Paradox Resolution

by K. A. Bedford

  Now Iris and Vijay were talking, discussing the state of things. Spider didn’t understand or follow a lot of it, but he could tell that things were as bad as bad could be. Iris asked Spider, “How tired are you?” and at first he misunderstood the point of her question, and thought she was talking about something entirely else, and felt not at all sure how to respond, considering, but then he woke up to himself, and realized this was all-business Iris. This was Inspector Street, taking charge of the situation. He said he was okay, at least for now, and asked why.

  She and Vijay exchanged a few words, and Vijay said, “I want to show you our lifeboat. You feel up to having a look at it?”

  “You have a lifeboat?”

  “It’s what’s left of an emergency escape vehicle we’ve been trying to build. Stripped down to the chassis. Just enough power to get the four of us home. Iris was very insistent that we were not leaving without you.”

  Spider looked over at Iris and Phoebe. Iris had not been expecting him to look her way, and he saw her with her guard down, sitting there on a box by the weak electric light next to Phoebe’s blanket-strewn cot, clutching the stump of her right arm. It was healing, but Spider could see, in that rare moment, that Iris was in terrible pain, holding it with her remaining hand, biting her lip, stricken, her face drawn. Then she glanced up, saw Spider looking at her, and blushed, scowled at him, and sat up straighter. She yelled at him, “Don’t just bloody well stand there like an idiot. Go and help Vijay! Christ!”

  He went, but felt awful for Iris, even as he knew she would not, not ever, not under any circumstances, want anything even smelling of his pity or concern. She would be resolute and strong and carry on like the Black Knight in that Monty Python film, losing his limbs one by one, and fighting on, blood spraying everywhere, insisting the missing limbs were mere “flesh wounds”. That was Iris, no question. She would be fine. Spider got on with it.

  Vijay led Spider on another trek through the nooks and crannies of the engineering department, taking great, even pedantic, care to explain to Spider the full nature of every possible hazard. It was still shockingly cold, the air thin, and there was that smell of burning electronics in the thinning air. That can’t be good, Spider thought. At length, they arrived outside at a lab to which Vijay had a key. Inside — and Spider recognized the smell of a time machine workshop immediately — Vijay showed him the lifeboat.

  It was all Spider could do not to laugh.

  “Took me ages to find the parts,” Vijay said, walking around it, switching on a couple of lights.

  “I can imagine,” Spider said, nodding.

  Vijay had, apparently, set out to rebuild Kali. This turned out not to be possible. That fabulous hotrod time machine had been stripped down to component screws and washers, and all of the custom spintronics, the chromed translation engine cluster, the heat dissipation vanes, and recycled in various ways in the course of trying to rebuild the timeship’s mighty engines. And, once used, it was not always easy for one skinny nineteen-year-old guy to scrounge them back. So he’d “liberated” whatever he could find from the parts of every time machine that had been brought here while the driftnet had been running. The result, Spider thought, was a machine sculpture the old Molly might once have found fascinating. Spider could see parts of Kali, but he could also see some of the more elegant parts of the Wellsian Time Machine he and Iris had used to get here. There was the big spinny dish, now mounted horizontally. And there was an enormous scanning/translation engine connected by thick insulated hoses to a power-source the size of a small car. It was, he thought, the ugliest, most grotesque monster of a machine he had ever seen. The contrast between the brute functionality of some parts and the studied elegance of others, and the electric blue, lightning-bolt styling of still others was stunning. Spider walked around and around the machine, marveling. From what Vijay told him when he asked pointed questions about system integration and the memory-depth of the scanning engines, about the specific curve and limits of the Fenniak Transform, and the sheer computational grunt of the translation engines, this shambolic contraption should be able to take the four of them on a single, mind-hurting leap across the vast airless gulf separating their current time to any point, any time, any place eight million plus years ago.

  This contraption was their ride out of here. All he had to do was get it running. The wreck of the timeship around them wasn’t going to stay even as relatively intact as it was for much longer. And the singularities now swirling around the core of the planet were only going to get bigger and hungrier.

  Spider said, at last, “What have you figured out, so far?”

  “Power supply works. Green lights on the board.”

  “Good. How much power?”

  Vijay told him, and Spider did some calculations in his head, based on passenger load, the computational requirements of storing the vector-state data for each particle in the human body, in the machine itself; then there was the energy-cost of translating — editing — that data to reflect the destination’s time-coordinates. By the time he finished his sums, Spider whistled, or tried to whistle. His mouth was not quite fixed yet, and he made an embarrassing tooting noise. “How are the data processing connections?”

  Vijay told him, and in fact told him about every key system and subsystem. The kid knew his time machines. His old man would be proud. And, listening to Vijay, Spider found himself running out of objections for why the beast should not fly. Vijay said he had a full board of green lights, all systems operational, everything working the way it should — but still it would not go. It was, Vijay suggested, as if the beast was maybe a little afraid.

  Spider climbed into the unlikely structure, asking Vjay if he’d tried x, if he’d tried y. Spider tested individual components, checking voltages and current, and basic connections, plugs and ports, making sure nothing was loose or had come undone. It always paid to check the basic stuff, Spider had learned, because sometimes a job that had been baffling you for days turned out to be a loose lead deep inside the translation engine. And on this Frankenstein’s monster, where few of the parts were meant to go together, it was worth checking.

  That sorted, Spider moved on to more systems-level issues. Number one: software. Had Vijay managed to scrounge up or hack viable drivers for these components. Careful inspection, and beady-eyed questioning of Vijay revealed that he had performed wonders. “I’ve been writing custom drivers since I was five,” Vijay boasted at one point, and Spider shook his head and wagged a finger.

  “That kind of thing, young man,” he said, trying to keep his face straight, “could lead to a life of criminal time machine hackery.” Vijay grinned, but said nothing.

  Finally Spider said there was nothing left to do but pull the entire scanning engine, and examine it piece by piece. It was possible that the machine was failing to start the scan cycle for the good reason that the scanning process was out of phase with the translation engine. Though how that could be, when the status lights on the control panel all showed green, Spider did not know.

  Pulling the scanning engine took time. It was laborious, tedious work, compounded by occasional tremors shuddering up from the growing singularities below. When Vijay went on his routine patrols to check air-tight door seals, he found one had been bent out of alignment during the quakes, and fixing it became a matter of higher priority than the time machine. The repair took two days.

  At night, while Spider slept, he pulled the time machine apart and, like a Chinese Puzzle Box, put it back together again. Over and over and over, dreaming he would find the fault.

  The cold was brutal, and felt personal, mean, like the universe outside was pressing in, hammering at them all the time, trying to find its way through the fragile, broken hull of the timeship.

  Back at the lab, Spider opened up the status board. Holding a weak light between his teeth, he examined the connections feeding the indicator
lights, and found a loose solder. “You bastard!” he muttered, now holding the light close to the circuit grid so he could see the fault as clearly as possible. “You bloody bastard!” The circuit grid was receiving signals from the out-of-sync scanning engine, but the defective solder was allowing a false-positive signal through when it should have indicated a red light.

  The re-soldering took longer than it should have done, Spider’s hands were so clumsy and hopeless, dropping tools and having to go fossicking about in the works of the beast to find them. In the end, though, he completed the job. His multi-tool showed that circuit now worked properly and the light showed red. At least the panel was now working.

  During the next four days, as Spider and Vijay struggled around the clock to figure out how to get the lifeboat going, there were two major earthquakes, including one which threatened to cut off Iris and Phoebe. It took another day and a half of hard, difficult work to make sure the access between the two sites was safe, and to ensure that there had been no further ruptures to the fragile hull of the timeship. “We have to shift everything into the lab,” Spider said, horrified at the idea of being cut off from the others. That evening they moved everything, including Phoebe on her cot, through the labyrinth and into the lab. The lab was much colder than their closet. “I don’t know if I can take much more of this, Spider,” Iris told him, and he noticed her mouth was turning blue. The shakes now were constant for all of them, no matter what they did, how much they “rugged up”, and they were aching and dizzy from hunger. Phoebe’s condition was marginal at best; the girl was barely breathing, her pulse was thready, and Iris thought the girl had a mild fever. “Soon,” Spider told Iris. “We’ll get it soon. Hang in there.”

  Chapter 23

  The next day they heard the machines outside, on the timeship’s shattered external hull.

  “What the f-fuck is that?” Iris said, more from deathly weariness than anything. They were used to the hulk’s constant groans and creaks, but these new sounds were different: they were purposeful.

  “Are those footsteps?” Vijay said, staring up into the dark of the high ceiling. Far above, faintly, yes, the sound of something with what sounded like heavy boots clomping about on the outside.

  Then, amid the shuddering and clanking as some sort of unthinkable hardware engaged with the hull, the unmistakable screaming howl of industrial power-tools, carving through wreckage, off in the distance, echoing through the remaining air-spaces and connecting linkages of the ship. “Shipbreakers,” Spider said.

  “What?” Iris said.

  Vijay, though, understood only too well. “Salvage guys. They’re cutting up the ship, stripping it for whatever they can sell. Must be pretty desperate if they’re interested in this old heap.”

  “They sound close,” Iris said, staring upward, listening, even as the ground trembled and rumbled beneath them.

  Spider thought so, too. “They probably don’t know we’re here.”

  Vijay, who’d been lying underneath the lifeboat time machine, inspecting joints and connections, rolled out. “We need to—”

  Iris needed no further encouragement. She got up, demanded the biggest, heaviest damned tool Spider had — the best he could do was a spanner half a meter long — and Iris got to work with her good arm, pounding the spanner against the wall, screaming, shouting, “We’re here! Hey! We’re here!” The noise was spectacular, and the impacts were taking their toll on the wall. When she paused after a few minutes, there was no change in the sounds of outside activity, so she went at it again, in bursts of two to three minutes, until she had to sit down, a long while later, sweating, breathing hard, her breath steaming before her. “Oh, look, my sweat’s starting to freeze,” she said, horrified and amazed. Her efforts appeared to make no difference. The shipbreakers kept at it, the power-tools coming closer. Spider was shocked at the speed of it. The way things were going, the shipbreakers would reach this part of the timeship’s engineering section in a couple of days, long before the singularities finished their hungry work.

  Iris kept at the hammering, as much as she could. Spider and Vijay worked on the lifeboat around the clock. Phoebe’s condition deteriorated. Iris told Vijay, “I think she’s now actually comatose. I’m so sorry.”

  “Yeah, but she could wake up, right? People wake from comas all the time.”

  “I’m no doctor, okay? But I know a bit about this stuff; there are key signs to look for. In my opinion, she’s hardly there at all. I don’t know…”

  “But we’re so close, Iris!”

  “I don’t know if she could survive a time-jump, is my point, Vijay.”

  Vijay was staring at the dimly-lit alcove where Phoebe lay, with her blue lips and hands marbled blue and white, no steam visible from either mouth or nose. She lay too still for words. “But it’s just teleportation. It’s nothing. There’s no health impact, there’ve been studies. My dad—”

  “Let Spider carry on. I’ll hand him tools. You sit with Phoebe.”

  Spider called out, “Talk to her. She can probably hear you.”

  Iris shot him a look, and he shrugged, and got back to work.

  The next day, Spider was back working on the control panel. He had a very pretty row of green lights. He’d checked everything, at least three times. Despite Vijay’s concerns, he had managed to disassemble and test the vast majority of the lifeboat’s systems. There was, as far as Spider could tell, nothing wrong with the machine. It ought to work. The shipbreakers were almost upon them. The noises of their grinding and banging and dragging grew louder, closer. It sounded like a lot of machines were out there, and a lot of people, all working hard, no doubt hurrying to cut up the timeship and grab the valuable bits before the planet became too unstable. And all the while, as they worked and listened to those sounds, sometimes stopping what they were doing and just looking up at the ceiling as if they could see through the layers of internal infrastructure between them in this lab and the workers climbing around outside on the hull, there was that one profound terror: at any moment a team of those guys out there were just as likely to bring their gear to bear on the hull directly above this lab. How quickly would the stuffy air in here disappear? How quickly would unconsciousness hit? Would they freeze before they asphyxiated?

  There was nothing wrong with the bloody lifeboat. It ought to work, so why wasn’t it? Spider had tried everything, gone over every possibility. In a moment of desperation, he muttered, “Open the bloody pod bay doors, Hal!” It was only too tempting to grab Iris’s spanner and smash this useless piece of shit to bits for all the good it was doing them.

  Vijay said, “What?”

  Spider never heard him. As soon as he’d said it, he felt something in his head wake up, just the way he remembered from his old police days, when he’d have a keen moment of insight about a difficult case. “Open the pod bay doors, Hal,” he said again, and then supplied Hal’s response, “I’m sorry, Dave, I can’t do that.”

  “Spider?” This from Iris, who flashed a worried look at Vijay.

  Spider had not had any sleep in at least three days. He’d barely eaten, was trying to ignore signs of frostbite in his toes, and was running on adrenaline, so maybe, who knows, maybe that had done something interesting in his head, connected stray ideas together, things he’d heard a long time ago, back when he was at TAFE learning about time machine theory, about weird but incredibly rare anomalies. He climbed down and stood in front of the lifeboat, even as the shipbreakers stomped and clomped and worked and cut the wreck of the timeship out from under them, even as the growing singularities shook and trembled and threatened to swallow up the very ground on which the wreck of the timeship was perched. Spider stood there, staring at the lifeboat. “Open the pod bay doors, Hal,” he said, and he cracked a smile.

  Vijay came up to him. “Um, Spider, sir? You’re—”

  Spider turned to Vijay.
“It’s Schwartzmann’s Ghost!”

  Vijay was baffled. “Ghost, sir?”

  “Yes, Schwartzmann’s Ghost. Also known as Schwartzmann’s Complete Fucking Pain in the Arse.”

  “I’m, um—”

  Spider saw that Vjay wasn’t getting it, and further that Iris was looking at him funny, as if worried that he’d lost it. He said, trying to explain, “No, look. Not any kind of actual, you know, ghost-ghost, like a spook, a haunt, nothing like that.”

  Vijay clearly didn’t like the look on Spider’s face. “O-kay…”

  “Trust me, and I might just get you home to see your dad before he goes to prison. Look, it’s like this. This time machine is the most absurd, convoluted, mess of a time machine ever built, but it should work, and it’s a brilliant tribute to your good self, Vijay. You’re a genius. But the thing is, in the course of building this fabulous beast, the scanning and translation engines have developed an emergent behavior. You follow me? It’s as if the thing’s haunted. Not by an actual ghost, no. It’s a metaphor. It’s like there’s someone in there, holding the machine back, refusing to cooperate. You get me?”

  “You’re saying the lifeboat can fly, but it just … doesn’t want to?”

  “That’s right. Well, no, it’s as if it’s become self-aware, and that metaphorical self just doesn’t want to. Do you see?”

  “So why not just give us a red light for the scanning system? Why all the bullshit?”

  “Because it’s cussed. Because it’s just one of those things about time machines, particularly a home-made one like this, bolted together from cannibalized bits of other time machines. There’s all kinds of machine history in the thing, all kinds of machine memory. It’s a strange and spooky thing, machine memory.”

  “Uh-huh…”

  “We have to lobotomize it.”