ACHILLES ACHARÇIS

It was a good hunt. Zabajac had taken the elk buck down from a mile and a quarter away. Zabajac's my good Scythian, recurved bow. Pull of more than two hundred pounds. It could pierce armor if I needed it to. The name means Killer in Czech. I don't like announcing myself with something like a shotgun blast. I came up to the Yukon three years ago to get away from people—and to forget. All that time I'd not seen more than three people—and none of them saw me.

I'd gone through a lot of trouble to find a place where I could keep the stench of man out of my nostrils, and no one on God's good green earth knew better how cover his tracks than Achilles Acharçis

No phone, computer, or radio—nothing but the overwhelming trees and the overreaching sky, the beasts of the earth, the moose, the elk, the eagles and hawks, the beavers and wolverines—only them, the creatures I'd always felt I'd had more in common with than your average man on the street.

I was two miles away from home when I saw the light, flickering in the Autumn sky about two hundred feet up, and a mile away. Habit made me crouch beneath a stand of black spruce and let the buck slide off my shoulders. I fit an arrow to my bow. I could see the light glinting through the needles. I watched as it swept about in ever-narrowing circles until it came to halt, still high above me. Government drone? Camping in public lands was illegal after all. Had they gotten a bead on me after all these years?

I sent an arrow straight to where I knew the drone would be, having marked the pattern it was flying.

Normally I would have stopped and deboned the elk. It was important I got home as soon as possible. That meant hefting several hundred pounds. There were wolves, bears and wolverines about, and there was no way I was going to chance losing enough meat to get me through the Winter. I hefted the elk to my shoulders once more. I'd keep my eyes open and try to spy where the drone landed.

Half an hour of evasive maneuvers got me back to my little hobbit hole. Dug straight into the hillside. You wouldn't have been able to make out where my front door was unless you knew exactly what to look for.

Looks like the drone knew exactly what to look for.

Ten feet from my concealed door was the drone. One end hung limply over the ground, the part where my arrow had struck. The other hovered at an angle, about three feet in the air, bobbing up and down.

I dropped the elk and seized the nearest bowling ball-sized rock. If this thing was broadcasting my location I might be sunk. I hesitated. Thing was spindle-shaped, about two feet long and nine inches at its widest. It was like no drone I'd ever seen. Its outside was a bright, silvery, polished mirror surface. My reflection looked large and threatening. I let the rock drop.

How the heck did it fly? There was no obvious means of propulsion. Something also nagged in the back of my mind. I'd seen something like this before, hadn't I?

I grabbed the drone. Had a bit of struggle. It was like wrestling a gyroscope.

There was a sudden click and whir of machinery, and two mirrored panels slid aside to reveal the inner workings. I jumped back. When I got close enough again, I was able to look inside. The structure was like a heavily armored carapace. I saw a series of camera lenses. The silvery surface acted as a one-way mirror. The carapace housed a set of microphones. It had auditory as well as visual capacity.

What puzzled me were these mesh-screens situated near air vents. I know I'd seen something like this before. They were...olfactory scanners. Son of a bitch! He'd made it all work. Eyes, ears...and nose! He'd hunted me by scent! He'd sent this thing hunting for me over a hundred thousand square miles of Canadian territory!

Hector Hargreaves! Hadn't seen him for three years. Looks like he used that time to get things working right.

I'd known him since high school. My God, the man was brilliant—brilliant, but wildly impractical. He'd gravitated toward long outdated concepts like the aether in outer space, the fiery element, phlogiston, and the superhuman force the ancients called vril. I'd been able to steer him toward more scientifically viable theories over the years.

Unlike Hector and Achilles in The Iliad, we became the best of friends. I couldn't stomach bullies and I'd saved my friend from them on more than one occasion. Not that Hector was a weakling, or a coward, by any means. He just felt he had better things to do than stand up for himself. At least I finally convinced him to take up some martial arts. Never needed them myself since scrapping comes easily to me, and training can stifle your spontaneity. But for Hector it worked perfectly!

Inside a small 8x5 inch box was a copy of William Shakespeare's King Lear. That clinched it. Hector and I had devised this way of communicating when we wanted to keep things especially secret. We'd take a Shakespeare play and quote from different acts and scenes. Never made sense to anybody but us.

I thumbed through the book. Three passages stood out, treated and highlighted in such a way you had to know the secret to read it.

“Come hither, friend: If thou shouldst dally half and hour, his life,

With thine, and all that offer to defend him,

Stand in assured loss: take up, take up; And follow me, that will to some provision

Give thee quick conduct. Thou must not stay behind. Come, come away.”

[Act Three, Scene Six]

“Lady, I am not well. Sick, O sick! My sickness grows upon me. She is not well; convey her to my tent.”

[Act Five, Scene Three]

“Though this knave came something saucily into the

World before he was sent for, yet was his mother

Fair; And the whoreson must be acknowledged.” [

Act One, Scene One]

Now, what the devil was this supposed to mean?

I pondered the message—“Come hither, friend.” Obviously Hector urgently wanted to see me.

“She is not well.” That was the line that galvanized me. “She is not well.” It had to mean something completely different. It must! It had to, but something kept telling me this had to do with Evelyn. But that was impossible—Evelyn McKenzie died three years ago.

Hector had introduced us five years ago. Never had friend done friend greater favor. She became the love of my life. She was my Beauty. I was her Beast. I've always been something of an anti-social outcast. She helped cure me of that, coaxing out of me sides of myself I never knew were even there.

We'd gotten engaged to be married. And then she died.

Her death was nobody's fault. But I was driven right back, emotionally, to an almost feral state. I could not bear to be near a single human being—not even Hector, whom I loved as a brother.

I walked up the once familiar walk. I'd left everything behind. Keeping to back roads and traveling only at night, it took me two weeks to get back to the States. Crossing the border wasn't a problem—even well trained guards are half asleep compared to me.

I thought I'd said goodbye at Evelyn's grave site. I'd felt her spirit slowly waking and spreading its wings. I'd gritted my teeth at her leave-taking and howled in my anguish.

Hector wanted me back as soon as possible. Why? What was so urgent? I knew Evelyn was gone, so she couldn't be the woman that was sick. I did not like being reminded of the suffering she'd gone through.

And just what exactly was that about someone coming into the world before their time, who yet must be acknowledged?

I gave the lion-shaped knocker a few well-timed clacks at the door and waited.

“Yes? Can I help you?” The young woman who answered the door was of medium height, very prominent cheekbones, long straight hair as coal black as my own, and the bluest eyes I had ever seen, outside of a mirror.

She was a dead ringer for Evelyn McKenzie.

“I'm looking for Hector...Hargreaves.” That slight hesitation was the only concession to my utter surprise.

She brightened up. “Oh—you must be Achilles. Is that right? Achilles..?”

“Achilles Acharçis,” I inclined my head slightly, “At your service.”

She smiled. “Ah! You're a charmer. Pleased to meet you. Hector mentioned you were coming. Have you known him long?”

“Friends in High School.” I didn't feel safe saying much more than that.

“Good to meet you. I'm Evelyn—Hector's wife.” She extended her hand and I took it. “I'll get Hector for you.”

“Thank you.”

This was going to tax even my level of self-control.

It was Evelyn, the way she walked, her body language, the tones in her voice. I held my hand to my nose. Her scent. Even her scent. Faint, but I hadn't forgotten it.

Yet...there was nonetheless a subtle difference, but a very subtle one. Too subtle for me to put my finger on it.

“Been a long time, Achilles. You and I need to talk.” Hector looked largely the same. Still thin, but he'd put on some lean muscle since I'd seen him last. He was also noticeably on edge. The wife didn't seem to notice. It was best if I let him dictate the perimeters of our “cover story.” Those strange, golden eyes of his told me he was champing at the bit to talk to me—and it was something he didn't want the wife to here.

“Honey—we're going to go talk for a while. Think we can set another plate?”

“Already on it. I look forward to Dinner. Hector's told me a lot about you, Achilles.”

The basement room had been turned into a den. All of the machinery and equipment was gone.

“Like what you've done with the place. Fireplace. Carpet. Pool table.”

Hector let out a long, drawn out sigh.

“If you want to throw me through the wall, I'll understand.”

“Well, you did get rid of our collection of vintage vacuum tubes. I was particularly fond of the Edison 390. Always did outshine the Tesla Coil 3000. Kind of ruins the ambiance.”

“Damn it! I'm talking about Evelyn. She introduced herself as my wife, didn't she? Hate me if you want, but I swear, this is not what I had in mind.”

“Well, do you want me to slam you through a wall? It's a nice wall. Shame to wreck it. Okay. What happened?” Hector shook his head.

“I brought her back, Achilles. I brought her back.”

“No. You didn't.”

“I did!”

“That's not Evelyn. Not my Evelyn, anyway. She looks like her, sounds like her, carries herself like her. But it's not her. You know as well as I do, that Evelyn McKenzie passed away more that three years ago.

“Yet, that woman upstairs I talked to, she is Evelyn McKenzie—or Hargreaves, if you like, if you guys are married. And yet...she's not. That's the only way I can put it.”

“How can you tell? I look at her and I can't tell the difference—she's just the way I remember her.”

“And that's your problem. You'd known her since she was twenty-four, two years before you introduced us. She was twenty-eight when she died. That woman up there—she's twenty-four. Even four years can bring subtle changes. I recognized them. You didn't.”

Hector looked like a broken man. I think I was about to hear the reason why.

“Do you remember back in college, when I started fooling around with time travel theory?”

“Sure. Do you remember how I talked you out of it?”

“Grandfather Paradox. Go back in time. Accidentally kill your grandfather when he's a boy. You cancel out your own existence—which means you don't go back and kill your grandfather.

“I couldn't bear seeing what her death did to you. So many times I wished I could go back in time and bring her back to you—just as she was before she got sick. You may think I was crazy for even considering the idea—especially after you proved how impossible it was. But I couldn't get it out of my mind. What if we were understanding time in the wrong way? What if time could be changed—and, by God I found a way!

“Achilles—time travel's only impossible if there's only a single time line—but there are -infinite time lines. Endless parallel worlds—and they're all identical, even down to the quantum level!

“If I could build the machine—I could reach over to another parallel, find the Evelyn McKenzie of that parallel, and bring her back to you!”

He was flush with excitement, barely able to restrain himself.

“You contacted me two weeks ago.”

“Yes—I wanted you here to witness when I set the thing in motion.”

“And when did you bring her in?”

“A week ago, I wish you'd been here.”

“You know I would have talked you out of it.”

“I was doing it for you, Achilles.”

“And as usual, you didn't think it through. You are a friggin' IDIOT!”

“It worked, didn't it?”

“You told me that all these parallel time lines are absolutely identical, right?”

“Yeah. Right.”

“You snatched this Evelyn, from another parallel, when she was the age of twenty-four.”

“Right on both counts.”

“Was our Evelyn ever married to you in our history?”

“Uhnn...no.”

“Then why was the Eveyln you snatched married to you—in her time line? What about her husband—your doppelganger in her time line?”

“Are you saying...?”

“I'm saying you kidnapped a married woman from her time line—her husband's been missing her for a whole week, now. You say you're doing this for me? What you're doing is robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

As brilliant as Hector was, he honestly hadn't thought this one through. My head rested in my hand as I looked at my poor friend. I wish I had gotten here sooner, in time to talk some sense into him.

“You never needed to do this for me, Hector. I've let Evelyn go a long time ago—my Evelyn. I don't blame you, but I think we've both been very unpleasantly surprised—me, to find the woman I loved married to my best friend. You, to find out you're been a married man for—how many years now?”

“I swear to you, Achilles—I never touched her.”

“Well, except for the fact that, no matter what she thinks, she's not really married to you. You have to send her back.”

“Back?”

“This one isn't for either of us. My Evelyn's gone—and this one was never meant to be yours. She's got to go back, where she belongs.”

Hector was starting to look a bit uncomfortable.

“Are you starting to crush on her? Don't. This is bigger than you realize. You were so gung ho to help me you didn't follow things out to their logical conclusions. Let me break it down for you.

“You said there are an infinite number of parallel time lines, and they are absolutely identical—even down to the quantum level. Yet, the one you snatched Evelyn from was different. You didn't see a problem with that?

“If everything was identical, you would have stepped into the parallel next door. And there would have been a Hector Hargreaves stepping into the parallel next to him, and so on. But that didn't happen.

“All these parallels are like a Roman Fasces. They're like poles wrapped around the center pole-axe. But what if one of those poles started breaking? And that one breaks the one next to it. They go down like dominoes. And then pretty soon, the entire Chronological structure of Space-Time starts breaking down.

“And it couldn't have just started in one, because if one did it, they'd all do it. There must be something outside of the structure of Space-Time. It's taken one time-line—ours, and begun to alter all the other ones.”

“I still don't follow. Why couldn't it just have started with one?”

“John Wilkes Booth goes to a play in 1865. Uncounted numbers of John Wilkes Booths, from innumerable parallel histories. And they all climb up to the President's box. And they all pull the trigger and start a grand old presidential tradition. You think one of them is just suddenly, for no apparent reason, going to change his mind? Only if in one of those worlds, a free agent came in and confronted Booth on the stairs, or something like that, would he have changed his mind.

“We are dealing with some free agent from beyond the Universes—and we may be too late to stop it. Maybe all we can do is delay it, slow it down. Whatever it is, it's like the thing that took Evelyn. We can't fix that, but maybe we can put things a little bit back together.”

Hector hung his head. “You're right. We have to send her back. She's got to go back.”

A voice came from the door. We hadn't heard Evelyn come in.

“Send who back? Something I need to hear Hector? Achilles? Either of you?”

“I think you'd better take this one, Hector.”

I sighed deeply. This was going to be a long night...