Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych) (2 page)

She can kill the doctor with a single wink. One pebble starts a landslide; a single snowflake begets an avalanche.

But she is comfortable here. The doctor’s death would change the farm, compromise her comforts. The doctor lives a bit longer: she has decided his fate.

She has cast off the winter cocoon of her childhood to stretch her wings in the sun.

She is a butterfly, leaving hurricanes in her wake.

*

It is summertime, hot and green and glorious.

Her ability is extensive, flexible. Full of subtleties. She can make anybody do practically anything, if only she’s willing to search the web of future time lines long and hard enough. Willing to practice countless variations on a brief conversation, or a momentary interaction. Infinity always includes a time line that spools out according to her whims.

The doctor fails to comprehend the extent of his creation. She revels in paradox.

She pushes the horizon back years. And when her power grows sufficiently grand, she does what any self-respecting demigoddess would do: she divines her own fate. Fates.

Alas. She is not a true goddess; she won’t live forever. But surely, with the proper choices at the appropriate junctures, she will live a very long time. She plunges ahead, looking for the day her body finally succumbs to age. Is she ninety years old? A full century?

Along the way, she sees other things looming. All time lines show the world soon engulfed in war. It doesn’t worry her. Finding a comfortable path through the wartime years is trivial.

She explores the most promising potentialities first. She plumbs the future, and looks deeper still, until the branching and rebranching of parallel time lines has woven the threads of possibility into the finest fur …

… and discovers something watching her.

Something that lurks in the gaps
between
the time lines.

An interstitial horror, prowling the places where nothing should exist. Titanic. Malevolent.

It notices her. And it is angry.

*

Winter again. Nothing but ice and shadow.

Nightmares torment her for weeks. It takes longer than that before she recovers the courage to explore the deep future again. And when she does, she encounters that same wall of suffocating malice, that same sense of something vast and ancient watching her from outside the time lines.

Every exploration of the future—discarding, as always, the branches that end prematurely when she is shot, strangled, struck by lightning—ends with her tumbling into that abyss. Ends with a darkness so complete that even her fearless heart quails before it.

Again and again and again and again she tries. But there is no avoiding this destiny. She learns what she can.

The demons are called Eidolons. They are everywhere, everywhen. They are the mortar between the bricks of the universe. They are beings of sheer volition, and they despise humanity. Despise the stain, the corruption, humanity leaves upon the otherwise perfect cosmos. For humans are nothing but a pointless accident of space and time—minuscule, meaningless—forever shackled by their spatial and temporal limitations, yet somehow sentient and possessing a limited form of free will. Nothing could be more offensive to the Eidolons. And thus they seek to eradicate the insult.

But the Eidolons’ vastness is their weakness; humanity’s salvation is its insignificance on the boundless scale of the cosmos. All of human existence rests on a problem of demarcation. This is a precarious balance, stable only as long as the Eidolons never truly perceive humanity.

But they will. For there are warlocks in the world. Men who commune with the Eidolons. Men willing to improve the Eidolons’ perception of humanity in exchange for fantastical, impossible feats. For the demons are not bound by the laws of nature.

The horrors the warlocks will unleash are a consequence of the looming war. Even she cannot avert it. It is far too large, and coming far too soon. The world committed itself to this path before she was handed the reins.

In many time lines, the end comes during the war itself. There are other future paths, more complicated and less likely scenarios, where the Eidolons consume the world years after the war has ended. Perhaps even decades. But even at the fringes of possibility, on the most convoluted and unlikely time lines she can discern, everything ends in darkness. Everything ends with the Eidolons.

She
ends with the Eidolons.

In every single time line.

*

The seasons turn. She struggles to find meaning in the face of her own doom. Slides into nihilism. Brother doesn’t understand. He can’t. Her concerns extend far beyond mortal comprehension.

What point is there of being a demigoddess if she can’t change the things that matter? Can’t alter her own fate?

She whiles away the months with desultory explorations of the future. Like brother, many of the same people reappear in her investigations, their fates braided with hers across a multiplicity of futures. But one man piques her interest. In some time lines, their interaction lasts for no more than a few moments. But that is immaterial: she sees him again and again and again.

His name is Raybould Marsh. He is strong. Courageous. Beautiful. Burdened with anger. Not as clever as she, but that is no sin.

Clearly, they are meant to be together. Why else would this magnificent stranger appear in so many of her futures?

She experiences something new: it begins as a lump in her throat, turns into a wonderful ache in her chest, becomes butterflies in her belly, and spreads down her spine to create a warmth between her legs.

She plays at seduction. Explores the futures in which she snares his heart. He is a prickly man, and difficult at times. But love is just another emotion, and she can make anybody do virtually anything—feel almost anything—given enough time and patience. And there are time lines where he succumbs to her charms. Difficult to access, and rare, but they do exist.

On lonely nights she pleasures herself while watching him sleep. It is one such night, spent imagining his calloused hands on her naked body, when she discovers that Raybould Marsh can be something more than her lover.

He can be her savior. He can save her from the Eidolons.

What would Raybould do in the face of inescapable doom? Every time line ends with the Eidolons. But he would see it differently: every
preexisting
time line ends thus.

So why not build a
new
time line? From scratch?

She sits bolt upright, the first tremors of orgasm forgotten.

*

Springtime again. The butterfly stretches her wings.

Outwitting the Eidolons is a superb challenge. The only challenge worthy of her attentions. It becomes her sole focus for years on end: mastering manipulations; piercing the dark heart of the knottiest paradoxes; culling insights from obscure potential futures; skirting her own death at the hands of enraged allies and determined enemies; weaving cause and effect across decades.

She inspects every detail, for she must leave nothing to chance. The plan must unfold over so many years that the tiniest crosscurrents will grow into cyclones capable of unraveling the slender thread of her machinations.

It is a Herculean undertaking. But she succeeds.

*

It will start with a man named Krasnopolsky.

Soon, the doctor will use the civil war in Spain as a field test for his children’s abilities, thus proving to his benefactors that he can make real their dreams of conquest. The triumphant feats of Willenskräfte will be filmed for further study. Krasnopolsky will be one of the cameramen. He will witness unnatural things. Things that disturb him.

It will be easy for her to nudge Krasnopolsky’s disquiet into thoughts of defection. The British will send a spy to collect him. A spy named Raybould Marsh.

He and she will first glimpse each other at the port in Barcelona. She will set the hook with a wink.

And thus, after the war begins, Raybould will return to the Continent, seeking information about the doctor’s farm. She will let him capture her.

He will bring her to England, where he and his colleagues will show her to an Eidolon. The Eidolons will see Raybould, too, and sense what she intends for him. He will catch their interest. And that moment will become her anchor, the graft point from which the new time line will grow. But there will be so much more to do.

With her guidance, brother will rescue her. She will become the most valuable advisor to the highest echelons of the military. She will guide them through the annihilation of Britain’s army on the beaches of Dunkirk; direct the systematic destruction of Britain’s air defenses. Her Willenskräfte will become a scalpel, cutting away all hope.

Raybould, meanwhile, will attempt to raise a family. It hurts to think of him with another woman. But it’s a necessary part of the plan. And his misguided infatuation with the freckled whore won’t last forever. He is meant for one woman and nobody else: she is the woman who sees through time, and he the man who will transcend it.

She will orchestrate a bombing raid that kills Raybould’s infant daughter. He will go mad with sorrow. Grief will make him careless. He will spearhead a surprise attack on the farm. The British will use the Eidolons to transport soldiers to Germany. It is a very clever idea. But she will thwart the British, to lay the groundwork for a desperate withdrawal. The Eidolons will claim Raybould’s next child for themselves before letting the few survivors make a panicked retreat to England.

Britain’s survival will require drastic action. Raybould’s compatriots will break the Wehrmacht with supernatural winter and lure the Red Army to finish the job. Their ploy will succeed. But in spite of Raybould’s efforts to prevent it, the farm will fall to the Soviets. The Soviets will claim the doctor’s work for themselves.

Including her. And brother.

Events will coast without her adjustments for over twenty years. The British Empire and the Soviet Union will settle into a precarious stalemate. Eidolons on one side, the doctor’s research on the other. But when the time is right, she and brother will escape. And their return to England will lure Raybould out of retirement.

He will be a different man by then. Bowed, but not yet broken. The strain of living with a child twisted by the Eidolons will have destroyed his marriage. But he endures because Britain is free; he endures because he believes his sacrifices are meaningful.

By then, the Soviets will have improved the doctor’s technology. But Raybould’s attempt to eliminate the Soviet Willenskräfte army will fail, and he will be grievously injured (not killed, of course; she will never allow that). His beloved Britain will fall under withering attack.

Then, and only then, will Raybould be in the proper emotional state for what she needs.

Lost in despair and rage, he will unleash the Eidolons. But the demons will inhabit his empty son and use human eyes to see humanity in full. Raybould’s anguish will become the thing that hurls their time line into the malevolent abyss.

But. She will have long since set her anchor in the past, long ago laid the bait to lure Raybould back. And in the final moments of that world, when he finally comprehends her plan, he will step forward to save her.

He won’t understand he’s doing it for her. He’ll think he’s seizing a second chance to save his infant daughter.

But all that matters is he relents and allows the last of the warlocks to send him into the past. He will arrive at the anchor point, and create a new time line.

One in which she isn’t consumed by the Eidolons.

*

Saving herself means stitching new threads into the tapestry of possible futures. It means breaking Raybould Marsh, the man she loves, and forging his sorrow into a tool for destroying the world.

It means tempting him with the one thing he desires above all else. It means luring him into the past.

It works.

one

12 May 1940

Westminster, London, England

I crouched in the painful embrace of a hawthorn hedge, the screams of a dying world still echoing in my ears.

Hot sweat tickled my scalp. But I shivered from chills, nausea, and the lingering touch of the Eidolons. I hadn’t realized just how ill I felt until those demons took me apart and reassembled me twenty-three years in the past.

I was a time traveler. A refugee from the world’s end. The sole survivor of a cataclysm that I had caused.

The western sky blushed orange and pink beyond a swath of royal parkland. The last traces of gloaming silhouetted lampposts in St. James’. All dark, all unlit. The only other light came from a narrow gap in the opaque curtain covering the window overhead; a shaft of pale light speared through the shadows above my hiding spot. London itself was a hulking presence sensed but unseen in the night. The Admiralty building loomed behind me, cloaked in blackout. I could smell the dampness from a recent rainstorm and woody sap from where I’d cracked a few hawthorn branches in my hasty exit through the window. Everything was silent but for the occasional distant hum of a car along Whitehall.

The darkness lent an unexpected familiarity to this place and time. Like encountering an old lover after leaving her behind long ago, and discovering she hadn’t changed a jot.

This was the spring of 1940. Those early days of the Second World War, before France had fallen and we’d lost an army on the beaches of Dunkirk. Before the first dominoes had toppled in that long chain of events culminating decades later in a demonic apocalypse.

My job was to break that chain. Somehow.

The suffocating weight of that task left me breathless. I couldn’t take in the sheer enormity of it all without becoming dizzy. A spasm cramped my gut.

I took a steadying breath and tried to ground myself in the here and now. In a previous life I had been a gardener, and so I concentrated on my immediate surroundings.

Long thin shoots poked randomly from the top of the unkempt hedge. They broke the clean, level lines of the shrubbery. The slender branches had just begun to swell with white May blossoms, and my shivering caused green thorns to skitter against the window glass of the Admiralty. Thorns like those had pierced my shirt when I leaped from the window. They raked my skin from waist to armpit.