Spider sympathized, but suspected time was short.
James went on. “She was right, of course. That was the point. I had brought about Sky’s death. Here, look, this is…” He’d leaned forward and was starting to rummage among piles of crap on the coffee table near the media center control screen, and there it was, loose amid everything else, not in a protective case, just a loose XVD disc.
Spider stared at the disc in James’s shaking hand. He forced himself to say, “What is it?”
James was staring at the disc, too, his face crumpling with anguish. “What is it? Here, let me show you.” He placed the data side of the disc face-down onto the square reading surface of the screen, hit some controls, the nano-agents in the surface read the data, and then, replacing the TV news on the media wall, there was the by now familiar too-sharp, bottomless image of Sky Rutherford, at sunset, somewhere out in the bush, red dirt and dark blue sky, dazzling sunset light from the west carving sharp shadows across the ground, lighting her face as she read that letter, as she applied the petrol, with such care, not wasting a drop, and as she reached for the lighter—
Spider lunged forward and hit the stop button on the screen. “I think that’s, God, that’s more than enough, thanks.”
James stared at the freeze-framed image up there, filling the entire wall of the apartment, so vivid it was like you could walk into that scene. He shook his head. “I watch it over and over, trying to understand, you know? How could she do it? How could she do something like that?” He was holding the disc again, staring at it, as if he might perceive some pattern in the glittering rainbow light that would explain his wife’s actions. “She never said anything about this. Never said a word about Clea. I was the one who told her about Clea, did you know that? I felt so wretched over it, like I’d betrayed Sky in the worst way. I could have killed myself, but she was so calm about it, so understanding. She said she forgave me, it was behind us, she would forgive, but not forget, that’s how she put it at the time. I couldn’t believe it. How could she be so reasonable in the face of what I’d done?”
Spider shrugged, still trying to remain calm.
“And then one day she says she’s going bush the next day, wants to get some shots of the desert and sunset, and I figure, fine, no problem. She was always heading off to work on her video projects. She’d always been an artist, mixed media, installations, you name it.”
“My wife’s the same,” Spider said, chilled to think about the parallels here, but still keeping an eye on the door. Then he said, “So do you know where she went that day?”
But James was again staring at the disc, holding it in both his hands. “This is all I have of her, Spider, you know that?” He started trying to break the disc, as if he could tear it in half like an old-fashioned phone book.
Spider touched his arm. “You sure you want to do that?”
James glared at him, and snapped the disc in two, and he broke down, sobbing helplessly, even as he took the pieces of the disc and broke those, and then broke those pieces, making smaller and smaller fragments until he could do no more with just his hands, and he dropped the bits on the disc reading surface — where Spider had found them earlier.
Spider touched James’s shoulder. “James,” he said, feeling tense again, “I need to know if you remember the date that Sky… did that to herself. Do you know the date?”
He lifted his face from his hands. “The date? Why the fuck do you want to know the date? God, I don’t know!”
Spider sagged back into the couch. “You must remember, James. It’s the biggest thing that’s happened in your life, your wife killing herself. You must remember!”
“I don’t bloody remember, Spider. It was, God, it was six years ago! Six years! Do you remember stuff from six years ago?”
That was about when Spider met Dickhead, he was thinking. “Yeah, some things,” Spider said. “Listen, what about, uh, you said that weekend she took her video gear out into the desert, right? Do you remember roughly when that was?” He figured he could work with a near-enough date, and refine it from there.
Sitting there, wretched, sprawled back into the couch, his arm over his eyes, breathing through his mouth, James tried to think. “Why’d you want to know, anyway?”
“It’s complicated, James. I just … I can’t say, but I just really need to know. It could help us both.” The sight of Molly, her shoulders bent so horribly, when they pulled her out of that frozen tomb on the Destiny, loomed before him, filling his consciousness.
“I think it was, let me think, I don’t know, sometime in March or April that year?”
“You can’t get any closer? Think, James!”
James turned his head and looked at Spider. “Just what are you up to? You’re trying to fix something, aren’t you? You want to go back there.”
“It’ll help everyone, James. Please, just try.”
“You think you can talk to her, is that it?”
“I’ve got some ideas, yes,” Spider said, sure his time was running out.
James snorted. “She’ll never listen to the likes of you. She never listened to anybody, not when it came to her art. Sky knew best, she always knew best, always had to have the last word.” He stared at the fragments of the disc. “Always the last word, Spider.”
Spider was thinking. Sky’s body had to have been found at some point after she did what she did. There would have been some kind of investigation by the local police of whatever the nearest major town was. How many suicide-by-self-immolation cases were there out in the bush back then? Probably not that many, he thought. “Anything at all you can remember, James. Anything.”
“You look like you’re in a bit of a hurry,” James said.
“Not really,” he said. “I just want to get on this.”
“What do you know?”
“I—”
“What happens to us? What happens to me?”
“I. Can’t. Say.” He felt like shit.
“What happens to me, Spider?”
“James—”
“Am I dead, is that it?”
“Oh, God…”
“Is it that bloody Electra? Fuck. Listen, Spider, can you keep a secret?”
“Evidently not,” Spider said, anxious, trying not to keep looking towards the door. “Why? What is it?”
“I have to kill her, Spider.”
“Oh?” he said, trying to feign surprise and horror.
“She knows I want to go to the cops.”
“Why haven’t you?”
James sagged against the couch, anguished again. “I don’t know. I’m scared of her. You ever been absolutely shit-scared of someone?”
He thought of Dickhead. “Oh yeah,” he said, nodding, but wanting to fast-forward through this to what he needed to know.
“Things are bad when you find yourself planning the murder of your own child,” James said, sad beyond measure, exhausted.
“Yeah,” Spider said.
In the silence that followed, Spider heard rain against the windows, and faint scuttling sounds from somewhere nearby. James looked at him. “So.”
Spider looked at James, and said, “I’m trying to save you,” he said. “You just need to tell me everything you can about the day Sky died.”
“I’m dead?” he said, curious, a little intrigued despite himself.
“Anything at all.”
“When? Tonight? Is it tonight?”
“You could come with me, if you want. You might remember something later.” He knew this was fruitless, and one of the many things his near future self had probably tried without success.
Then, to Spider’s great surprise, the man who planned to kill his daughter later tonight, blurted out, “Oh, wait. She went to Southern Cross,” he said. “She went to Southern Cross.”
James was surprised at himself. “I remember the police there calling me.”
It wasn’t the actual date, but it would do. He could work with it. “Thank you, mate. Thank you so much.”
CHAPTER 25
It was tough leaving James that night. The man was a mess, and had been before Spider showed up. Spider felt awful. He had done (another) terrible thing: he’d left James with a sense of hope. He understood that if Spider succeeded in his mission, so much of the past six years might never occur. He might never find himself sitting there in filth, thinking about how to kill his daughter.
That hope was a heavy thing to carry, Spider found, as he turned his back on James’s closing front door, and set off for the elevators.
Now for the hard part, he thought. Where was Electra? He knew she’d be around the place somewhere, waiting for him. God, he was stupid. Such an idiot move, letting the murderer know you were on to her. Sometimes, it didn’t matter. It changed the dynamics of things, even made it more interesting, here and there, but in a situation like this, with no backup, no sidearm, no protection of any kind — and no reason Electra should let him live, he knew his best chance was to get out of this building, head straight for the Boron, and punch the hell out of here.
The elevators were slow. People shuffled on and shuffled off at different floors, chatting amongst themselves, people going about their lives, caught in their own dramas, maybe contemplating the use of time machines to solve their troubles. If he could offer them just one piece of advice, Spider thought, it would be to leave the bloody time machines alone. Who the hell thought it a good idea to let time machines become a mass-market item? Whose brainwave had that been? Maybe he should try to find out, go back in time and find that person — and kill him, or her, or them, and take care of the whole problem. Except, of course, that might not do it. The email from the future, the one that contained the attachment detailing just how to build working time machines, had landed in the inboxes of a great many engineers — electrical, electronic, software — all at once. No-one knew who had sent it. At first most of the recipients thought it was spam, and treated it as such. Not all, though, Spider knew, thinking about the dimensions of the problem.
He couldn’t kill every single recipient of that email. He’d be caught in no time. Or someone would come back from the future and stop him killing anybody. Someone way up in the future felt it crucially important to start the proliferation of time travel sooner than it would have done otherwise. That was the guy to kill, Spider thought, realizing the difficulty of the problem as it gaped before him. You would as easily shut down the advent of chronotechnology as you would keep the world from learning the secret of the atom, and everything that entailed.
Feeling bleak, watching everything around him, Spider made his way across the beautiful lobby. Electra, he reminded himself, is going to kill me. He forced himself to focus, to come back to the here and bloody now. Will she attack me while I’m safe in here, in the light, in front of people? No, she’d be lurking outside, in the gardens, taking advantage of the overcast sky, the lack of light, the weather.
When he reached the main entrance, he peered out into the darkness, trying to spot the Boron on its trailer, but couldn’t see it.
What if she’s somehow broken into it and gone? he thought. He’d be stuck — at least until his earlier self, Near Future Spider, and Iris showed up with their Boron. Thinking about this crap made his head hurt. He edged forward, peered out into the darkness, trying to get his eyes adjusted.
There was nothing else for it. His heart pounding in his throat, hardly able to think straight, he set off, out into the open, making for the winding pathways that led through the expansive gardens, now picking up speed, glad he stayed on the pavement, and watching, all around him, for signs of extremely scary crazy young women in frightening clothes trying to catch him and gut him like a whale. He saw nothing other than all the things he expected to see: traffic, people coming and going, taxis. Then he was at the curb, near the taxi rank. Three taxis stood there, their drivers sitting at the controls, bored, reading things off their glowing screens, waiting for customers. The Boron, Spider saw, was just across that road. So close, so very close, he could almost taste it. He stood on the curb, waiting for a break in the traffic, freezing, shaking with the cold, trying to wrap himself in his flimsy jacket — there was the break he needed, and he darted out, dodged two cars and a gaggle of horn-honking scooter riders who yelled abuse at him, and there he was, climbing up on the trailer, fishing in his pocket for his keys, and for a moment he thought he’d lost them! Had he left them at James’s apartment? Could they have fallen out while he sat on that horrible couch?
They were in his other pocket. Thank God! he thought, laughing madly, and fumbled with the keys, got the time machine’s driver-side door open, took in that unpleasant smell again, but it was warm and dry, and he climbed in, pathetically grateful, slammed the door shut, and settled in at the controls, getting the unit ready to jump. The sooner he got out of here, the better he’d like it.
The Boron powered up, he had a complete array of green lights, the humming from the engine compartment sounded good, and it was time, at last, to go.
The Temporal Positioning System on the dashboard indicated he was back in his present, only a moment after his departure. Right now, Iris and Near Future Spider were still up in James’s apartment. Things were bad.
And, he noted, peering out the unit’s windows, no sign of Electra. She must really have headed out for a night with her pretentious boyfriend, maybe to discuss setting up that band he’d heard about. Was that likely, though? She knew he was on to her. She had not looked happy about it. Just how devious could she be, if she put her mind to it? The thought gave him chills, but he also allowed for the possibility that his brain right now was so fried from all his recent adventures that he was seeing things that weren’t there.
He popped the door, hefted himself out of his seat, aiming his leg for the trailer framework, muttering at the bloody rain again, and climbed back down to the ground—
Electra was waiting, soggy, idly fondling the remote for her Umbra, and, for one brief moment, she smiled at him. Then, before he could register shock, she was killing him. There was no preamble, no cocky, “I’ve got you now, Mr. Bond, now let me explain everything to you so you’ve got time to escape.” None of that. She waited for him to hit the road, turn around, see she was there, and she lunged at him, pressing herself against him so it would look to passersby and bored taxi drivers like she was maybe very, very glad to see him, and she plunged the knife into him, hard, oh God, so hard, he could feel it, cold and hard and full of death, right there in his chest, he could feel his heart racing as he panicked, as he tried to react, his mind a blur; she was right there in his face, close enough to kiss him, so intimate, so warm, and yet so fetid, and sickly sweet, reeking of her home, of corruption and madness, a vision out of a bad horror movie, right there, not smiling, not laughing, just getting the damned job done, twisting the knife now — he cried out, feeling it against — was that a rib? Oh God.
The heat of his blood rushing out, away from him, leaving him, abandoning him to mortality, was its own special horror. He wished he could tell someone about it, wished he could talk to Molly one last time, even if it was only a one-way conversation, even if it was all just him standing there, telling her he was so fucking sorry, he thought it was the right thing to do, he should never have done it, never ever ever…
He was down, cold, sitting on the road, shivering, leaning against the wheel of the Boron’s trailer, and she was crouching before him, watching him from behind those dreadful black eyes, pretending to help him. It was hard to hold his head up, and really why should he? He could see the lights from the apartment complex, and there were taxis, and cars, and Electra was down on her haunches, talking to him, telling him some damn thing, and he guessed, vaguely, that observers must imagine she was tr
ying to help him, poor man. He tried to raise a hand, to wave for help, but his hand weighed — no kidding, this is true — about five tons! He couldn’t lift it to, well, save his life.
So very cold, empty of blood but full of regret, he sat there, wishing she would go away, but she was waiting for him to go, to make sure he was gone, and couldn’t get in a time machine later, and come back and get her in turn. He thought he heard her talking about cutting his throat, to get the job done faster, but then there was a strange, harsh, blatting sound, and someone calling his name,
“Spider!” He was limp, knowing he was leaving the world now, going the way of all flesh, and there was more of that harsh, blatting sound, and he heard, faintly, Electra cry out, and an arm whacked him in the face that he hardly felt, and something heavy collapsed and fell across his numb legs. He was so cold now that he was starting to feel just fine, thanks, and remembered, slightly, that this was bad.
A faint woman’s voice was yelling something, he caught the word “ambulance”.
Spider was gone.
CHAPTER 26
Four months later, and six years earlier, a tired man found a very determined woman out in the desert outside the country town of Southern Cross late one March afternoon. The woman, attractive, intense, full of purpose, had a lot of equipment with her, including a small but professional-looking video camera wirelessly linked to a high-end laptop. As the man strolled up to where she was spreading out a picnic rug — red and black tartan pattern, very nice — on the ground, he noted that she had a basket containing various items, including what he knew was a one-liter can of petrol, and a plastic disposable cigarette lighter.
It surprised him, as he came within speaking range, and particularly since he was not exactly creeping or tip-toeing along, that she appeared unaware of his approach. But that was her all over, wasn’t it? he thought. Determined. Driven. This was Sky Rutherford in full flight, a woman on a mission, out to make James pay. Nothing, nothing at all, would deflect the bullet of her revenge from its path.
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