Eoin Colfer - Artemis Fowl - the time paradox

Holly gestured at the LEP squad to stand down, then tilted her head slightly as a message came through.

‘There’s a chopper coming in. Your father. We’ve got to fly.’

N o1 wagged a finger. ‘And that’s not just a figure of speech. We actually have to fly. I know humans use that expression even when they don’t intend to actually fly, so just to avoid confusion-’

‘I get it, Number One,’ said Artemis softly.

Holly raised her forearm, and Jayjay jumped on to it. ‘He will be safer with us.’

‘I know.’

He turned to Holly, meeting her gaze. Blue and hazel eyes.

She gazed back for a second, then activated her wings, rising a little from the surface.

‘In another time,’ she said, and kissed him on the cheek.

He was at the front door before Holly called to him.

‘You know something, Fowl? You did a good thing here. For its own sake. Not one penny of profit.’

Artemis grimaced. ‘I know. I’m appalled.’

He looked down at his feet, composing a pithy remark, but when he looked up again the avenue was empty. ‘Goodbye, my friends,’ he said. ‘Take care of Jayjay.’

Artemis could hear helicopter rotors in the distance by the time he reached his mother’s bedroom. He would have some explaining to do, but he had a feeling that Artemis Senior would not press him for details once he saw Angeline in good health.

Artemis flexed his fingers, summoning his courage, then pushed through into the bedchamber. The bed was empty. His mother sat at her dresser, despairing at the state of her hair.

‘Oh dear, Arty,’ she said in mock horror on spotting her son in the mirror. ‘Look at me. I need a team of hairdressers flown in immediately from London.’

‘You look fine, Mother… Mum. Wonderful.’

Angeline ran a pearl-handled brush through her long hair, the lustre returning with each stroke. ‘Considering what I have been through.’

‘Yes. You were ill. But you are better now.’

Angeline turned on her dresser stool, reaching out her arms.

‘Come here, my hero. Hug your mother.’

Artemis was happy to do as he was told.

A thought struck him. Hero. Why did she call him a hero?

Generally, victims of the mesmer remembered nothing of their ordeal. But Butler had remembered what Opal had done to him; he had even described the experience to Artemis. Schalke had been wiped. But what of Mother?

Angeline held him tightly. ‘You have done so much, Arty. Risked everything.’

The rotors were loud now, rattling the windows. His father was home.

‘I didn’t do so much, Mum. What any son would do.’

Angeline’s hand cradled his head. He could feel her tears on his cheek. ‘I know everything, Arty. Everything. That creature left me her memories. I tried to fight her, but she was too strong.’

‘What creature, Mother? It was the fever. You had a hallucination, that’s all.’

Angeline held him at arm’s length. ‘I was in the diseased hell of that pixie’s brain, Artemis. Don’t you dare lie to me and say that I wasn’t. I saw your friends almost die to help you. I saw Butler’s heart stop. I saw you save us all. Look me in the eye and tell me these things did not happen.’

Artemis found it difficult to meet his mother’s stare and, when he did, it was impossible to lie.

‘They happened. All of them. And more.’

Angeline frowned. ‘You have a brown eye. Why did I not notice that?’

‘I put a spell on you,’ said Artemis miserably.

‘And on your father?’

‘Him too.’

Below, the front door crashed open. His father’s footsteps raced across the lobby, then on to the stairway.

‘You saved me, Artemis,’ said his mother hurriedly. ‘But I have a feeling that all your spell-casting in some way put us in this situation. So I want to know everything. Everything. Do you understand?’

Artemis nodded. He couldn’t see how to escape this. He was in a dead end and the only way out was complete honesty.

‘Now we will give your father and the twins time to hug me and kiss me, then you and I are going to have a talk. It will be our secret. Understood?’

‘Understood.’

Artemis sat on the bed. He felt six years old again, when he had been caught hacking into the school computers to make the test questions a little more challenging.

His father was on the landing now. Artemis knew that his secret life ended today. As soon as his mother got him alone he would be explaining himself. Starting at the beginning. Abductions, uprisings, time jaunts, goblin revolutions. Everything.

Complete honesty, he thought.

Artemis Fowl shuddered.

Some hours later, the master bedroom had been transformed by the whirlwind known as Beckett Fowl. There were pizza boxes on the night table and tomato-sauce finger paintings on the wall. Beckett had stripped off his own clothes and dressed himself in one of his father’s T-shirts, which he had belted round his waist. He had applied a mascara moustache and lipstick scars to his face and was currently fencing with an invisible enemy using one of his father’s old prosthetic legs as a sword.

Artemis was finishing his explanation of Angeline’s miraculous recovery. ‘And then I realized that Mother had somehow contracted Glover’s Fever, which is usually confined to Madagascar, so I synthesized the natural cure preferred by the locals and administered it. Relief was immediate.’

Beckett noticed that Artemis had stopped talking and heaved a dramatic sigh of relief. He rode an imaginary horse across the room and poked Myles with the prosthetic leg.

‘Good story?’ he asked his twin.

Myles climbed down from the bed and placed his mouth beside Beckett’s ear.

‘Artemis simple-toon,’ he confided.

COMMANDERTrouble Kelp led the Retrieval team to dig Opal Koboi out of the rubble himself. They inflated a distortion bubble over the work zone, so they could fire up the shuttle’s lasers without fear of discovery.

‘Hurry up, Furty,’ Trouble called over an open channel. ‘We have one hour until sunrise. Let’s get that megalo-maniacal pixie out of there and back into her own time.’

They were lucky to have a dwarf on the team. Normally dwarfs were extremely reluctant to work with the authorities, but this one had agreed so long as he didn’t have to work any of the hundred and ninety-odd dwarf holy days, and if the LEP paid his exorbitant consultant’s fees.

In a situation like this one, dwarfs were invaluable. They could work rubble like no other species. If you wanted to dig something out alive, then dwarfs were the ones to do it. All they needed to do was let their beard hairs play over a surface, and they could tell you more about what was going on under that surface than any amount of seismic or geological equipment.

Currently Trouble was monitoring Furty Pullchain’s progress through the kraken debris on the feed from his helmet cam. The dwarf’s limbs were a shade paler than usual in the night-vision filter. One hand directed a nozzle of support foam that coated the tunnel wall at stress points, and the other reached in under his beard to rehinge his jaw.

‘OK, Commander ,’ he said, managing to make the rank seem like a insult. ‘I made it to the spot. It’s a miracle I’m alive. This thing is as steady as a house of cards in a hurricane.’

‘Yeah, whatever, Furty. You’re a marvel. Now, pull her out and let’s get below ground. I have a captain I need to discipline.’

‘Keep yer acorns on, Commander. I’m readin’ the beacon loud and clear.’

Trouble fumed silently. Maybe Holly Short was not the only one who would have to be disciplined.