40
Four ships at a time could dock at Lagrange 1. Even though four ships filled with soldiers would hardly be an armada, Atilano felt that the 300 troops so conveyed would be plenty enough to handle a pipsqueak like Walsh. Since Earth in its orbit had overtaken Mars and was now racing ahead of it, it was in a convenient E-lead position to launch Earth’s own counterrevolutionary force. Even so, it would still take a few months for Mars arrival, however.
Atilano was a patient man and could otherwise wait, but when he learned of armed skirmishes and executions, he decided to move quickly. It was no longer urgent, but an emergency. Through his hacked CommLink, he called his friend, Dr. Jay Kubacki. “If I remember correctly,” he told him, “we have an extra UltiCapacitor.”
“Your memory is excellent, Mr. President,” Dr. Kubacki replied. “I know what to do.”
Seven minutes later the Mars Colony ṺberCollider made the jump from the minimal maintenance strength that was keeping the first tempconciliation preserved up to the capacity of 30 teraelectronvolts. The maintenance meant Dr. Kubacki had only needed the last dozen of the 430 steps he needed to engage it a second time. In no time at all there would be no minutes at all that behaved themselves.
Temporal reconciliation had always been an experiment in progress, and because of the Go Slow policy, it has remained for the most part only a theoretical experiment in progress. The initial scientific courage it took to attempt it the first time on Mars promised inherent safety measures. First, the time epoch retrieved was from over three billion years earlier, thereby eliminating the paradoxes famous in science fiction literature, for example, going back in time to kill one’s grandfather, see one’s self, or even commit so atrocious an act as stepping on a butterfly and returning to a drastically changed world. Second, the venture involved a location 60 million kilometers away, on Mars—and even farther as the planets withdrew from opposition—a risk conveniently removed from the goings-on of Earth, goings-on being a decidedly temporal reference. These presented quite a protective segregation.
The only unknown had been the colony itself. Even though there was a three billion-year temporal buffer, it enjoyed no such spatial immunity. But there emerged a consensus of thought, the concept of Time Prime: there could only be one time for anything, and there could only be one thing for any time.
All of the vagaries of the concept were exhaustively explained by the mathematics that led the way, but they were ultimately simplified by a metaphor stated as a “shimmying” of existence, an existence of multiple realities until a path of least quantum and chronoton resistance set all into stability for one’s unique Time Prime. One was left with a temporal reality where everything found a way to fit, and when conflicting, one version won out, the other careening off into another reality for someone else, somewhere else, somewhen else. It was a blurred double vision focused into a solid sharp contour. If one were to visit himself temporally, either the previous or the later one would prevail, but not both. Which one? The mathematics of that probability formula had yet to be worked out and probably awaited a Nobel Prize, but thankfully enough was proven that there would survive no paradoxes for long. Again, “long” being a temporal reference.
Nevertheless, in case of an unexpected grand miscalculation, the initial tempconciliation had limited the zone to that within the ring of the ṺberCollider itself. The current time, with its failures in finding fossils, had been passing unacceptably. Before, caution called the shots; then destiny entered the game. Caution versus destiny. Go Slow versus Go.
Caution lost.
Thanks to enwrangled correspondence between Dr. Renée Niemann and MCPSC President Gavin Atilano, and between Atilano and Earth, and because of the infamous political upheaval of the colony, science partnered with politics, brains partnered with brawn.
Admittedly, with the Walsh disaster, Destiny had been tempted to fold its hand; but now it was dealt a royal flush. A new strategy called for temporal reconciliation within the actual time of the first tempconciliation.
The target: that day of supposed failure, although it had proved ultimately an unqualified success. A zone much bigger would be retrieved. The time retrieved and times reconciled would involve both the three billion year epoch and the time just before declaration of the first tempconciliation “failure” that justified Walsh to enact his perfidious seizure of the planet. The original tempconciliation would stand, but it would jump back to before Walsh had engaged his schemes. Everyone could be prepared for Walsh and could make him fail. Mars could have its cake and eat it, too.
A few remaining skeptics worried about the superimposition of temporal deposition onto the previous temporal rearrangement. The mathematical matrices for overlapping temporal reconciliations was unimaginable. Also, there was worry about the range—a bigger zone, but how big? The programming was to include the entire Tharsis shield area, from 240º to 270º W latitude, and from 30º S to 30º N longitude. But would it self-contain or might it extend? Might that big a zone trigger a temporal inflation? Beyond the focused area? Beyond Mars? As far as Earth? Throughout the universe, tearing the clichéd fabric of space-time?
Probably not. So said the rest of the scientists who were dying to find out. Again, Caution lost.
Emotionally supportive was the hope, albeit a slippery slope, of seeing alive again those who had recently perished in the battle at the VSD. Desperate times, disturbingly echoing Walsh, had called for desperate actions.
The dead? Back to life? Was God involved now? Now even the theologians were dying to find out. Would the newly living remember their deaths? Would they remember things that were now not to happen at all, and thereby never had happened?
The emergency UltiCapacitor at Lagrange I accepted the emergency authorization from Atilano, assembled the muscle-power input from Earth and Venus, and then broadcast its output to the ṺberCollider below. Which is where Atilano, Pasternak, and Dr. Kubacki now found themselves, blinked into existence off of Lagrange I, weeks earlier. Specifically, in the ṺberCollider’s VIP room. It was the same setting as the original tempconciliation ceremony. It fact, it was the very same Tempconciliation ceremony. Kubacki’s face went white. His mouth, which usually was slightly ajar, tightly closed and he grinded his teeth nervously. He was distraught. He turned to Atilano.
“I just saw myself,” he said blankly, his face remaining very pale. Atilano remembered his original ceremony when he thought he had seen himself.
“I know,” Atilano told Kubacki, and his face began to show his own disturbed astonishment.
Atilano looked around and saw the Mickals and Renée. He knew if he kept looking he would see others, including himself, so he closed his eyes. He couldn’t explain why, but he liked the reality of just one of himself much better and found any other arrangement intolerable. He didn’t fancy another version of him having as much say as he as to who would continue in this existence.
And being unsettled about it all had been the last thing he had remembered.
It was like coming out of anesthesia. Everything that had happened had been like a dream—the battle, The Martian Citizen, Walsh’s coup, everything else to follow. Although no one was disappointed to miss the bone-rattling shuttle from Lagrange 1 to the colony—time was a faster way to travel—all who suddenly disappeared from the large spacecraft, by simply not being there yet, were surprised to find themselves suddenly on the planet. Atilano and Pasternak sank in chairs in the ṺberCollider’s VIP room. A period of confusion weighed them down lethargically. Like everyone else, their minds struggled against this malaise to come to terms with their new temporal reality. Evan, Deniz, and Mare were dizzy, but improving. Renée was the first of them to reconstitute as her memories came drifting back. All of them were approaching wherewithal, but at different speeds.
Eventually, all caught up with their new present, which was their old past. The glass wall separating them from the outside was open and Atilano noted that the red, phony, prop button was pushed in, indicating they had been plucked from the future and jammed into this new present, moments after the tempconciliation had been engaged.
Walsh was there, too, and quickly realized what had happened. If they could do it again, I could do it again, he thought. But he was furious. A uniformed, muscly man named Lt. Lawrence felt himself from head to toe in saucer-eyed amazement.
General Llorente stood near the door of the VIP room now joined by Colonel Leeper and Dr. Jay Kubacki. His eyes caught Walsh’s eyes. Evan’s caught Renée’s. Atilano’s agenda was blossoming anew for a Mars where tempconciliation worked and Walsh was not an issue.
Where he was nothing.
Everyone remembered: just because it hadn’t happened yet didn’t mean it hadn’t happened to them. Even those who weren’t expecting this figured out what had happened. Once down a road, one knows that road.
The confusion settlement-wide stopped all colony activity when everyone realized they were repeating all they had done before. A little asshole named Taffe had an opportunity to keep his nose from being broken at PIP recess, but he proved incorrigible and young Tibbs broke it anyway.
Back at the ṺberCollider VIP room, Walsh’s fury tempered with amazement—surprised but fully cognizant. All that work—for nil. The interchange of nervous glares was busy but silent traffic. Atilano eyed Walsh, Walsh eyed Ricardo, and Evan and Mare hugged Blaise with an embrace Lazarus would have found excessive.
The eyes continued their frenzied targeting among the murmur of the stunned crowd. It was a tempconciliation standoff, all scoping each other, minds whirring. Evan and Blaise were the first to act. Each took one of Mare’s arms and pulled her out of the invitational observation room. Deniz and Chris followed them. Before out of Renée’s sight, they shot her a look easily understood. They would all meet and hunker down at the VSD. Was Walsh still a threat? The Prestige Guard was pre-nascent. More importantly, everyone knew the future that Walsh would try to repeat.
Walsh had been reduced to an army of one. He rose from his own chair carefully, Atilano and Ricardo observing him cautiously until he had slipped out. Everyone else sat as if remembering the details of a dream unfolding in memory. Déjà vu became maitenon vu—déjà now. There was some uneasy, nervous laughing among the others in the room. One man gagged into a handkerchief.
Atilano weighed the forensic considerations. Was Walsh actually guilty of anything now? He hadn’t actually done anything.
Yet.
This had been discussed by the exiled Security Command on Lagrange 1 when the second tempconciliation had been approved and the outcome of the discussions about Walsh had passed muster with the NOE. Even though Walsh had no longer illegally seized and displaced the MCPSC, imposed Martian Law, exiled his potential enemies, seditiously recruited a private army, or even ordered anyone’s execution yet; even though he could not be found guilty of any crime he hadn’t yet committed, there was always that government charge that had proven so valuable in the past when actual guilt of a crime was impossible to prove:
Conspiracy.
Atilano, Llorente, and Leeper simply let Walsh leave. Unless he could find a way onto Lagrange 1 and then back to Earth, he would never get away. Besides, even if he did so, Earth would be waiting for him.
Evan tried to remember the last time he had slept. He had been up all night with the additional crag bin barrier, which he now realized was no longer there, had been to Dr. Willner’s, been to war, and traveled back many weeks. Yet he felt refreshed. Strange. Nevertheless, he had a premonition of something coming. And it wasn’t Walsh. Some type of adjustment. Renée, Blaise, and the rest felt it, too. It was vague but looming.
Just as the sound of a supersonic aircraft would all bunch up into a sonic boom shadowing its path, so a temporal accretion—soon to be known by the plebian slang, chronic boom—would strike those externally and internally. Internally, it would strike those who dealt with the memory reconciliation of two different times, who had to reconcile two sets of recollections. Hardly devastating, it still gave one pause. It was psychologically disturbing. The more one changed their new on-going future, the more disturbing the psychological fallout. It wasn’t depression, but an overwhelming feeling of being lost in time, in identity, in purpose. Luckily, it only lasted from a few minutes to several hours, but it was filled with psychological regret. Dr. Willner would win the Parsons Prize in Medicine for elucidating it. In the future. A future he would have to wait for the usual way. The Chronarchy would ultimately be a non-stop clearinghouse for the identification, description, and understanding of hundreds of spin-off phenomena. Those who had found themselves in the VIP ṺberCollider observation room for the second time would be the first to experience them.
The external chronic boom would be something else altogether.
At this point, however, the ones who comprised the VSD family had all rendezvoused back in the VSD conference room. Mare was impatiently awaiting Tuesday’s re-arrival, as were Chris and Ricardo their own Martian comrades, all three soon to be plucked from the late Hesperian epoch.
Jeremy Pasternak was hurriedly preparing a Level-5 Interrupt of The Martian Chronicle to explain the successful tempconciliation and re-tempconciliation, which would explain to the colonists the unsettling sensations like déjà vu and the jockeying for position between two sets of memories.
At the conference room, after a brief absence, Blaise and Dr. Willner reappeared with a bottle of champagne.
“Too soon?” Blaise asked everyone.
“Gimme that,” Renée demanded, then uncorked it very slowly. Blaise had been courteous enough to insert a large bore needle into the cork first, due to the low atmospheric pressure on Mars being unkind to carbonated beverages and those foolish enough to open any of them casually.
“Yes!” Ricardo agreed enthusiastically, and he retrieved a stack of clear plastic urine collection glasses that he passed around. Even Mare got one.
Wednesday and Thursday sauntered in and sought out Chris and Ricardo, respectively.
“Where’s Tuesday?” Mare asked.
“I do not know,” answered Wednesday.
“Perhaps he will be here shortly,” Thursday added.
The VSD was as they had remembered it. The animals were back. Gone were the bullet holes, but to Renée’s disappointment, so was the second barrier of the crag bin, which she discovered when she ran down the hall to get some napkins. The crag hit the single-glazed glass with the usual ferocity.
“Damn!” she shouted. “Y’all need to rebuild it,” she called back to Evan, Blaise, and Chris in the conference room. She regrouped from being startled and considered her time slip; she recalled that she hadn’t had sex with Ricardo yet, nor he with the Sun, so she vowed sternly to prevent any rips in the space-time continuum—it was her duty to repeat some things—and then she laughed to herself.
“All that work,” Evan told her when she had returned, referring to the now absent second barrier.
“In the past,” Blaise toasted him.
“In the past,” they all chimed in.
“To the future,” Ricardo now added, winking at Renée.
“Yes,” she agreed, “what will be will be.”
“To the future,” they all agreed.
“Intruder alert,” the automaton announced.
“I don’t like that alert,” Willner said.
“I bet it’s Tuesday!” Mare exclaimed excitedly. Ricardo pulled out his own gun that was hidden under his pants leg.
“Really?” Renée protested. “Again with the guns?”
“Just in case it’s Lt. Lawrence again,” Ricardo explained.
“Lawrence isn’t coming. No one’s coming. Walsh is done,” Blaise boasted.
“Lawrence was dead,” Deniz said. “Would he be able to come back?”
“I think I saw him back at the VIP room.,” Deniz said nervously.
“Did anyone tell God?” Blaise asked, savoring another sip of champagne. “Doesn’t He make those kind of decisions?”
“Wait,” Renée said, “you were dead, too, Blaise.”
“Actually, no.”
“But we heard the shot.”
“He missed,” Blaise said, and took another sip.
It was in fact Tuesday who entered, so Mare clapped happily. Closely behind him, however, walked in Walsh. In another time he had entered prodding Colonel Leeper with a gun; now he prodded Tuesday.
Fast, but not bullet-proof. At point blank range, even an unlouvered, fully arrayed Martian would fall if Walsh were to fire.
“Drop it,” Walsh commanded Ricardo, and Ricardo let his pistol fall to the ground. “I’ve always wanted to say that,” Walsh confessed with a devilish grin.
“History repeats itself,” Ricardo said.
“Except sideways,” Evan said. Walsh looked around. He saw the other two Martians.
“Are you guys winking at me?” he asked them. Ricardo whispered something to Thursday and they stopped.
“One big happy family again,” he said. “And champagne? How appropriate. Save a glass for me, will you? I have a feeling I’m going to be celebrating, myself.” Evan took a position in front of Deniz and Mare. Blaise stood in front of Renée. Ricardo and Chris stood with their respective Martians. Walsh looked around his hostage, Tuesday, for a quick glance. “All those mouths and nothing to say?”
“Now what?” Ricardo asked Walsh.
“Well, you’re gonna get in touch with Dr. Kubacki and get him to shut down the ṺberCollider.”
“Why?” asked Tuesday. Everyone was surprised, for the Martians usually minded their own business.
“Oh, does that make you nervous, green man?” Walsh answered.
“Oblivion hurts,” Tuesday said.
“What would you care? You’d be nowhere, gone. Who’d be there to hurt?”
“It hurts now,” Tuesday answered. “Perhaps, Director Walsh, you could go to oblivion.”
“Me? I’m the guy with the gun in your back, remember?”
“Either you or me,” Tuesday said, remembering a game with Mare where she went first. “We could flip a coin. If either one of us goes, what’s the difference. It’d be fair.”
“Will you listen to this guy? He wants to be fair. I didn’t come here to be fair. Maybe I was wrong before. Maybe you are stupid.”
“So it seems.”
“Yea, so it does. But if you think oblivion hurts, is it any worse than getting your face fried off? Don’t need that kind of thing happening, do we? You or me? I vote me.”
“No one’s turning off anything,” Ricardo said to Tuesday. “The loss would be incalculable. We haven’t even begun.” Walsh snickered.
“We’ll see.” Then he looked at Renée. “Your crags.”
“What about them?” Renée asked.
“Oh, you know. You know all about them. Your friends found a way to aim the little bastards.”
“That’s just crazy,” Blaise said with disgust. Walsh looked menacingly at him.
“Didn’t I already kill you once?” Then he again addressed Ricardo. “The crags. I’d like the datastrip on the protocol used.”
“I made all of that up,” Ricardo spit out.
“Liar!” Walsh said loudly, pointing his finger at him.
“You’ve got nothing,” Ricardo answered, “no Prestige Society, no death squads.”
“You’re nothing,” added Blaise.
“Remember how I never liked you, Lewis,” Walsh threatened. “Remember the last time?” Walsh circled the room with his eyes. “Tempconciliation. That’s O.K. for someone like Atilano. Don’t like how things are turning out, just change it by redoing time again. Who’s the tyrant now?”
“Who’s the tyrant again?” Ricardo countered.
“Mr. Walsh,” Willner offered, “I can start seeing you daily. I can help you with your problems.”
“I’m not the one with a problem. The guy with the gun is never the guy with the problem.” Then to Ricardo, “Llorente,” he ordered, “swap with Cthulhu here. Did I say that right? In any case, this guy—the creature from the Black Lagoon here.”
“And he didn’t know who Ray Bradbury was,” Blaise murmured quietly. Walsh motioned with the gun between Tuesday and Ricardo. “I really don’t trust him after what I saw he did to our Lt. Lawrence. Could have exploding farts for all I know.” He waited. “That’s a joke. Llorente, why are you not moving? C’mon, swap. Now. Yesterday.” As they approached each other, Walsh pulled back the hammer on his gun to emphasize any zero tolerance for attempts at reversal. Tuesday and Ricardo carefully switched places.
“Here I am, Walsh,” Ricardo announced. Walsh jabbed him hard in his back.
“We’re going for a little walk. We’re going to go visit the crag bin.
“Now that’s crazy!” Willner cried.
“This is crazy, that’s crazy—everyone’s a shrink here. The general here is gonna go in. So if you guys have found a way to control ‘em, you better get ’em to leave your friend alone.” He smiled. “This way. Everybody. The big green goon in front. Me and the general will bring up the rear. You, too, little girl.” Deniz sandwiched Mare between herself and Evan.
The nine of them filtered out of the conference room single file, Tuesday first, Walsh and his gun last. As they passed the dog kennel and the orangutan closure, these animals began crying out, followed by the other animals. Tuesday’s ear calderas pivoted rapidly, pell-mell. An unheard 10 hertz vibrato began deep within him, and the other Martian calderas began gyrating.
“Open it,” Walsh commanded when they had reached the crag bin. A crag snapped at the glass next to Renée and she shrieked. “No, I don’t suppose you would like one of those in your head, would you? Hmm…would you like to help me with some data instead? You know what I’m interested in, all of you.” This was met with silence. “Fine,” Walsh concluded. “Open it.”
Renée was filled with terror. She knew, besides the obvious danger, that based on her walks through the hall there was always a crag that wanted her. She took a breath. She still had her thumbclip on, and she used it, instead, to open the enclosures of all of the Earth animals. There was mayhem, animals scurrying this way and that, extremely vocal in their panic, but all of them scattered out of the hallway when Walsh’s bullet ricocheted like a pinball.
“Open it!” he screamed. The second bullet was convincing. He promised Ricardo the next one, putting the gun to his temple. Ricardo frantically searched his mind for some type of martial arts escape maneuver that would not risk a third aimless bullet in this crowded space.
The crag door opened.
“Get in,” he ordered Ricardo. Ricardo had to do a bit of a dance spin around Walsh to fit past him through the opened door. He eyed the many crags moving almost unperceptively at his feet. “Now close it,” Walsh further ordered Renée. Ricardo looked at Renée furtively from inside the enclosure.
It was a tightly tandem dual action between Ricardo and Renée, his grabbing Walsh and pulling him in with him as Renée closed the automatic door. Walsh fired at Renée from behind the glass, but the crag-proof glass held and the bullet flew back to the floor and struck his own right foot. He jumped. Renée screamed. Deniz huddled Mare away and they ran back to the conference room.
Walsh was furious. He almost shot Ricardo out of his sheer spinal reaction anger, but paused. He lowered his gun. “Pretty slick, Llorente,” Walsh said, grimacing from his foot pain. “I could threaten to shoot you unless they open the door, but then they’d just leave me in here with your shot up self.” He looked at the floor. We’re in the same boat, the two of us, aren’t we? Your friends are more likely to save both of us if you’re still alive. Better save my bullets for now.” The ferropods started inching their way around both their feet and Walsh tried his best to look unfrightened, but he couldn’t maintain the façade for long. He kept looking from Llorente to those looking at them through the glass to the floor crawling with crags. A trickle of sweat beaded down his left temple.
Ricardo moved fast when Walsh reached down to hold his painful foot. In one smooth exercise of martial artistry he snatched the pistol away, flipped it into his other hand, and crimped Walsh’s fingers in a vise-like hold. The scuffle played out silently to Renée and the others from across the glass. Ricardo let the gun fall to the floor.
“Hey, easy there,” Walsh puffed, feeling the loss of his gun was minor compared to the bigger peril about them. “Aren’t you afraid you’re gonna attract them with all this commotion?”
He was afraid.
He feared the unknown. In his perfect world, commandeered and impounded, or otherwise, there would be no unknowns. Fear of the unknown—fear of being at someone else’s mercy instead of everyone being at his mercy; fear of what happens to you when you die, fear of oblivion, fear of nothingness—all of these could be averted if he could telomorph over and over and never die.
Fear of crags.
Aren’t you afraid of attracting them? His question was so revealing of his fears that, validating the observation, the thousands of crags began mooching not only the floor, but up the walls and glass and above them on the ceiling, six meters overhead, like the sword of Damocles. Walsh’s eyes were windows into his mind, through which Ricardo saw terror. Ricardo next saw these eyes locate the gun on the floor.
“C’mon, man, tell ’em to open up and get us out of here. You don’t care if you get a crag in your head? Didn’t you see what happened to that poor bastard Hansel?” Ricardo just smiled and parted his hair hanging over his forehead.
Walsh saw it. The perfectly round, well-healed, crag-sized scar on Ricardo’s forehead.
“Too late,” Ricardo replied. “I’m already a member.” Walsh’s eyes became wild. He started banging on the glass. In the hallway, the pounding mollified into a muted thumping only; Renée realized how much harder the crags must have snapped at her to produce the sharp blows they did, because Walsh was pounding for his life.
“Please! For the love of God! Please!” he cried from within, the hallway audience hearing nothing but was able to see to the back of his throat with the bleating. “Open the fucking door!” he screamed. A crag snapped right past him and he squealed. His injured foot finally gave out, and he fell to the ground, huddling around his flexed knees.
The gun Ricardo had let fall to the floor now lay within Walsh’s reach, but Ricardo was looking out of the window at Renée. Walsh snatched it up and snapped upright and pointed it at Ricardo. “Open up or I shoot him,” he said slowly toward the window, with exaggerarated articulation so Renée could read his lips. Another crag snapped, startling him, and he emptied all the remaining rounds aimlessly at the ceilings and walls. One of the rounds ricocheted into his other foot. “Fuck!” he screamed, and he threw the empty gun at the glass.
“Please!” he pleaded. Another crag snapped but missed. He covered his head frantically with his arms.
“Shouldn’t we open it? Renée asked urgently.
“You want crags out here?” Blaise asked right back. Deniz, back in the conference room, could hear them and she enwrapped Mare even more tightly. Willner stood in rapt horror.
In the crag bin Ricardo soon collapsed and just sat in the corner furthest away from Walsh to watch. Incredibly, even with two injured feet, Walsh stood up with excruciation and began dancing as if a cowboy were shooting at him while the crags continued snapping. He cried out from the pain and from his terror—they were the same cry. Ricardo thought of popcorn: the oil must have been hot enough; crags were popping all over, a mounting of percussion. Walsh’s head jolted back suddenly.
He had finally caught a crag in his big, fat, fleshy head.
This opened a new chapter in ferropod history when this particular crag snapped into him with enough force to actually exit, never before seen in previous victims. There appeared both entrance and exit wounds. Renée gasped, continuing to distrust the glass barrier.
Ferropods, besides the Chantū, the only other natural source of ferramine and chronotons, left a trail of both along a specific path in Walsh’s sensorium, in this case a long, lost cortical island of childhood memory. In and out in an instant, but for the crag it was an instant stopped in time. In that instant, in only that amount of time it took to make the trip along this neuronal pathway between and from skull entrance to skull exit, time meant nothing.
Therein lay the answer to the vexing question of why such force and momentum had never wreaked a swath of radiant shock injury like any other penetrating projectile would. Like a bullet would. Or a heavy metal door. The brain was changed by a ferropod, but undamaged, as the instant of penetration and migration was stretched into an atraumatic epoch. Outside of time, the whole assault was tranquilly slow and the motion Brownian.
This is what the chronotons did as their part in the attack: a ferropod had all the time in the world to ease in and then grope gently along, searching for its path of least resistance. Such a yielding path was lit up for the ferropod like a grand boulevard; it was illuminated for the ferropod by guilt and misgiving.
This is what ferramine did as its part in the attack: there are patches of human neocortex with unique receptor sites for an as yet identified neurotransmitter. Happily, all humans are born with these sites amply filled. Then life happens—the maturity of hard knocks, lessons learned, and trusts betrayed. The sites lose their neurotransmitters which served as the glue for a moral compass. Unfilled or emptied, the persuasive concepts of self-reproach and culpability become incarnate in the mind’s eye, creating a vacuum of vulnerability; this vulnerability lowers the resistance for ferramine-seeding vehicles like Ferropodia conglobinans.
Without a ferropod sniffing around, one of two things happens along this open path of vulnerability. Either the mind finds a way to fill the receptor sites again with the more conventional neurotransmitter fare, a physiologic action called reconciliation and which would make the painful neuronal pathway unremarkable to a hungry crag (one might even call the whole scenario conscience); or remaining unfilled, a conflicting duality—prideful self-esteem battling a hollow conscience—invites binding arbitration by another part of the brain. A part that is underqualified. An ancient part. An antediluvian part. The amphibian part.
The part that even the caveman outclassed so long ago.
With a ferropod out and about, however, such a vacuous part of the mind, lacking such receptor-site binding, stands out, attracts attention, incites a ferropod’s predation, and invites its penetration. It becomes for the ferropod a drive to dutifully bestow neurotransmitter to those struggling receptors. It becomes a pilgrimage; it becomes a quest.
In the crag bin, the zigzag along Walsh’s neuronal pathway of a single memory was purchased easily by the creature that followed no rules of time. It had all the time it needed to cover the full pathway of an item that sat so disgracefully in his conscience. Additionally, it also covered the serpentine tracts that suppressed it. Careening this way, dodging that way, the ferropod followed the sinuous flight of thought, first along the idea of some wrong done, then along the self-indulgence that suppressed the moral law in a way that would make even a four-eyed schoolchild balk. Outside of time, the ferropod was able to pay a visit to all of the other parts of Walsh’s brain that participated directly or indirectly, all instantaneously.
One ferropod, one unconscionable deed, two paths—the one for the deed, the other for the suppression of any self-condemnation. In Walsh’s case, the crag covered the deed and the conscience before exiting.
It was a purge. Carved out without time constraints, instantly, assigning the deed forever, to eternity.
One unconscionable deed. Most people have one, some even more than one. Chris had his; Ricardo, too. Even Mare struggled with hers. But where Chris, Ricardo, and young Mare may have had an isolated, primary regret of conscience to reconcile for eternity, Walsh seemed to have a huge catalog that might even overwhelm all of the crags in the bin:
One crag for Walsh was not enough.
Whereas Chris’, Ricardo’s, and Mare’s ferropods sat comfortably in their hosts’ brains, Walsh’s first was not so content and its own innate instinct of self-survival necessitated escape. A second crag snapped into him—another first in crag attacks and duly noted by the amazed observers. Likewise, armed with time-irrelevant chronotons, it instantaneously followed the neuronal path of volitional misdeed, then altered course to follow an empty synaptic pathway normally involved in reconciliatory regret and remorse. The ferramine poured out of it, but his receptor sites were resistant and too many, until the ferropod became lost, repeatedly going off the track and seeking refuge via escape.
Instantaneously.
The third, likewise.
So much exploratory brain surgery with no overt damage; it was a testimonial to the ferropods’ timeless gentleness.
The fourth, likewise.
Walsh sat crumpled on the floor. Ricardo watched in stunned amazement as new holes on both sides of his head kept appearing, small holes opening with contralateral small holes opening diametrically to match. Entrance wound and matching exit wound, simultaneously. Each matching set with a lengthy course of visitation to the workings of his mind. Instantaneously.
The fifth. The sixth.
Walsh sat with his head bobbing violently with each surgically precise strike, his mouth hanging open in disbelief.
The twenty-fifth. The twenty-sixth. By now, the successive strikes were beginning to connect the dots in his head.
Each crag that came and went left a parting gift for him—a serial trail of chronotons and ferramine along each path of ill will, each circuit of mean-spiritedness, each route of self-serving, selfish profit, and along each road block to the moral law even a child knew intuitively.
The one-hundredth. The one-thousandth.
Even 2700 ferropods were not going to be enough. Walsh was a bottomless pit of regrettable and lamentable life decisions.
St. Peter at the gates, consulting the chapter on Denton Walsh in his pearlside reference book, would have a rough day the day he applied for passage. Charon would have to charter a private boat, express, to bypass the Elysian Fields, even commission Hades to ferry him directly to Tartarus while the Furies ripped at his fleshy, crag-pocked head. Dante missed an entire circle for him, lest he would have had to condemn the entire Italian language to a status of ineffable profanity.
Back-stabbing, extortion, deceit, misogyny, political ruin, racism, social putrefaction, family destruction, and tidy, clandestine murders made up the neuronal itinerary that was Walsh’s success story.
Now the onslaught of thousands of ferropods created a buzz about his bald head, which began rattling like a can in a paint shaker. All of the others except for Deniz and Mare watched in horror, but unable to turn away. At one point Evan had drawn Renée’s face into his chest to spare her.
If the quantity of the malevolence overwhelmed the ferropods, likewise did the quality. Even so many chronotons had questionable mass, but the amount of ferramine deposited seemed to bear down upon his ferociously vibrating head. Enough ferramine, like guilt, weighed heavy.
Time is fancied to heal all things. The ferramine left in his head attempted a purge, timeless as long as the chronotons didn’t decay. But there are those who resist purgatory, remaining unconvinced forever. A timeless purge of hurtful decisions in one who resists is no longer Purgatory. Bad persons do not do well with eternity.
They might as well be in Hell.
Renée knew this already from her investigation into Cassie Rogers and Randy Hansel. Had she fully realized the extent of what was going on inside Walsh, however, her own conscience would have troubled her.
She had loved her husband, but not unconditionally, furious over his refusal to burn his reproductive bridges. Worse, she was furious over his illness that forbad his telomorphing. The man she loved, the one with whom she had planned to spend the rest of her life, even her extended life, was also the man she hated for his indecision and its implications. Worse—and paradoxically—the love of her life was also the man she hated for ending his. Especially the way he did. Another surprise for her.
It wouldn’t have taken him long to die, but he had made sure. Earlier in the evening she had stroked his head lovingly while thinking angry thoughts and bad names for him. She had told him she would see him the next day, but by the next day he had taken his life, leaving her a mess to handle—two adolescent daughters, a financial quagmire of bad investments, a busy house to run, all while struggling to prop up a failing veterinary practice. And a grisly body—the empty shell of her life foundations. The entry and exit wounds had not been as gentle as those rendered by ferropods. The more she caught a glimpse of Walsh, the more angry she became about Jason Niemann.
How dare he!
How dare he break her heart, once while alive and again by dying. He had not only snubbed his nose at a longer life with her, he had the gall to commit the ultimate effrontery. His cancer was his fault. That can’t be often said, but it could be said by her about him. He had squandered his opportunity of refurbishment via telomorphing until the window of cancer had closed silently on him. Spurning an extended life and her, he had left life altogether.
Renée’s household began to crumble when her daughters began acting out. When bankruptcy closed her office and animal hospital altogether, she ran to the safety and reliable paychecks of academia. There she excelled, garnering a fine international reputation. She put herself as far away from a private practice mentality as she could.
Her daughters straightened out God knows how and did well, married, and gave her beautiful grandchildren. But they themselves had declined telomorphing, a painful reminder of their father’s legacy and insidious posthumous suggestion. Both her daughters were already phenotypically much older than Renée, each of them a wife and a mother. The final tragedy would be that already having out-survived her husband, she would now out-survive her own children, too. She would even present younger than her own grandchildren, should they turn down extended lives themselves.
The Telomorphing Ethics Committee orientation didn’t address these little tortures—items that after the fact had frightened Renée, hurt her, and ultimately defeated her. She was right to jump, startled, at the glass bang whenever she walked past the ferropod bin, to feel that somewhere there was a crag with her name on it. But she was not self-judgmental enough to accept the real reason. There was no way she could suspect the violent battle going on in Walsh’s head, so she was unaware of the crag hungry to splay out her own conscience.
Had Ricardo suspected what was going on inside Walsh, he would have recognized the Waterloo of his own conscience—a last stand where the outcome was uncertain.
Had Chris suspected what was going on inside of Walsh and were he able to reconcile his own anger with God, he would have labeled it a symbiosis between man and the divine, whose outcome would have determined either reconciliation or damnation. Did Chris hate God? Did he hate Him more than Healthcare “bell” panels? More than brainstem aphasia? More than the empty vessel that was Dr. Rogers?
Had Mare known of the machinations from which her Dad was shielding her, she would have recognized it as a fight—the tightly fitting puzzle pieces of remorse and forgiveness. But presents are wrapped and one doesn’t always get what one wants or expects under the wrapping, and the ungrateful make a bad thing out of a good thing. If only she would receive such a gift, such a present, she would think to herself. In another situation, she would probably giggle over the pun—that a past can be represented and gift-wrapped as a present.
Walsh was a pile of detritus, dead but alive forever in a moment, stubbornly resolute against the chronotons and ferramine buckyballs that stung him. The entire attack and escape of 2700 ferropods—the whole event—from the time of the first snap into his head until the last ferropod had come and gone, had taken only ninety seconds by the outside clock. With his chin collapsed on his chest, looking up as high as his quivering eyes could rise in their sockets, he shook pitifully. Completely around the globe of his head was a bloody mush of pulp more porous than a colander. As surprising as it was that he even survived, even more remarkable was his successfully uttering one last thing that Ricardo had to come very close to him to hear.
“Please kill me.” Wherever he was now, Walsh wanted to go there the old-fashioned way.
The VSD family was still standing at the glass, stunned, shocked, and horrified when Ricardo exited the bin. Renée seized him and took him into her arms. Deniz and Mare ventured out of the hallway, but once they went far enough for line-of-sight to the crag bin, Mare began crying and Deniz began gagging. Dr. Willner was psychologically incapacitated. Blaise would likely start gagging as well, but ground his teeth so violently that he threw his TMJs into painful spasm.
The three Martians, however, understood perfectly.
“I can’t believe he’s not dead,” Blaise finally spoke. Mare tried to break away to see better, but Evan caught her and held her fast.
“Ferropods know right where to go,” Tuesday explained.
“Intruder alert!” the automaton announced suddenly—and rudely—since the old-style ceiling insert Piezos were directly overhead. Everyone jumped. Renée swore. A ferropod snapped at the glass. Renée had hardly finished yelping from the automaton when she added a second syllable.
“Where?” she yelled, her third syllable.
“RibCart courtyard,” Mr. Know-it-all replied. No one noticed the small hairline crack that appeared at the surface of the crag bin glass barrier.
“How many?” Ricardo demanded.
“Hundreds,” the automaton answered.
“Who?” Evan asked.
“I do not know,” it answered.
“Great,” Blaise muttered.
“But,” Mr. Know-it-all added, “there are so many that they spill out of the gates and there are many behind them.”
“Um,” Evan said cautiously, “how many is many?”
“Unknown number of intruders.”
Evan, Blaise, Ricardo, and Dr. Willner shot each other desperate looks, then bolted to the conference room to engage the perimeter cameras.
“Courtyard view,” Evan said hurriedly, then added fearfully, “align view along axis of the gate.”
There was a glare, making what looked like hordes of individuals a mere skyline silhouette of bobbing, threatening heads.
“More soldiers?” Blaise asked. No one answered; no one ventured a guess. When Renée arrived, she put on her thumbclip which read her fingerprint and pulse-ox biorhythm signature and readied itself to accept instructions.
“Mr. Know-it-all, do a white balance, f-stop at subject mid-torso, away from the sky, zoom 40%, auto-contrast, and extrapolate-fill exposure anomalies,” she ordered the automaton. It complied, leaving no doubt as to what they were seeing. The three Martians now entered with Chris, Deniz, and Mare.
“The ṺberCollider,” Renée said, “underachieved with just a colony-wide focus. We only caught three Martians that time. But this…
“Zillions of ’em,” Mare cooed.
“Actually,” Tuesday offered, “you are mistaken, Dr. Niemann.”
“Is this going to end bad?” Blaise asked.
“This time the algorithm slipped a bit,” Tuesday said.
“And what?” Blaise asked.
“The temporal reconciliation was planetary.”
“Planet-wide,” Renée said softly, trying to digest it.
“So much for Go Slow,” Blaise said. “Looks like this time the ṺberCollider overachieved.”
“So many,” Willner said. “I guess all the Martians,” he continued, looking into the holodepiction of the perimeter. Deniz squeezed Evan’s hand while holding Mare with her other arm. Tiring, she let her slip down out of her grasp.
“The ṺberCollider,” Ricardo repeated blankly. “I’m about Ṻber’d out.”
“Yes, General,” Willner responded, “it is all about the ṺberCollider, I’m afraid.”
“It is about time,” Tuesday added.