Second Paradigm (19 page)

Half a block from the Rangely, Chris came across Rat. He lay on his back, grinning with glazed eyes, cut in half at the chest by a half-ton block of masonry from one of the small, old office buildings that dotted the area.

The sight filled Chris with a sense of loss.
He was the only one I’ve met so far that I could trust. Sorry I never got to look you up, pal. At least you finally kicked that cough.
With a chest tight from sorrow, Chris knelt over the dead man and shut his eyes. For no reason he could think of, he pulled two coins out of his pocket and placed them over the eyes he had closed. He stood back up and finished walking to his hotel.

The Rangely was better off than some of the other buildings on the street, though glancing around the side he saw the back third of it had collapsed.
Poor Charlie
, thought Chris.
I wonder if he’s okay.
Chris realized then that he trusted Charlie, too, and laughed, despite himself, at the friends he’d chosen.

Charlie swept broken glass and wood splinters out the front door. Smoke rolled from somewhere behind the desk, which didn’t seem to concern him. He stopped sweeping when he saw Chris and leaned forward on his broom. “I didn’t see you leave again.” He looked Chris up and down, genuine shock in his eyes. “Man, you look like shit. What the hell’d you do in the last fifteen minutes?”

“What are you talking about, Charlie?” Chris got that feeling again, deep in the pit of his stomach. Something more than it seemed was happening here.

“I mean, you walk in looking sharp fifteen minutes ago, you walk in now looking like shit. Don’t tell me, you’ve been in a coma,” he snorted at his own wit, genius insight in Charlie’s world, and Chris couldn’t begrudge him that.

Chris looked at Charlie, who shifted uncomfortably when he got no response. He said nothing, trying to catch up to his spinning mind and see the bigger picture.

Charlie got a slight red flush to his cheeks and said, “Hey, man, fuck you. I didn’t mean nothing by it. I’m curious, is all, to how you could get all jacked up like that in fifteen minutes …”

Chris spun on his heel and marched up the stairs toward his room, pulling the old gun from under his coat. Time to sort this out.

“Holy shit, man, I haven’t seen a Glock in years!” he heard Charlie say behind him, but the clerk didn’t follow him up the stairs despite his apparent excitement.

2873: Alexander Zarth’s Isolation Compound

Cold scotch burned its way down Garret’s throat and a burst of heat flooded through his body. He twirled the glass in his hand, watching the amber liquid form a whirlpool through the center of the cubes of ice. He grimaced and gulped down the rest of his drink.

He looked up through his tears. The universe reeled around him as he stared again at his dead wife. Standing in front of him, in
his
subjective time. And his age; even more beautiful than the day he thought he had lost her. The impossible had happened.

“Wanda.” He cleared his throat. “Why? Why haven’t you sent me word? Why have I been made to suffer this?”

His wife, standing alive and beautiful in front of him, smiled sadly. Both happiness and pain twinkled in her eyes. “Love, I had no choice. Alex trapped me here. And with what I’ve learned over the last ten years, I agree with his decision, as hard a decision as it has been on us.”

“How could you agree with it?” he managed “I … I was torn apart. Damn it, I thought you were dead.” His fingers dug into the arm of the chair as his fists tightened.

Again that sad smile graced her lips. “Because ultimately, what you are doing must be done, and no one else could have initiated it. Only you, Love. Like Alex said, you’ve made mistakes in your path, but regardless, no one but you could actually have set these events in motion. And to have not done what he did would have created an even bigger paradox.”

Worry lines creased her eyes as she smiled sadly to her husband. “Please understand why, Love. The last ten years have ripped me apart too, to know that you lived through the deception. But each of us must do what we must. I know it hurts you to hear this, but personal, no matter how close to the heart, is not the same as important. This was important, James.”

Her words splashed like ice-cold water across his face. James fought down ten years of loss to ask the next question, somehow forcing his voice to stay level. “What, then, would be paradoxical? Why did this situation require me to do what I have done? To lose you?”

Wanda sat down across from him and sighed. “I don’t pretend to understand the entire math set behind the situation, but let me try to explain this for you in the way I came to understand it. The paradox is that without Lucille Frost’s murder, Christopher Nost would never have invented time travel. Yet for Lucy to create the situation in which Chris could make the discovery she had to travel almost nine hundred years into the past;
and
be alive while he made the discovery. Are you with me so far?”

Garret nodded. “Of course. This is all basic, not at all difficult. A displaced cause and effect chain which requires the effect in order to create the situation in which the cause can exist. It does get a bit slippery when you add in the multiple state matrixes of her simultaneous life and death, but I’m sure it is solvable. It has to be.”

He leaned forward, scratching his chin as he went on. “In a way, if you look at time travel as an object, it is an ontological paradox. Just like any other bootstrap paradox, it creates the conditions for its own existence. Frost would be another, if you argued that alteration of the time stream would not produce her.”

Wanda noted that her husband seemed to be moving out of the emotional overload and instead heading into his analytical headspace. A good sign. This was a James Garret that could hold her in his heart long enough to do what he must do. And one that she could heal after that was done.

“Here is where it gets … odd then. Lucy would never have been sent back on her mission—less than one year ago for us, if not for you having shown up and altering the outcome of the trial. And ten years ago, I would not have been sent back, if not for Lucy getting killed on her mission now.”

Garret pursed his lips and shook his head. “That cannot be. Paradox is linear and has to travel in one direction or the other to build itself. Your piece of the equation should be a reset point, creating a secondary paradox line which masked the first.”

“No, James. That is where the Time Corp went wrong. Our math systems are … bluntly put, wrong. They work in a limited fashion, but apparently in certain functions they fall apart. Here, James. Solve this problem.” Wanda waved her hand over the hologrid sensor and sketched out equations in the air. The blue letters, symbols, and numbers of quantum calculations and paradox resolution theory cast a minute reflection in James’s eyes.

James bent to work on the problem, filling up the space in front of himself with floating notations as he worked out a solution to the paradox. His brow creased as he got further into the problem until he sat back, eyes closed, and drummed his fingers on the seat’s armrest. His fingers knocked the antimacassar off the arm, but he didn’t notice. Reopening his eyes, he looked back to the page in his other hand, then back up to Wanda.

“Okay. Not solvable with modern math. I see your point. Now where the hell did you find this? I’ve never seen a problem like this one. Hell, I never even thought up anything with these variables or anything like them.”

Wanda looked grim. “It’s the equations surrounding your jump back into Christopher Nost’s trial. There were certain key points to the jump that you were missing, and that is the whole of the problem. It includes the changes you have made in that time stream. And it is the first such paradox in known history. So don’t feel bad. As brilliant as you are, Love, you’re still human.” She knew he tended to be hard on himself when he thought he had overlooked information.

Garret looked again to the page in his hand as comprehension dawned on him. “Then … but …” he sighed in frustration. “Okay. I’ll buy it then. How the hell do you work this out?”

Wanda keyed open the wall display unit and brought up a section of the materials she had been studying for the last several years. “Our understanding of paradox was incomplete. As I understand this information, there are three types of paradox. The first is a closed loop. Closed loops are the traditional paradox type, already known to us. Everything the Time Corp has dealt with in the past are closed loop paradoxes, which you already understand.”

Wanda scanned forward in the information on the wall display and continued talking. “Here is where we move into the new math. The second type of paradox, which appears to be what we are locked into, is most easily called an open loop paradox. It destabilizes time as much as a closed loop, but in this case it’s basically a situation in which time cannot move forward unless the paradox occurs, because a factor, or effect, from the ‘future,’ creates a condition which is necessary for the cause which will produce it. Here is the kicker, James— the effect must be the sole unique condition which can create the cause.”

Garret leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling for a minute, absorbing the information. Something in his mind clicked into place and he leaned back forward. “I see. Please continue.”

Wanda smiled in pride. “The third is the destructive force behind paradox. Alex refers to it as a ‘Point of Origin’ paradox. It occurs when you take an open loop and try to resolve it with closed loop mathematics. It’s kind of like taking a bootstrap paradox and trying to resolve where the object was before, or after for that matter, the loop. Resolving Point of Origin paradox does not, however, shatter history, as we have always thought. This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. Truly it is. What Point of Origin paradox does is create the mythical divergent time stream. The reason you were never able to find it when you sought it is fairly simple too.”

She licked her lip as she thought, then continued. “Divergent time splits backwards, James. It doesn’t change what happens moving forward, it changes everything downstream to create a set of events that could have produced the paradox. Imagine time as a lightning bolt, striking down from the sky and hitting history, which is a tree rooted in the ground. The tree grows up, so we perceive a forward, or upwards motion through time, but when the lightning hits, the motion rips through it in a way that we perceive as backwards to the growth momentum, or motion.”

James sat bolt upright, jaw agape. “How has no one in the history of … history, ever thought of that? There isn’t some science fiction novel somewhere that speculates something like that?”

Wanda shrugged. “Not that I’ve found.”

“The hells.” James bent over the problem. “In a non-relativistic framework, when we embrace that the universe isn’t linear, but mashed into a giant ball, that would mean that paradox is a fracture? So time is like a … pincushion? That is seriously all that a paradox does? A little puncture—then it just heals over?”

“Not exactly. But you are on the right track at least partially. James, I just spent a decade figuring this out.”

He nodded, distracted. “I’m forgetting something simple, aren’t I? Of course I am. Heliosheaths. The big bang casts a protective sheath around the temporal universe. So … surface tension.” He scrabbled furiously in the air, blue tracers flowing from his fingers as he worked the hologrid.

He muttered as he went. “Could there be a temporal version of Metastability?” Finally he looked back up to Wanda, and she could see genuine fear in his eyes. He said the only thing that came to his mind. “There’s no unifying theory … Oh, fuck.”

Time: 2873
Location: Director Arbu’s home; Aspen, Colorado
Operation: Recovery

The future was a bleak place from where he stood, looking into the past. Arbu meditated over the things he had learned in his office that day. Questions swam through his mind and sixty-four years of life and experience pushed one of them to the forefront.
Will there be a tomorrow?

Always, humanity had weathered the darkness of the night by knowing deep within the collective soul this one thing: that with tomorrow will come the sunrise. When all is obscured by the darkest hour, humanity has known as a race that the brilliant hues of sunrise are just over the horizon. If only they could survive that long.

And as a byproduct of millions of years of evolution, those very processes forced Arbu to come face to face with events that challenged the very foundations and precepts of his faith, while admitting to himself that he was part of the chain of causes that had unfolded into this. The sun might not rise from the darkness of this night he had helped create. But there was one other who could see further than him and maybe had set the stage for his actions. He had to hope.

Scenarios of destruction played themselves out in his head, but Arbu fought the oppressive weight of them and reached for the light deep within himself, standing and pushing his body into motion. The body, mind, and soul must be one.

And to center his body would then center also his heart and soul. Cleansing his body came as second nature to a man of Arbu’s background, having traveled the ages and studied under most of the great martial masters. He focused on the core of his being, finding the stillness inside.

He raised his hand, flattening his palm until the edge of his hand mimicked that of a knife’s blade. With a delicate sweeping motion, arcing around the front of his body, he traced a semicircular blocking motion, pivoting as the arc concluded, allowing the block to continue in a circular motion. This transferred the movement’s energy to his hips as his balance shifted forward to his left and his other hand snaked outwards in a lazy motion, striking an invisible opponent in front of him.

He held the pose, poised between block and strike, feeling the symmetry and balance of his body, allowing his subconscious to be eased by the control he exhibited over his muscles and balance. With no visible signs of warning, he sprang into action, allowing his reflexes to rule his movements, losing himself in the lightning fast motion of his martial dance.