Chapter Six
Eilish
She was drawn from deep, dreamless sleep by the light knock at the door. Her first impression was of warmth and the slight stickiness of damp skin surrounding her. Then she registered the late morning sunshine on her face. Easing her eyes open, she looked down at the man’s arm that wrapped around her. The sunshine was glistening on the fine hairs of his arm. His skin was so white.
‘Damn! Sorry,’ an American-accented, male voice said. A door clicked shut.
‘Damn!’ she echoed, instantly awake and aware of what had just happened. She drew herself out from under her lover and scrambled off the huge bed.
‘What?’ came the groggy query.
‘Luke is back and he just walked in on us. I am going to the bathroom.’
‘I will handle Luke.’ his voice was no longer groggy and there was steel in its tone.
‘Leave it, Max. It is late. He probably didn’t expect to find me still in bed. Certainly, he would not have expected to find you here with me.’
‘I will handle Luke,’ he repeated stonily, as he, too, made to rise.
Groaning, she limped toward the en suite and closed the door behind her. She dreaded what Luke would say. He was so moody and irritable lately, it was becoming a matter of major concern.
After using the toilet, she washed her face and threw on the dressing gown that hung on the hook behind the door. By the time she left the room, Max was dressed in trousers and shirt, but without collar, shoes or socks. He was heading out the door to confront her partner.
‘Max…’
‘It will be all right, Eilish. I will handle this.’
She groaned again and followed him slowly. Standing behind the open door, she watched the confrontation as it played out.
‘Sorry for intruding,’ Luke muttered, as he saw Max walking stiffly toward him, his black and white formal attire looking at odds with Luke’s daywear. Luke was leaning over the mantelpiece, staring down at the smouldering coals. ‘I assume Eilish has told you about us now.’
‘About us? I was not aware there was an ‘us’ where you and Eilish were concerned.’ Max was sounding as stuffy as a judge on the High Court Bench.
‘Us as in where we came from and why we’re here,’ Luke explained with pained patience.
‘If you mean that ridiculous story about the future, then yes she has told me. Am I to take it from what you are saying that you believe that nonsense too? Surely you are just humouring her.’
Her temper flared at the patronising tone and she almost entered the room to take issue with him, when Luke did it for her.
‘Don’t talk about her like she’s some brainless bimbo. You don’t humour Eilish, you either take her at her word or you leave her be. Do I make myself clear?’ Luke was dangerous, very dangerous in that moment, and his voice was hard, cold metal rasping on stone. He had turned to stare at his victim like a cat about to pounce.
‘You do not have to defend her honour.’
‘It ain’t her honour I’m defendin’! It’s her intelligence, experience and knowledge. She don’t deserve to be patronised by a limey, stuffed shirt like you.’
Max drew back and blinked rapidly. Eilish couldn’t help but feel the urge to defend him against Luke’s attack. It wasn’t his fault their story was so hard to believe. Luke had not believed it himself for a long time, even when presented with the reality of New Atlantis itself.
But Max was not rebuffed. Instead, he seemed thoughtful when next he spoke. ‘It is clear we are talking at cross purposes. I had no intention of demeaning Eilish in any capacity. I am simply unable to accept this outlandish story of hers. Are you telling me you are three hundred years old, and come from the future too?’
‘Jeezus H Christ, this is why I prefer Retrieving kids! If I have to deal with one more jerk who can’t see what’s as plain as the nose on his face! No, I ain’t three hundred years old. I’m thirty-five goin’ on sixty, because of the goddamn affect time travel has on my body! But yeah, I’m from the future. Not originally from the distant future like Eilish, but far enough to know what’s going to happen to you if you don’t get on board with what we’re tellin’ you. Buddy, you’re goin’ to die unless you let us help you!’
‘Luke!’ she cried, hurrying into the room and taking up a position just in front of Max, unconsciously trying to protect him with her body from Luke’s harsh home-truths. ‘I have not gone that far yet. You have the sensitivity of a bull in a china shop!’
‘So I’ve been told more than once. But diplomacy ain’t goin’ to fix this and all this tippy-toein’ around is driving me loony.’
‘Who are you? What is your part in all this?’ Max asked cautiously, as if approaching a live grenade.
‘Who am I? Good question. I can tell you who I was. I was First Sergeant Lukas Danielewski, Company A, First Ranger Battalion on reconnaissance in German occupied Poland in 1942 when I had the misfortune of encountering three Gestapo agents interrogating my angel. And, before I knew it, I was in wacky world and part of this crazy-arsed crusade to save goddamn humanity!’
He turned away with disgust and stared into the dying fire. For several minutes, there was silence in the room and Eilish could hear the cheery voices of the staff moving along the corridor outside their suite.
‘1942. You come from thirty years into the future when Germany occupies Poland? But Germany already occupies Poland, along with Russia and Austria.’
‘Poland gets its independence and then the Germans invade and start World War II.’
‘World War II? That implies that there is a World War I between now and then?’
‘1914,’ Eilish contributed reluctantly. ‘I told you a little about that the first night at dinner.’
‘How can you possibly know such things?’ Max said with a gasp, reaching out unsteadily to grip the edge of the chair closest to him.
Eilish wanted to go to his side and support him but she knew that in this moment he might reject her, just as he was trying so desperately to reject what they were telling him.
‘And the Reparations from that war will lead the German people to Hitler, a monster, if I remember that conversation rightly?’
Eilish smiled weakly and nodded. ‘Sit down Max, we have a lot to explain and from the look of you, you could do with a drink. Or I could order up breakfast?’
‘I am not hungry, but a stiff drink might help.’ Max took the smoking chair beside the fire and stared thoughtfully into the dark grate.
‘Either you are both escapees from a lunatic asylum, which from your luxurious accommodation does not seem likely, or you are telling me the truth.’
‘Damn the limey bastard is coming ‘round faster than most!’ Luke gave a hoot of laughter. Eilish could see deep circles under his eyes and she wondered when his last good night’s sleep had been.
‘Go home, Luke. You have to take some down-time with Faith to sort this out,’ she said, coming to his side and placing a hand on his shoulder.
‘I can’t. If I go back now the whole mission’ll have to be postponed.’
‘So? You know it doesn’t matter on that end. Whether they leave on schedule just after us, or in six weeks, or a year from then, it will all be the same at this end.’
‘People will be waitin’ around. Other missions will be…’
‘Luke, you are essential to this mission. If you cannot do your job properly, we are all at risk, Bart included. Go home, see Faith, do what you know you have to so we can get the results we need.’
Luke shook his head tiredly. ‘I ain’t never been this bad before. I’m scared… I’m scared of losing Faith and Bart, I’m scared of not being able to Integrate, I’m scared of what it’ll be like if I do Integrate with that lump of dead flesh. But most of all I’m scared I’ll fuck up this mission – and that’ll cost lives.’
‘You are an exceptionally brave man, Luke Bedford. How does a brave man handle fear?’
Luke turned to her and stared deeply into
her eyes. ‘He does what he has to anyway.’
She smiled gently, cupping his cheek in her hand. ‘Go home Luke, face your fears, and then come back here to finish what you started. I will meet you at Southampton Dock. Did you get our tickets?’
‘Yes, I’ll take them back with me. I could come back here, if you need…’
‘And turn up looking like you are fifteen years younger, overnight? No, Max will take care of me. If there is a problem, I will come home too.’
Luke sighed heavily and then nodded. He looked over at Max and then back at Eilish. ‘Here?’
‘Yes, why not? It might further convince Max we are not escapees from Bedlam.’
Luke went to his coat, which was hanging on the back of a chair at the small table in the corner. He removed his palm-sized Portal Activator and pressed several buttons. While Max gasped in shock, a sheet of sparking lights eight feet high and six feet wide instantly formed in the centre of the room. The hum from it vibrated through the floor to where Eilish stood.
Without another word, Luke turned and stepped into the light. And as fast as it had appeared, the light disappeared.
‘God in Heaven! You are actually three hundred years old!’ Max said into the silence that followed.
Eilish turned to smile impudently at him. ‘That is your only concern in all this? My age?’ Then she gave a throaty little laugh. ‘It is Saturday morning, you do not have to be at work and we have the suite to ourselves. Come back to bed and I will show you how active an old lady can be!’
Max shook his head in stunned bemusement as he climbed slowly to his feet. ‘I cannot decide what I need more in this moment – more answers or more bed play.’
‘We can multitask. That is a term that became popular at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Women are better at it than men, as we are better than men at many important things.’
‘I will believe you. In this moment, if you told me Queen Victoria would rise from the grave and take back her throne, I would believe you.’
Eilish leaned up, wrapped her arms around his neck and placed a kiss on his mouth. ‘Oh, she does that in 1913.’
‘What?’ he jerked back from her in horror.
She grinned and giggled. ‘Just kidding! You should see your face!’
‘I am starting to see the justification behind some of the old ways. As your husband, I would feel totally within my rights to put you over my knee and paddle your backside.’ Instead, he scooped her into his arms and padded across the floor toward the bedroom.
‘Lucky we are not married then…’ she replied impudently.
‘That, my dear, is something I plan to remedy at my earliest opportunity.’
‘Do not worry about it. If you come with me, you will leave your marriage as well as your life behind.’
He lowered her gently to the floor next to the bed. ‘I am really going to die?’
‘Not if you choose to join us in New Atlantis. Then your wife will be dead four hundred years and you will have no need of divorce.’
‘Why me? Why did you come back for me of all the people in the world who must die?’
‘Humanity of the future is sterile. It has been for hundreds of years. When we discovered time travel, it became our first task to repopulate the world with worthwhile people from the past who had disappeared from their own time lines. For some, it was getting lost in the wilderness; for others it was falling off boats. But what they all have in common is that their bodies were never found.’
‘And my body will never be found?’
‘That is right. And you are a worthwhile person with a flexible mind who can accept the unbelievable. You have proved that here today.’
‘The proof was pretty convincing.’
‘Yes, but we would never have opened the Portal in front of you if we were not already sure that you were a suitable candidate. Luke might think you are a stuffed shirt, but he also knows what it takes to be a citizen of New Atlantis. He was impressed with the speed with which you came to accept what we told you. It took him many months and he was living in our world at the time.’
‘How does it happen, my disappearance?’
‘Are you sure you want to know this right now?’ she teased, beginning to remove the shoulder of her dressing gown.
Max stopped her and frowned. ‘Yes. I need to know.’
‘You drown when the Titanic sinks on her maiden voyage. Your body is never recovered.’
Max swore loudly and colourfully as he backed off from her and spun around, raking his hands through his dark hair as if he wanted to tear it from its roots.
‘The Titanic, Eilish, the Titanic is unsinkable! Her sister ship the Olympic rammed another ship and tore a hole in her side and she still didn’t sink. This is ludicrous. You cannot expect me to believe this! I am dreaming. That is the only answer. I will wake up with you in my arms on that bed and all of this will be just a dream.’
Eilish came toward him slowly and rested her head on his bent shoulder. ‘Not dreaming, my love. The Titanic will hit an iceberg in the middle of the Atlantic at eleven forty on the fourteenth of April and will sink two hours and twenty minutes later, taking with her two-thirds of those aboard her.’
‘But I am not even planning to take that voyage! Agnes would…’ He stopped and stared suddenly into middle distance. ‘I am going to take that voyage because I met you, and I will not care if it inconveniences Agnes.’
‘And you will take out a large life insurance policy with Lloyds to cover your journey, making her the beneficiary. She will be well set up for the rest of her life.’
He swore again, this time more softly, but with just as much passion. ‘I am not dreaming. This is all true. In a little over two weeks, I will be aboard an unsinkable, sinking liner and will travel to the future to live out my days with a three hundred-year-old woman I love passionately and completely. How is any of this possible?’
‘Come to bed, Max. There is plenty of time to ponder the mysteries of the Universe. Right now, there are better uses of your time…’
He looked over at her and his expressive hazel eyes told her that he was happy to oblige. A slow, satisfied smile crossed his lips and he swung her once more into his arms.
‘As you have come such a long way to meet me, I had better make it worth your while then…’
Sometime later that afternoon as rainclouds gathered outside the window, Max shifted onto his side and stared down at Eilish as she drowsed languidly at his side. He looked so fierce, suddenly, that her heart lurched. The adrenalin surge, which accompanied her heart’s reaction brought Eilish to full wakefulness as she reached for him.
‘What is it my love?’ she asked.
Max took her hand and kissed it gently. ‘Nothing… everything. I have been thinking over this terrible event that you tell me will happen. That you want me to be part of.’
‘Yes?’
‘If you come from the future and know such terrible calamities befall us, why do you not do something to change them? Surely you could stop this war that is coming knowing what you do? Surely you could warn the Titanic’s Captain so no one need die?’
Eilish sighed and rested her head on his arm stroking it lazily. They had made love three times now and each time was better than the last. Her body was sore and exhausted but her soul reached out for him, wanting to be joined again.
‘We cannot interfere with history. There were many arguments in the early days about such matters. If we truly wanted to change the terrible destruction wrought on our planet, surely we could go back to where it began and effect the changes necessary?
‘But the more they grappled with the quandary, the more they realised that even if, and there is a significant if in this scenario, we could change pivotal events, might we not inadvertently create even worse results? And while doing that, we might wipe out the ancestors of the minds that discovered time travel so that it never came into being. We would then never go back in time to change the past… the past an
d future are inexplicably connected. Our world is built on an infinite number of tiny, insignificant events that add up to something monumental. If we know something happened in the past, then it is part of us in the future. We can no more change it as remove a card from the base of a house of cards and expect it to stay standing.’
‘Then how can you justify taking me?’
‘Historically, you disappeared from the timeline. There is no record of you being seen after the alarm was raised. That past will not change.’
She shifted onto her side so she could look him in the eye. ‘Greater minds than ours have grappled with this, and there are interesting anomalies that show, in retrospect, of our involvement. For instance, I was always meant to come back here and fall in love with you. If not, what other reason would you have had for being on the Titanic when you had other definite plans in place?
‘And Luke has booked our tickets on the Titanic under names of people who our research uncovered never existed.'
Max frowned deeply. She hurried on to try to explain. ‘The records of those who travelled on the Titanic are patchy but quite detailed. By setting our computers to do backgrounds… sorry, a computer is a machine that thinks and performs many of the tasks men previously did. In this case, it gathers information from a multitude of sources and cross checks it with others. In this way, we discovered anomalies… people who were no more than names with false dates of birth and home addresses on the ship’s manifest.
‘We matched up these details with people on our teams so we knew who would be going, right down to one Michael O’Riley, son of Mary and Ryan O’Riley, who boarded the ship at Southampton as third class passengers. Michael is ten, Mary is twenty-six and Ryan is listed as twenty-nine. The O’Rileys never lived at the address listed on the manifest. In fact, no O’Rileys with those names and dates of birth were ever born. They did not exist. But Mary,’ she indicated herself, ‘her husband Ryan, who with any luck will look considerably younger than twenty-nine the next time I see him, and Michael, who will probably answer more to Brat than Micky, will board the Titanic on the tenth of next month. As will eight other non-existent passengers who were said to have died when the ship sank that day.’
‘Incredible!’
‘It truly is. When we started finding where we may have stepped in, it made things so much easier. But a lot of times we didn’t know we influenced events until it happened… like you. Like Cara.’
‘Cara?’
‘Cara is a Newcomer like you will be. She was Retrieved from 2010, I think. Do not quote me on that year. She introduced the idea of Retrieving children, something our society had been loath to do up to that point. This mission is not so much about Retrieving you and a few other adults we have identified, but forty-eight children in third class. There were huge losses of children in steerage and we plan to offset those losses by Retrieving as many children as we can. We have no idea how successful we will be, but when it is a choice between death and a new life in a safe and beautiful world, then we will do our best.’
‘Why, if there were more losses, are you only aiming for forty-eight?’
‘Because those are the children who were never seen during the chaos of the final hours. Or did not match up with bodies recovered and unidentified.’
‘And their parents?’
‘We will play that by ear. But as a matter of Protocol, we will not take adults who were not vetted first for suitability. Our people have tracked down many of the parents already and have found them unsuitable, several others… we are not sure about yet. But our attitude is that those parents would want us to save their children, if that possibility is open to them.’
‘What makes someone suitable?’ Max lay back on his pillow and brought Eilish’s head onto his bare chest.
‘Flexibility of mind, moral character and being a productive member of their society.’
‘My affair with you casts doubt on my moral character.’
She chuckled and reached down to stroke his tired member. It jumped into action at the first stroke. He groaned and drew her hand away. ‘I am a middle-aged man and should not have the constitution of a young man, as I seem to be exhibiting. If you want me to live long enough to board that ship, treat me gently, I beg you.’
Eilish rose up and kissed him on the mouth, running her tongue along the seam of his closed lips. ‘You are simply making up for lost time. All that stored seed that never had a chance to be planted before.’ She froze in place.
‘What?’
‘You will never father a child. That is the price you will pay for joining us. Your seed will become sterile.’
He opened his mouth and kissed her deeply. ‘As long as I can still spill my sterile seed in you, I will not care. I did not expect to have children with Agnes, anyway.’
‘Yuk, that sounds awful! Anyway, I digress. I was explaining about Cara and the temporal anomalies. Jac was Cara’s Retriever and he fell in love with her. He gave her a card and a piece of jewellery and it was not until after he bought them that he remembered seeing the card and the jewellery box on the coffee table in her police files. He chose the card because it looked familiar. It looked familiar because he saw the card he would give her in the police files hundreds of years later.
‘Then there’s Jane. She was a nineteen-year-old shop assistant in Sydney, Australia, in 1968. Julio met her as part of his reconnaissance. He was there to Retrieve a boy who fell off a ferry. Jane was briefly mentioned as having died trying to save his life. That’s when it got interesting. Jane would never have been on that ferry that day if Julio hadn’t suggested it to her. She was always supposed to be Retrieved, we just didn’t know it.
‘And then there is one of our most unusual cases to date. One of our Researchers fell in love with a young woman in 1810, who history recorded had died in a horse-riding accident four months later. He was devastated, but knew that hers was not a case for Retrieval. She hadn’t disappeared. Her body didn’t go missing.
‘But when he went to her funeral, he spoke to her sister who wondered what he was doing there. He was supposed to be on his way to the New World with his wife. Much to his surprise, he discovered that he had, with the help of two of her sisters, arranged to fake his wife’s accident and burial. Until he learned what he had done, he had no plans to do such a thing. Where did the idea first come from?’
‘My mind is in chaos trying to think my way through all this.’
‘Yes, well you are not alone. There are even more contentious situations, like taking children from paedophiles before they can hurt the child. At first, we thought we had to let such events play out. But then Julio initiated an action that led, inadvertently, to the historical event, and so we started to be more proactive about our rescues. If we thought to rescue a child, then we were always meant to rescue that child. We were changing nothing – simply fulfilling destiny, as it were. That is our mantra now.’
‘What is a paedophile? It is Latin for “child lover.” Are not all parents child lovers?’
‘This refers to sexual love, and often harms the child. It becomes a major problem in the later part of this century. It was probably a problem before, but it was never recognised as such.’
‘Those men exist. We call them buggers.’
‘Nooo,’ Eilish denied tentatively. ‘I think that refers to male homosexuality. Homosexual men are not usually paedophiles. Let us change the subject.’
‘Certainly, especially as my brother has been concerned all these years that I was one.’
‘One what? Paedophile or homosexual?’
‘Both, either… my unnatural disinterest in women concerned him greatly.’ He chuckled amiably.
‘Luke tried to ask me the same question. No, before you ask… he wanted to know if I was interested in women if I was not interested in men. I said I was interested in neither. We are a singular pair, are we not? Until we met, neither of us had any normal sexual urges. Now look at us, at it like rabbits.’
Max cho
ked back a laugh. ‘Are all women of the future so explicit?’
‘From about the middle of this century they started to become less ‘ladylike’ and never looked back.’
‘Well, I imagine I will need to get my affairs in order – very subtly of course – in the next few weeks. In between times, I will busy myself being “at it like a rabbit” if my doe will comply.’
‘Rabbit away, my buck. I find such activity very effective exercise to counter the rich food we are eating so often.’
Max kissed her mouth suddenly and with much fervour. ‘I feel like making the most of my fertile seed while I have it,’ he mumbled against her mouth.
‘You said you were too old and that I would kill you…’
‘I am meant to board that ship, so I doubt you will succeed in killing me. If you do… well, I will die a happy man.