“Noble,” replied Jack, “but, in war as in literature, we have to sacrifice our babies.”
There was a pause, and I noticed Finisterre’s eyes flick to something behind us. Jack saw it, too, and drew and fired in one smooth movement without looking or turning around. The guard didn’t even make a sound as he fell, and I looked at Finisterre, who swallowed nervously. He did love his books, but after due consideration was decidedly not willing to die for them.
“Which book are you after?” he asked.
“It was a thirteenth-century bestseller,” replied Jack. “Zvlkx’s Brothels of Dorset on Sixpence a Day.”
Finisterre looked momentarily confused. “You’d kill someone for that?”
“I’d kill someone for fun, Mr. Finisterre.”
“Well, you’re going to have to be disappointed. We haven’t got a copy of the Brothels of Dorset.”
“It’s awaiting cataloging,” replied Jack confidently, “from the library of the now-extinct Brotherhood of Perpetual Defenestration. I have good intelligence.”
Neither Finisterre nor I moved. I could feel my head clearing, and my hands were a little less numb. In five minutes I’d be merely useless, not utterly useless as I was at present.
“Listen,” said Jack, taking a pair of cutters from his pocket, “it’s very, very, simple. I’ll remove your fingers one joint at a time until I get what I want. How many fingers and how much pain do you think a Zvlkx codex is worth?”
He was right, in an odd sort of way. Brothels of Dorset on Sixpence a Day was not rare; it could be bought in any antiquarian bookstore for about five hundred pounds, more if it had salacious margin notes and “interesting” staining.
“Take it,” I said, “and leave.”
“I’m so glad you’re seeing it my way at last,” he said. “Mr. Finisterre, lead us to it.”
We walked over to the other side of the room, where the books awaited cataloging. The Brotherhood of Perpetual Defenestration’s small collection was lying in a cardboard box on one side of the copying table, and as soon as Jack saw this, his mood changed abruptly.
“What is this?” he demanded, indicating a flatbed scanner.
“We copy all books,” said Finisterre while rummaging in the cardboard box. He found it eventually—a sad, tired and very well-thumbed book, the racier pages darkened with seven centuries of surreptitious titillation. This would be a copy that would barely make two hundred pounds, even on eBay.
“Has it been copied?” asked Jack, and I looked at the records.
“Yes,” I replied, “this morning.”
“Where would the copy be?” he asked angrily.
“Uploaded to our server, two floors down.”
“Anywhere else?”
“Zurich,” I replied. “Our servers are backed up every hour.”
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered. “That was a waste of time.” He took a deep breath. “Then again,” he added, “I could kill the pair of you—at least then the morning won’t be a total loss.”
I think he would have done it, too, but just as he raised his gun arm, there was a sound like a melon exploding, and James and I were spattered with the contents of the Day Player’s head.
We stood in silence for some moments, and I picked off a scrap of bone fragment that had landed on my upper lip.
“That,” said Phoebe, who had appeared at the other end of the vault, “was for Judith Trask.”
She walked up and tapped the headless corpse. Those old top-break revolvers carry a fearsome punch. She handed me her gun and badge.
“Arrest me, Thursday—I should stand trial for murder.”
“You didn’t murder anyone,” I told her. “It’ll take more than that to avenge Trask. But I’ll tell you this now, I’m grateful you did what you did.”
They both looked at me, then at the corpse, which was starting to ooze an unnatural yellowish liquid from the top of its spine.
“What in hell’s name is that?” said Finisterre.
“It’s a kind of temporary satellite consciousness,” I said in a soft voice as I felt a tingling return to my leg. “Let me explain.”
I told them what a Day Player was and how Jack Schitt would be back in his suite at the Piper-Astoria right now. Phoebe apologized for disbelieving me, and after we had discussed it at length, I called Stig to alert him that we had another nonevolved life-form for collection. And while the colonel secured the scene, Finisterre and I cleaned ourselves as best as we could with a box of wet wipes.
“So why did he lose interest once he knew that Brothels of Dorset on Sixpence a Day had been copied?” asked Phoebe when we’d explained to her what had happened.
“No idea.”
Finisterre was busy looking through the small volume. “What palimpsest was he after?” I asked.
“We can find out,” said James, “by using multispectral filming, and by superimposing the images we should be able to view each palimpsest and identify the source of every single reused page in the book. Some recycled pages will have been well washed and scraped, others less so. And the comparing of the palimpsests with known works that Zvlkx bought in bulk will take some time. I suggest dismembering the book and having several teams working on it until we find something.”
“Like what?”
“Something we don’t expect to find. I’m thinking that perhaps a book of peculiar rarity and importance made it into Zvlkx’s rebinding factory—and that those pages made their way into random copies of his books.”
“Then we should get started right now,” murmured Phoebe, who seemed relieved that she wasn’t going to be arrested for murder after all.
I told them to call me when they had anything and left them to it.
John Duffy was waiting for me back up in my office. I borrowed some spare clothes from the lost-property bin and went to have a shower and emerged refreshed twenty minutes later wearing a tweed skirt, mismatched socks and a large Swindon Mallets sweatshirt, something that Conrad Spoons found unaccountably funny when I returned to the office.
They were busy inventorying what the Wessex Library Service actually owned and had found about 2.4 million pounds’ worth of cars, vans, two tiltrotors and forty thousand date stamps that had been ordered in error.
“How much time will two point four million buy us?” I asked.
“About a week.”
“It’s a start. Anything to give us some breathing space. Duffy?”
I beckoned him over, and he asked me what I needed.
“Keep this quiet, but did Geraldine score any more of those patches?”
“Ten, I think. She was considering selling them around the office and making enough profit to buy a new car.”
“Get me another one and a pair of scissors, will you? I think a half might be just about perfect.”
“Are you certain?”
“Never been more so.”
Duffy did as I asked, and a few minutes later I headed off for MadCon2004.
32.
Thursday: MadCon2004
“MadCon” is a contraction of the ironically titled “Mad Scientists’ Convention,” so named because of the derision that heralded the inaugural event in 1931. The cofounder of MadCon was Mycroft Next, who attended every meeting in the Swindon Convention Center that now bears his name and eventually won the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award in 1988. The event caters to those interested in outlandish scientific ideas, and despite being shunned by the conventional scientific community, MadCon continues to deliver top-class science to the world.
Francine Grooper, On the Edges of Science
The Mycroft Next Convention Center’s main hall was huge, noisy and filled with people. But, despite this being MadCon, it was populated by not just the insane scientists working on the very edge of accepted rules of physics and mathematics but also by journalists, industrialists, private-equity firms and conventional scientists in disguise, all eager to see what the deranged geniuses among the scientific community we
re up to. There were many trade stands, too, manned by both oddball and respected scientific foundations that wanted to help bring bizarre and seemingly impossible ideas to the marketplace.
There was an hour to go before Tuesday’s keynote speech, so I made my way slowly toward the stage at the far end of the convention center. The Anti-Smite Strategic Defense Shield Corporation was here in force, hoping to sell the technology to other nations who might also have cause to attract the Lord’s ire due to some misdemeanor of their own.
I passed by the large Goliath stand, which was this year promoting the idea of homegrown donor organs with zippers for easy transplanting or, for the more budget-conscious, externally worn organs that could be used on a “timeshare” basis. Beyond Goliath was someone peddling intelligent string to wrap up parcels unaided and for self-tying shoelaces. After that there was a stand where a tech firm had designed a joke-compression standard that would allow gags to be encoded digitally, stored and then played back with no loss of nuance, subtlety or humor— even after thousands of years.
“Once we can successfully synthesize gags,” said one of their reps once I had paused to see, “we’ll have found another industry that the digital revolution can destroy for no reason other than it can. We’re calling the compression standard JAPEG.”
He passed me a sheet of paper. It read:
20
30 “I say I say I say, my dog’s got no nose.”
40“How does he smell?”
45
50“Terrible.”
52
55“He can’t smell he has no nose.”
60 IF laughter=0 GOTO 65>
65
A few stands farther on was a tech start-up company hoping to solve all our energy problems by inducing power from the sun’s magnetic field via a one lakh-mile tether being towed behind a space station anchored gravitationally at Lagrange One. The power would then be transported to earth by a high-powered laser with a transfer efficiency of 1.3 percent—not impressive, but still powerful enough to cater to three-fifths of the earth’s power needs.
“Would you like to take a leaflet?” asked an eager young man. I told him no thanks and walked next to a group of tech companies that were adapting ancillary time technologies to assist modern living. I noted that Age-Fast had a trade stand here with one of their perfectly weathered Jaguar XK120s in pride of place.
Next door to them and still on the same theme was a company marketing the Dilatorvator, a fridge that kept food fresh by simply slowing down time.
“The interior of the storage unit will age only two seconds every week,” explained the promoter, “A fresh steak will last four centuries—and at room temperature. Food-storage problems are finally solved forever. And when our photon dilatorvator is perfected, we really mean forever.”
I hurried on, trying not to be distracted, and had almost reached the stage when I came across a stand that was manned by someone of more immediate interest—Mr. Chowdry, Swindon’s rep of the Asteroid Strike Likelihood Committee.
I walked up and introduced myself to him, a tall man with a kindly manner and a soft voice that sounded like the E string on a double bass.
“Tell me,” I said, “how do you calculate the Ultimate Risk Factor for events like HR-6984?”
“I have little to do with the actual calculation,” admitted Mr. Chowdry. “I simply feed in relevant details. Longevity projections of the Destiny Aware were of huge assistance. Since we have no one who lives past February of 2041, the destruction looks more and more likely. In fact,” he added, “we’ve just updated our forecast this morning. The likelihood of a fiery end has jumped from yesterday’s sixty eight percent to eighty-one percent.”
“Why?”
“Several reasons. Pension applications have dropped off, and there has been a significant jump in the number of endowment policies to mature one year before the strike.”
It looked as if people were beginning to get worried after all, but then they usually did when the Likelihood Index rose. I suddenly had a thought.
“But surely,” I ventured, as math was not my strong point, “the fact that people are making provision for our end can’t actually raise the possibility itself?”
“Classical probability theory would exclude human expectation from the result,” said Mr. Chowdry in a quiet voice, “but Expectation-Influenced Probability Theory postulates that the observer can and will affect the outcome of events purely by the weight of his own expectations. If enough people believe that HR-6984 will miss, then the eventline will bend to ensure that it does. Similarly, if we all believe that we’re going to die in a fiery cataclysmic event, we shall.”
I stared at him for a moment. The notion seemed . . . well, counterintuitive.
“I know the eventline can be changed,” I said, “but I always thought our intervention was limited to things we could physically alter due to choice and free will—not a chunk of rock the size of the Isle of Wight traveling through space at forty-two thousand miles per hour.”
Mr. Chowdry thought for a moment. “Take your brother Joffy and the Church of the Global Standard Deity as a case in point. For the past thousand years, the existence or nonexistence of God has bobbled around the thirty-two percent mark, given the multitude faith dilution. Once all the major religions were joined together the likelihood of His existence jumped to over eighty percent—and what happened?”
“He revealed Himself,” I said in a quiet voice.
“Right,” said Chowdry, “and once the atheists were on board, He began all this smiting. Without faith He is nothing. But with faith He is everything, and in this context ‘everything’ means real, dangerous, vengeful—and unknowable.”
“Is this proven?” I asked.
“Not at all, “replied Chowdry. “Expectation-Influenced Probability Theory is right on the edge of accepted mathematics. You should get over to the stage if you want to hear your daughter talk.”
I thanked Mr. Chowdry for his candor and walked away. If I had understood it correctly, the asteroid wouldn’t hit if we didn’t think it would. The trouble was, we thought very much that it would. To turn around the 81 percent, we needed something to change people’s minds—like some sort of proof or, failing that, doubt.
I pushed these thoughts to the back of my mind and headed toward the stage, where I could see Landen standing at the side with Tuesday, chewing her nails. Most of the five hundred seats had now been filled, and those unlucky enough to have been having a quick sandwich or a pee or something were standing at the back.
“You made it, Mum!” said Tuesday, giving me a joyfully nervous hug. “But where’s Jenny? Dad said she’d be with you.” I thought quickly. “She’s with Gran and Polly.”
“They said they wouldn’t be here.”
“They changed their mind. I was just talking to Mr. Chowdry about Expectation-Influenced Probability Theory. Does that make any sense to you?”
“It should,” she replied. “I invented it. It’s a sweet theory because it’s obligingly self-proving and fits in nicely with the human psyche. It will prove itself correct because we want it to. Why are you dressed like that?”
“I got covered in . . . Actually, it doesn’t matter. You look terrific. Ready?”
She pulled a face and crossed both fingers. She looked more like a schoolgirl about to give her first flute solo, rather than the twenty-sixth-finest mind on the planet about to address her peers.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” said the emcee, who had just strode onto the stage. “And welcome to day one of MadCon2004.”
There was a burst of applause, and the emcee went on
to welcome everyone to the conference, and then followed five minutes of boring stuff about where the fire exits were in case someone tried to blow something up or create a white hole or a small bang or something, and then he listed the high points of the conference, such as tomorrow’s demonstration of AA-size Duraspin kinetic batteries, a new form of copperless copper and how earthquakes could be harnessed to prevent earthquakes.
He started to ramble after this, and I lost interest.
I was pondering over Jack Schitt’s curious behavior regarding the copied Zvlkx book when the emcee suddenly announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to call on . . . Tuesday Next!”
There was more applause, and Tuesday walked nervously onto the stage.
“It is a great honor to be here,” she began, “speaking at a conference that my great-uncle loved so much and gave so much energy toward. I’d like first to thank the staff of MadCon and the board of trustees for their generous help in . . .”
I moved closer to Landen and grasped his hand, and he squeezed mine in return. Despite recent events— the smiting, Goliath, HR-6984— all I could think of was how much I loved my children and how proud I was. I like to think I’m pretty resilient, but listening to Tuesday talk, I felt my my eyes water and my chest tighten. I remembered what a small baby she had been, how she had walked late, talked early. Of her first Erector Set at two, her first long-chain polymer at four, and of learning Latin at five, so she could better understand the Principia Mathematica. I remembered her first day at nursery school and how the teachers said how much they’d learned, her first patent application for an improved alphabet with only eighteen letters, her going up to collect her doctorate in mathematics at age eight.
But through all that she had been our little girl, and despite her dazzling intellect, we had endeavored to bring her up as normally as possible. And while I watched her fluff over her lines with the nervousness of a normal person rather than the detached and mechanical tone of her contemporaries, we knew at least that we had succeeded in attempting to make her as human as she was brilliant, and with that, we trusted, given her an ability to see beyond the pure science and the application of knowledge and to be able to make a distinction between what science could do and what it should do.