put the evidence bag back in her raincoat pocket. “Could be important, Spider.”
“Could be a one-way trip to winding up dead like Stapleton, too!” It had occurred to him that the thing that killed Stapleton might have been looking for that D6, for whatever unimaginable reason. “Any further information about what killed the poor bastard?”
“We’re setting a regress for tonight. You want in?”
A “regress” was the coppers using time machines of their own to rewind time to see just what happened at the crime scene, at the time of death. “Ghost mode?”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“What if whatever killed Stapleton—”
“It won’t.”
“The way Stapleton finished up, nothing ordinary, conventional, did that, you realize that, right?”
“Forensics reckons that kind of damage might have been done by a harvester, like on a farm?”
Spider nodded. “Should be easy enough to spot a whacking great John Deere agricultural harvester rampaging along the street here.”
Iris made a face at him. “I`m pretty sure it wasn’t any kind of machine.”
“Yeah, me, too.”
“Weird thing to think about. Actual, you know,” Iris said, uncomfortable at the very idea. “Monsters. Not just things under the bed, or in the wardrobe.”
Spider was more concerned about, as he saw it, the bleeding obvious: Stapleton was trying to reach him before this thing caught up with him. It strongly suggested that pretty soon Spider, too, would be trying to get away from it. “Yeah.”
“We’ll be armed to the teeth, of course,” Iris added.
“Good. That’s real good.”
“You don’t think we can take it?”
“You saw the guy, Iris.”
“Yeah, I saw him all right. I’ll be seeing him all the rest of my days, I reckon.”
“Great job. Career opportunities.”
“Complimentary post-traumatic stress disorder. So, you’re definitely in, then?” she said.
Maybe they could grab Stapleton before he got hit, and take him off somewhere safe and talk to him. Find out what the hell’s going on. Find out what’s up with that damned D6 of his. If, in fact, it was his. Time machines, for all that Spider utterly hated them, and hated what they did to people’s heads, were brilliant for dealing with ordinary crime, including murders. It was the easiest thing in the world: go to crime scene. Activate time machine. Wind back through time until you catch the murderer red-handed. Spider knew there was a vexed philosophical question over the issue of what should be done about victims of crime: do you try to prevent the crime, or do you let it happen, and then prosecute the offender? You can’t charge a person with a crime he has yet to commit — unless you have incredible evidence suggesting that said person is deep in the planning stages of a premeditated crime. That was a separate case, and presented its own problems. The WA Police Service’s Office of Philosophical Analysis, once the province of ethics graduates and constantly mocked by the real-world coppers they worked with, was these days a vital center of study into the question of just what was police work about. The current view was that police work was primarily about solving crimes, and only secondarily about preventing crimes, if possible. It turned out to be very good PR for the Service to be seen by the public arresting murderers red-handed. That played to the media extremely well, and the politicians loved it — whereas catching a guy who was about to kill someone rather lacked the same impact. Yes, you saved a life, but those people saved had a strange way of going on to die anyway in terrible accidents. It was an example of the cussedness of time travel. At what point was the prevention of crime actually about preventing bad things happening at all? Should people be protected from everything that could happen to them? On this issue the Office of Philosophical Analysis was, at least at the moment, quite clear: police can only follow the current law, and arrest people who offended against the law. Anything else started to become babysitting, and nobody wanted that. “Yeah, I’m in. Like I could say no. I mean, an actual, for-real monster. Gosh.”
“I imagine the technical term would be more like some kind of extra-terrestrial lifeform, or some damned thing.”
“Not necessarily,” Spider said. “It could be indigenous fauna, just from the way far future or something evolved from crabs, maybe.”
“That’s one big crab.”
“Yeah.”
“About the D6,” Iris said.
“I said I wasn’t going anywhere near the bloody thing.”
“I was just thinking it might help.”
“It might help,” he muttered, shakin
g his head, not happy. Iris stood there, not looking at him, with her hands buried in the deep pockets of her raincoat, staring at the teeming traffic; Spider stood there, too, feeling guilty for not helping Iris. She really had done a lot for him, he knew that. But this thing, this bloody D6! It could be dangerous! It could be… He sighed, staring at passing traffic. What was the worst that could happen? He could get a bit of a burn? Well, no. The worst that could happen was that he could wind up dead, in small bite-sized pieces. He rubbed his eyes, and knew what he’d say. “Iris.”
“Yeah?”
“Gimme the damn thing.”
She handed him the bag, a wry look on her face. “If it was dangerous, surely one or other of us would have come back from the future to warn us about it, right?”
He was fumbling with the ziploc seal of the bag; Iris had to help him. His coordination was still crap. At last, the bag open, Spider closed his eyes and tipped the D6 into his gloveless hand.
“It’s not burning me,” he said, blinking, surprised. The thing just sat there in his hand, currently showing a four. “It’s not doing anything!” He even flashed a rare smile, and laughed a little.
Iris joined in. “Thank God!” she said.
“Oh,” Spider said, after a moment, the smile vanishing. “Oh, what’s that?”
“What’s what? Spider?”
“I’ve got this, sort of, ooooh, there’s something going through, oh this is very weird, it’s like someone’s rummaging about in my head…” He stopped, touching his forehead, and looked at Iris. Then, he looked at his hand again. “There’s this warm, tingling sort of feeling, in my hand, no, now it’s in my arm.”
“There is? Oh, God, I’m so sorry, Spider!”
“It’s, it’s not unlike if you have to have radioactive dye injected into your arm before a CT scan or an MRI. The way you can feel a hot sensation moving up your arm. It’s like that. Weird.”
“It’s doing that? Should I get help?”
Spider smiled. “No, no. It’s not unpleasant. And that feeling in my head, now there’s this kind of warm, beneficent sort of feeling, like whatever the hell it is is happy. The weirdest thing!”
“Spider, are you sure? I can get help—”
“No, it’s fine. Oh, it’s up in my shoulder now, and…” He touched the side of his neck. “It’s heading for my head. Uh-oh.” This, he was starting to think, might be trouble after all. In fact, he thought—
Spider passed out and collapsed, just as the warmest, dreamiest, most wonderful feeling in the world bloomed in his head.
“Spider!”
Chapter 12
Spider dreamed — it had to be a dream — of red-checked paper tablecloths, and shiny steel cutlery wrapped, mummified, snug inside paper napkins. A small bottle of Heinz Ketchup. A small, boxy metal gadget from which one could control a jukebox, with flippable pages listing songs he didn’t know.
There was a rich smell of coffee, and he saw that there was a large white china mug of black coffee before him on the table, on a plastic placemat. There was a small saucer containing sealed plastic cups of “half-and-half”. There were sugar cubes, arranged in a neat little pile, as if awaiting an engineer to build them into something impressive. He was sitting on a vinyl cushion, on a wooden seat with a high back — he realized he was sitting in a booth, in a diner, like diners he’d seen on American TV shows.
“What the hell?” he said, and slid out from his seat, stood up — his balance and coordination were okay, he noticed, and his head felt fine — and looked around. If this was a diner, it was empty. There were no staff he could see, and no smell of food cooking, nor sound of people bustling about. There was a blackboard up behind the counter, listing the various offerings, many of them dishes Spider had never heard of. What the hell was “poutine”? Turning, walking around, he went to the front door. It was a big glass door, with a sign on it, the kind of thing you can flip between OPEN and CLOSED. Right now it was CLOSED. “No kidding,” Spider said. The big glass windows either side of the door both featured switched-off neon signs. “The Daily Grind”, he thought one said, in cursive script. And under that, the lettering arranged in an upside-down smile-shaped curve, “RESTAURANT”. No shit, Sherlock, he thought, and pulled on the door handle. A small silver bell over the door tinkled. He looked outside.
The diner was on the corner of a city street. The city appeared empty. Tidy, but empty. There was a breath of wind; it smelled faintly of pine trees and earth and sunlight. It was, he noticed, despite the end-of-the-world creepiness of the people-free city, a beautiful day, though the light was strange: Spider was used to the hard-as-bloody-nails sunlight, what some called “Mediterranean” light, in Perth. The light here was different. The colors not so startling. He counted four white fluffy clouds. There were no birds that he could hear. There was a traffic light thing hanging down over the center of the intersection he saw, and that was so unfamiliar he just stopped and stared at it for a long time. The traffic lights should be mounted on yellow poles by the side of the road at intersections. Why were they hanging down over the intersection like that? Surely that was dangerous. He saw, too, colored steel boxes with windows in front containing folded papers. It looked as though you had to insert a coin, or something, into a slot, so that you could retrieve a copy. There were several such boxes, in different colors, with different names. Calgary Herald, said one.
Newspapers! he thought. “Bloody newspapers!” Spider had not seen an actual newspaper, in print, on actual paper, the ink coming off on your fingers, in years and years. These days if you wanted to know the news, you hit the tubes, like everyone else, with the device of your choice. Nobody published a print edition.
He checked his watchtop, looked up Calgary. Biggest city, but not the capital, of Alberta Province, Canada. “If this is Canada, where is everybody?” He walked up and down a while, looking in windows, examining cars — and saw that drivers would sit on the left side of these cars. “Now that’s just wrong,” he said, shaking his head. Some of the cars looked sort of familiar; some didn’t. Hmm, License plates, dated various years, clustered around the period 1999-2003. Then he stopped, thought about where he’d just been, and what he’d just been doing. Something in the hypercube D6 had done this to him. The D6 they got from that dead Canadian guy. Hmm. At that point Spider started to understand that this was not a dream; it was more like some kind of hugely elaborate and detailed simulation. So detailed, in fact, his watchtop appeared to work.
“So,” he thought, “this is a representation of the past.” With no dust on cars. No bodies in the street. And no birds in the sky.
Spider retreated to the café — no, the diner. Yes, the diner. Right. He opened the door and stepped inside, squinting to see in the relative dimness inside.
“Spider! Hey, over here, man,” said an unfamiliar voice, which startled him. He’d just spent half an hour wandering about the abandoned streets of Calgary, getting used to the idea that he was the only person here, at least that he could find. So he stood by the door, peering into the diner, waiting for his eyes to adjust, and waiting for his beleaguered heart to settle down.
“Back here. Hey!”
Spider saw someone waving an arm. That voice had sounded a little familiar, too, but the fact that the only other person he’d found, so far, was sitting here, apparently waiting for him, was not, he thought, a good sign. What to do, what to do? He thought, Okay, outside, in the real world, I’m with Iris. She gave me the D6. Then all this happened. Lucky me. More weirdness coming right up, step this way, sir.
“Look, I won’t bite, okay? Promise.”
Which, Spider thought, was a funny sort of thing for the guy to say, but there was something in the voice that undercut any possibility of humor, something bleak, even grave. Spider’s suspicions started to shade, a little, into sympathy, just hearing that tone. So, certain he was going to
regret it, certain it would all end in tears, and likely with his own horrible, screaming death, he stepped further into the diner, moving down the aisle on the left, his footsteps loud on the checkered linoleum floor.
The new arrival was sitting on the opposite side of the booth Spider had occupied earlier. He was a tall guy, slumping a little, portrait of a tired man. Yup, Spider thought. This is Stapleton. But he was in one piece. This was a guy with a story to tell. Poor bugger. And he was smiling at him — as if Spider was a long lost friend who had finally turned up to rescue him, or some damn thing like that. “Hey,” Stapleton said, as Spider slid awkwardly into the seat opposite Stapleton. “How are you doing, eh, Spider? It’s damn good to see you, buddy.”
Spider nodded thanks, but felt at a loss — and now, in this booth, pinned down in a way he had not felt when he was here earlier. “Hi,” he said, uncomfortable. This guy had gone to a lot of trouble to find and talk to Spider, and that, right there, made him curious.
Then this Stapleton guy sat up straight, all at once. “Oh, sorry, Spider. I forgot. You don’t know me yet. We haven’t met. Geez. Rookie mistake.” He stuck his hand out. “John Stapleton. Pleased to meet you, Spider.”
“Mr. Stapleton, yes. I know who you are. Nice to see you in one piece,” Spider said, and winced, thinking that was a stupid thing to have led off with. He tried to cover the gaffe with a nervous smile, but it was no good. Stapleton stared at him. Spider then added, “Hello, nice to meet you at last.” Stapleton reached a hand across the table, but Spider did not shake it, and he was not sure why, exactly. It was just a gesture of greeting, so why the reluctance? Was it that Spider had already seen this guy in blood-soaked pieces in a park in Midland? That there was something of death itself hanging over him? Actually, Spider thought, yes, that might be it. It was like meeting a ghost. Stapleton retracted his hand, and looked embarrassed for a moment. Now that Spider was close to him, he could see that Stapleton had been living rough. His skin was drawn and tight, more greyish than anything else, and pale, as if he were sick. There were three or four days of greying stubble around his jaw, and his hair, worn long in a ponytail, and starting to thin, hadn’t been washed in some time. He wore cheap, op-shop clothes, an old skivvy and trackpants. But for the bizarre circumstances of their meeting, Spider would have sworn the guy was long-term unemployed, living hand-to-mouth, eking out a living.
Paradox Resolution Page 14
