The Woman Who Died a Lot

“You would have known him?” I asked, intrigued that I’d met two people in one day who were ex–potential ChronoGuard.

  “Yes, he helped me find a new job when the service wanted to retire me after my accident. He would have been a good friend. Will you ask him if he wants to come to my Destiny Aware Support Group meeting tomorrow? I’m setting it up for ex–potential ChronoGuard who have received their life summaries, and Friday would be very welcome. We need guidance, and he would have been there for us time and time again. And might again. For the first time. You know. Anyway, it’s at the sports center at eight.”

  “I don’t think he’ll want to come.”

  “If he’s anything like the person I’m told he might have turned out to be, he’d say no but come anyway.”

  “I agree. I’ll tell him.”

  We walked out of TJ-Maxx and sat on a bench to compare notes.

  “Quinn and Highsmith,” I said. “We can get Millon to look them up.”

  “They were traveling by car,” said Landen, staring at several other images that Jimmy-G had printed out. “Those are car keys, and that’s a road atlas.”

  “So not local. Are you sure it says Tesco’s?”

  “You have a look, clever clogs.”

  “You know my vision is mildly blurred.”

  “That’s not my fault.”

  “Well, it’s certainly not mine.”

  “Am I interrupting something?”

  It was Phoebe Smalls.

  “Nothing at all,” I said. “Phoebe Smalls, this is my husband, Landen. Landen, meet the new head of SO-27.”

  “You seem quite young,” said Landen.

  “It’s due to my age,” said Phoebe, and Landen laughed, and I glared at him.

  “What do you think that says?” said Landen, handing the picture to Phoebe before I could stop him. I glared at him again, and he mouthed, What?

  “Tresco,” said Phoebe, handing the picture back. “The prison island off the coast of Cornwall. That’s my guess.”

  “That’s exactly what we thought,” I said hurriedly, “but always best to get a second opinion.”

  “Oh?” said Phoebe.

  “Congratulations on your appointment toSO-27,” said Landen. “We just heard. Who are you considering as your second-incommand?”

  I looked at him. He was using his “I’m so really up to something” voice. “Landen . . . ?”

  “That’s exactly why I’m here,” said Phoebe. “Earlier you generously asked me to work with you, and I thought I would return the compliment. I want you to be my deputy at SO-27, Thursday. My number two. My rock. What do you say?”

  “That’s a very kind offer,” I said, “and although SpecOps is in my blood and I would dearly love to accept . . . I’ve just accepted the job of chief librarian from Braxton.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Now, that’s a shame.”

  “Yes, it is, isn’t it?” I rose from the bench with considerably less elegance than I had hoped. “Good luck with the job,” I told her. “I’ll expect our paths will cross pretty soon.”

  “I’ll look forward to it.”

  We exchanged farewells and walked off. I didn’t speak until we were heading back toward Clary-Lamarr.

  “I hate that Phoebe Smalls.”

  “Don’t be so cross, Thursday,” said Landen, stifling a smile. “She seemed rather nice. Kind of like you.”

  “She’s nothing like me.”

  But she was, of course. Just younger. Once we were back in the Skyrail car heading home, Landen passed me his cell phone and I called Braxton to accept the chief librarian job.

  “Ballocks,” I said as soon as I had snapped the phone shut.

  “Now what?”

  “The Tesco/Tresco thing. Before my accident I would have made that connection instantly. I used to be sharper.”

  “It’s the Dizuperadol. I said you should stick to just three patches.”

  “I know. I hate the stuff, but without it I can barely function.”

  Landen laid his hand affectionately on my thigh, and I let my head fall onto his shoulder. We sat like that for several minutes. I wasn’t going to tell him I had upped my patch dosage to four.

  “Landen?”

  “Yes?”

  “Aornis give the mindworm to me, didn’t she?”

  “Yes,” said Landen quietly, “damaging, annoying and potentially destructive of personality and family. And since those memories are as much part of her as you, there’s only one way we’re going to be able to get rid of them.” He patted the pocket where I knew he kept his pistol. “We’re going to deal with the Aornis situation once and for all.”

  I looked into Landen’s eyes for a long time. He was deadly serious.

  “Is the BookWorld the mindworm?”

  “No, that’s real enough.”

  “The whole Granny Next thing?”

  “No.”

  “I’m not me at all but someone else?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “Look at your hand.”

  So I did, and I was confused, and angry. And not for the first time today, apparently.

  7.

  Monday: Tuesday

  Although a “Divine-Induced Destructive Event” is highly tangible, the warnings of that same event remain tiresomely obscure. Even after the Almighty’s Revealment to his creations, the time and place of a pillar of all-cleansing fire is revealed only to a State-Registered Meek—usually in the form of a vision or some other inexplicable sign. Following a rash of false vision claims, the Lord agreed that a secret code word should be given so a genuine divine apparition could be differentiated from, say, a dream.

  Charles Fang, Mankind and the Modern Smite

  We stepped off the Skyrail at Aldbourne and picked up our car from the station car park. It hummed quietly up to the house, and after we paused briefly to punch in our security number on the keypad, the gates swung open and we drove in.

  We went straight into the garage and parked the car. The Wing Commander was standing at the door waiting for us.

  “Password?” he asked.

  We always felt happier arriving before darkness fell. Less risk that someone or something might slipp past security.

  “My postilion has been struck by lightning,” recited Landen.

  “No ring goes like a Ringo goes,” returned the Wing Commander.

  The passwords over, the Wingco took our coats and led the way into the house.

  “I trust the day went well?” he asked.

  “Pretty good,” I replied as we walked into the kitchen. “You’re looking at the new head of the Wessex Library Service.”

  “Congratulations,” said the Wingco. “What did you find out about Aornis?”

  I handed him the names of the guards and the date and time at which she probably would have arrived at Land’s End International, the usual last stopping-off place before convicts were flown to the small cluster of islands twenty or so miles off Land’s End.

  “See what you can find out—the time she arrived at Tresco Supermax, ideally. If she didn’t, we can work backward from there. Did you get the hotpot on?”

  “It went on at five.”

  The Wing Commander’s place in the household had been of huge benefit over the past couple of years, the last few months especially. His full name was Wing Commander Cornelius Scampton-Tappett, and he was a stereotypical wartime RAF officer. Very English, very stiff-upper-lip, and very young—barely twenty-five, but with the demeanor of one who had seen and experienced much, and all of it harrowing. He was utterly steadfast, fearless and loyal. He sported a large walrus mustache and wore the blue uniform of an RAF officer, except when he went out, at which time he wore an Irvin flying jacket. His four greatest laments were that he no longer had a bomber of any description, nor the spiffing chaps to fly it, that he would as like as not never take tea with Vera Lynn now that she was president, and that the war wasn’t still on. It hadn’t been, in fact, for over fifty years, a
nd if Scampton-Tappet’s appearance, eternal youth and general demeanor caused a few raised eyebrows, it was because he was entirely fictional. I had bought him in a BookWorld salvage yard to pep up one of Landen’s books. That didn’t really work out for a number of reasons, so he now acted as family bodyguard and general assistant—as well as conducting vital research and development work for the BookWorld.

  “How’s Jenny?” I asked.

  “Unchanged since this morning,” he replied, glancing at Landen, “but she ate some lunch, so I think the flu is easing.” “I’ll go and see her,” I said.

  “I’ll go,” said Landen, and he walked off toward the stairs before I could argue.

  “Any progress today?” I asked.

  “Not much,” replied the Wingco. “I’ve interviewed two dozen ICFs since I’ve been here, three of which have subsequently vanished. None of them have ever managed to transmit anything back to me—it’s like the Dark Reading Matter is a heavy black curtain that allows movement only one way.”

  The Wingco’s research work involved finding some evidence of the disputed Dark Reading Matter. Theoretical storyologists had calculated that the readable BookWorld makes up for only 22 percent of visible reading matter—the remainder is thought to be the unobservable remnants of long-lost books, forgotten oral tradition and ideas locked in writers’ heads when they died. A way to enter the Dark Reading Matter was keenly sought, as it might offer a vast amount of new ideas, plots and characters as well as a better understanding of the very nature of human imagination, why story exists at all.

  Naturally, wagging tongues insisted that the real reason the Council of Genres was interested in the Dark Reading Matter was for the potential yield of raw metaphor—something that was in dwindling supply in the BookWorld, and often the cause of disputes. But the bottom line was this: Every single explorer had vanished without a trace, and the DRM remained stubbornly theoretical.

  “So no headway at all?” I asked.

  “None, but it’s still early days. Research into ICFs offers the strongest thread I’ve encountered so far.”

  An ICF was an Imaginary Childhood Friend, those pretend friends one sometimes has when a child. Contrary to popular belief, they don’t go away when no longer required; they simply wander the earth until their host dies. They share common DNA with fictional people like the Wingco in that they are constructs of the human mind—living stories, if you like. Because of this they are quite visible to fictional people and, on occasion, to us as something normally dismissed as “ghosts” or a “trick of the light,” an area in which the Wingco was at present directing his efforts. And when he wasn’t doing that or looking after us, he liked to tinker on a small bomber he was building—purely for sentimental purposes.

  “I say,” said the wingco, “I hate to mention something as vulgar as money, but could I ask Tuesday to lend me a few quid? A bargain’s come up.”

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing much— just a Rolls-Royce Merlin aircraft engine. A pair, actually.”

  “Everyone needs a hobby,” I said with a shrug. “I have no objection.”

  Tuesday was the one with the money in the household, as the licensing rights from her many inventions brought in a considerable income. She was the reason we could afford the move to a huge Georgian house with extensive grounds and outbuildings to match. She used the old library as a laboratory, and that was where I headed next. There was a cross-sounding “What?” as I knocked on the door, but I walked in anyway.

  The room was large and, airy, and it boasted an ornate plaster ceiling. The floor space was covered by workbenches piled high with interesting devices in various stages of completion. In one corner there were an experimental Anti-Smite Field Generator and an Inverse Teleport device that would only take you to places you didn’t want to go. Tuesday had recently turned her attentions to domestic appliances and had developed a Nuclear Aga that ran off a nonradioactive isotope of Nextrium. To increase the heat, all one did was remove a graphite rod from the middle of the circular pellet of 253NX underneath each hotplate. The stove had not yet made it to the marketplace because a test model broke a graphite rod on demonstration, and the suits from Aga then had to watch in dismay as the cooker melted in front of their eyes.

  There was a large blackboard in the middle of the room where Tuesday often jotted down ideas, and scribbled on the board today was an ingenious way in which jellyfish could be dramatically improved, as well as some early conceptual work on an attempt to understand the Reality Distortion Field. On a worktop nearby lay a machine that could assemble itself into a machine that would be able to dissemble itself, the practical applications of which were somewhat obscure. The room looked like Uncle Mycroft’s laboratory, in short, and it was from my father’s side of the family that Tuesday had gotten her intellect. Sadly for Mycroft and Polly—who were both geniuses—their sons, Orville and Wilbur, had turned out to have something resembling low-quality putty between their ears.

  “Oh, it’s you,” muttered Tuesday grumpily, looking momentarily up from her workbench. “How’s the leg?”

  “Still painful. Back from school early?”

  “Mr. Davies said the school was grateful for my valuable insights but there were only so many exciting concepts they could cope with in a day. So he gave me the rest of the day off—after I’d done the school accounts and figured out a way to heat the school for free. So I did. And here I am.”

  I put on my stern look. “Your father and I don’t insist you go to school for the education,” I pronounced, and Tuesday set down her soldering iron and removed some papers from a chair so I could sit.

  “I know that,” she said in a huffy manner, “but having to mix with dimwits is hideously boring. Great-Uncle Mycroft put it best when he said that for a genius this planet is excruciatingly dull, only made briefly more illuminating when another genius happens along.”

  “Maybe so,” I replied, “but if you’re to have even the hope of achieving a meaningful human relationship or learn to discourse usefully with us—the dimwits—you’re going to have to suffer the slings and agonies, bruises, defeats, betrayals and compromises that all the other sixteen-year-olds have to suffer. I’m serious about this.”

  “I am taking it seriously,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Before I left school this morning, I stole Linda Blott’s eraser, teased Mary Jones about her dad being in prison, got caught writing ‘Mrs. Henderson has a fat arse’ on the loo door, was given double detention, then showed my boobs to Gavin Watkins for fifty p behind the bike sheds.”

  “Tuesday!”

  “Oh, puh-lease,” she muttered sarcastically, “are you really going to tell me you never showed your boobs to anyone at school for cash?”

  “I might have,” I replied, “but that was completely different.”

  “How was it completely different?”

  “Mostly because Flossie Buxton dared me to. She was more into that sort of thing. Still is, actually. And . . .”

  “And what?”

  “I charged a pound.”

  “Holy strumpets,” said Tuesday, making a quick mental calculation. “That’s the equivalent of—let’s see—over twenty-two pounds seventy-five pence in today’s money. Did you ever consider a career as a stripper? It was going pretty well for you.”

  “No I didn’t, and yes, I know what we said, but please, no more flashing. It’s . . . undignified.”

  I was actually relieved that she was taking the social side of being a sixteen-year-old seriously. She might be a supergenius, but we wanted her to be a real person, too—even if that meant her being a bit grumpy, sometimes uncommunicative and on occasion demonstrating ill judgment with boys.

  “Okay, no more flashing,” she said.

  “And especially not to Gavin Watkins.”

  “I think he’s cute.”

  “Cute? He’s a foulmouthed little creep.”

  Tuesday giggled. She was pulling my leg. “No flashing, promise,” she said. “B
oy, your face!”

  “Very funny,” I said. “What are you doing to Pickers?”

  I had turned my attention to her workbench, and in particular to our pet dodo, Pickwick, whom I had personally sequenced almost twenty-six years before, when the home-cloning fad was in full spate. She was a valuable V1.2—without wings, as all the early ones were—and unique in that she was not just the oldest dodo in existence but also sequenced before the mandatory autosenescence laws were brought in. Barring a major extinction event and the cat next door, she would outlive everything.

  “Ah, yes,” said Tuesday, turning to stare at Pickwick, who was sitting patiently on the workbench. She was wearing a small, bronze domed cap on her head that was about the size of half a tennis ball, from which trailed a jumble of brightly colored wires.

  “After rejiggling her DNA until her feathers grew back, I got to wondering in what other ways she might be improved.”

  “I’m not sure Pickwick needs improving,” I said somewhat dubiously, since Pickwick had been with me for so long it was almost impossible to recall a time when she wasn’t wandering around the house, plocking randomly and bumping into furniture. “I’d miss her glorious pointlessness if it were taken away.”

  “Okay, well, maybe,” said Tuesday, “but I found that reengineered dodo brains have neural pathways that are particularly easy to map. That copper helmet thingy she’s wearing is an avian encephalograph. By reading the electrical brain activity, I’m attempting to discover what’s going on in her head.”

  “I’m not sure you’ll find very much,” I said, since despite my affection for the small bird, I was under no illusion about the level of her intelligence.

  “In that you might be mistaken,” said Tuesday, “for with my newly invented Encephalovision I can decode and then visualize her brain patterns. Watch.”

  Tuesday turned on a highly modified TV, tuned it in carefully, and after a while strange shapes flickered and danced on the screen.

  “What we’re looking at,” said Tuesday with a grin, “is what Pickwick is actually thinking.”

  I tried to make some sense of the shapes on the screen.