Paradox Resolution

by K. A. Bedford

  “What’d she tell you?”

  “She told me the Vores are coming.”

  “Oh. Shit,” Iris said.

  “So, can you, um…?”

  Iris rounded up a makeshift wheelchair that had been built in case either Molly or Spider couldn’t walk properly once they woke up. Spider thought he didn’t need it, that he could get around just fine, but in practice he was able only to walk about four steps, and then had to stop and get his breath back, preferably while sitting. He put up with the wheelchair.

  As Iris propelled him along through cramped, low corridors, often so narrow that only one person could pass at a time, and frequently so cold that he was grateful she had brought a blanket from his bed.

  Iris said, “Did she give you any kind of timeline for their arrival? Like a time and a date? Some sign we might look for?”

  “No, nothing. That’s what I need to find out.”

  “How bad could it be?”

  “Bad.”

  “Great. Fucking great. Like we haven’t got enough to worry about.”

  When they reached Molly’s room, Iris wheeled him up to her bed, and asked if he wanted some time alone, to talk to her, but she left before he could answer — for a long moment he found he could not speak: just seeing Molly unconscious, lying, tense, under enormous pressure, in bed, hardly breathing, so shrunken, her whole face screwed up hard, as if to keep out something horrible, or as if she were in terrifying pain… It was harder to see her this way than he’d expected. He could not look away. Iris, waiting for him outside, was forgotten. Molly lay there, in the grip of something dreadful, from which she could not escape. Spider stared and stared at his sort-of ex-wife. He remembered how he had once, a long time ago, found her at the End of Time on Dickhead’s flagship, pale and apparently frozen and dead like all the others, and how that had felt, the wrenching guilt, the wanting for things to have been different, for Molly to have been left out of the whole thing. And she had forgotten it all, once she came back to him. Dickhead, somehow, had fixed things with his magical timeline manipulations. All Molly had been left with was that terrible arthritis, and frustrating dreams of pain and anger that, awake, she could never articulate, and tried instead to express it in her work, all these wretched partial creatures, bent over, shivering with agony. Spider hated seeing them, knowing what Molly did not, knowing what really had happened to her. And now here he was again, a vile circle complete. Molly before him, close enough to touch, cold, her mind filling with the Vore’s presence, like a monstrous file downloading from a remote server, all checksums complete. What would happen when the Vore was finished? Spider wondered, looking at her, wishing he could take it for her. He already had experience with things getting injected into his head. He could take it. It would be okay. But Molly? This was not her battle. She did not deserve whatever it was that was happening to her, deep within the vault of her own lonely mind. Spider sat there, shaking his head, trying to keep from weeping, and not having much luck. Wiping his eyes on his arm, he maneuvered his chair over closer so he could reach out to her, and touch her face — and she flinched. “Oh, shit,” he said, startled, and pulled back, eyes wide, staring. “Sorry, Moll,” he said. The last thing she needed was for him to be adding to whatever was going on in there. So he sat there, and wondered when he’d last touched her face, but couldn’t remember. All he could remember was Molly yelling at him, telling him he was useless, but still wanting him to mow her backyard, or paint her fence, or, good grief, look after her sick goldfish while she went to New York. And hadn’t that worked out well? “Geez, Moll,” he said, hardly able to speak. “What have you done now?” He remembered hearing from Stéphane Grey about Molly’s adventure in New York, and her meeting with, he assumed, a future version of herself, luring her into the wild beyond. Why would Molly have gone along with that? Molly’s idea of using time travel was to make sure she had set the timers on her lawn reticulation; she wasn’t inclined to go off on grand adventures. She had too much work to get through, grants to apply for, meetings with potential clients to go to. That nurse had mentioned to him that Molly had said she thought she was blipping off to a visit to the Louvre, and instead wound up here.

  Then, Molly was speaking to him. “Al,” she said, her voice coming from far away. She rotated her head, opened her eyes, and looked at him, only this was the Deep Sea Molly, the Molly-thing from his dreams, the one with the gouged-out eye-sockets, like hungry mouths, shadowed and cold, staring at him. “You’re running out of time. It’s almost finished moving into my mind. Not long now. If you’re going to help me, if you’re going to get off your comfortable arse for once, you have to do it now. Do you understand me? Can you hear me? Al?”

  Electrified, shaking, cold all the way through, Spider sat there, unable to move, staring and staring into those gaping, bottomless sockets. “Moll, I-I’m here. I heard, but I don’t—”

  Then, a new voice, male, booming, right behind him. “Hey, Spider! There you are!”

  Spider jumped, yelling, clutching his chest, almost falling out of the wheelchair. Turning, he saw John Stapleton, in those same white overalls, picture of a man who’d lost his way, just barely this side of nuts — Spider had seen that look before, and not just on Dickhead. Spider remembered attending the scenes of domestic disputes, back in his days as a copper, turning up, and finding strung-out housemates, wasted on meth, or psychotic from too much dope, with kitchen knives, holding his or her other housemates at bay, screaming abuse at them, telling them to keep back, or else, you understand, or else! People who’d been awake, for days or weeks, well past their own mental use-by date. Stapleton looked like that, but he was trying, hard as he could, to conceal it, even from himself. He remembered Iris saying something, while he’d been out of it, that Stapleton had been spending all his time with “the Guest”, trying to commune with it, to coax out that Final Bloody Secret of the Cosmos, tuning the confinement field of the trap to hurt the Vore, to make it talk. Iris had told him nobody saw Stapleton much. Day-to-day operations in the timeship were left to his few remaining followers, who in turn bossed about the surviving time machine geeks and the others who’d been swept up along with the Guest.

  “John,” Spider said, once he’d put together his shattered composure once more. “Good to see you again. See you’ve recovered from that gunshot.” Spider did not trust Stapleton. In his mind he saw, by starlight, Dickhead’s head starting to slide away from his blood-spurting neck, and noted the look of fevered hatred on Stapleton’s face as he did it, as he saw the results of it, watching the blood; watching the head. He remembered Stapleton taking the head before it fell to the ground, and holding it up, intending to show it off like a hunting trophy, like something he’d won after a long battle. “See the mighty hunter, triumphant at last!” Except the head vanished, after a final, discreet wink at Spider, leaving Spider with the command to “kill Stapleton”.

  Stapleton flexed the leg that Iris shot, and Spider could see it wasn’t quite right. “Yeah, good as new. Nothing to worry about. Bit of a graze. Iris and me, we’re buds now, no problem. The whole thing was a misunderstanding. I should’ve realized at the time.”

  “Oh, good,” Spider said, “I’m so glad you guys are buds now.”

  Stapleton confected a smile. “Yeah. So, you’re back in the land of the living yourself at long last. That’s great! I hear the tech guys could use your expertise,” he said, pronouncing “expertise” with a hard “s” sound, rather than the more familiar “z” sound Spider would have used.

  “I’m no engineer, you realize. I just—”

  “Of course, obviously.”

  “There’s a limit to what I can do. Domestic time machines? Yeah, no worries. The time engines on a ship like this? I dunno.”

  “Yeah. I know. It’s okay. We have help files.”

  For a crazy bastard with messianic dreams of acquiring the most sought-
after nugget of information in the universe, no matter what it took to get it, Stapleton seemed surprisingly laid-back about it. He was putting up a great front. The man went on. “I’ve scheduled a tech briefing for you later this evening. Just to go over the current situation, where we’re at, things we’ve tried; options we’re still looking at. Get you up to speed fast as possible.”

  “Oh, good,” Spider said, thrilled at the prospect and thinking if it involved PowerPoint slides, he might just shoot himself.

  Meanwhile, Spider noticed that while Stapleton was standing there, towering over him in his white jumpsuit, he was watching Molly, as if waiting for something to happen, and worried about what it might be. It occurred to him that maybe Stapleton knew what was going on between her and the Vore. But if he knew what was happening, why hadn’t he stopped it? More to the point, how had some earlier self of his failed to warn him it would happen? Surely… Spider lost track of his thinking when he saw Molly. Her face was as it had been before, scrunched up, as if with great pain and internal torment, as if fighting something, and losing the battle. God, Molly, he thought. Then he had a closer look. Her eyes looked, for all that her face was all screwed up, like there were normal eyes staring out from under normal eyelids. There was no sign of the Molly-thing that had spoken to him, that had warned him “You have to stop John tormenting the Vore.” The Vores were coming to the rescue and to lay waste to everything they found in their way. Things that ate space and time, that ate the stuff of the universe itself. It occurred to him that he had never found out just what kind of creatures or things these Vores actually were. Were they monsters? Were they insanely intelligent aliens, plotting the destruction of the universe, or what?

  “Mind if I ask you something, John?” he said, as if unconcerned about anything at all — just a guy shooting the breeze.

  “Sure, anything,” Stapleton said. His eyes looking like broken glass.

  “Why the hell is Molly even here? What’s with that?”

  Stapleton looked, for a fractional moment, like he was going to snap, and show something of his true face, but he pulled back. “Damned if I know, to tell you the God’s honest truth. I think she was doing a time-jump and got caught in the worldline driftnet—”

  “This Guest everyone keeps mentioning…”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s a Vore, right?”

  Stapleton appeared surprised at Spider’s information. He thought a moment. “You know about the Vores? Who—”

  “Dickhead. Dickhead McMahon? My former employer and personal nightmare? Big head, cheap suits, obsession with key-point indicators and the end of the universe itself. He told me all about ‘em. Angelly thingies out to burn down the universe, because God wanted to start over, get it right this time.”

  “Ah, I see. You believe him?”

  “About what? Vores as such, or the whole angel thing?”

  “The angel thing.”

  “Fuck, no,” Spider said, and managed a convincing skeptical laugh. That crazy Dickhead and his wacky ideas!

  Stapleton managed a laugh, too, though it looked like it hurt him. He was lost in his own brittle thoughts for a long, cold moment, and Spider remembered him killing the bastard. “Good old Dickhead, eh? He and I met—”

  “I know how you met. Calgary bar. Hockey night in Canada on the telly.”

  Stapleton went pale. “Oh, right. Yeah. You said that, that night, on Destiny.”

  “Yeah. The night you murdered Dickhead. The night you did your fucking best to kill me, too.”

  “Hey, now wait just a minute there, Spider. I apologized for that. That was a misunderstanding. That—”

  Spider nearly laughed. “A misunderstanding? You and your mates nearly kicked me to death!”

  “It was a bad time for all of us—”

  “I know! I was bloody well there. Twice! I saw the bodies, the ship’s crew, all dead and frozen. I had to dig my wife, yes, her, right there, her, Molly Webb, I had to dig her out of a pile of frozen corpses. You know what that’s like, John? Can you imagine what that might be like, sorting through corpses?”

  “Spider, I’m really sorry, I am, it’s just—”

  “Yeah. You’re really sorry. Me, too, mate. Me, too. Oh, and here’s a memo: that D6 of yours? You filled up my head with all this nano-shit, just so you and I could have that little chat in the diner, aw, poor old Canadian me, misunderstood Dickhead victim, poor, poor me, waaah! Sometime, when you can manage it, I’d love it if you could get someone to remove that shit from my head, thanks.”

  “Spider, we will absolutely see to that, no problem. Just as soon—”

  “Mate, don’t give me ‘soon’, okay? I have it on good authority that your time is up. You’re finished. You know that Vore you’ve got on ice downstairs in the basement? The one you’ve been torturing all these years? Yeah, its mates are coming. They’re coming here as we speak. Express delivery. And they’re gonna burn all of this, and all of us, down to the ground.”

  At this, Stapleton stared down at Spider, and by the look on his face, Spider figured the guy had just concluded that Spider clearly needed his medication, because he was nuts. Stapleton said, “Oh, I see.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “Sure I believe you, Spider. Sure I do. Why wouldn’t I?”

  Spider hated being patronized, but he could see the guy’s point. Where was Spider getting this information? On what evidence did he base this outrageous claim? The Vores are coming! Oooooh, scary! Yes, it sounded crazy. And the fact that Spider had been told this by Molly, who right this minute was away with the fairies, and had been for a long time, did not exactly bolster the credibility of his case. Spider was, he knew, one of those old guys who stands near traffic lights with big placards proclaiming “The End is Nigh’” and “Repent Now, Sinners”. And until such time as the Vore cavalry arrived, Spider was screwed. He’d blown it. Looking up at Stapleton, he saw that his captor now looked very much like a man who’d won something. He stood taller, looked confident. He looked like someone ready to go about his business, leaving Spider to it.

  “Well, if that’s everything, Spider, I do have a busted timeship to fix.”

  Spider considered his position. The fight had gone out of him. He was exhausted, and sagged in the wheelchair. “You mentioned a tech briefing later tonight?”

  “Yeah. That’s right. Just a brief overview.”

  Nodding, Spider said, “Okay. I’ll be there.”

  “Unless the Vores come and kill us all, of course,” Stapleton said, and laughed, shaking his head, amused. He turned to leave.

  That, Spider thought, was uncalled-for. The bastard had won the day, left his opponent on the field of battle, lame and bleeding. There was no need to get in one last stab for good measure. Watching Stapleton leaving the room, still giggling a little, Spider called after him, “You’ve been interrogating that Guest of yours for ages, haven’t you?”

  Stapleton paused in the doorway, turned halfway, glanced back at Spider. “Eight years, give or take.”

  “And so far, bugger all, right?”

  “It’s taken longer than I thought it would to establish the right level of tuning for the containment fields, but I’m—”

  “Eight years. Eight long years. Eight years of sitting down there, working the controls, trying this, trying that, trying every damn thing you can think of, burning up God only knows how much power that you might otherwise have used to get your ship going again, or maybe just provide your crew with decent living conditions, something better than food that tastes like liquid shit and water that smells like urinal cakes—”

  “You going somewhere with this, Spider, or can we just take it as read that you’re a bit cranky today?”

  “What makes you think that Vore thing is even conscious, in any way? Huh? How do you know it’s
got language? Sure it might know the elusive Final Secret Blah Blah, but could it tell you even if it wanted to? How do you know it’s not basically just some kind of dumb animal, or maybe even some kind of bug, or an insect, like maybe a tick? When Dickhead first told me about the Vores, they kinda sounded like ticks, I thought, stuck in the skin of the universe. How do you know there’s anything in there at all? How do you know there even is a Final Secret? Suppose it’s just some shit Dickhead dreamed up—”

  “There is a Final Secret, Spider,” Stapleton said, again patronizing him, giving him that tone in his voice, that I-know-best vibe that Spider hated more than just about anything.

  “There is? You sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure.”

  “How sure?”

  “I spent eight years on this. I know it’s there. I just haven’t—”

  “Haven’t found quite the right way to inflict pain and suffering on this creature you’ve got downstairs?”

  “I have to tell you, Spider, as a man of science, I do resent this assertion of yours that I’m torturing it.”

  “Oooh, man of science!”

  “I’m not a torturer.”

  “No, ‘course not. Silly me.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So what is it you’ve been doing down there all this time, until the wee hours, every day, causing the thing to scream and howl in everyone’s sleep?”

  “I’m just attempting to find a mutual communications modality—”

  “Ooooh, modality!”

  “Stop that now.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop mocking me.”

  “What else should I do?”

  “You could be damned grateful I saved your useless life, grateful that I allocated valuable and scarce resources to healing you — and for caring for your useless wife, someone who has absolutely no value to our community here, who is worthless…” Stapleton was watching Spider as he was saying this, watching the way the blood drained from Spider’s face, the way his hands gripped the arms of his chair white-knuckle tight, the way he stared back at Stapleton, fire in his eyes. “Yes, Spider? Something you want to say before I head off to go about my business keeping your ass alive?”