“There was an escape committee, like I said. No gliders or tunnels, but there was the secret construction of a one-man, one-shot time machine.”
Spider was amazed, but tried not to let it show. “Which, I’m guessing, you’re going to tell me actually worked, and here you are to tell the tale?”
Stapleton couldn’t resist a satisfied smirk at this. “Something like that,” he said.
“Okay,” Spider said, frowning, sensing something wasn’t quite right about all this, that there were quite a number of details Stapleton was leaving out. “That’s all fine and good. But the thing is, like I said, you were torn up pretty bad, John. And I’m talking limb-from-limb here. The cops reckon, to the extent that they can even think about what might have happened to you, someone turned up with some heavy-duty piece of industrial hardware, because the alternative — that there’s some kind of rampaging monster stalking the streets and parks of Perth — is just too unthinkable. This is Perth we’re talking about here.” As if it would be far more plausible for such a creature to be rampaging about the streets of Sydney.
“Yeah, that. Hmm,” Stapleton said, scratching his chin, staring into his coffee. “That’s going to be problematic to explain.”
Spider rolled his eyes. “How bad could it be, at this point?”
“Badder than either you or I would ever want, believe me.”
Spider watched him, thinking hard, trying to evaluate what he was hearing. Some of it sounded all too plausible, even likely. But some other parts? Stolen suns? Earth drifting through space, its atmosphere snowed out and lying around on the ground? Sounded like madness and delusion talking. Spider wasn’t sure quite what to do, but he had to hear the rest of it, if only to find out what he might be up against. “So why don’t you tell me some more about it,” he said at last. “Leave nothing out.”
Stapleton nodded, finished his coffee, set the cup aside. It didn’t vanish. “Things were bad, Spider,” he said, hunched forward, trying to meet Spider’s gaze. “Everything was breaking down. The guards had left. Why did they leave? I have no idea. I never even knew who or what they were. That thing you say killed me? That was another prisoner, kind of.”
“Just tell it, John.”
“Most of the prisoners were doofus humans like me and you, time travelers who wanted to see the future. But there were some others, not so familiar.”
“Aliens?”
“For want of a better term, yeah.”
“Good grief.”
“This particular prisoner, this alien thing, was very different from the rest of us. So different it had its own holding facility. You’ve heard of the Vores?”
Spider’s jaw dropped, he was so surprised. He knew it was a bad move in a situation like this, to reveal any kind of reaction to what you’re hearing, but it had been a long time since he’d first been told about the Vores, and the very idea of them still haunted him. “You’re saying…”
“It was a captured Vore, Spider. Near as we could tell, the entire facility was built to capture and keep this thing. The rest of us, regular dumb human time travelers, we were never meant to wind up there. We were swept up in the same net, like jellyfish.”
Spider did not know quite what to say. Dickhead had told him about the Vores. He’d described them as things, whether creature or machine, Dickhead didn’t know, busy eating the space-time fabric of the universe itself, but spewing out waste matter and energy to the outside of the universe. It was as if Vores were ticks, embedded in the surface skin of the universe, with their gruesome mouthparts appearing in the universe, while their bulging abdomens protruded from the outside. And, Spider remembered, there were all manner of weird creatures, indeed a whole ecosystem of such creatures, living a precarious existence on the outside surface, relying on the Vores’ excreta to live.
The thing was, Dickhead had never given Spider any idea of their size, or actual appearance, or explained just exactly how it was that they could consume space-time itself. That, on its own, did not appear to make much sense. The only similar things he could think of were singularities, deep inside black holes, that consumed everything within reach of their enormous gravity wells. Were Vores somehow like black holes? Living black holes? Spider felt his brain hurting as he tried to think about it, and tried further to think about what kind of trap you would need to catch such a thing, particularly since, in the case of a captive black hole, surely the thing would eat the trap, you, everybody you know, and ultimately the whole universe itself. So, a bit of an engineering challenge, then.
“So, um,” Spider started, thinking hard, “this place has a Vore on ice. But, strangely, the Vore manages to free itself. Oops. Small design flaw. Suddenly, you’ve got all manner of trouble rampaging about.”
“Hence the need to use the time machine built by the escape committee.”
“Okay, yeah, got that. You manage to get away, and leave everyone else to be digested or otherwise killed by the Vore itself. Not such a good look for you there, John, eh?”
“The idea,” he said, clearly stung, “was that I would go and get help, and come back in time to save everyone else.”
“Ah,” Spider said, seeing the full design at last. “And this is where I come in?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes.”
Spider suddenly felt like a rain of shoes was about to come screaming down out of the sky, and pound him into the dirt. “What’s the catch?”
“The catch, well, it’s not a big catch,” Stapleton said, now looking all discomfited.
Spider remembered, finally, the ESC command. “Tell me now or I’m out of here and never coming back.” He had been full of sincere compassion for Stapleton earlier, the thought of losing your beloved in the course of escaping the worst trouble in the universe — that was tough. But now, Spider was starting to feel like he had been manipulated from the start.
Stapleton said, “The captured Vore?”
“Spill it or I’m gone.”
“It was no longer just a Vore. It had changed. Something had happened to it.”
Spider was ready to write ESC at a moment’s notice. “Come on.” He was trying to act all tough about this, but he could see from the look of horror on Stapleton’s face, and the way his hands were starting to shake, that something about what he was going to tell Spider was seriously not right, not right at all. Spider was dead sure he was going to hate what came next.
And, sure enough, he did.
Visibly trembling, unable to look Spider in the eye, Stapleton managed to say, “Spider, the Vore…”
“Get on with it, damn you!”
“It’s merged itself with Molly.”
It took Spider a moment to twig to what Stapleton was telling him. To fully grasp the true scale of it. “M-Molly? My Molly? That Molly? Eight million years from now?”
Stapleton nodded. “I’m so sorry, I—”
Spider cut Stapleton short and slipped out of the booth, hot with bitterness, fury, and, most of all, confusion. He stood there, staring back at Stapleton, who sat there still, his hands up, as if to ward Spider off. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you, I—”
Spider did not trust himself to speak. The bastard had set him up, fabricated the whole stupid story. Spider could barely think. Molly? His almost ex-wife Molly? There was no way his Molly would let herself wind up in a situation like this. Like Colditz. It would simply “not do…”, he could imagine her saying in frosty tones, “…not do at all.”
The thing was, though, he was thinking, his overheated brain blazing with the speed of his thinking, it was one of those things that was so utterly crazy that it might be possible. If all she had to do was travel in time when the vore-net was deployed, and boom, next stop, Colditz. But why would Molly and this Vore connect? And how would they even begin to strike up a conversation? Without, that
is, her being pulled into the Vore’s lethal event horizon. Without her being destroyed? It made no sense. And it was that lack of sense that made Spider, in the back of his mind, start to believe everything was possible.
Then, Stapleton was up out of the booth. He was in Spider’s face. “I didn’t do this, Spider. It’s not my doing. You gotta believe me, okay?”
Spider struck out and hit him good and hard. It hurt, but felt good.
Stapleton fell backwards, hit his head, and slumped to the floor. Spider stood over him.
Hitting people like this, he knew at least in the real world, was stupid and counter-productive. But this was not the real world; far from it.
He went up to the blackboard menu, found a bit of chalk, wrote, “ESC”, and left, rubbing his knuckles.
Chapter 14
He woke gasping for breath, confused, his eyes hurting from the glare; he spied Iris, who looked worried sick, and saw that he was in an upmarket café, and there was a fabulous aroma of fresh-ground coffee in the air, and—
He remembered what Stapleton told him. It’s merged itself with Molly. What the fuck did that mean?
“It’s all right, Spider. It’s all right!”
“It fucking well is not all right!”
“Okay, just breathe, nice and slow. Nice and slow now.”
“I have to talk to Molly!”
“You said Molly’s in New York—”
“No, she’s—” He tried to get up, but was too dizzy, and collapsed back into his chair. “Oh, oh God. What now…?” He felt like someone had installed a gigantic refrigerator inside his skull, against all advice that there might be insufficient space. Something, right behind his eyes, felt huge, like it was taking up every cubic millimeter of space back there. Surely his actual brain, such as it was, would be oozing out his ears, and he was so stunned and disoriented that he actually checked his ears, and found nothing out of place. He wiped at his face, and glanced around. He was quite the object of embarrassed curiosity, which embarrassed him. Must settle the hell down. Right now he looked like the town drunk, he imagined, like those guys he used to see on the bus, when he was a kid. So, with Iris hovering next to him, ready to help, he said, “Could you get me a coffee, please?” Said it like it was the most important request a man ever made, like the fate of the universe hung on the outcome. Iris told him one was on the way. Already he could hear the Italian espresso machine gurgling and hissing, emitting wonderful steam, attended by black-clad baristas, men and women who knew their stuff, for whom coffee actually was the most important thing in the world. It was comforting, oddly.
His heart was starting to settle down, easing back into his chest, and resuming its residence, crisis sort of over, at least for now. “Iris,” he said, and she was right there, sitting next to him, one of her arms around his slumping shoulders. She smelled the way the Major Crime Squad offices used to smell, back when: bad coffee, late nights, too much time in front of computers, lousy overworked air-conditioning.
“I’m right here, Spider,” she said.
And she was indeed right there. “Iris, I have to talk to Molly.”
A waitress brought over Spider’s coffee, a double macchiato, two shots of espresso, a dab of milk, a pattern in the crema resembling a spiral galaxy. The aroma hit him, and he gasped. “Oh, my! Oh, my, yes!” He decided to try a sip; his hand shook so he used both hands, and managed to get some. It blazed in his mouth, but it was smooth, multilayered, rich and… He stared into the cup. “This could be the best cup of coffee I’ve ever had,” he said, and looked up at the team manning the machine, the others serving the long line of customers, and realized where he was. “This is the Pure Bean café, isn’t it?”
“Well, yeah, it was the closest place I could take you when you spazzed out like that. They helped me carry you in. The coffee’s on them, by the way.”
The Pure Bean café was near Mrs. Ng’s, but Spider had never been inside. A simple flat white there would have set him back almost twelve dollars. He simply had never been able to afford it. Even now, thinking about what money he had on him, he doubted he could cover the cost, and that was important to him. He wanted to tell the staff that the double mac was superb, but didn’t, worried that he’d embarrass them and himself. He really would be like those old drunk guys on the bus if he started doing that.
So he sat there, clutching the mug in both trembling hands, taking in the restoring steam, feeling more and more like his usual self with every passing moment. It helped. Iris had done the very best thing she could have done for him. There was nothing, at least in Spider’s experience, like coffee for making things better. “How do I contact someone,” he started, still staring into the coffee, “who likely doesn’t want to be contacted, Iris?”
“Why would Molly not want to hear from you?”
“It’s…” he started to say, “It’s complicated,” but knew that if he were to try that gambit, Iris would come back with, “So explain it to me,” which would result in a counter-move from him along the lines of, “It just is, trust me,” and so on, and so on, and nobody would get anywhere anytime soon, and right now, as far as Spider could see things, based on what he’d been told, time was crucial. Instead he asked, “Is that regress still on for tonight? It is tonight, right? I haven’t lost a day, have I?”
“It is on tonight, yes, we’re planning to hit the rewind button at eight on the dot. As for you, you were out cold for all of about three minutes, give or take. Lucky you didn’t hit your head when you collapsed.”
“You didn’t think to call an ambulance?”
“If you didn’t come round in a couple more minutes, then yeah, absolutely.”
He nodded. “Right. God, my head, Iris. It’s just…” He looked at her, trying to figure out how to convey to Iris the sheer scale of what he could now feel in his head. Not that it hurt in any way; it was simply the sensation of great mass and size, as if his actual head were now heavier, somehow. As if when he swung his head back and forth, it had more momentum, and required more effort to swing back the other way. He wondered, briefly, if he was going to get a sore neck and shoulders at some point.
“You’re not exactly impressing me with your calm, composed and rational self here, Spider.”
“I know, yeah, sorry.” He had some more coffee. God, but it was good. “It’s just, I was in there for ages, it felt like maybe an hour, two hours?”
“In where?”
“Virtual environment, constructed inside my head. The whole thing was incredibly detailed—”
“Virtual environments are not exactly cutting edge tech, Spider.”
“Yes, but inside your head? The man wanted to explain things—”
“Man?”
“John Stapleton. He built and recorded this thing while he was on the run, before he wound up here.” Spider filled her in on the basics, how he knew Dickhead, his part in Zeropoint and the final massacre, how he and a few others escaped, followed by Dickhead’s goons, zooming across time, all to come here, to find him, Spider Webb.
“Why you? What are you supposed to do?”
He explained about the Colditz facility, full of trapped time travelers, and one, presumably very unhappy, Vore.
“Wait, you said last year, these Vores, they eat the very substance of the universe, the fabric of space and time itself. Is that right? That Dickhead thought they were these incredible angelic beings, intent on tearing down the universe so God could start over with, I guess, a new, no doubt improved, Big Bang, now with even more Bang?”
“Yeah, that’s it. When Dickhead was a little kid, he had this, hmm, ‘religious experience’, I suppose you’d call it. For all we know his little wee brain might just have had a stroke or some damn thing. Upshot, though, was he thought an actual angel appeared before him, and told him all kinds of neat but apocalyptic stuff about the unive
rse, about God’s decision to start over, and that only the very few, the Chosen, could be part of it, and thus find out about the Final Secret of the Cosmos.”
“But that’s bullshit, surely.”
“The Vores seem real enough,” Spider said. “How what happened in Dickhead’s childhood bedroom has anything to do with things that can devour space and time itself, I don’t know. Dickhead thought he knew. And all these trusting people believed him.” Again, in his head, the memory of bodies lying there, wreathed in hoarfrost, perfectly still in the silent vacuum of Dickhead’s flagship. He had some more coffee, needing to warm himself up. The coffee was starting to make him feel more or less human again, his bloody great huge head notwithstanding. “This guy Stapleton said that Colditz had been built to hold one of these things.”
“And just incidentally, oops, bit of a design flaw, caught all these clueless time travelers as well?”
“Yeah. And maybe Mr. Patel’s Kali and the children, too.”
Iris stared at him a moment, a sour look on her tired face. She got up from her chair, and went to order a double-macchiato for herself. When she got back she sat facing Spider, shaking her head a little. “If this was anybody but you, I would think that’s the biggest bloody load of bollocks I’d ever heard in my life — and I’ve heard some serious, professional A-grade bollocks in my time, let me tell you. I’ve heard the very best, top-shelf bullshit, from some of the masters, blokes who could bullshit for Australia in the Olympics, they’re so damn good.”
“I know,” Spider said, in a small voice. “There’s more, though.” And he told her what Stapleton had tried to tell him just before Spider punched out, that somehow this imprisoned Vore had “merged” with, of all people, Molly.
Iris pinched the bridge of her nose. “It’s a bloody good thing they hadn’t made my coffee just yet, or I would’ve just sprayed it all over you. God!”
“My thoughts exactly.”
Paradox Resolution Page 17
