“At the end of the universe, in the final moments before the last iota of space and time is destroyed in the last great fire, the Vores will communicate a message to the True Believers. Those who have helped the Vores, who have worked against the Doubters and the Skeptics, will be rewarded with the Final Secret. The last truth, the ultimate revelation.” Dickhead was nearly weeping with joy at the prospect of it all.
“So what is this Final Secret? Any ideas?” Spider asked, trying to sound reasonable.
“We don’t know. We just don’t know. All we know is what the Vores have communicated to us so far.”
“Right,” Spider said, nodding, hating every moment of this nonsense. “And when you say ‘we’ and ‘us’, what you really mean is ‘you’, yes?”
“They communicate through a living channel, yes, and that is, of course, me.”
Spider stared at him. Despite the terrors of the End of Time, and the sense that there was no floor under his feet, Spider heard that tone in Dickhead’s voice, and wanted to run. He tried to kid McMahon along a little, and said, “You do know that sounds like so much bullshit, don’t you?” He said it with a smile.
Dickhead glanced at him, and all the weird messianic glow was gone from his face. He looked like the Dickhead he remembered from the shop. He grinned, nodded, and said, “Oh yeah, sure. I agree, absolutely. And I would have thought so, too, but one day — okay, this is going to sound awfully clichéd — well, I had this dream, Spider.”
“Oh, kill me now,” Spider said, shaking his head. “Not bloody dreams.”
“You don’t understand—”
“You had a dream in which, let’s say, some kind of angel appeared to you, and told you your destiny” — Spider made a show of saying the word, to emphasize its full ridiculousness. “And you thought, unlike anybody else, who would have said, ‘Hmm, too much cheese before bedtime,’ you thought, ‘Cool! Where do I sign up to be part of this awesome destiny?’ Right?”
Dickhead was peeved. He glared at Spider, working his jaw, clearly straining to avoid saying all the things that were right there on the tip of his tongue, right now. For some reason Dickhead appeared to need Spider’s … approval? Understanding? Help? It was puzzling, and more than a little worrying. Dickhead said to him at last, “It wasn’t quite like that. But I did receive a ‘call,’ if you like. I knew I had to do this, that it was what I was put into the universe to do. Everything else, my whole life up to this moment, has been about getting here. Spider, I want to know the Final Secret of the Cosmos.”
“What about your gung-ho little mates out there, the Marauders, and all the rest of ‘em? What are they supposed to do when they get all wiped out? I mean, all those billions of years of development, for nothing? That’s not fair, is it, Dickhead?”
Dickhead smiled. “We’re attempting to contact the Marauders.”
Spider tried to imagine how long it might take to communicate with a lifeform evolved for the absolute zero environment. “Let me guess. You think you can talk them round to joining forces with your lot?”
“We think they have a lot to offer, the Marauders.”
“I see,” Spider said.
He sat there, arms still crossed, starting to feel more terrified of Dickhead than of anything else he’d seen or heard. Clearly, the man was crazy. Something was definitely going on “here” at the “End of the Universe.” He was quite happy to accept that part. That it had anything to do with “God,” or with a higher consciousness or divine entity of any kind, Spider was not so sure. “Okay,” he said at last, knowing Dickhead had some very bad news for him, “where do I fit into your insane little plans?”
“I’m glad you asked,” Dickhead said, smiling, looking like a salesman again. “It’s very simple, I assure you.”
“Do tell.”
“It’s like this, Spider. My organization here is called Zeropoint. I mentioned it to you back at the shop, right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“The thing is, like I said, we’re at war.”
“Of course you are.”
“It’s true. We’re in a war with another version of our own organization.”
“What?”
“It’s a bloody civil war, Spider! The other side is led by a man called Webb.”
Oh, no, Spider thought. He suddenly saw everything very clearly. “Aloysius Webb, Dickhead? Spider Webb? Me? Is that why you brought me here, because I was already here, but working for the wrong side?” He was flashing back to that night, years ago, the night he met Dickhead in a pub. Now he could see that Dickhead had been looking for him, hoping to solve a difficult problem in the remote future with a simple fix back in the past. All he had to do was go back and recruit Spider to his own side ahead of time, and maybe prevent the civil war…
“The war has reached a very difficult point, Spider,” he said, ignoring Spider’s protest. “Their side is down to one last ship. They call her the Masada.” He shook his head, no doubt hating them for using such a pretentious name. “Do you know the story of the siege of Masada?”
“I’ve read the Wikipedia entry.”
“Ah. Well, never mind. Anyway, the people on that ship, Spider, think they’re the last honorable, noble, decent people left at the End of Time. They think they’re the good guys. They think their shit doesn’t stink. What’s worse, though, is that they’re trying to undermine our campaign with endless lies and propaganda, and it’s starting to work. What they can’t do through sheer force, they can do with bloody propaganda! They will tell you that the Vores must be stopped, even killed, if possible. They will tell you God is not involved, that there is no God. They will tell you the Vores are just a bunch of aliens, and maybe not even real lifeforms. They don’t care about the Final Secret, Spider. They just don’t care. They say there is no Final Secret, that it’s all a delusion, a myth!” Dickhead was getting worked up again. Spider edged his chair back from the table.
Spider said, “How do you know they’re wrong?”
Dickhead looked at him as if he thought Spider hadn’t been paying attention, and maybe even that he was a little stupid. Then he smiled indulgently, and said, “Spider, I know what I’m talking about, okay? I know. The Vores are agents of God. We are fighting the good fight.”
“Okay, fine,” Spider said, and managed a cheery smile. “Sure, why not?”
Dickhead was enormously relieved. “Thank the Lord!”
“There’s just one thing I’m a bit hazy about.”
“Let me guess,” Dickhead said, leaning forward, hands clasped together, looking all earnest, “you’re wondering where you fit into the project.”
“I was wondering.”
“It’s like this, my friend.” McMahon touched a control. A large portrait-format image appeared floating in the air above the table. “The problem is this man, Aloysius ‘Spider’ Webb.” Next to Dickhead’s messianic bullshit, Soldier Spider looked like a hero.
Spider looked, sighed, then did his best to feign puzzlement. “Who is that?”
“Hmm,” Dickhead said, “this is a bit difficult. You see, this is you.”
“I beg to differ, mate!”
“No,” he said, “it is. This is you, decades from now. He’s an old man, fixed in his ideas, a bit funny in the head, frankly, and he’s the man we have to eliminate.” He left that word, “eliminate,” hanging in the air between them.
At last, after all the previous blather, Spider thought, we finally reach the crux of the matter, the bitter fact, the hard ask. “You want me to eliminate my own future self?”
CHAPTER 19
“He’s a dangerous old man, Spider.”
“You could just blow up his ship, couldn’t you?” he said, feigning ignorance.
At this, Dickhead pursed his lips, looked at the image of Soldier Spider, sighed and sat back in h
is seat. “Actually, no.”
“No?”
“No. Not as such.”
“You said you’ve got millions of ships, and they’ve only got one.”
“Yes,” Dickhead said, sounding tired, “that’s all true.”
“So what’s the problem? Pound the shit out of ‘em!”
“The problem, Spider, is that their ship is flux-proofed.”
“Which is?”
“Which makes the ship itself pretty much untouchable. Its complete timeline, from the first day at the shipyard when the keel was laid—”
“Timeships have keels?”
Dickhead carried on. “Its entire existence has been sealed away from attack. You can’t attack it today because it continues to exist a year from now. It exists for the entirety of its natural lifespan as an object, until such time as they switch off the flux-shield, and decommission it. Likewise, you can’t go back in time, say, a year, and try to damage it then, because it still exists today. It’s a real problem for us.”
Spider took this in, noted that it agreed with what he’d been told before, and asked, “What about your ships?”
“Same. We’re all flux-proofed.”
“So what you’re saying is, you’re all screwed, attack-wise.”
“We can’t hit them; they can’t hit us, yes. That’s why we need you.”
“What can I do?”
“You can get onto the Masada.”
“I beg to differ,” Spider said again, trying to laugh dismissively, but not sounding all that convincing, even to himself. Only too aware of this, he tried to cover the lapse. “What makes you think I can—”
“Because,” Dickhead said, interrupting, “you’ve been there before.”
Oh, shit, he thought. “I’ve what?” He felt his cheeks burning, and his stomach was in knots. All this time, Dickhead had been playing him along, the bastard!
A silence fell between them. Dickhead sat back, watching him, all trace of apocalyptic messianic craziness gone, and replaced by the stone-hard face Dickhead normally reserved for discussing Spider’s shop’s sagging bottom line. Spider did his best to look innocent, but he knew it wasn’t working. The silence was brutal. It begged to be filled. He recognized the technique, of course. It was an old cop trick, something to pull out when questioning a tricky suspect. You just shut up, sit back, cross your arms, or maybe just sit there, tapping a finger on the table, and let the silence, and the tension, accumulate, like an electric charge. In time, with most suspects, the tension becomes unbearable, and they start talking. In fact, with some suspects, the hard part is trying to get them to shut the hell up. He didn’t appreciate finding himself on the receiving end of this tactic. The thing to do in this situation was to play it ice-cool. To sit there, quite unbothered, all the time in the world, so to speak, minding your own business, and just wait out the copper. The whole tactic rested on the idea that silence was oppressive, that you had to fill it, like a vacuum. But for some suspects silence was just fine. They could sit there and say nothing at all, maybe for years on end, and they’d never feel even a moment of anxiety or stress about it. Spider had dealt with a couple of guys like that in his time, and he had found them to be spooky bastards. Men quite happy with their own company, who probably never said more than two words every few days even in their normal lives, when they weren’t up to no good, of course. Spider tried to think the way those guys thought, to get into that same frame of mind, where silence was easy, and talk was a rude interruption, and couldn’t do it. He muttered, “Damn it,” and looked across at Dickhead, who smiled.
Spider said, “I’m not a killer, Dickhead. Forget it.”
“You’re not?” He sounded all surprised, and even a little disappointed.
“No.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
“It would be very much worth your while, Spider.”
“No. Not for anything.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“Well,” Dickhead said, scratching his chin, “this is kind of a problem.”
“You could send me home.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I could go back to fixing time machines.”
“No,” he said, “I don’t think so, Spider.”
Spider felt great forces moving around him, forcing him in one direction and one direction only. “So if I don’t do the job, you’ll fire me? Is that it?”
“No, not at all. If you don’t, or won’t help me out, I’ve got no use for you. That was the deal all along. I took you on when nobody else would touch you, Spider. I picked you up out of a puddle of your own squalor, you were broken, useless, full of self-pity and self-destruction. You were pretty much homeless, remember? Do you? And I came along, and I saw you, and I saw potential in you. I saw that I could do great things for you, and you could do great things for me. That’s the secret of a successful business, that is, you mark my words. It’s not about dollars and cents and accounts receivable and all that bullshit, it’s about knowing people, Spider. Knowing what a person can truly achieve, if he’s motivated enough. Your problem, as I saw it, was that you never had the right motivation. You never had the right guiding hand showing you the way.”
Dickhead was killing him with this speech. Spider did remember those days, remembered them only too clearly. “I can’t do it, Dickhead,” he managed to say. “I just can’t. I’m not a murderer.”
“That’s all right, mate,” Dickhead said, his voice full of kindness. “It’s okay. I understand. There are no born murderers. You used to say that yourself, remember? There are people who are very likely to go down the wrong path, you used to say. People who are almost forced by the circumstances of their lives to make the wrong choices. I understand. I get it. But you used to say something else, Spider: you said anyone could become a killer. Anybody at all, from a little kid to a saintly, old, white-haired grandmother who always rescued daddy longlegs spiders from the shower cubicle. They just need the right motivation, the right combination of circumstances. Can happen to anybody, right? Didn’t you used to say that, Spider?”
Spider didn’t remember having this conversation with McMahon, but that was typical of his life lately, wasn’t it? Forces beyond his control plucking the strings of his life like a harp, shifting him from one timeline to another. So who knows? Maybe some version of him had told Dickhead all this about the people who kill people. It was certainly true, though, that was for sure. Again, he felt those huge forces squeezing him down one particular channel, putting him in a situation where he would have only bad options. Dickhead looks too cocky, he thought. He’s got something up his sleeve. Something very bad. Spider was so tense, his whole body knotted up with dread, he hurt all over, waiting for Dickhead to reveal all.
For now, Dickhead was content simply to stare at him, a tiny smile curling his lips. Spider could see, even if he had never seen this before, that Dickhead had never been any kind of real friend to him. He had always been an opportunist, had always only been out for his own goals.
When Spider could take it no longer, when the pain of waiting was almost too much to bear, he said, “You can’t force me to do it. You’ll have to kill me.”
Dickhead looked all shocked. “Kill you? Why would I kill you? You’re my friend, Spider. You’re my responsibility. No, don’t be silly.”
“Well, you’ll have to do something about me, ’cause I’m not killing that guy.”
“I think you will. I think you’ll do it cheerfully. I think you’ll be grateful to do it, in fact, and you’ll come to me afterwards, and you’ll beg me to let you kill other people. I think, contrary to what you told me, Spider, that you’re a born killer. You just haven’t opened yourself to the possibility before. What do you think?”
Spi
der felt tears welling in his eyes. “Fuck you, Dickhead.”
It was as if McMahon never heard him. He carried on. “It’s like I said. You just need the right motivation.” He glanced at his control display, and touched two buttons. “That should do it. Ah yes,” he said, smiling, looking at the video window that had opened up in the air above the table. “Can you see that all right, Spider? I can adjust the brightness if you like?”
And there she was, not safe and sound in the care of Soldier Spider and his merry men as he’d planned. No, Molly was right here. He felt his heart stop. He didn’t want to look. Just listening to the audio feed was bad enough, but he knew he would have to look at her. He would have to take in the full measure of his failure. Tears spilling down his cheeks now, he looked at the window. The scene was dark, but clear enough. She was suspended by her own arms, which had been wrenched back and upward, the wrists cuffed together. Her feet hovered mere centimeters above the floor. It was hard to see Molly’s face, but he could see enough to know she was sick with agony. With each of her rapid, shallow exhalations, her breath misted the chill air. Nearby, a humanoid robot similar to the one Spider had seen earlier delivering dinner stood, bearing what was unmistakably some kind of gun. Spider could not speak. His mind fled in horror. His genitals retracted. He felt sick, but could not look away. He tried to say, “Molly…” but his voice wasn’t working.
Dickhead looked at him, took his time about it, scowling, weighing up the effect the image was having on Spider, then touched the controls again, and the image disappeared.
Spider said, “What do I have to do?”
Dickhead said, “Here’s the plan…”
Spider’s office, late afternoon, raining outside, gray and overcast. Sounds of traffic nearby. Malaria in the outer office, talking to someone on the phone, trying to help diagnose a problem with a wonky time machine. Out the back, in the workshop, Spider hears a heavy metallic tool hit the concrete floor, and then hears Charlie Stuart swearing a blue streak.
Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait Page 24
