Paradox Resolution

by K. A. Bedford

  “Yes, actually. Thanks, by the way, for fixing me up after trying to kill me. Much appreciated. Jolly decent,” he said, but before Stapleton could speak, Spider continued. “About my ex-wife here. Molly. Her name is Molly. She’s an artist. Back home, that is. A sculptor. She’s pretty good. And yes, not much of a contributor to your little project here, that would be true. Even if she wasn’t asleep, and about that more in a minute, there wouldn’t be much she could do for you, except maybe make coffee with a certain passive-aggressive manner. That’s not the point, though. The point is Molly has no business being here. She’s here by mistake, John. She’s here because she met a future version of herself who lured her into making a jump in time, and in doing so she got scooped up in your little cross-time driftnet.”

  “I know you’ve got a point in there somewhere,” Stapleton said.

  “The point is this: you want me to work for you, you treat her with respect. She’s not a parasite soaking up your terribly precious resources. She’s my wife, still, technically, and you talk to me about her the way you just talked about her, I’ll punch your fucking lights out.” Spider was out of his wheelchair. He was taking cautious, crazy steps towards Stapleton. His legs felt like they would collapse out from under him at any moment, and the adrenaline was surging through him, and he could feel his booming heart in his ears. He was right on the red-line of what he could possibly do, taking a giant risk.

  Stapleton looked at Spider dismissively. He snorted, and began to turn away again. Spider said, “Awfully sorry to hear about your wife, by the way.”

  That got the man’s attention. His head snapped back towards Spider. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You said you lost her.”

  “I said what?”

  “Yeah, it was back when you were telling me how you and your ragtag group of conscientious objectors to Dickhead’s mass-murder campaign — sorry, the ‘ascendancy program’ — up and fled, rather than carry out Dickhead’s orders. You told me how you guys ran off from the End of Time, hurtling into the past, and Dickhead’s minions, the loyalists, gave chase. Sounded terribly exciting. Except for losing Ellen, of course. That had to really suck.”

  Hearing that last bit, Stapleton went pale, stricken, showing a glimpse of his true, fried, self. The interior Stapleton who was hanging on by his bitten-back fingernails, who was obsessed with the damned Vore in the basement, with the promise of the power he could access if only he had that Final Secret of the Cosmos. Spider saw all this flicker over the guy’s face, and it wasn’t pretty. And that whole chatty, friendly mask was starting to crumble. “I told you about Ellen?” His contempt for Spider could not have been plainer.

  “Yeah, you told me all about it at the diner. Real shame.” Spider shook his head, all sympathetic. Spider could smell Stapleton now, the pain and the desperation, the longing, the cracking eggshell of his mind.

  “It was… It was an accident,” Stapleton said, shaken to his marrow, withdrawing into himself.

  “You think Ellen would want to see you torturing the Vore, John?”

  “I’M NOT A TORTURER,” he said.

  “I don’t see why not,” Spider said, smooth and calm. “You’re already a murderer. The way you killed Dickhead. That was something. You remember that night on Dickhead’s ship?”

  “He wanted us to kill everyone.”

  “You said Dickhead told you it had to look, how’d you put it, ‘inviting’.”

  The man stood there, clutching at his head, eyes squeezed closed, rocking a little, Spider noticed. “He had to make way,” Stapleton said.

  “Yeah, ‘cause you figured there was no need to wait for the end of the universe to get your special magical treat from the Vores when you could just go and bag one right now and torture it into telling you everything, eh?”

  “I — That’s not how it was!”

  “You know, Dickhead’s head wound up in my fridge, at work? Did you know that, John?”

  “No, I, er, you, oh God,” he said, struggling for composure now, and beginning to lose the fight.

  “Dickhead was a right bastard, a tyrant, a bad husband, and a pain in the arse in every way, but he’d never harm a helpless creature. Unless of course he drove over it in his Hummer, but generally, no. He told me stories about rescuing spiders from his shower cubicle. Funny bloke.”

  “He was a monster. He had to go!”

  “But you could just have waited with him, up there at the End of Time in your mountain fastness, all you Zeropoint people. The Final Secret was coming. You just had to wait. Why couldn’t you do that?”

  “He — I…”

  “I reckon,” Spider said, “deep in your black heart, you know, you’ve figured out already, that there is no Final Secret, haven’t you?”

  “What the hell are you—”

  “You know. You’re a man of science. You believe in evidence and reason and all that Enlightenment stuff. You must have concluded, by now, after years and years, that that Secret thing is bullshit. There’s nothing there. It was just Dickhead’s stupid wet dream all along — only you’ve come all this way, with all these people, and you’ve lost so many of them, and now you know it’s all for sweet bugger all, and you can’t face the reality of it, so you carry on, killing that creature, punishing it. That’s what you’re doing now, isn’t it? You’re just punishing it. Making it suffer, for no good reason at all.”

  “There is a Final Secret!”

  “But what if it’s just bullshit? God, you’re a mess. You’re coming apart at the seams, and for what? Come on, mate. Give it up. Let the thing go. It’s had enough. Nothing deserves that kind of pain and wretchedness. What do you reckon?”

  “There is a Final Secret. Dickhead would never have lied to me about that.”

  “Prove it.”

  “I don’t have to prove it to you,” Stapleton said, clawing back a tattered remnant of his former cocky manner and trying to make it cover his true face. “I believe Dickhead because I have heard them, too.”

  This surprised Spider, and he hesitated a moment. “Oh, what?”

  “I’ve heard them singing to me, late at night, singing in my mind.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “I am their Chosen Vessel!”

  “No. You’re a torturer and a murderer!”

  “I AM CHOSEN!”

  “Oh, fuck off, you are not.” It was Spider’s turn to laugh.

  Stapleton clobbered Spider in the face, once, twice, and again. Spider fell back, bloody, hit the back of his head on the wheelchair, banged heavily against the frame of Molly’s bed, and collapsed to the floor, the pain barely registering, consciousness collapsing in on itself, huddling, curling up inside his damaged brain. The pain, and there would be plenty of that, was still on the way. Right now, he lay there in a stunned numbness, a tingling raw, wet, blood-in-the-eyes confusion, curled up, struggling to get back up, but his hand slipped, and he fell again, hard. Stapleton, meanwhile, loomed over him like a sinister building, and pulled something from his pocket — Spider heard a familiar whipping, whooshing sound, it reminded him of … something, oh God, what did it remind him of? Fading in and out. Fragments of waking detail and action. Disconnected awareness. Bits of a dream. Eyes stinging with blood. The far-off sound of Iris yelling something.

  Stapleton roared, flung himself at her, huge, his arm sweeping down, and there was that swooping sound. Iris screamed, “That’s my fucking arm!” Spider saw a great spray of blood. Then Stapleton was coming for Spider. “You want evidence. I’ll show you evidence,” the man said, from far away, his voice almost lost in the roar of pain and confusion that was Spider’s mind. Stapleton added, spit flying as he spoke, “I. Am. Chosen, damn you.”

  Spider, his mouth full of blood and pain, said, “Bull. Shit.”

  The bed frame moved above him. The blank
ets folded back. Two legs appeared next to him, legs he recognized through the bloody mist. “Molly…?” It was Molly. She was getting up. Spider saw her feet on the blood-slick floor, saw the freckles on her pale skin, the tiny tattoo depicting a winged death-head skull, on her ankle. He remembered what the Molly-thing had told him. Time was short. Soon the download would be complete. The Vore would merge with Molly, and now it looked like it had at long last arrived.

  Spider, struggling to stay conscious, heard someone scream. He thought it might be Stapleton. “No, no, no fucking way. No fucking way!” Spider watched those freckled feet advance towards the shadows. He saw Stapleton slip in a smear of blood, and fall. But Stapleton managed to back away, still saying, “No, no, this is not happening. This is not happening.” He made it to his feet, looking shit-scared, and glanced at Spider. “What have you done to your wife, man?”

  The creature which had been Spider’s sort-of ex-wife paused as Stapleton bolted off, screaming instructions, and for a cold moment it looked down at Spider. This was the eye-less face he had seen before. There was no sign of the Molly he knew. She was gone. Whatever drove her body now was vast and ancient; it had time. The Mollyvore’s cold, stone-hard hand reached down, touched Spider’s face, gently. A faint, passing hint of a smile flickered across its face, and Spider realized, in a sudden moment, an oasis of clarity, that Molly was indeed still in there. She was fine. She would be okay. He should not worry about her. He said, “Okay,” and the Mollyvore, shedding the flimsy surgical gown of the helpless patient, left the room, blood on its feet, looking to Spider like the Greek goddess of cold and furious vengeance, trailing ruin.

  As darkness settled over him like a blanket, Spider heard, in the distance, thunderous explosions, screams, running. “Ah, Molly,” he murmured, with a weak smile.

  Chapter 21

  Cottesloe Beach, Perth, dawn. It was chilly. Towering Norfolk pine trees stood around in a park up on a bluff. Down on the beach, before the morning sun arrived, even as the usual gang of crazy dawn swimmers went about their painful business, a wedding was taking place. The groom, nervous, happy, clad in a tux one size too small, kept fiddling with the too-tight neck of his shirt; the bride, luminous, in a sheath of antique white lace, her hair hanging loose and free around her pale shoulders, was annoyed at the groom, and trying to pay attention to the celebrant before them. Arrayed around the bridal party, a rowdy crowd of well-wishers, muttering about the early hour, wondering if five in the morning was too early to get pissed.

  Far up on the bluff, among the pine trees and the black cockatoos feasting on cones, was a park bench affording an unmatched view of the beach, the rocky groyne, the pavilion, and the old pylon out in the water. On the bench sat two people: one, a middle-aged man, weary, beaten-down, dressed in old grey overalls and well-worn Doc Marten boots, touching his face with great care, as if worried about broken bones; the other, a woman of great, venerable age, with no eyes, white hair hanging loose around her shoulders, blowing in the gentle breeze, wearing cargo pants and a black turtleneck sweater, focused on the wedding party down on the sand, far below.

  “You’re fine, Al,” the old woman said. “This isn’t strictly speaking real, kind of.”

  This confused him. “It’s not? So, what? I’m dreaming?”

  “No, you’re here, inside a memory. Your unconscious body is at Colditz.”

  “Oh, good. I was worried,” he said, deadpanning. He watched the proceedings down on the beach. “You looked gorgeous.”

  “I wished you’d stop fidgeting with your bloody collar.”

  “The bow tie was too tight. I couldn’t breathe.”

  “The most important day of your life, and you didn’t plan ahead and maybe, just maybe, get your neck measured?”

  She was right. He should have had a proper fitting before buying the damned thing.

  “All you had to do was stand there and look good in the suit and say, ‘I do’. That’s it.” She shook her head, watching.

  “We got through it, didn’t we?”

  The Molly part of the Mollyvore was in charge here, in his memory. She looked at him. It was the damnedest sensation. It was exactly as if she still had eyes. Those dark and empty sockets somehow bored right into him. There were no secrets, and could be none. She saw everything, now that the troublesome eyes were gone. He shuffled a little on the bench, uncomfortable, knowing that only a moment ago he had been left for dead in a pool of his own blood on the floor of a crashed timeship in the Year Eight Million. He realized this, all of this, this scene around them, was an illusion, which the Mollyvore had laid on for his benefit, to remind him of something, and by way of it saying goodbye. He knew that in what passed for a real world, his ex-wife had turned into an avenging demon of some kind, and that she had gone forth to kill John Stapleton, and who knew what else. Maybe the entire ship was gone by now, taking Spider, and the children Mr. Patel had sent him to find, and everybody else, with it. Maybe this was the afterlife. The Mollyvore had not said, and this was, he knew, its meeting. It was weird to see his and Molly’s earlier selves, down there on the beach, two crazy kids totally unaware of the observers here, up among the pine trees. They were foolish young people who should never have married, but had been full of hope and something resembling happiness, a shade of happiness, at any rate. Spider’s police career had taken off and Molly’s artistic endeavors were starting to gain recognition. She had been hailed in various industry magazines as “a talent to watch”, “a star in the making”. Great things lay before them both.

  “I’ve decided to forgive you,” the Molly part of the Mollyvore said, her voice mild, as if she were commenting on the cool weather.

  This got Spider’s attention. Guiltily, he looked at her. “Um, what?” he said in that tone you use when you know you’re in trouble, but you’re trying to “act natural”, thus demonstrating that you are indeed far from “natural”. He heard that tone in his voice, and cursed himself.

  “When I was in New York, my future-self showed me what you did at The End of Time, and it all came back to me.”

  Something heavy and cold settled deep in Spider’s guts. She knew. Crap. “Oh?” he said, still playing all innocent, but starting to bead up with cold, cold sweat.

  “It’s all right. I said, I forgive you.” Mollyvore touched his arm; her hand was like ice.

  “You forgive me?” It was hard to speak; his mouth had gone dry.

  “But you should have told me. That was wrong. That was nineteen kinds of wrong. I was — God, I can’t begin to tell you how angry I was — even though it explained so much, it was kind of liberating in its way. It made sense. I even, sort of, understood why you did it. Even so, if you’d been in New York with me, at the time, I probably would’ve killed you stone dead. I would’ve grabbed someone’s gun and shot you, full magazine, right in the guts, where it would hurt, where you’d take a long, horrible time to die — and I’d have gone on from there, seeing what else I could do to you.”

  “But, you forgive me,” Spider said, suspecting he might be running out of time, and that the Molly part of the Mollyvore might soon be gone forever.

  “I need to know one thing,” he said, trying to understand his new unreality. “Why did you go with your future-self, knowing what had happened to you in your subjective past?”

  “Vanity, I guess. Future-me told past-me that in fifty years I would be making a big splash in France, and that there was an exhibition of my work at the Louvre. How could I not go?” A faint hint of a smile flickered over her ancient face.

  “And so you were caught in Stapleton’s driftnet.”

  “Yes, and that’s when the captured Vore decided to become a part of me. It was my destiny.”

  “You had to be because you already had been,” Spider said, thinking about circularity, cause and effect, and hating the whole miserable thing.

  �
�Time’s funny that way,” she said.

  “Okay,” Spider said, fully aware of who, and what, he was sitting next to. He understood in that instant why the Mollyvore had chased John Stapleton back through time to the park in Midland, why it had to kill him, and how Stapleton must have used the “escape” time machine the prisoners built to clear Colditz security, and the Time Voyager software in his head to blip back, hoping to elicit Spider’s help in dealing with Molly. Stapleton must have hoped that he, Spider, could in some way reach the Molly part of the Mollyvore. Hell, maybe Stapleton even expected him to kill Molly, and keep her from going to New York and meeting Future Molly. It made sense. And he hated that it made sense. Like everything in the world of bloody time travel, it was circular; with fanciful baroque curliques and ornate twists and turns in the time-space continuum — but which always ended with Stapleton being torn to snack-sized bloody chunks in Midland.

  The only puzzling detail in the whole thing was this: Stapleton was, as far as he could tell, still alive. He thought long and hard about what the Mollyvore had told him so far, and the way she had said it, still with that cool, calm voice. She had had a very long time to think about the matter. “Why?” he said, at last. “Why forgive me, when you could kill me with a glance?”

  “Nothing I can or could do to you would be as bad as what you’ve been doing to yourself, knowing what you did and why you did it. You betrayed me, your wife — not once, with that stupid affair with what’s-her-face — but twice. Even though we were separated at the time, I was your wife. We had vows. Promises. I treated you like shit, and you liked it. That was the deal. And then you pulled that number on me. Do you know how long Dickhead had me hanging there at the End of Time? Hanging by my wrists, bent up behind my back. Only a centimeter or two off the ground, so close, agonisingly close. You remember that, Al?” She stood up and demonstrated, gasping at the pain as she showed him, again, what had been done to her. “I was hanging there like that for hours. All to get you to cooperate with Dickhead’s monstrous schemes. Which you did!” She was disgusted. “How weak is that!”