The Last Enemy, page 13
part #3 of A Time Traveller's Best Friend Series
He certainly shouldn’t be telling her what he was telling her. Arabella wondered momentarily if he was just a crazy man, and that was why no one else talked with him, but she was aware that the Facility chose people for a reason. Crazy he might be, but he would be a useful sort of crazy.
“Why are you making a Fixed Point of someone’s death?” she asked.
“Because they’re the hive mind, of course. If we don’t make a Fixed Point of it, someone might come back and get him out of it.”
The sheer ruthlessness of it took her breath away. “Who are you going to kill?”
“I’m not going to tell you,” he said, peering down at her again. “You’re a spoke, but you’re in someone else’s hive mind and you’re still a young one. You could go off and form a hive mind of your own if I’m not careful. We already have enough trouble.”
“All right,” said Arabella. “Then tell me this: who are you really working for?”
“I’m more of an off-shoot than a spoke,” he told her. “And for your information, I am working for the Incursion Specialists here at the Facility.”
“That’s not all of it, though,” she said, suspicious. She felt that she was very close to understanding why she had been brought to the Facility. “All right, fine. Don’t tell me. I don’t care.”
“Yes, you do,” he said accurately. “But I won’t tell you anyway. You’re too dangerous.”
“If I’m too dangerous, I’m surprised you’re telling me anything. I haven’t even had my proper training yet.”
“It was a course of action recently recommended to me,” he explained. “I took into account all the variables and came to the conclusion that it was the best course.”
“I suppose I should be flattered,” Arabella said. Truthfully, she was. But she was also worried, and she wasn’t sure which feeling she ought to be giving the most weight. Testingly, she asked, “Am I more or less likely to meet that captain now that I know this?”
He shouldn’t have known what she was talking about, but she wasn’t surprised to see him taking a moment to think about it—not as though he was trying to figure out what she was talking about, but as though he was busy doing the kind of computations that she had seen scrolling across one of the computers yesterday.
At last he blinked, and said, “How interesting. If my calculations are correct, far more likely.”
“All right,” said Arabella. “Then you don’t have to tell me who you’re really working for.”
“I wasn’t going to tell you.”
“Do you know when it will die?” asked Arabella, tilting her chin at the garden.
“I’ve got a very good idea,” he said.
“What about the other one? The hive mind that’s a person?”
“Once everything is set up, I should know to within an hour or two, but I should think it will happen just about the time that you go on your honeymoon.”
Arabella very nearly opened her mouth to ask him what on earth he meant by that, but managed to keep it shut for just long enough to think of a more important question.
“When’s that, then?” she asked instead. “My honeymoon?”
“I like you!” he said approvingly. “You ask the right questions. You’ll have to wait and see on that one: it’s in flux, just like the rest of this lot at the moment. The fire is catching, but the hive mind isn’t yet dead. And that reminds me—can you go to the toilet at exactly eleven hundred LRT today?”
“I don’t know how it works on your world,” said Arabella, “but I don’t have my internal systems on that accurate of an internal clock.”
He looked at her for a moment or two, as if trying to decide whether or not she was joking. “You don’t have to relieve yourself,” he explained. “Just sit in there. When someone knocks, tell him it’s occupied.”
Amused, Arabella asked, “Do you have a particular toilet in mind?”
“Of course. It would be ridiculous to ask you to sit in a toilet just anywhere in the Facility at eleven hundred LRT.”
“Of course it would. Does this have something to do with the two robed people who are walking around inside?”
“Absolutely not,” he said firmly. “In fact, I’m trying very hard to make sure that there is no connection whatsoever between them. We’ll have a lot of trouble if there is.”
“I suppose that’s why it has to be eleven o’clock,” suggested Arabella.
“Exactly.”
They watched the fire in silence for a few moments, then the green-haired man looked down at her again as if surprised.
“Off you go, then,” he said. “You can come back tomorrow for the death. You’ll need to use the toilet on the personnel floor, fourth corridor. You can make it if you hurry.”
With twenty RMUs to go until she apparently needed to be in a toilet on the personnel floor, Arabella should have been able to take her time without feeling particularly rushed. But there was a ticking pulse behind her ear urging her to hurry, urging her to get where she needed to go.
Perhaps that was the fault of the green-haired man—and why hadn’t she gotten his name today, either? she wondered—or perhaps it was just that she suddenly felt a sense of purpose she’d been lacking, and didn’t want to ruin the work she’d been given.
Or perhaps she just didn’t want to miss out on improving her chances of meeting the captain with the kind eyes.
Arabella hurried along, content for now not to wonder too much which of the reasons was uppermost in her mind, and collided with two familiar figures as she entered the main building again and turned to take the corridor to the closest lift.
The taller one muttered something in Third World dialect that must have been a swear, even though Arabella first thought it was eggs! Since eggs didn’t make sense, she let it go and merely said, “Sorry. Wasn’t watching where I was going. How did you get out of the cupboard, by the way?”
“Where are you off to in a hurry?” asked the shorter of the two.
“I have to go to the toilet,” she said, without blinking.
An accusing stare made itself felt from the depths of the hood of the shortest one. “That’s suspicious.”
“Very suspicious,” said the taller. “Why are you suddenly off to the loo?”
“I’m fairly sure I’m not allowed to tell you,” Arabella said. It was rather satisfying to say that to two mysterious figures who had been baiting her with their mysteriousness earlier.
The two figures seemed to look at each other. One shrugged; the other said, “Fair enough, I suppose.”
Arabella’s first instinct was to hurry along, but given that she had plenty of time, and the green-haired man had urged her to hurry, she wondered suddenly if this was what she had been hurrying for—one last chance to see the mysterious strangers before she went to play silly beggars in a toilet upstairs.
And she very much wondered if this was the doing of the Incursion Specialists themselves, or if they were being infiltrated.
“You’re supposed to be out of here by eleven o’clock, aren’t you?” she asked them.
“Good grief,” said the taller of the two. “She knows a lot more than I was expecting her to know at this age. Irritating, isn’t it?”
The smaller one stared at Arabella for a few moments before agreeing, “Flaming irritating. I don’t like this. C’mmon, let’s get out of here.”
“I wanted to ask some more questions,” Arabella protested. There were still about fifteen minutes to spare.
“Well, as you so succinctly put it, we’re supposed to be out of here by eleven,” said the taller one. “C’mmon, robot-breath.”
The smaller figure back-handed him in the stomach. “Watch it, or I’ll leave you behind,” it said.
“Wait!” called Arabella, as they strode past her and toward the other end of the corridor. “But what were you here for?”
They stopped briefly and turned, and she had the feeling that if she could have seen the faces within the hoods, they would have been grinning.
The smaller of the two said, “Making fires,” in its robotic voice.
“Immolating people,” added the taller of the two. “We’ll be seeing you. Might have a bit of work for you later.”
“Wait!” Arabella said again, as they swept around the corner, but she was too late. By the time she darted around the corner, there was no one in the hall. Of the silence of the corridor, she asked, “Are you my hive mind, then?”
Nobody answered, but they didn’t really have to: Arabella had already made up her own mind about that. She checked her time-piece and started for the lifts at the end of the corridor.
It was time to go to the toilet.
The Art of Pyromaniac Gardening: an Excerpt
“Have you seen the noticeboard this morning, my darling?”
Arabella wasn’t surprised when Mikkel looked over the top of his coffee at her, suspicion in every line of his face.
“No,” he said. “And I’m not going to, either. It’s our honeymoon: I don’t care what those two pains-in-my-rear-end are up to.”
She sat down beside him on the rug and pushed the biscuits closer on the coffee-table. “What would you like to talk about instead?”
“I’d like to talk about the fact that I haven’t had more than two kisses this morning, and that puts my daily average down from yesterday, which might have been an aberration but in my opinion should be made the new norm.”
“I didn’t like to interrupt your coffee-drinking,” explained Arabella, tilting her head up a little to press a kiss into the warm skin just below his ear. “And I think you were going to ask me something last night before we got…carried away.”
Mikkel grinned into his coffee like a schoolboy, but he said seriously enough, “You never told me how you came to work for your employers.”
“It’s a long story,” said Arabella. She turned a prim smile on Mikkel and explained, “And of course, there was the issue of incriminating myself. Now that we’re married—”
“Anything that incriminates you also incriminates me,” Mikkel finished. He sent her a reproachful look that very nearly had her believing its sincerity until he added, “I knew there was a reason you agreed to marry me.”
“There were several reasons,” Arabella told him, a laugh catching in her throat. “But that was certainly one of the unexpected side-benefits.”
Mikkel raised a brow at her.
“Well, perhaps not unexpected,” allowed Arabella. “But it was merely the cherry on top, I do assure you!”
“I’d certainly like to think so,” said Mikkel affably. “If only for the sake of my poor, bruised ego! I am curious about one thing, however.”
“Just one? That’s very well-adjusted of you, my darling.”
“In my optimism, I like to imagine we’ll be able to get to everything else in a pleasingly leisurely manner,” murmured Mikkel. “I like to imagine that we have many years ahead of us yet to get to know each other.”
“I could give you a solid answer to that,” Arabella said. “But then I’d have to kill you and that would be a pity, not to mention creating a self-destroying paradox, which is a no-no in my line of work.”
“It’s a no-no in anyone’s line of work,” Mikkel said. “And I don’t think you could kill me at this point, anyway. I’m far too adorable. But leaving aside my adorableness and the many benefits of aligning yourself with me, what on earth could someone offer you as bait that would get you to wriggle yourself into the life and affairs of a Time Corp captain and otherwise duck around in time and space at their bidding?”
“I don’t think you understand,” Arabella said, overwhelmed with a familiar sense of fondness as she gazed at the golden-haired man across from her. She liked the laugh-lines that had scored themselves around his blue eyes: they hadn’t been there when she first saw him, and his curls had been more carefully trimmed then, too. But one thing had remained constant about him since she knew him—the kindness that lurked at the back of his eyes.
“I’m quite certain I don’t understand,” said Mikkel. “It’s why I asked. What on earth did they offer you as bait to become a Time Corp ensign alongside me and put your life in danger every day?”
“I wasn’t offered bait to accompany you, my darling,” said Arabella. “Accompanying you was the bait.”
Mikkel looked as though he was caught between rue and laughter. “Your employers used me as bait to corrupt you?”
Arabella, who had operated both outside of and alongside the Universal Law for most of her life, fixed him with her primmest look. “I like to think that I was already pretty fairly headed along the path I was going to take before my employers offered me a way to do what I wanted to do anyway.”
“What was it that you wanted to do?”
“Meet you, of course,” said Arabella, delighting in both the breath she saw suddenly catch, and the faint ruddiness to Mikkel’s cheeks. “I’d been waiting for years. Of course, when I finally did meet you in person properly, it was rather overwhelming—”
“You sent me flying,” interrupted Mikkel, making a valiant comeback.
“Well, I wasn’t prepared to see quite so much of you,” Arabella protested. “And I was used to having a screen between us, so your physical presence was rather…awe-inspiring.”
“I wouldn’t have guessed it from your bearing.”
“I’m very glad to hear it,” Arabella said. “I was trying desperately to be business-like. At that point I didn’t know I really would marry you; I just wanted to be the one to work with you. Are you sure you don’t want to see the noticeboard, my darling?”
“I’m not even faintly interested in the noticeboard,” Mikkel remarked. “I very much want to know more about how your employers used me as bait to employ you.”
“As I said before, it’s rather a long story.”
Mikkel turned a particularly melting look on her. “I assume it starts at the point where you fell in love with me.”
“No, it starts with gardening,” Arabella said firmly. “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to check the noticeboard first?”
“I’ve become used to the feeling of being herded,” Mikkel told her. “But you shouldn’t imagine that means I like it. What exactly is it you want me to see on the noticeboard?”
“I thought you might be interested to see that a new Fixed Point formed overnight, my darling. It’s pertinent to what you’re asking about.”
Mikkel narrowed his eyes at her, but she saw the curve of his lower lip as he tried to stifle the smile. “Something that just happened is pertinent to both gardening and how you ended up on my ship?” he asked, briefly scanning the noticeboard. His brows went up. “Good heavens.”
“Yes,” said Arabella cheerfully. “Isn’t it interesting?”
“I’m still more interested in how I was used as bait to induce you to put yourself at the beck and call of shadowy employers who not only permit you to break universal laws but positively encourage it.”
“Ah,” said Arabella. “Well, to understand that, you need to understand—”
“Gardening. Yes, so you said.”
“No, my darling; first you need to understand that I like to know the rules, but I don’t always follow them. I just like to know what the consequences are for not following them so I can make my own decisions. Why are you kissing me?”
“Because you’re my favourite anarchist. What is the second thing I need to understand?”
“The second thing you need to understand is exactly how the art of pyromaniac gardening works…”
Memento Mori: Redux
There was a certain calmness to six o’clock in the morning, no matter whether the time occurred world-side, where a sun or suns could be guaranteed to be rising or about to be rising, or onboard any ship or orbiting apparatus that went by its own relative time.
Peaceful, quiet, and entirely unhurried moments ticked heavily by, one by one, as soft shadows crept across the wall opposite the window simulator Selroy had installed in his entirely underground room. He had installed it in order to trick his Eighth World brain that he had some species of access to the outside world on those days he didn’t leave his quarters, and beside the smug pleasure it gave him to so easily hack his own bodily chemistry, it provided for a pleasant past-time in the morning as he limbered up his brain to begin work for the day.
By the time the bars of shadow and light had progressed to the corner of his sleeping closet, Selroy’s brain, bright and warm and quick-moving, would be ready to begin work for the day. At 06:15 by Local Relative Time here in the Incursion Specialist’s underground, Selroy would rise from his prone position like a vampire in its coffin, the corded green stalks of his hair pointing straight at the ceiling and his angular shoulders slightly hunched in the same direction.
This morning was no different: 06:15 LRT arrived in a steady, soft progression of fake dawn-light across the wall, and Selroy sat straight up in his bed, green, stalky hair pointing straight at the ceiling.
This morning, however, there was one slight difference. When Selroy padded out into his workshop, blinking mildly to clear the sleep from his eye implants, the corner of the room was missing. Selroy stared at that missing piece for the space of a few moments, his mind running through various scenarios, then went on through to his kitchen.
The matter was urgent, but unless he fed himself, he wouldn’t be in optimal shape to do what needed to be done. Missing reality was a very bad sign, even if there wasn’t a lot of it missing: the fact that it was missing was enough to signal one of only two different problems.
Best case scenario, someone, somewhere out in the universe, had caused a hiccough in the fabric of time and space that would cause Time Corp and the Incursion Specialists alike a headache, and keep Selroy up for a week in fixing it.
