Part Ten

Virgil dropped heavily to the sand, turned his back to the ocean and the late-rising moon and stared unseeing into the dark night of the forest. 'I can't do this anymore.'

There was a moment of silence that the sea rushed to fill, and then Gordon opened his mouth, pushed words into the heavy air between them. 'Brains told me that Time is circular. That if you could go fast enough – '

'You told Brains?'

Gordon squatted down opposite him, plunged a hand into the sand and let the soft powder slide in rivulets through his fingers. 'It came up one day.'

'Time travel is hardly the stuff of daily conversation.' Virgil blinked in the dark, surprised at the venom in his own voice.

Gordon wiped his hand on his shorts and settled himself back against a tree. Waves pushed gently at the shore, slid softly across the cooling sand. Beyond the reef the surf pounded dully, distant, muted by the heat-laden air pressing down from above.

Virgil watched the dark shape beneath the tree, the soft glimmer of Gordon's eyes as they stared intently towards the horizon. 'Tell me,' he said as the yellow moon pulled hard at his back.

'Space,' said Gordon, motionless beneath the whispering palm, 'is curved.' He seemed unaffected by the forces working on and around him, a calm and dark oasis at the centre of a maelstrom. 'It's bent around gravity,' he continued, 'and Brains says there's enough mass out there to bend the universe right around on itself.' He raised a hand into the air and spiralled it in a lazy arc. 'And if Space is curved on itself, then Time is, too.'

'Meaning it's circular as opposed to linear.'

'Right.' Gordon nodded in the dark. 'Which means everything is relative to where you are on the curve of the Space-Time Continuum.'

'Listen to yourself.' Virgil reached for the cigarettes in his shirt pocket and tapped one out of the package. 'Space-Time Continuum,' he repeated, shielding his face from the breeze as he struck the flint of his lighter.

Gordon shifted against the tree. 'When are you gonna give that shit up?'

Virgil slid the lighter into his pocket, inhaled deeply. 'Time travel can't be real. It's not possible.'

'Time travel is possible, Virg.' The answer was firm, loaded with conviction.

'It can't be.' The cigarette glowed brightly as Virgil inhaled. 'Something else must have happened. Mind Control. Drugs.' He cast about in the dark for alternatives. 'I don't know. Hypnosis.'

'Think about it. If Space-Time is a sphere, then to get to the future all you need to do is fly in the same direction that the universe is rotating.'

Virgil snorted. 'And to get back you fly in the other direction?'

'Right.' Gordon ignored the scepticism in his brother's voice.

'You think about it, Gordon. If Time is circular, then everything that can happen has already happened.' Virgil exhaled a soft cloud of smoke. 'Which means the future must be as fixed as the past.'

'No.' Gordon shifted against the tree and stretched his legs out on the sand. 'It's exactly the opposite. Nothing is fixed, and the past is as changeable as the future.'

Virgil turned away from the silhouette of his brother, watched the moon rise in the corner of his eye. 'Why us,' he said, into the dark.

'I asked her why,' Gordon replied. 'She said we were – '

'Don't,' Virgil said, already knowing. Hearing the woman's words ringing clear in his head as she reduced him to an abstract. To a single point in Time and Space.

He remembered other things, too. The way the chair felt, cold upon the small of his back. The sterile smell of filtered air and plastic. The woman's profile, dark against the light. And her words, cool and calm and filled with vague hope and the gentle threat of terror.

'There are individuals who warp Time,' she had told him in a voice as brittle as splintering glass. 'They wrap it around themselves like eddies in a current. But like pebbles in a stream, they are always swallowed up. Destroyed by the roles they play in the great routs of humanity.'

The dark eyes studied him closely, lips quirking into something that might have been amusement, might have been disappointment. 'You stand at a crossroads, Mr Tracy.' She slid the datapad away from him, caressed it absently with a finger. 'You merely have to choose the path.'

He shook his head. 'By allowing a man to die.'

'We are giving you the opportunity to change your own future. Hoped that by offering you the choice between living and dying, then your motivation might be stronger.' She seemed weary, suddenly, and older than she looked. As though the tight planes of her smooth face concealed a being more ancient than the universe itself.

'You are asking me to choose,' he had said, 'between my life and my integrity.'

'For most people it isn't a choice.'

'Most people,' he repeated as a tremor rose inside him.

'You still don't understand.' She shook her head. 'You never understand.'

'What the hell does that mean?' The tremor reached his hands and he lifted them to the table, spread his fingers along the cool white plastic to stop them from shaking.

'This is our third attempt to convince you, Mr Tracy.'

Virgil's fingers stilled on the table, sinews pulling hard against the bone.

'What,' he stared at his hands as the world spun out from beneath him, 'are you saying?'

'This is the third time we have brought you here. The third time we have given you this opportunity.' She watched him closely, her voice tainted with pity and resignation. 'And your response is always the same.'

'But I don't…' He cast about in the shadowless room for answers. 'I've never ... never...' The words trailed off as he stared up at the smooth face. Watched as death and destruction rose in the dark orbs of her eyes.

Virgil pushed the cigarette into the sand and looked up at the sky overhead. 'I can't kill a man, Gordon.'

Gordon disappeared into darkness as a cloud obscured the rising moon. 'I can.'

Virgil opened his mouth, tasted salt on the wind. 'What happened, Gordon? What did they do to you?'

'Ah...' Gordon shrugged in the night, leaned back and looked up at the sky, as though he were searching for the answer in the broken clouds that scudded overhead. 'They motivated me,' he finally said, softly.

'Motivated you?' Virgil repeated as the clouds parted and the moon painted them both in silver.

'It wasn't that difficult.' Gordon turned away from the sky, glanced at the sea, at the sand, at the moonlit ghost of his brother. 'They offered me the opportunity to save my family.' The dark eyes fixed intently on him. 'To save you.'

Virgil clenched his hands in the sand, balled them into gritty fists and bowed his head. 'I don't want to die, Gordon. Not like that.'

He closed his eyes, felt the island move and breathe around him, felt his blood pulse to the inhale and exhale of the tide as the ocean pulled at the fabric of reality, wearing it away one atom at a time.

Virgil felt the dissolution keenly, felt his skin prick as the universe sought to tear him apart.

Scott stepped into the tiny office and closed the door softly behind him. 'I need your help.'

John leaned back in his chair and raised an eyebrow.

'How about it?' Scott prompted, when his brother didn't say a word.

'How about what?' John toyed with the pen between his fingers. 'You haven't told me what, exactly, you want.'

Scott looked away from John's clear gaze and sucked a lungful of air noisily past his teeth. He shook his head.

'What?' John dropped the pen to the desk and leaned forward to look closely at his brother.

'I need…' Scott continued to avoid John's gaze. 'I need access to Virgil's server account.'

Silence filled the small room.

'Will you help me?' Scott met his brother's eyes.

'Scott…'

Scott studied his brother expectantly.

'…I can't,' John said.

'You mean you won't.'

'No. I won't.'

'Jesus, John.'

'Don't give me that. What the hell's the matter with you?'

Scott's jaw tightened.

'You're obsessing,' John continued. 'Leave him alone.'

'I can't.' Scott's face remained tight. 'Something's wrong.'

'Something's wrong with Gordon, too, but you don't seem to have noticed that.'

Scott flinched. Of course he'd noticed. Fleeting glimpses whenever Gordon's carefully schooled façade had cracked, the merest hint of terror bleeding through. 'Gordon?' he said aloud, stupidly.

'Yes. Gordon,' John repeated. 'He's quiet. Withdrawn.' A look of disquiet passed across John's face. 'Have you ever seen him look so tired?'

Scott's head shook, a gentle tremor as he considered his brother's words.

John turned away and leaned back towards the desk.

'So you won't help me.'

'Christ, Scott. Just leave it alone.'

'There are other ways.'

'Fine.' John returned to his analysis. 'Find another way.'

Virgil stared at the piano, hands resting heavy on his thighs, the keyboard stretching away beyond the far edges of his peripheral vision. The instrument seemed dangerous somehow, the keys grimacing like faded yellow teeth that might bite at him and tear his flesh to shreds. Virgil straightened on the stool, a surge of dread crawling along his spine and forming a hard, tight knot at the base of his skull.

He positioned his fingers lightly on the keyboard, glanced across the room at his father, removed his hands from the keys and returned them to his lap.

'Father?'

'Yes, son?' Jeff raised his head from his paperwork, slid the reading glasses from his nose.

'What day is it?'

'Today?' Jeff's eyes darkened briefly. 'The fifteenth.'

'November, right?'

Jeff nodded, eyebrows furrowing.

Virgil looked back at the keyboard, keenly aware of his father studying him from across the room. He adjusted his music, reached across the piano and started the metronome, rested his fingers once more on the grimacing keys.

Tick…

Virgil lifted his eyes to the metronome as the pendulum swung wide upon its case. He swallowed, stared down at the worn keys, at hands baked hard by the sun and the passage of time.

Time.

…tick…

Jeff returned to his paperwork, oblivious to his son's heart lurching in three-quarter time.

…tick…

Sweat blossomed in Virgil's armpits as his heart skipped a beat. He pressed his fingers to the keys. His hands, stiff, unwieldy, perversely unwilling, produced a discordant crash as the pendulum swung mockingly into his field of view.

…tick…

Time, marking Time… Time breathing down his fucking neck!

Virgil reached out and grasped the metronome violently, sent it hurtling across the room.

He was a total asshole.

Scott hunkered over the computer screen in semi-darkness, glanced for the umpteenth time at the door to make sure it was locked.

He had to be.

Scott tapped the screen, brought up Virgil's downloads for the past three months.

Why else would he be here…

He positioned the pen in his hand, poised it over a clean piece of paper.

…lurking in the dark…

The screen ticked over momentarily, flared to life as a list of Virgil's searches displayed in high contrast on the monitor.

…accessing his brother's search history?

Scott scanned the list, mentally scratched out the irrelevant, hastily scribbled down a series of dates and times and keywords. He picked through the sheets of notepaper on the desk, carefully organised them into correlations.

Here…October 26, the day after Virgil was released from the infirmary… Hernan Matéo Alvaro. Biography, recent history, affiliations, political aspirations. And here, October 30, November 3, November 10, Alvaro again.

He shuffled through the papers, lined them neatly along the edge of the desk.

October 30, New Republic of Honduras. Bereznia, United Nations Anti-Nuclear Treaty. Honduran nuclear weapons program.

Scott leant back in the chair and stared at the computer screen. Rearranged the papers one more time.

October 26, 27, Ironhorse mine, Carajás, Brazil. Location. Schematics.

And here, November 1, the theoretics of Time Travel.

Scott scrubbed wearily at his face. Don't tell me Virgil swallowed Brains' Time Travel shit.

He turned his attention back to the computer screen. Tried to find the pattern hidden within his brother's mind. Jolted violently as a crash sounded from the living room and echoed down the hall.

Christ!

Scott hastily shut down the computer, scraped the papers into his hand and exited the room.