Dispel Illusion (Impossible Times) by Mark Lawrence

Author:Mark Lawrence [Lawrence, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2019-11-13T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

2010

Whatever we did, it seemed very likely that we were going to end up killing the man who had introduced himself as Sam Robson. If we sent him back to 1991, he was going to die alone in the dark, lost in the tunnels. If we told him and he didn’t go, then the resulting paradox would set the universe to trying to kill him and might very well rip the planet apart, too. Along with all the other planets, in due course.

It seemed strange and rather abstract to hold in my hands the power of life and death not only over one man, but all humanity, and not only over humanity but potentially over distant alien races who had never even looked twice at our star in their night sky. Establishing the barrier to further travel was clearly a moral imperative. Without it, anyone with a time-rig could imperil existence.

I wondered how many foolish scientists had already triggered the end of time and space in separate incidents across the cloth of our expanding universe. Each would be a hole in the fabric of reality, racing out in all directions at the speed of light. Clearly it didn’t happen often or we wouldn’t be here, but the universe is a big enough place for these things to have happened many times and still to have left us with millions or billions of years before we suddenly find out and simultaneously cease to care.

In the end, we did kill him.

We gave him the full training and sent him back. I felt sick about it, but I did it anyway. He didn’t look the sort to panic and lose his way where so many others had not, but even so the evidence said that he did, and I watched him as he stepped back into the timeline that had been waiting for him all these years, and I said nothing.

I think that was the point at which I first realised that whether I ended up going back to 1986 or not, I was no longer the Nick Hayes who first met Demus a few streets from Simon’s mum’s house. I had left that boy behind in my wake, just as we all abandon the children we were. Slow or fast, the years pull us apart from them, sometimes in one savage yank, sometimes by degrees, like the hour hand of the clock, too stealthy for us to perceive its motion and yet when you look again it is no longer where you left it. That night I looked in the mirror, not wanting to meet my own gaze, and it was Demus who looked back at me and smiled a bitter little smile.

It wasn’t until a year later, over another breakfast, that Mia stopped with a piece of toast raised halfway to her mouth and said, ‘1992!’

‘What about it?’ I looked up from my laptop and sipped my coffee.

‘We’ve sent six travellers back to the years between 1992 and this one.’ She looked slightly sick.

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