Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait

by K. A. Bedford

  “Looks like gibberish to me,” Spider said, bitter, not seeing how it might help.

  “Mr. Webb, Spider, listen to me. This is not advanced tech. It’s not. It’s something a well-equipped chronomedicine lab in your time—”

  “My time?” Spider stared at the doctor, starting to see what the doctor was saying. He knew, for example, that there was a state-of-the-art chronomed facility at the Queen Elizabeth II Medical Center, in Nedlands. “My God!”

  “We can arrange a referral for your wife’s case to go through DOTAS in your time, and that should facilitate the whole thing, and not cost you anything more than a hundred-dollar co-payment via Medicare.”

  Astonished, adrenaline blasting through his system, Spider stared in wonder at the doctor. “You little ripper!”

  CHAPTER 22

  Emergency Department, Queen Elizabeth II Medical Center. Queues for everything. Patients waiting for rooms stacked up five-high on what looked like shelving. Understaffed, overworked nurses hurtling about, frantic, exhausted. Phones ringing, alarms beeping, ambulances queued up outside, waiting for a delivery slot. Inside, kids freaked out on the latest street drugs; people who’d suffered unlikely home accidents; terrified parents nursing sick kids; and, standing around anywhere they could find a bit of space, poor buggers who in years past would have simply gone to see their local GP.

  Spider carried Molly inside where a keen-eyed male orderly placed her on a hospital hand-truck, saying “Well, obviously a wheelchair’s no good to her, eh?” Spider had to agree.

  “Stasis job?” asked the orderly.

  “Oh yeah.” replied Spider.

  “Third one this week. Bloody time machines.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  The orderly wheeled Molly into a triage queue and handed Spider a light cotton blanket. “This could take a while.”

  Spider tried to spread the blanket over Molly as best he could — no easy feat considering she was more or less standing up.

  Spider found it was difficult to see Molly like this, knowing he was responsible twice over. He resolved that if he ever got to become Soldier Spider, Warrior of the Far Future, he would make damn sure he never ever used her like this again. “Right,” he said, uneasy, “that’s decided. Good.”

  With Molly was safely rugged up, Spider decided to call the shop. Malaria answered promptly. “Time Machines Repaired While-U-Wait, this is Malaria, can I help you?”

  “Hi, Malaria, it’s me,” Spider said.

  “Spider?” she said, “It’s been twenty minutes. What’s up?”

  He managed a weary smile. “I’m at the QE II chronomedicine facility.”

  “Are you okay?” she said.

  “Everything’s fine. I just wanted you to know that Dickhead might be out of the picture for the forseeable future,” he said.

  There was a moment’s pause.

  “Ooooookay,” she said, wary.

  “Any messages?” Spider asked.

  “Street’s been trying to reach you.”

  “No worries. I’ll call her back.”

  “And Rutherford called about tonight.”

  The prospect of facing James Rutherford felt like one burden too many, and yet, he found himself saying, “Okay. I’ll call him back, too.” He rang off, dialed Iris’ number, and left a message assuring her that all was at least reasonably well, nothing to worry unduly about, but he would appreciate it if she would meet him at the QE II Medical Center’s chronomedicine facility.

  At length, sometime after five p.m., Molly’s name came up, and an overworked, middle-aged nurse from New Zealand gave Molly a brief examination. The nurse told Spider that Molly would be admitted, as soon as a bed could be organized in the chronomedicine unit, and that could take a few hours.

  “Things are that busy?”

  “School holidays, Mr. Webb. Teenage kids borrowing their parents’ time machines. Mix in some booze and some dodgy drugs, guess what happens? Universe-devouring paradoxes are the bloody least of it, if you’ll pardon me saying so.”

  Spider explained about his line of work, how he often had to fix — and clean — those very machines afterwards. The nurse nodded, understanding only too well, and squeezed his shoulder. She asked how Molly had wound up like this. Spider decided against telling her the truth, said he had no idea, that he had popped round to Molly’s house to fix her toilet, and found her like that, on the ground next to her time machine.

  The nurse nodded again, appeared to believe him, and said, “Yep, no worries.”

  A room for Molly became available sooner than expected, and soon Spider had to sit down with a clerk, providing Molly’s details, insurance status, Medicare number and so forth.

  By the time Iris turned up, Spider was sitting alone and depressed in the empty private room assigned to Molly. Molly had just been wheeled off for Stage One of her treatment. One of the nurses who’d taken Molly away told Spider she’d be gone for at least two hours, if he wanted to go off and get something to eat.

  “Good grief,” Iris said, after knocking on the open door, “you look like somebody shot your dog.”

  Spider looked up, surprised. “Hi, Iris. Thanks for coming.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Need a favor.”

  “How’s your wife?”

  “In treatment,” he said, looking at the space in the room where Molly’s bed had been.

  “Right,” she said.

  “Stasis attack.”

  “Shit. She gonna be okay?”

  “Should be. I got her here soon as I could.”

  She nodded. “So, eaten anything recently?”

  “Oh, just, you know…” he said, thinking about some thin soup he’d eaten on the Masada a few hours earlier.”

  “Come on. Nothing you can do for her now.”

  It was true. Spider hated the idea of leaving, of not being here when they brought her back to the room. Then again, it also occurred to him, they could meet James Rutherford at that cafe in Crawley, listen to the poor bugger, then come right back. He heard Soldier Spider’s voice telling him that James was trouble, that Spider was well-advised to leave James alone to self-destruct on his own, not to get caught up in it himself. It was good advice, Spider knew that. And yet, and yet… There was a chance James could lead him to Clea Fassbinder’s murderer. And, of course, he was a mate. Charlie Stuart had been right. Mates help each other. If he could help James, even if it was just helping him get the care he needed, that was a worthwhile thing in itself, right?

  With one last look around Molly’s empty room, Spider told Iris, “Lead on.”

  Once they were safely stuck in traffic, Iris asked him about his scruffy new look, and remarked that she’d never seen anybody grow that much beard in just a few hours.

  “I’ve been a busy boy,” he said.

  “So tell me.”

  He told her.

  When he finished, bringing her up to the present moment, she said, amazed, “So basically you’re saying McMahon went all Jonestown at the end?”

  Spider nodded. “The Destiny was his flagship, crewed by his very own cult, and they were all dead. We brought a few of the bodies back to the Masada for examination, and yeah, poisoned. It wasn’t the infamous purple punch, but near enough. Just… unimaginable horror, really.”

  Iris said nothing for a while. The sound of rain beating on the windshield, and the electric wipers swinging back and forth, back and forth, gently squeegeeing the glass.

  “And what about McMahon himself? You say there was no trace of him anywhere?”

  “I think he knew what was coming, had a plan in place, and executed it. All in the name of the Final Secret of the Cosmos, of course. Just him and his handpicked senior staff, murderers all.”

  “Why would h
e leave your ex-wife alive?” Iris asked.

  Spider had thought about that, but was no nearer an answer. “Beats me. If I run into him again, I’ll have to ask.” In fact, there was one possibility, and it chilled him to contemplate it: what if Dickhead had left her alive because he knew she’d be so damaged, so broken, that she would never again be the Molly he had always known, and always wanted back. What if he’d left her alive because that would be worse than killing her? Worse for her but, most important, worse for him — seeing her like that, and knowing it was all his fault. That’ll teach you to go betraying your master, Spider, he imagined Dickhead telling him.

  Iris listened to him wax on about his dreadful, wretched guilt, then she said, “But it’s not your fault.”

  Spider nodded. Cavers had tried to impress this upon him before sending him home. “Dickhead and his minions did this, Spider. They’re the ones who snatched her, and they’re the ones who hurt her. He wants you to blame yourself, so don’t. Don’t give the rat bastard the satisfaction.”

  It was a hard lesson to learn. He was pretty sure that if Molly ever did speak to him again, she would tell him it absolutely was his fault. “You should have said no when they first told you about it, you should have just refused!” she would say, and she’d be right.

  As the traffic continued to move at a snail’s pace, Iris remembered to tell Spider that she had a possible lead on the murder of his other future self, the one who’d gone and camped out in Spider’s capsule at The Lucky Happy Moon Motel that night, intending to save Spider’s life.

  “Our tech forensics people, frankly, pulled a bloody miracle out of thin air and managed to extract enough data from that surveillance tape to get a brief — and I mean really brief — image of the killer.” She popped her watchtop open and worked through the interface, pulling up an image, and showed it to him. “She look familiar to you?”

  He leaned over and peered at the image. There wasn’t a lot of detail, she was right about that, but he recognized that face. “Dickhead’s personal assistant. A robot.”

  Iris hadn’t been expecting that. “You’re kidding me.”

  “Iris, I’m too wiped to lie right now. Believe me.”

  She was peering at the image now. “A robot? They have robots that look like that?”

  “Oh, it’s a land of fucking wonders, Iris. You’ve got no idea.”

  She nodded, surprised. “Any thoughts why this, um, this killer robot — I cannot believe I just said that — why this killer robot wanted to kill you?”

  “Thought it was me. Well, it was me, obviously, but, um. It’s difficult. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn the idea was to wipe out my far-future self, Soldier Spider, the guy I go on to become, Dickhead’s great nemesis, nice and early. Or something. Who the hell knows? Dickhead had all kinds of wacky schemes going.”

  “Did you ever find out about the ‘Vores?’”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Should I be worried?”

  He wasn’t sure. “At this point, maybe. Maybe not. Dunno.” Neither Soldier Spider nor Dickhead had given him any kind of timeline. The Vores might be thousands of years away from the present, or they could turn up, munching the ground out from him next Tuesday. He didn’t know, and, the way he felt right now, didn’t want to know. It was a battle for another time, he thought.

  To change the subject, he said, “I’ve been thinking a lot.”

  “What about?”

  “Free will.”

  “Free will?”

  “Yeah,” he said, trying not to fidget, a weird feeling in his head. “I reckon free will is bullshit.”

  “You need to get some sleep, Spider.”

  “No, no, I feel okay, more or less.”

  “Free will.” she said, shaking her head.

  “It’s an illusion. That’s all it is. Everything is already sorted out, every decision, every possibility, it’s all determined, scripted, whatever.”

  Iris was looking at him as if she was worried. “Where’d all this come from?”

  “I’ve been to the End of bloody Time, Iris. From that perspective, everything is done and settled. Basically, everything that could happen has happened. It’s all mapped out, documented, diagrammed, written up in great big books, and ignored.”

  “You’re a crazy bastard, you know that, Spider?”

  “Maybe not crazy enough,” he said.

  Iris was still struggling for traction on the conversation. “You think everything is predetermined? Is that it? But what about—”

  “No. You just think you have free will.”

  “So, according to you,” Iris said, looking bewildered, “a guy who kills his wife was always going to kill her. She was always going to die.”

  “From his point of view, he doesn’t know that, and neither does she, but yeah. She was always a goner, so to speak.”

  “There is no way I can accept this,” she said. “It’s intolerable. It robs individual people of moral agency. According to you nobody chooses to do anything; they’re just following a script. That means nobody’s responsible for anything.”

  “I said, free will is an illusion. We think we’ve got moral agency, we think we make choices. It’s a perfect illusion. It just depends on your point of view.”

  “It’s a bloody pathway to madness, I reckon,” Iris said.

  “I dunno,” he said. “Right now, sitting here, thinking about everything, I think it makes a lot of sense. Kinda, anyway.”

  “Think you’ll find that’s just an illusion,” she said, and flashed a tiny smile.

  The Cafe Fuego at Matilda Bay, across Hackett Drive from the sprawling campus of the University of Western Australia, and only a few kilometers from the QE II Medical Center, was a favorite haunt of students and academics alike. Offering an unmatched view across the great gulf of the swollen Swan River to the luminous towers of central Perth, it looked — and smelled — warm and inviting, all picturesque brass fittings, and dark polished woodwork.

  They found a spot, not too far from the café, paid a fortune to the roaming ticket droid, and got out. Iris was snug in her belted raincoat; Spider, less prepared, felt the cold evening winds slicing through him, and he wished he’d brought a decent coat.

  The sublime aroma of good, hot coffee hit them even before they walked through the doors. In some ways, Spider thought, it’d be great if James didn’t show. It would be nice, after his recent harrowing adventures at the End of Time — to say nothing of the concentrated misery of the QE II Emergency Department — to just sit somewhere peaceful.

  A voice called from the darkness. “Spider!”

  Iris looked at Spider. “Was that you?”

  Spider, his hopes sinking, started searching around. “You might as well show your self. Come on! Haven’t got all night.”

  Another Spider emerged from the darkness beyond the lights of the café. “Thought you’d never get here,” he said, hands deep in the pockets of a heavy jacket.

  “Shit,” Spider said, shaking his head, pissed off. “And what do you want?”

  “Much as I’m loath to say so, Spider,” the new Spider said, “we need to talk.”

  “We’re meeting James Rutherford in a few minutes. You’ll have to make it brief, whatever it is.” Already, though, Spider had a very bad feeling about what this future self would tell him.

  “James isn’t coming.” The other Spider, who, now he stood in the light from the café, looked no older than Present Spider, but did sport a scraggly beard, long hair needing a wash, and conveyed an air of fatigue and depression. He checked his watch. “Yeah. Right now, in fact, Electra is stabbing him. He’ll bleed out in a few minutes.” He reported all this with a lack of affect Spider found chilling.

  “And you know this because…?” Iris said to him, not buying it.

/>   “I know it because it’s kind of my fault.”

  “Your fault?” Spider said. “I take it, when you were me, you resorted to time travel to try and save James’s life? Only it turned out…”

  “That my interceding like that more or less made everything worse, yeah,” Near Future Spider said, bitter and sad.

  Iris was watching the two Spiders. To Near Future Spider, she said, “A man is dying right now, yes?”

  “Yes, Iris,” he said. “And there’s sweet bugger all you can do about it. Trust me, I spent months trying.”

  “Even though Soldier Spider told you to leave James the hell alone, that he was trouble, and you could even get yourself seriously hurt or killed?”

  “He told you that, too, and here you are, waiting for the guy.”

  “Hey, I thought if I brought backup—”

  Iris turned to Spider. “That’s the favor you wanted? You wanted backup?”

  “It occurred to me things might go pear-shaped,” Spider said to her.

  “Things did go pear-shaped,” Near Future Spider said. “I was in hospital for three weeks. Thirty stitches!”

  “Shit,” Spider said.

  Iris was on the phone, calling her partner, Aboulela. She asked Spider for James Rutherford’s address, which both Spiders gave her, and she relayed that to Aboulela. “Get over there right now. I’ll be there ASAP.”

  “You’re already too late,” Near Future Spider said, again with that chilling flat tone.

  “We could use the time machine you used to come and visit us, couldn’t we?”

  “Sure,” Near Future Spider said. “That’s how the whole thing got started.”

  “I can’t just let a man be murdered!” Iris told him. “Let’s go. Where’s your machine?”

  “Across the road.”

  Spider said, “His daughter kills him? Electra? That daughter?”

  Iris was pushing Near Future Spider to take them to his time machine, but he called back over his shoulder. “Yeah. Turns out she’s the one who’s trouble.”

  “But she’s, what? Nineteen?”