“Explain.”
“I mean other people on this ship are waking up, one by one. Something very strange is happening here.”
“Who? Who else knows? Don’t try to hide them, Fedorov. You know damn well I’ll see through them as easily as I saw through you.”
“Orlov, for one. Yes, your first co-conspirator woke up one day below decks, and you can be damn thankful that I was there when it happened.”
“What?”
“He started remembering, having bad dreams as he explained it to me. Then the dreams became recollections, and then he woke up. He knows, Captain. He remembers everything, and he was none too happy with you when it all came back. It seems that the two of you had a little falling out back then. And why do you think he jumped ship? Because he got busted and sent down to serve with the Marines while you wormed your way back onto the bridge with your false oath to the Admiral, and then again to me.”
This came as a real shock to Karpov, for it was something that he had never really considered. In fact, he had been counting on the crew operating here with a clean slate. If they started to remember… If they suddenly knew everything like Fedorov…. He shifted in his chair, his anger abating, and now looked at Fedorov a little differently.
“Are there others?”
“I believe so.”
“How, Fedorov? What is happening here?”
“I wish I knew. I told you that just before Paradox Hour, things got very strange on the ship. You remember what I said about Lenkov? Well, it got worse. Men started to go missing, and no one seemed to remember them ever being there. They were disappearing, one by one, and by God, those same men are right here now, and now I’m starting to think they’re going to wake up, just as Orlov did, one by one.” He was only now just coming to this realization as he said this to Karpov, who had a very harried look on his face now.
“You mean to say they might all remember in time?”
“That’s what I think is happening. We handed Time a real dilemma, two ships, two crews, and what was she to do with them both laying claim to the same moments? You weren’t here when it happened. You were off on your airship—elsewhere. The men on the ship didn’t have that protection. Time had to choose, or so I believed. But it seems she’s come up with another solution. I think Time is doing what amounts to a save with replace.”
“What?”
“Yes… You save a file you’ve been working on, but forget to rename it. So it overwrites the old file with the new. You’re writing a story, or a report, and you don’t want to lose it so you hit that save button, and the old file is updated with all your work that day. Only in this instance, the story has already been written. That’s what got dumped into my head if it happened that way, and I’m willing to bet that somewhere—out there, somewhere, I was one of those men who went missing on the original ship. And if my theory is correct, it will happen to everyone else—even Lenkov, god rest his soul. I’d hate to be there when he remembers what happened to him….”
Silence.
The two men just sat there, forgetting their own petty quarrel and rivalry now. There was something else going on, something deeper, almost sinister from Karpov’s perspective. If they all remembered…. If they all suddenly knew all the things he had done, then Fedorov was correct in what he said a moment ago. He needed this crew, for in a very real sense, they were Kirov, they were the heart and soul of the ship. Without their Aye Aye to his order, the ship would go nowhere, nor would any man here stand to battle stations, and the missiles under that forward deck were absolutely useless. He had told himself that when he took command here, but power had a way of making his head just a little too big for his hat.
“Where is Orlov?” he said at last, his first instinct being to cover that square.
“Well Captain, Admiral, I’ll call you what you please. We have another problem now.” He told Karpov what had happened on the mission; how the ship reached 1908 as they overflew Tunguska, and how he could not find that timely cruelty within him after all. He told him what was said to Sergei Kirov, and what had happened to Orlov as they ascended the stairs.
“He did what? He sneezed?”
“And he must have reflexively moved his hand to his nose,” said Fedorov. “That broke the chain of contact that I was counting on pulling us all to the very same timeframe here. Why I came through, and not Orlov, is just another little snicker from Mother Time as she laughs at us. But we’ve got a real problem here now. Orlov went missing, and Orlov knows everything that happened—everything.”
“God almighty,” said Karpov, a look of shock and distress on his face. “Where could he be, Fedorov? Where could he have possibly gone?”
“That’s anybody’s guess, but it would most likely have to be some time in which he did not already exist.”
“But yet my brother and I share this same time.”
“That I haven’t figured out yet. Yes, you were elsewhere when he shifted here, and that’s the only reason I can put to it.”
Now Karpov remembered his own tortuous reasoning on this very issue, and the reason he had called off Fedorov’s mission in the first place….
Time makes mistakes.
That was all he could think of. Time isn’t perfect, and the chaos they had caused was so great, that she slipped a few stitches. That satisfied where things like the magazine they found were concerned, but not for his own personal fate.
I’m not just anybody, he thought. I’m Vladimir Karpov. I built this entire world! I was the one who pissed off Orlov. Absent that, he never jumps ship. So all of this is my doing, because I am first cause for this world to exist. That is why I persist here—why I will continue to persist. Time might dearly love to get rid of me, but she can’t, I’m just too damn important. Without me, none of this ever happens.
But what about my brother?
Who is the pretender to the throne here, me or my brother? How could time allow him to enter my world while I was here? Ah… but I wasn’t here. That’s what all that travail was aboard Tunguska. I was somewhere else when my brother self appeared here aboard Kirov. My brother was supposed to replace me! Time was planning to crown my brother king here. That bitch was trying to eliminate me completely, but something happened. I eluded her grasp and survived.
So time is quite content to let this time line persist—in fact, that is exactly what she is planning! There is only one errant thread in her loom as she weaves all this together again—me!”
Now a real fear struck him, and one he had tiptoed around in his own thinking for some time. “Fedorov,” he said, his voice lowered ominously. “If what you say is true—Orlov remembering, other crewmen waking up—then what happens if my younger brother remembers? Have you thought about that?”
“Interesting proposition? In one sense, I was thinking that as the two of you are not identical, two different men in so many ways, that Time made allowances. Yet if the other version of yourself does start remembering, that could get very thorny.”
“Well I’ve told him things that happened; things we did. It doesn’t seem to have shaken anything loose. Maybe he can’t remember if I’ve got those memories locked away in my head. How about that possibility?”