“It’s not that easy.”
Spider wanted to pull his hair out. “I’m ready to go right now.”
Soldier Spider grabbed Spider’s overalls, picked him up, and pressed him up against the wall. “Shut the fuck up, settle down, and listen to me. I have to tell you a bunch of stuff you won’t like. We’ve got a plan. You’re the star of the plan. But there’s a catch you’ll absolutely hate, okay?”
“Fine.”
Soldier Spider put Spider down and straightened his overalls. “Right,” he said. “The good news, the one thing you need to hear up front, is this: if you carry out the plan to the letter, Molly will live. The taxi accident will never happen.”
This got his attention. “I’m listening.”
Soldier Spider sighed, exhausted, and managed a weak smile. “I don’t remember being quite this difficult when it was my turn.”
“Still listening!”
So Soldier Spider told Spider the plan. As Spider stood there, taking it in, and realized just what was being asked of him, he wanted to refuse. “There is no way, right? No. Way. In. Hell. that I’m doing that.”
“No one else can do it, Spider.”
“Molly would never speak to me again.”
“That’s true, yes. You’re right. She doesn’t.”
That was a blow, right there. “She lives, but she hates my guts forever?”
“She lives, hates your guts forever, but the universe is saved, at least for now.”
“I don’t care about the universe,” Spider said and slumped down and sat on the floor, his legs stretched out.
Soldier Spider squatted next to him. He said nothing for a minute or two, then nodded, clapped Spider on one of his knees, and said, “Okay, fair enough. Good point. You’re right.”
“What?”
“You’re right. It’s too much to ask of you.”
“So you’re sending me home.”
“Sure.”
“Just like that.”
“Just like that. Come on, get up.”
“What’s the catch?”
Soldier Spider offered him a hand to help him get up. As Spider got to his feet again, he felt more than a little suspicious.
“There’s no catch. Look, here’s what happens.”
“Here comes the catch,” Spider said.
Ignoring that remark, Soldier Spider led Spider along the corridor. He said, “We’ll send you home. You’ll arrive a moment after you left with me. You’ll remember what I told you about picking up Molly from the airport, but you’ve got a meeting with Dickhead. You could blow that off, I suppose, but either way, you go out to the airport to get her. You get there just in time. Like always, Molly treats you like shit, but you love her anyway. You pack her stuff into the van, you get in, get moving, and head back to her place. Molly’s in a pretty bad mood. The show in Bangkok didn’t go that well. You try to cheer her up.”
“Oh, God,” Spider said, seeing where this might be going.
“That’s right. You wind up in an accident. Van’s totalled, and so are you and Molly. Here, check it out…” Soldier Spider led him into another room, much like the previous one, only this one had several dissection tables. Two of them were occupied. Soldier Spider indicated to a technician to expose the bodies’ faces.
It was bad enough, Spider thought, seeing Molly again like that. What tilted the entire business into a new dimension of weirdness and horror was seeing the other body — himself, clearly himself, lying there.
“You sick fuck,” Spider said.
Soldier Spider nodded toward Molly’s body. “This is not the same body from the other room.”
Spider advanced on his future self. “How dare you?”
“The thing is,” Soldier Spider said, not moving, “this happens in every timeline we’ve examined. Every single—”
Spider lunged forward and hit Soldier Spider, as hard as he could, in the man’s jaw; he felt some teeth crunch, but he also felt one of his own knuckles crack. Soldier Spider staggered back, but remained standing. He winced, touching his face. “Damn,” he said, and went to a stainless steel trolley nearby, opened a drawer, and pulled out a small, paper-wrapped item that looked, Spider thought, like a boiled sweet. Soldier Spider put it in his mouth, and started sucking on it.
Spider’s hand hurt like crazy. He’d broken the skin over two knuckles, and they were starting to bleed. The pain was much worse than he had expected. “Shit,” he said, shaking his hand, and, the adrenaline rush subsiding, starting to feel a little ridiculous. He apologized to Soldier Spider. “Look, I’m really sorry. It’s just, it’s too much, I can’t stand it.”
Soldier Spider tossed him one of the boiled sweet things. When Spider unwrapped it, he saw it looked very similar to the thing he was given by his other Future Self that long, strange night in the car, the thing that rebuilt his mouth. He stuck it in his mouth. “Do I thuck on thith fing or what?”
“In your case,” Soldier Spider said, his reconstructor pellet stuck in the side of his mouth, “swallow it. You’ll be good as new.”
Neither said anything for a while. After a few minutes, the stinging sensation in Spider’s hand subsided and was replaced by a hot tingling. As he watched, the skin on those two knuckles knit back together, and he swore, amazed to see it happen. It took longer to rebuild the cracked knuckle.
While he waited for the agents to complete their work, Spider found himself staring at his own dead body. It was one thing to see massive head trauma on someone else, the way he did back when he was a constable, attending the scenes of traffic accidents. This, this was different. His dead self’s head had been caved in from one side; he guessed the shop van must have been hit from the driver’s side. There was a lot of bruising, and the neck looked wrong. He touched the corpse’s face: it was cold and hard. It gave him the horrors, seeing himself like this, imagining what it must have felt like. This, he understood, was his immediate future. If, that is, he didn’t cooperate with Soldier Spider’s desperate plan.
He said to Soldier Spider, who’d been quietly watching him, “How do I know any of this is true?”
“Why would I lie to you?”
“You could lie to me if it was in your interest.”
“Spider, I’m you, more or less.”
“You’re what? Thirty, forty years older than me?”
“Ah, actually, quite a bit more than that.”
“My point. You’re not me, not anymore. You’ve followed a different path. It’s changed you. So why should I believe anything you tell me?”
Soldier Spider took this in, nodded. “Yeah, fair enough. So. You want me to send you back so you can take your chances avoiding all this?”
“The alternatives,” Spider said, “are not great.”
“They’re never great, Spider. It’s always Hobson’s Choice.”
He found himself looking again at Molly’s body, glad the sheet was there, concealing the full extent of her injuries. The fact that her body did not lie straight on the table was bad enough. “You say she’ll live?”
“She’ll live, yes.”
“But she’ll hate me.”
“Oh yes.” Soldier Spider, for all his years, looked like he remembered Molly’s hatred only too well, and it still hurt.
“Good God,” he said, dismayed at the choice.
“I wish there were some other way.”
“Dickhead’s ships are all flux-proofed, too, right?”
“Their entire existence, from plan to finished ship to ultimate decommissioning, yes. We can’t touch them, and they can’t touch us.”
“Why do I feel like Winston Smith, confronted with the rats in Room 101, telling Mr. O’Brien to do it to Julia instead?”
“Dickhead needs someone close to you, Spider
. It’s basically Molly or your parents.”
He was starting to find it hard to remain standing. He thought he was going to be sick. “I feel ill.”
Spider knew, in his roiling gut, that he’d made his decision, and he despised himself for it. “Shit,” he said, mainly to himself.
Soldier Spider nodded. “Thank you,” he said.
“Fuck off.”
“I need you to come with me now. There’s still a bunch of stuff I need to tell you…”
At the end of the new briefing, Spider felt overwhelmed. He said, “I think we’d all be a lot safer if it was you taking care of Dickhead, actually.”
“But I already did. Now it’s your turn.”
“Wait a second. Wait just a second. You remember taking care of the Dickhead problem when you were me.”
“That’s right.”
“But now, you’re older, and yet somehow Dickhead’s back?”
“Think of a hydra with billions of heads, each one from a different timeline, and each one pure Dickhead McMahon. Think about it.”
Spider thought about it. He swore for a couple of minutes. Soldier Spider nodded and told him he was now starting to get it.
“Now remember,” he told Spider, giving his shoulder a reassuring squeeze, “take no prisoners, okay? Believe in yourself. You can do this. If in doubt, improvise. And, whatever happens, kick butt!”
And with that, they sent Spider back home.
Spider arrived back in his office only a second or two after Soldier Spider had whisked him away to the Masada. It was 4:42 p.m. He could hear Malaria on the phone, listening to people explain the weird stuff their time machines were getting up to and doing her best to diagnose the truly simple stuff, working from the office copy of Time Machines for Dummies, so that Spider and Charlie wouldn’t have too much of their time wasted. From the way the phones kept ringing, Spider could see that business was good. If bloody Dickhead would put on an extra technician they could really get some throughput going, he thought — and then he stopped hard, his brain screeching to a halt like something in an old cartoon.
Dickhead. Yes. Dickhead is a bad guy. Zeropoint. The mission. Right.
Strange the way he’d nearly forgotten about all that. It was, after all, only a minute or two ago that he’d been sitting on a timeship, the last such ship at the End of Time, engaged in an existential conflict with otherworldly things called Vores that were destroying the universe one bite at a time. He remembered wondering how a vessel like that, way off in the unthinkable future, could be so, well, primitive — albeit capable of sliding like a bead along the long thread of time, sure, but still primitive in conditions and such. Soldier Spider had tried to sketch in for him the idea that on the Masada something like ninety percent of the available energy went into running the vessel’s mighty translation engines; only ten percent was left for crew life support, and that meant living squeezed into cramped spaces.
On the way back to his desk, his phone patch went off. “Webb, hello.”
“Hello? Spider?” It was Rutherford, and he sounded rushed, breathing fast. There was the sound of running footsteps on wet pavement, and in the background deafening traffic: dozens of bikes, jangling bells, people shouting; and motorized traffic inching its way along, drivers shouting abuse, honking horns.
“James? Uh, hi. What’s up?”
“Just… running for the bus. Hang on, let me just get under some cover.” More running, edging his way through crowds, and then, “Right, that’s better.” Spider could hear rain hitting the roof of the shelter, and people around him talking on their own phones. “Okay, good,” James said. “Listen. Are you busy tonight?”
Tonight? Spider found himself wondering, What is significant about tonight? Soldier Spider didn’t tell me anything. Damn!
“Yeah. If it’s not convenient…” James trailed off. He sounded distracted, even distant.
“No, that’s okay. What’s up? You okay?”
There was a painful pause, then James said, his voice straining, “I need to talk to someone, Spider. I’m in trouble.”
Intrigued, Spider asked, “Is this to do with the business you told me about?”
“Um, I can’t talk about it over the phone. Could we meet somewhere?” James said. In the background Spider could hear a bus pull in to the stop, its tires hissing on the pavement, brakes squealing. “You know Café Fuego, at Crawley?”
Spider knew of it, an upmarket café with a spectacular view over the Swan River and the city skyline. “Yup. How’s eight o’clock?”
“See you then.” James killed the link.
Spider sat, thinking about what he’d just heard. James sounded preoccupied, his voice flat. What the hell? Spider thought to himself.
Then, right on schedule, according to the instructions Soldier Spider had given him, Malaria appeared in his doorway, and said, “Dickhead just arrived, Spider.” She was full of dread, anticipating Dickhead’s unique charm. “I swear, if you don’t get him to leave me alone, I’ll bloody kill him.”
“And so it begins,” he said. He told Malaria that he would sort Dickhead out. No problem.
Her arms crossed, turning so she could see out the front window and watch Dickhead parking his immense Hummer, she told Spider, “If I don’t get a personal apology from him, today, I’m out of here.”
“I said I’d handle it,” and he flashed his best attempt at a reassuring smile. Hardly mollified, Malaria went back to her desk and braced for impact.
Right on schedule, Dickhead squeezed through the office door, damp from the drizzling rain outside, and shook his boxy head. “Since when did bloody May get so miserable and wet? I tell you, it never used to be like this, not when I was a kid. God, May used to be maybe a bit cool, maybe the odd handful of rainy days, but nothing like this! Have you seen it out there? Parts of Perth are actually underwater, the river’s burst its banks in places — don’t you listen to the news here? My God, it’s a bloody scandal, you mark my words! Good thing I’ve got the Beast out there” — the Beast was his Hummer — “or I’d be underwater, too, for God’s sake! And it’s not even properly winter yet! It’s just insane out there.” He paused for breath and smiled at Malaria. “Ah, the lovely Malaria! And how are you this afternoon? Not working too hard, I hope?” He chuckled, looming over the front counter so he had a good view of Malaria at her desk.
“Bugger off, Dickhead,” Malaria said, this time with no undertone of good humor.
Dickhead, quite unfazed at Malaria’s suggestion, saw Spider lurking in the doorway behind her, and winked at him. “Spider, the fair Malaria here sounds a bit overworked. Things must be looking up!”
Malaria glanced meaningfully at Spider, and went back to her work.
Spider said, “Dickhead, we need to have a little talk.”
“Any chance of a double macchiato?” Dickhead asked Malaria, who flinched but said nothing.
“Droid’s not working,” Spider said as Dickhead pushed past him like an iceberg in a wool suit.
Dickhead complained bitterly about the coffee situation, and when Spider offered him a cup of instant he protested noisily and went on about what a hard day he’d had, going around all the other Time Machines Repaired shops in the metro area, and how for some reason all their coffee droids were broken, too. “But I got all those coffee droids in a deal!” he said, settling into the guest chair in Spider’s office. “I tell you, Spider, you can’t trust African workmanship anymore, it’s a bloody disgrace, a bloody disgrace! After all we’ve done for them, too! God!”
Spider settled behind his desk. “Dickhead, before we begin, I’ve got a bit of a problem.”
Dickhead looked like he was considering the idea of treating Spider’s comment as a hook for a joke, but changed his mind, going instead with an expression of serious concern, tempered with delight a
t being the one to whom Spider turned for help. “Anything I can do?”
“In a word, yes. Look, it’s about Malaria.”
“Delightful creature,” he said, smiling. “I’m trying to get her to go out for dinner with me, but so far she’s playing it cool.”
Spider sighed and shook his head. “Well, about that, just stop it, okay? Leave her be.”
“Um, what?”
“I said, and I quote, Leave Malaria alone. She’s a great worker, and she’s doing a good job for the shop, so show a bit of bloody professionalism and leave her alone. She’s not interested.”
“What are you trying to say, Spider?” He looked baffled.
“You’re always trying to chat her up. I’m telling you to stop it.”
Dickhead stared at him, astonished, then got up and went to the door, opened it, called out to Malaria, “You know, Malaria, if you had a problem with me, you could have spoken to me directly. There’s no need—”
Malaria yelled out, “Spider!”
Spider was out of his chair and at the door, behind Dickhead’s bulk. “What, are you drunk?” He shut the door. “She just wants to do her job and go home. She’s not interested! You’re giving her the shits!”
“You know, Spider,” Dickhead said, turning to stare at him, “I decided today was a good day to launch the next phase of my little project, and I thought, I know, I’ll get Spider to come on board, he’s a good bloke, reliable, hard-working, imaginative — plus of course you owe me — so I came out here, all set to give you the big spiel, lay it all out for you, the whole thing, the vision, if you will — and here you’re telling me off for sweet-talking your receptionist. And I’m all confused, frankly, I really am confused, because all this time, I thought I was your boss. I thought I owned you. Now I find out I was mistaken. All this time I was proceeding from a false premise, as they say. All this time, somehow, despite the lack of money in your bank account, and the rather large amount of money in my bank account, and all of that, it turns out that you’re my boss instead!
“You can see how this would come as something of a shock to me, Spider, particularly after everything I’ve done for you over the years, and without ever seeking a word of thanks, or gratitude, or even recognition! And now here you are, talking to me like you’re some kind of, God, I don’t know, like an equal! Help me out here, Spider. Help me out.”
Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait Page 18
