The Time Paradox (Artemis Fowl 6)

“Get the lemur now!” shrieked Opal.

Butler had enough strength for three words. “Go . . . to ...hell.”

Then he clutched at his arm and collapsed.

“Oops,” said Opal. “Heart attack. I broke him.”

Stay focused, Artemis ordered himself. Opal may hold all the aces, but perhaps there is a hole in one of those aces.

Artemis tickled Jayjay under the chin. “Hide, little friend. Hide.”

And with that he tossed the lemur toward a chandelier suspended from the ceiling. Jayjay flailed in the air, then latched on to a glass strut. He pulled himself nimbly into the hanging light and hid behind sheets of dangling crystal.

Opal immediately lost interest in Artemis, concentrating on levitating Angeline’s body to the level of the chandelier. With a squeal of frustration she realized that such remote elevation was beyond even a being of her power.

“Doctor Schalke!” she called, and somewhere her real mouth was calling it too. “Into the bedroom, Schalke!”

Artemis filed this information, then ducked below Opal to his mother’s bedside. A mobile JumpStart defibrillator cart was parked among the row of medical equipment ranged around the four-poster, and Artemis quickly switched it on, dragging the entire contraption to the limit of its cord, to where Butler had collapsed.

The bodyguard lay faceup, hands thrown back as though there were an invisible boulder on his chest. His face was stretched with the effort of moving the great stone. Eyes closed, sweat sheened, teeth clenched.

Artemis unbuttoned Butler’s shirt, exposing a barrel chest hard with muscle, scars, and tension. A cursory examination told him that there was no heartbeat. Butler’s body was dead; only his brain was left alive.

“Hold on, old friend,” murmured Artemis, trying to keep his mind focused.

He pulled the defibrillator paddles from their holsters and peeled back their disposable safety covers, leaving a thin coating of conductive gel on the contact surfaces. The paddles seemed to grow heavier as he waited for the unit to charge, and by the time the GO light flashed green, they felt like rocks in his hands.

“Clear!” he called to no one in particular, then positioned the paddles firmly on Butler’s chest and hit the shock button under his thumb, sending three hundred and sixty volts of electricity into his bodyguard’s heart. Butler’s body arched, and the sharp smell of burning hair and skin assailed Artemis’s nostrils. Gel crisped and sparked, burning twin rings where the pads had made contact. Butler’s eyes flew open and his massive hands gripped Artemis’s shoulders.

Is he still Opal’s slave?

“Artemis,” breathed Butler, but then frowned in confusion. “Artemis? How?”

“Later, old friend,” said the Irish boy brusquely, mentally progressing to the next problem. “Just rest for now.”

This was not an order he would have to repeat. Butler sank immediately into exhausted unconsciousness. But his heart beat strongly inside his chest. He had not been dead long enough to have suffered brain damage.

Artemis’s next problem was Opal, or more specifically, how to get her out of his mother’s body. If she did not vacate soon, Artemis had no doubt that his mother would not recover from the ordeal.

Gathering his nerve with several deep breaths, Artemis switched his full attention to his mother’s hovering body. She was twirling below the chandelier as though suspended from it, clawing at Jayjay, who appeared to be taunting her by waving his hindquarters in her direction.

Can this situation get any more surreal?

Just then Dr. Schalke entered the room brandishing a pistol, which seemed too large for his delicate hands.

“I am here, you creature. Though I must say, I don’t like your tone. I may be spellbound, but I am not an animal.”

“Do shut up, Schalke. I can see I will have to fry a few more of your brain cells. Now, please, fetch that lemur!”

Schalke pointed four fingers of his free hand toward the chandelier. “The lemur is at a considerable height, yes?

How do you suggest I fetch him? Perhaps I could shoot him dead?”

Opal swooshed low, arms and legs twirling like a harpie. “No!” she shrieked, striking him around the head and shoulders. “I would shoot a hundred of you, a thousand, before I let you harm one hair of that creature’s fur. He is the future. My future! The world’s future!”

“Indeed,” said the doctor. “Were I not mesmerized, I suspect I should be yawning.”

“Shoot the humans,” commanded Opal. “The boy first; he is the most dangerous.”

“Are you certain? The man mountain looks more dangerous to me.”

“Shoot the boy!” howled Opal, frustration sending tears streaming down her cheeks. “Then Butler and then yourself.”

Artemis swallowed. This was cutting things a bit fine; his accomplice had better get a move on.

“Very well,” said Schalke, fiddling with the safety on Butler’s Sig Sauer. “Anything to escape these theatrics.”

I have seconds before he figures out that catch, thought Artemis. Seconds to distract Opal. Nothing to do but to reveal the hole in her ace.

“Come now, Opal,”Artemis said with a calmness he did not feel. “You wouldn’t shoot a ten-year-old boy, would you?”

“I absolutely would,” said Opal without a heartbeat’s hesitation. “I am considering cloning you so that I can kill you over and over again. Heaven.”

Then all of what Artemis had said registered.

“Ten? Did you say you were ten years old?”

Artemis forgot all about the danger surrounding him, lost in the sweet moment of triumph. It was intoxicating.

“Yes, that is what I said. I am ten. My real mother would have noticed immediately.”

Opal chewed the knuckles of Angeline’s left hand, thinking.

“You are the Artemis Fowl from my time? They brought you back!”

“Obviously.”

Opal reared backward through the air, as though taken by the wind.

“There is another one. Here somewhere, another Artemis Fowl.”

“Finally!” said Artemis, smirking. “The great pixie genius sees the truth.”

“Find him,” shrieked Opal. “Find him immediately. At once.”

Schalke straightened his glasses. “At once and immediately. This must be important.”

Opal watched him go with real hatred in her eyes.“When this is over, I am going to destroy this entire estate just for spite. And then, when I return to the past, I shall—”

“Don’t tell me,” interrupted ten-year-old Artemis Fowl. “You will destroy it again.”

Almost Eight Years Ago

When fourteen-year-old Artemis had a moment to consider things, sometime in between scaling pylons and outwitting murderous Extinctionists, he realized that there were a lot of unanswered questions about his mother’s illness. He had supposedly given her Spelltropy, but who had passed it to him? Holly’s magic had permeated his body in the past, but she herself was hale and hearty. Why wasn’t she sick? Or for that matter, how had Butler escaped infection? He had been healed so many times that he must be half-fairy by now.

And of all the thousands of humans healed, mesmerized or wiped every year, his mother was the one to fall ill. The mother of the only human on Earth who could do something about it. Very coincidental. Too coincidental by far.

So, either someone had deliberately infected his mother, or the symptoms were being magically duplicated. Either way, the result was the same:Artemis would travel back in time to find the antidote. The lem

ur, Jayjay.

And who would want Jayjay found as much as Artemis did? The answer to that question lay in the past. Opal Koboi, of course. The little primate was the last ingredient in her magical cocktail. With his brain fluid in her bloodstream, she would be literally the most powerful person on the planet. And if Opal couldn’t nab Jayjay in her own time, she would get him in the future. Whatever it took. She must have followed them back through the time stream, jumped out early, and organized this whole affair. Presumably once she had Jayjay’s brain fluid, navigating her way back would not be a problem.

It was confusing even for Artemis. Opal wouldn’t even be in his present if he hadn’t gone back in time. And he had only gone back in time because of a situation she had created. It had been Artemis’s own attempts to cure his mother that had led Opal to infect her.

But one thing he now felt sure of was that Opal was behind this. She was behind them and in front of them. Chasing their group into her own clutches. A time paradox.

There are two Opals in this equation, thought Artemis. I think there should continue to be two Artemis Fowls.

And so a plan began to take shape in his mind.

Once the young Artemis had been apprised of all the details and convinced of their accuracy, he had at once agreed to accompany them to the future, in spite of Butler’s vocal objection.

“It’s my mother, Butler,” he said simply. “I must save her. Now I charge you to stay by her side until I return. Anyway, how could they hope to succeed without me?”

“How indeed,” Holly Short had wondered, then taken more pleasure than was necessary in watching that arrogance drain from the boy’s features when the time stream opened in front of them, like the maw of some great computer-generated serpent.

“Chin up, Mud Boy,” she’d said as Artemis the younger watched his arm dissolve. “And watch out for quantum zombies.”

The time stream had been difficult for Artemis the elder. Any other human would have been torn apart by such repeated exposure to its particular radiation, but Artemis held himself together by sheer willpower. He focused on the high end of his intellect, solving unprovable theorems with large cardinals and composing an ending for Schubert’s unfinished Symphony No 8.