He clapped his hand over his forehead, exasperated. “What about notes? Did you make any notes?”
“It was late, I was out of my head on sheer weirdness, and I knew I was risking all kinds of bad shit from work just talking to him. And then, this morning, when I got up—”
“He was all gone, and you weren’t sure he’d even been there?”
Iris blushed, and glanced away for a moment, then looked back, concentrating on her hands. Spider was baffled, and stared at her, wondering what the hell was going on, but then in a great rush of understanding he saw what must have happened.
She hung her head and sighed. “It was… it was weird—”
“Weird? Well, thanks very much!”
Acutely embarrassed, her face bright pink, she said, “Sorry, bad choice of words—”
“Weird!?”
“Look. It was one of those things. It got late, we’d been talking all night. I offered him the couch. It’s just, he was all kind of sad and pathetic—”
Spider thought his head might explode from shock. “Pity sex? You had pity sex with him?” He took a minute or two to try to think his way past it.
“I didn’t say I was proud of it, Spider.”
“Not helping your case there, Iris.”
Nearby, two guys from the Medical Examiner’s office were carrying a sealed temporary casket containing the dead man’s body down the stairs. When they reached the lobby, Iris took the welcome opportunity to escape from Spider, and went over to have a quick word with the two guys, who nodded and took the body outside to the waiting van. Uniformed officers and equipment-laden forensic techs wearing bug-like black eye-plugs, like the ones Spider had seen on Mr. Vincent, followed the ME guys. Iris’s partner, Sergeant Aboulela, looking very tired, came over and briefed her about the preliminary findings. Iris brought him over to meet Spider.
Spider got to his feet, and was relieved that he could actually stand up without feeling as if his legs would collapse. It was hard not to keep staring at Iris: the thought of his future self having sex with her — it was freaky yet also strangely appealing, and yes, “strangely” was the right word.
Sergeant Aboulela, a tall thin Sudanese-Australian, on meeting this version of Spider, was visibly taken aback. His handshake was weak and cold. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Webb,” he said, very politely. “Must be a strange situation for you.”
He shot a glance at Iris. “I’ve known stranger, believe me.”
Iris glared back at him, then said to Aboulela, “Spider met with the deceased last night.”
The sergeant was surprised, but interested. “Did he give you any indication that someone—”
“I’ve already taken Mr. Webb’s statement,” Iris said.
Spider, ignoring Iris, said, “I met him last night. We had a very odd encounter.” Unconsciously he touched his tongue against the healed teeth; again there was no way to tell, from touch, that anything had ever happened to them.
Aboulela turned to Iris. “I believe you said you met with the deceased last night as well.”
“It was a big night for all of us,” she said, trying to finesse her way clear. Before he could ask her anything further, she told him to take a statement from Mrs. Ng, and to get a copy of all of the manageress’s security data from today.
“Yes, boss,” he said, nodding. Then, to Spider he said, “Pleased to have met you, Mr. Webb.” He went over to talk to Mrs. Ng.
Spider tried to focus on what was important. “We were talking about Zeropoint.”
Iris sagged, “Yes.”
“What else did he tell you about them? What do they want?”
She was rubbing the back of her neck, her eyes closed. “It had to do with the woman, the dead woman the other day, in the time machine.”
This got his attention. “What about her?”
She leaned in close to him. He could smell the coffee on her breath. “That’s just it. When I got back to the office this morning, these guys from DOTAS Section Ten were waiting for me, and they told me I was off the case, the whole thing was a DOTAS matter now, and I had to sign a bunch of paperwork, and hand over all our records and evidence, the whole thing.”
“You couldn’t protest?” Spider asked.
“Who to?” she said, looking at him. “The minister? The prime minister?”
“Good point,” he said, understanding. He wondered if the same guys might have gone around to visit Mr. Vincent in the middle of the night and had a quiet word with him, too. “Hmm, okay.”
“Back to your future self,” Iris said. “He gave me a name.”
“What name?”
“Clea Fassbinder.”
“Is that her name? The dead woman?” Spider was wiped out, he just wanted to sleep for three days, and he was pissed off about time travel intrigue generally, but the part of his brain that still cared about murder was hanging on tight.
“She supposedly works — well, worked — for Zeropoint.”
Spider sat down. “So who killed her?”
“Future Spider didn’t know. Just finding out her name was hard enough, he said. If, of course, that is her real name.”
His mind raced, thinking it all through. “Who else knows this?”
“Dunno,” she said, yawning behind her hand. “Not my guys, that’s for sure.”
“You didn’t tell them?”
Iris looked deeply uncomfortable. “He told me only to tell you.”
“What the fuck am I supposed to do with a name that doesn’t connect to anybody?”
“He seemed to think it might help.”
“Help what?”
“Beats me. I’ve already done a tube search, not that that was much help.”
“And?”
“And nothing. She doesn’t exist.”
Spider was rubbing his face; he needed a shave. Sand-grains of gunk were crusting up the corners of his eyes. “So we’ve got spooks from the future, a dead woman who doesn’t exist, some bad guys called ‘Vores,’ and… what?”
“And a murderer with a taste for gore and cheap drama, who can slip through this place’s security without a trace, and without drawing attention. I mean, we talked to nearly everybody who was around at the time, and nobody remembers seeing anything odd,” Iris said. She yawned again and stretched her arms over her head.
“Oh good, an invisible assassin. My favorite!” Spider muttered. He thought about his own hypothesis involving a killer who looked so much like trouble everybody ignored him — except the imperturbable Mrs. Ng. She was the flaw in that whole idea.
Iris nodded, but added, “My own impression was that Future Spider was trying to save your life, in his own blundering, shambling way.”
He tried not to think of Future Spider shambling and blundering into Iris’s bed, and then felt he needed to scrub out the inside of his brain to get rid of the image. “You think he knew they were going to kill him?”
“‘They?’” she said.
“Whoever wanted him dead,” he said, then added, without thinking, “wanted me dead.” For the first time he could begin to see the possibility that Future Spider had allowed himself to be killed in order to save him. The idea was bizarre, but he could see a certain crazy sense to it.
“This is the point in the proceedings,” Iris said, “where I offer you official police protection.”
“Yeah,” he said, bitterly amused, “and this is the point where I laugh in your face and (a), remind you that I have no reason to trust any police officer other than you, and (b), ask what makes you think a killer like the one you just described could be stopped by mere police protection?”
Iris, slumped in the chair, was rubbing her eyes. “You are, of course, right. Or, at least, you have a point.”
“Thank you,” he said,
all magnanimous.
“Yes, which is why I feel like I should at least make you the following offer…” She took a deep breath and looked him in the eye. It looked to Spider as if she was trying not to laugh, and not to blush. “Come and stay at my place.”
Spider laughed so much he started coughing, and found it hard to stop.
Iris got him some water and pounded his back until he waved for her to stop. At length, he looked up at her. “You are a beggar for punishment, aren’t you?”
“In for a penny,” she said, pulling out her keys. “So, you coming or what?”
“Got room in your car for my bike?”
CHAPTER 10
Spider was in his office at the shop the next day when Malaria told him she had James Rutherford on the phone, wanting to talk to Spider about a time machine not working right. He’d been sipping a well-deserved coffee at the time, taking five minutes after a dizzying backwards time-jump to deliver a fixed unit to its satisfied owner, and trying not to brood about his troubles. It didn’t help that last night at Iris’s apartment, trying to get comfortable on her couch, he hardly slept. Not because Iris was keeping him up, but because of the sheer, mindbending weirdness of what was happening in his life just at the moment. The thought that Iris and his future self had actually slept together the previous night, presumably in her bedroom, just through that door over there, did not help. It bothered him more than a little, but only because, when he thought about it (and he had a lot of time in which to think about it), he wished it had been him, Present Spider.
Malaria’s news surprised him. He nearly choked on his coffee. “James Rutherford? DOTAS James Rutherford?”
“Sounds like him, yeah,” Malaria said, chewing on the end of her stylus.
Amazed, but also far enough into the continuing strangeness of his recent life to feel suspicious about James’s timing, he said, “Put him through, by all means!” He made himself comfortable in his office, behind his desk, the one place in his life where he felt at least nominally in control of things. If James Rutherford was indeed on the phone, it could be a very welcome development. At last, he thought, here was someone who might know something, who could maybe fill in some of the gaping blanks.
Then again, he thought, didn’t Malaria just say that James wanted help with a time machine? What? James Rutherford, senior chronosystems engineer, time machine geek extraordinaire, needed help with a time machine?
Spider tapped his phone patch, and said, “James?”
“Spider, hey.”
Right away, Spider was frowning, listening to the tone in James’s voice. The man sounded tired, beaten down. He remembered the way James had been during the initial examination of the crime scene. Spider, wondering where this was going, said, “Hi yourself. Good to hear from you. Been wondering where you’d gotten to. Been trying to call you for ages now. What’s up? Am I persona non grata with DOTAS all of a sudden?” Spider wasn’t sure where that question came from, but it was something he wanted to know. It was also something with which he had some previous experience.
“What? You — what? Um, no. No, you’re fine. Everything’s fine. It’s just, I’ve been on personal leave for a while now. Didn’t want to be disturbed.”
Personal leave? Spider thought. “James, is everything okay?”
There was a long pause, and he could hear James breathing hard. “Define okay,” he said, only a little dismissive.
Spider knew enough not to pry. “Right, yeah, okay.”
“You do know why I’m calling, right?” James asked.
“Malaria said something about you want some help with a faulty time machine? Really? What the hell kind of problem could you possibly have with a faulty time machine?”
“Look. Spider. It’s Electra’s. It’s on the blink. She wants it fixed, and I told her I know just the guy. Is that a problem?”
“No, no, of course not. It’s just, you—”
“Do you mind if I bring it round to show you?”
Spider’s mind was spinning like mad, trying to think what the hell might be going on here. “Sure. You bet. I’ll be happy to give it my full attention.”
“Great. See you shortly.” And then he was gone.
Spider yelled out to Malaria that James would be turning up at some point this afternoon, and to show him through to Spider’s office when he arrived. Malaria yelled back to confirm.
Sitting there in his office, fiddling with paper clips, full of both curiosity and dread about James’s visit, Spider thought he should probably do something useful to fill in the time, so he went through to the workshop and got busy helping Charlie sort through some baffling technical problems. It felt like a wonderful holiday, for a while, anyway.
When James turned up, a big backpack slung over his shoulder, Malaria sent him through to the workshop where Spider was soldering new contacts on a scanning engine motherboard. James called out, “Hey, can a guy get a coffee around here or what?”
Spider, startled, glanced up, saw James, and saw that James was doing his best to act all jaunty — and not doing a very convincing job of it. “You know where the coffee droid is.”
He smiled. “Got a minute?”
Spider gave some instructions to Charlie, and said he’d be back a bit later. He took James back to his office, got him a coffee, and moved his chair around to the front of the desk. “So,” he said, waiting for his coffee to cool.
“Thanks for making time to see me,” James said.
That was an odd thing to say, Spider thought. Since when did James feel the need to thank him for “making time” to see him? “No worries,” Spider said. “So, that’s the offending unit in the backpack there?”
James set his coffee on the front of Spider’s desk and hauled the pack around in front of him, opened it, and pulled out a roughly conical device about the size of a vacuum cleaner, sheathed in translucent matte-black plastic. He sat the unit on his lap and smiled. “One Toshiba Umbra base-station unit. The latest thing.”
This was true. The industry was moving on from the large-scale units epitomized by the Tempo and its many imitators, in favor of smaller machines like this. The idea was that instead of travelling about in a big bulky time machine, you placed the base-station somewhere near the geographical spot you were aiming for, then used the unit’s remote to operate the unit. This way you could move about in time however you pleased, while the base-station remained back in your present. It was a popular idea and so far looked like it was sweeping in a new era of consumer time travel enthusiasm. Spider was less than enthused about the prospect.
“What seems to be the trouble, then?” he asked James.
James produced a note on black paper, written in white ink. “Darling daughter left this on the dining room table this morning before she went out for the day.”
“How is Electra?” he asked.
“The same,” James said, and sighed a little, closing his eyes for a moment. He looked exhausted, just thinking about her.
Spider nodded. “Right.” He read the message. “Oh,” he said.
The message read: “Time machine won’t go. Make time machine go. NOW!” The handwriting was heavy, with big loops. The I’s were dotted with tiny death’s-head skulls.
“I see what you mean,” Spider said, a little afraid. “Such a subtle girl.”
“That’s Electra all over, sadly.”
“No other diagnostic detail?”
“That’s it.”
“Okay, then. You want to fire it up, see what happens?”
James fished the remote out of the backpack and handed it to Spider. The remote, like the base-station, was cased in translucent matte-black plastic, only this was sculpted to fit the hand, the colored buttons ergonomically styled and arranged. If you peered close, you could see tiny mechanical clockwork mechanisms hidden
inside; they were not part of the unit’s functionality, but they looked very cool, Spider thought, despite himself. When he switched on the remote, the clockwork came to life, and he could hear it ticking faintly, like a heavy grandfather clock.
Pointing the remote at the base-station, he hit the “on” button, and waited for the “power” light on the unit to come on. It did not. The unit sat there as if nothing had happened. Spider nodded. “Let’s have a look at the system maintenance panel.”
James placed the unit on the desk and rotated it slightly until the system maintenance panel cover was facing Spider. Spider opened the panel and had a good look. Inside were a row of status LEDs, now showing red; some input transponders for diagnostic tools; and a very small screen. He squinted, trying to read the small type. “Well, now that’s interesting.”
“I thought you’d appreciate that,” James said.
“I did not know there even were Y-series error codes.”
“I did, but I’d never seen one on a consumer time machine.”
Spider grabbed a screen off his desk and tubed across to the Toshiba Australia Chrono Solutions site, and dived into the relevant Knowledge Base for this specific model. He soon found the solution to the mystery. “‘Translation stack integrity self-check failure’, Spider said. “Is that all?”
James said, “Darling daughter was right.”
“Time machine won’t go,” Spider said.
“You can fix it, though, right?”
“Now I know what it is, yeah, no worries. Swap out the bad DCA module, swap in a new one. Should be fine.”
“Great,” James said, and took a sip of his coffee. “That’s great.” He sounded less than enthusiastic.
Spider was watching him. “What really brings you out here today?”
James did his best to feign bafflement. “Er, darling daughter. Time machine won’t go? Wants to go shopping in the Fifties. Expects me to organize everything, get the period currency, make an appointment for her to get the shots, the whole ball of wax.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. I mean, here you are, by far the brainiest guy in the room just at the moment. What you don’t know about time machines isn’t worth knowing. But you bring me this thing, nice as it is, and you want me to look at it.”
Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait Page 12
