Iris said, “Shit.”
Spider said, “Apparently, the old woman looked all confident, self-assured. Molly looked pale — okay, more pale — maybe a bit anxious. The minder asked Molly to introduce her to her new friend. By way of answer, Molly dismissed the minder.”
“Dismissed her. I see.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Spider said.
Iris said, “So what did the minder do?”
“She’s getting paid by the hour, no hazard pay, not much more than minimum wage, so she cleared off back to wherever she came from to get a new assignment. Probably got a cab and left.”
“So Molly goes into Starbucks to get a coffee, gets accosted by tough-as-nails old lady, and they wind up leaving together, and ditching the minder. Next they’re spotted back at the hotel, going up to Molly’s room. I’m guessing nobody saw either of them come down again, right? Yeah, thought so. Then Stéphane himself comes back, expecting to find her, and finds Molly gone, that note, and some missing luggage.”
“That would appear to be the whole thing,” Spider said.
“Did this Stéphane go to the trouble of trying to find people who might have sat near Molly and the old woman in the Starbucks, who might have overheard them talking?”
Spider looked at her. “Get serious. In a city like that? In the current situation?”
“Yeah, I know.” Iris finished her second coffee, and looked like she wanted another. “A lot of those old buildings in New York have those fire escapes, don’t they? Could Molly and—?”
Again, Spider just gave her a look.
“Worth a thought,” Iris said. “Someone’s gotta look out for the sensible and rational.”
“You’re suggesting I’m neither?”
She smiled at him, the sort of smile an exasperated mother would give a kid who couldn’t stop screwing up or was always hurting himself in stupid attempts to fly or climb trees. She got up to order another coffee. Spider asked her to get him one, too. While she was gone, Spider stretched and yawned. He felt full, but he would not confuse that feeling with any sort of satisfaction. The food filled his stomach the way a bad argument fills your head with persuasive but ultimately nonsensical claims that are hard to refute. He suspected that later tonight, trying to sleep, he’d be plagued with heartburn and indigestion. Good-o! Meanwhile, the idea of Molly meeting a future version of herself, just the way he had met various future versions of himself, managed to both tickle his fancy, and fill him with dread. In the time machine business Spider knew he could expect all manner of space-time nonsense. But Molly, in stark contrast, was an artist, grounded in the here and now, at home with wet river clay under her fingernails. People from the future, Spider knew, could be intimidating and persuasive. To most people, the thought of meeting a time traveler was exciting, maybe too exciting. It was something like the shock and awe of meeting a hugely famous celebrity in real life. People from the future had an inherent sexiness to them, a glamour. Knowing Molly, she’d need some serious convincing, but then, Spider thought, she’d be arguing with an older, crankier, more disagreeable version of herself. Future Molly would practically force Molly to believe, simply to get on with things.
Iris came back and presented him with a coffee which, already, just smelling it, he could tell was badly burned and bitter. Damn. Iris sat, made herself comfortable, and sipped her own coffee.
“The bloody future!” Spider muttered. “What’s it ever done for us?”
This made Iris laugh, an actual, proper laugh. For a while they swapped favorite bits from Monty Python, laughed, corrected each other’s misremembered quotations, had a huge flaming argument over the Spanish Inquisition sketch, which led the restaurant manager, who looked all of eighteen, to turn up and ask them to settle down or take it outside. Iris and Spider stared at this manager kid, and laughed, banging the table with the flats of their hands. They took their coffees, got up and left, still laughing. They ended up outside in the carpark. It was near midnight. Getting a little chilly. The night sky was clear. Stars blazed and glittered. Iris and Spider sat on the bonnet of Iris’ car, sipping their coffee, watching the heavens.
After a pleasant, companionable moment, Iris said, “What’s it like, out there?”
“Horrible,” Spider said, not wanting to talk about it.
“You know, when I was a kid…”
When Iris trailed off, Spider looked at her, and found her looking back at him, her eyes huge, and gleaming with reflections from the carpark floodlights. She looked, he thought, different, but familiar. He knew that look. It reminded him of… He tried to think. Iris interrupted him, and said, looking away, staring at the ground, “Nah, you’ll just laugh.”
“No, what? When you were a kid … what?”
“If you laugh I’ll hit you with my Taser.”
“Why would I laugh?” he said, watching her. She was smiling, even as she blushed.
“You’ll think it’s stupid.”
“Iris, for God’s sake!”
She looked back at him, and he could see she was actually worried about his reaction, biting her lower lip, to a degree he found hard to believe. Iris had never been one to worry about what other people thought of her, at least in his experience. “I wanted to be an astronaut. Oh, God, I said it. Oh, God!” She clapped a hand over her forehead, shaking her head, looking away from him.
“You wanted to be an astronaut?” He didn’t think this was remotely funny, or even embarrassing, and yet it was all he could do not to laugh. He struggled to master himself, and managed, at length, to say, “Cool. Why didn’t you pursue it?”
“Oh, piss off. Don’t patronize me, Spider.”
“No, seriously. Why didn’t you follow it up? That would’ve been great!”
Iris looked back at him, scowling. “If you’re taking the mickey—”
“I’ve been Tasered once today, all right? I’ve no intention of doing that again. Look. I Promise. Cross my heart, hope to die.” He even held up two fingers in a Boy Scout salute, which, he admitted to himself, was possibly pushing it a bit far.
Watching him now, lips pressed together, she seemed to decide he might be genuine after all. In any case, after a moment of staring at him, holding up those fingers like that, she burst out laughing, and kept laughing, great loud booming laughter that made Spider smile, and he felt warm inside, for the first time in a very long while.
He said, “I really do think it’s cool that you wanted to be an astronaut.”
Once she got herself back under more traditional Iris Control, she said, “I never had the marks. All that hardcore science, just couldn’t hack it in the end.”
“Sorry to hear it.”
“Just made my brain hurt.”
“Why’d you think I’d laugh at you?” This was the most in-depth conversation Spider had ever had with Iris. Even way back, when they were both young coppers, and had their brief-but-intense affair, they’d never talked like this. They’d always been too busy for mere talking, even once the affair began to end. They’d been a secret white-hot item for ten days, the first four or five of which had been incandescently fantastic for both of them. But then doubts, and guilt, started settling in. Spider had already been having trouble with Molly, early in their marriage, and what he needed at the time, really, was someone he could talk to, but he couldn’t talk to Iris, not that version of Iris — Past Iris, he guessed he could think of her — all she would talk about was her plans for the future, her towering ambition, to make Inspector before she was forty. It was dismaying, finding himself as if magnetically attracted to this extraordinary, flinty woman, even as he realized she was not what he truly wanted. Once their affair was over, they drifted apart: Spider found himself on the career fast-track, while Iris languished as a uniform cop, which also became a problem that neither of them could talk about. In fact it was only
last year that Spider and Iris met up again, as part of the police investigation into the business of the dead woman from the future who had been found hidden inside a faulty time machine. For the longest time Spider found it impossible to trust her. He imagined, wrongly, she had been one of the WA police who hated his guts. That she was not, and that she still cared about Spider, had been very hard for him to accept.
“I don’t know, I just…”
He nudged her shoulder with his arm. She nudged him back with hers. They went back to staring up at the stars, the ones they could see despite the carpark floodlights.
Spider said, “You’d still be up for it, though, eh?”
“Oh, yeah, like a shot.”
He sighed. “Be careful what you wish for.”
“True,” she said.
There was a commotion nearby that distracted Spider. Some git with a big trailer on the back of his four-wheel-drive had slung his vehicle off the main road and into the carpark, and was hurtling at surprising speed in their general direction, high-beams blazing, spotlights flashing, and, as the vehicle got closer, the driver was hitting the horn. Bystanders scrambled to get out of the way.
“The hell?” Spider said.
“There’s always someone wanting to ruin a lovely evening.”
Then Spider recognized the driver, and began to understand things. Before he could tell Iris, the four-wheel-drive rushed up to where they were sitting, and came to a sudden, brake-squealing stop surrounded by a cloud of its own chip-shop exhaust. The vehicle was a monster, a recent model, the serious sort of four-wheel-drive actually intended for off-road driving, the kind of thing you’d want for driving across a flooded river, or inching your way down a tricky, perilous mountainside. It was the trailer — and the tarp-draped object on the trailer — that had Spider dismayed. He got up, shaking his head, swearing loudly, throwing his unfinished coffee aside.
Iris got up, too. “You know this idiot?”
“You don’t recognize him?” Spider said, watching as the driver got out of the vehicle, his hand already out to greet Spider, a big nervous smile on his face, and he said hello to Iris.
Iris realized, all at once. “Oh, it’s…”
Spider said, “It’s trouble, is who it is.”
“Trouble?” said Iris.
“Spider!” Mr. Patel said, coming up to him, taking his hand, pumping it hard. “You’re a hard man to find!”
“Evidently not hard enough.”
“I couldn’t get you on the phone, so I had to track the GPS in your watchtop,” Patel said, still pumping Spider’s aching hand.
“Phone’s cactus,” Spider said, taking his hand back, rubbed it a moment, and told Iris what was going on. “Inspector Iris Street? I believe you’ve met my former employer, Mr. Patel.”
Iris said, “Mr. Patel,” in a quiet, cautious tone.
But, Spider was thinking, something was wrong, beyond the obvious. This, he thought, was not the twenty-nine-year-old Bharat Group wunderkind who had built Kali, and who had just today wound up the Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait shop in Malaga. This guy was middle-aged, his face all hollowed out, with deep lines carved in the coarsened skin, and bags under his eye-plugs. This guy sported a goatee beard gone salt-and-pepper, and his hair, which Spider remembered as receding, was now all gone, his scalp shaved back to aerodynamic smoothness, and there were two or three worrying-looking scars, pale against the brown skin. This version of Patel was much older, and hadn’t eaten well; he was much thinner, and he had already been a wiry whippet of a guy when Spider knew him, just yesterday. It was moments like these, with their jarring temporal dislocations, that bugged Spider most of all about time travel, the way they messed with your internal models of how people look and behave. Still, wherever this Patel had been — and Spider was betting it was nowhere good — the man had not lost his energy or enthusiasm. Right now, meeting Spider and Iris, Spider found he still kind of liked the guy, even though he was obviously full of trouble, and had not gone to the bother of tracking Spider down via GPS just to hang out and shoot the breeze about old times. The thing on the trailer under the tarp was meant for him, Spider knew that only too well. And what’s more, there was only one thing in the whole world that would look like that shape.
To Patel Iris said, “Any word of your son and his friend, sir?”
He said, “As it happens, yes, and that’s why—”
This got Spider’s attention. “You’ve heard from them?”
“It was the faintest signal, terribly red-shifted and attenuated almost all the way into the infra-red. If I hadn’t been scanning the TPIRB channel, I’d never have found it. And even then, there was so much cross-time chaotic noise, it was hard to pick out the signal, but I’m sure it was them. Very brief, repeated over and over!”
“Coordinates?”
“Coordinates. Last known TPS position.”
“Let me guess,” Spider said. “Eight-point-four million years from now, give or take.”
Iris was looking at Spider. “You said—”
“Yes, it fits with everything else. Shit!” He was looking at the object under the tarp again. “Is that what I think it is?”
Patel flashed him a broad smile, full of nervous pride. “It is, yes, very good. It took some doing, once I got out of prison, to get my hands on it, some intense time-trickery, which of course only seems appropriate, considering—” The man was talking so fast Spider was having a hard time keeping up.
Iris said, “You went to prison? Over the missing children?”
“That is correct, Inspector. I am currently on parole, so…” He shrugged, unconcerned, knowing he was going back to prison just as soon as the future police tracked him down. Spider had no doubt they were coming.
He said, “So you stole the Machine, and—”
“I borrowed it, Spider. The company had it stored with some other sculptures and artwork. They had no idea it was a working machine. The fact that it’s company property is a legal anomaly. And in any case, I do fully intend to return it.”
“For fuck’s sake, Mr. Patel!”
Iris was trying to follow the conversation. “What’s he talking—?”
Spider said to her, “Looks like I’m going on a little trip.”
Patel was just about bouncing up and down on his toes, he was so keen to get moving. “Spider, I’ve got the TPS coordinates. You’ve got to get going, my past is depending on you.”
“Damn,” he said, not happy about this one bit.
“My time here is short, you must understand. The police are coming. The plan did not go quite as smoothly as we had hoped.”
“Plans can really suck that way,” Spider said. “But can this machine go that far? Eight million years, I mean—”
“I have taken the liberty of replacing the power supply, the translation engine, and uprated the primary operating system. She’s as bootstrapped and bodacious as I know how to make her. So,” he said, bouncing on his toes again, full of bubbly intensity, “I need to know. What’s it to be? Are you a man of your word?”
Iris interrupted. “Now just wait a bloody minute here, sir. You would appear to be telling me that you are in possession of a stolen time machine?”
“Well, yes, but—”
“You are talking, let me remind you, sir, to the senior inspector in charge of the Time Crimes Unit of the WA Police Service.”
“Yes, but—”
“Mr. Patel, I am at this point well within my purview to place you under arrest on numerous charges, to say nothing of your own freely admitted breaking of the terms of your parole. Do you understand me, sir?”
Patel was sweating under the floodlights, looking at Iris, looking at Spider.
Spider said, “Inspector Street has a point, Mr. Patel. She’s got you dead to rights.”
Then Iris said, in the same forbidding tone, “You claim that Mr. Webb can use this machine of yours to locate your lost son and the girl?”
“Yes, that’s—”
“And that he can, in fact, bring the machine back, having retrieved said children?”
“Of course! That’s what—”
Iris said, “Which would nullify the original charges against you, which in turn would shunt everything to a new timeline.”
Spider was watching Iris think her way through this. She said, in a tone like death itself, forbidding and dire, “I do have a small degree of discretion in the way I carry out my duties and responsibilities as head of the Time Crime Unit, sir. It seems to me that if you sign an affidavit, explaining what you propose to accomplish—”
“Actually, Inspector, if we stay here, in this timeline, and Mr. Webb goes off in the Machine…”
Spider, full of mischief, was enjoying Patel and Iris’s strange dance around the law. “He did say it’s borrowed, Inspector…”
Iris ignored him. “And he brings back the kids…”
“And,” Spider added, “if you, sir, can convince your younger self, here and now in this timeline, to give me my job back, we might have a deal.”
Patel’s face lit up. “Of course, Spider. Leave it with me. I will do my best.”
Hmm, Spider thought, the statement filled him with no confidence at all. Fair enough.
Iris interjected, “But you’re talking about going more than eight million years into the future?”
“Yeah,” Spider said. “It’s where all the fun people are hanging out.”
Iris stood there, speechless.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes.” Spider said, moving down to the trailer, looking up at the hidden shape. He started unknotting the lines holding down the tarp. Patel went around to the other side, and did the same. Before long, they’d pulled the tarp free, and the Time Machine stood revealed, its brass framework gleaming under the carpark floodlights, just as it had once shone under studio lights in 1959. The thing that surprised Spider, seeing it before him, was how small it was. It had only one seat, a plush, deep red, well-upholstered chair, more of an armchair from which to view the shifting epochs humming by as it plunged off into the future. There was the great, concave disc, easily two meters wide, and marked with cryptic glyphs around the edge, with intricate filigree at each of its cardinal points. Then there was the modest white cylinder mounted behind the pilot’s seat, itself decorated with that lace-like filigree, from where the Machine drew its power. He could see that it had been modified in the process of converting it into a working time machine, and modified still further as Mr. Patel had turned the Machine into a hotrod version of its former sedate self. Spider could well believe that this new form of the beast would indeed have the legs to make an eight million year jump. Of more concern was the sheer lack of space. If he was going to get the two children home in this Machine, things would be a little too cozy for his liking. “Here, kids, just sit on Uncle Spider’s lap while I lay in the coordinates for home!” The thought of two nine year olds, climbing all over him, filled him with dread. Then again, it was quite possible that Patel’s Kali machine might simply need repair. Something he could easily do and then Vijay could drive Kali home with Phoebe. Sure, that could work, he thought. But, he reminded himself, time machines are nothing but trouble. They play up. They can seem to have minds of their own. They can have dead cats inside them that you can never ever find. They are the incarnation of trouble itself. There was a more than excellent chance that this would be a one-way journey. The fact that the children had not returned already weighed on him. Why had they not come home? What was keeping them? Could they come home? Were they even alive? Were they caught in John Stapleton’s space-and-time-distorting Vore trap? Stapleton had told him there was an escape committee. It sounded so collegial, so chummy. Not like an isolated, endangered human outpost on a dead world drifting through dead space towards who knew what kind of fate. And here you, Spider, are planning to go to this so-called bloody Colditz, with an ulterior motive of your own. Would you go if there was no prospect of Molly being there? If it was just about the children? Would you put yourself into that much jeopardy, just to rescue them? He wasn’t sure, but he told himself he would, yes, definitely. It was one thing for grown adults to wind up stuck in a trap, but children didn’t deserve a fate like that.
Paradox Resolution Page 22
