Lost in a Good Book

  He thrust his hand inside the nanodevice container as the final generator failed. The small blob of nanotechnology fell on his hand and the emergency lights flickered on, bathing us all in a dim green glow.

  'It's cold,' he said. 'How long have I got?'

  'It has to warm up first,' replied Wilbur glumly. 'Three minutes?'

  'I'm sorry to disappoint you, Sweetpea, but self-sacrifice is not the answer.'

  'It was all I had left, Dad. Me alone or me and three billion souls.'

  'You don't get to make that decision, Thursday, but I do. You've got a lot of good work to do, and your son, too. Me, I'm just glad that it all ends before I become so enfeebled as to be useless.'

  'Dad!'

  I felt the tears start to roll down my cheeks.

  'It all seems so clear to me now!' he said, smiling as he cupped his hand so none of the all-consuming Dream Topping would fall to the ground. 'After several million years of existence I finally realised my purpose. Will you tell your mother there was absolutely nothing between me and Emma Hamilton?'

  'Oh, Dad! Don't, please!'

  'And tell Joffy I forgive him for breaking the windows of the greenhouse.'

  I hugged him tightly.

  'I'll miss you. And your mother, of course, and Escher, Louis Armstrong, the Nolan Sisters – which reminds me, did you get any tickets?'

  'Third row, but … but … I don't suppose you'll need them now.'

  'You never know,' he murmured. 'Leave my ticket at the box office, will you?'

  'Dad, there must be something we can do for you, surely?'

  'No, my darling, I'm going to be out of here pretty soon. The Great Leap Forward. The thing is, I wonder where to? Was there anything in the Dream Topping that shouldn't have been there?'

  'Chlorophyll.'

  He smiled and sniffed the carnation in his buttonhole. 'Yes, I thought as much. It's all very simple, really – and quite ingenious. Chlorophyll is the key … Ow!'

  I looked at his hand. His flesh was starting to swirl as the wayward nanodevice thawed enough to start work, devouring, changing and replicating with ever-increasing speed.

  I looked at him, wanting to ask a hundred questions but not knowing where to start.

  'I'm going three billion years into the past, Thursday, to a planet with only the possibility of life. A planet waiting for a miraculous event, something that has not happened, as far as we know, anywhere else in the universe. In a word, photosynthesis. An oxidising atmosphere, Sweetpea – the ideal way to start an embryonic biosphere.'

  He laughed.

  'It's funny the way things turn out, isn't it? All life on earth descended from the organic compounds and proteins contained within Dream Topping.'

  'And the carnation. And you.'

  He smiled at me.

  'Me. Yes. I thought this might be the ending, the Big One – but in fact it's really only just the beginning. And I'm it. Makes me feel all sort of … well, humble.'

  He touched my face with his good hand and kissed me on the cheek.

  'Don't cry, Thursday. It's how it happens. It's how it has always happened, always will happen. Take my chronograph; I'm not going to need it any more.'

  I unstrapped the heavy watch from his good wrist as the smell of strawberries filled the room. It was Dad's hand. It had almost completely changed to pudding. It was time for him to go and he knew it.

  'It was Aornis, wasn't it?'

  I nodded.

  'Worst of the lot – not counting Phlegethon. You know what we used to say about her? Evil rich, cash poor. She has her Achilles' heel, same as the rest of the family. Goodbye, Thursday, I never could have wished for a finer daughter.'

  I composed myself. I didn't want his last memory of me to be of a snivelling wretch. I wanted him to see I could be as strong as he was. I pursed my lips and wiped the tears from my eyes.

  'Goodbye, Dad.'

  He winked at me.

  'Well, time waits for no man, as we say.'

  He smiled again and started to fold and collapse and spiral into a single dot, much like water escaping down a plughole. I could feel myself tugged into the event, so I took a step back as my father vanished into himself with a very quiet plop as he travelled into the deep past. A final gravitational tug dislodged one of my shirt buttons; the wayward pearl fastener sailed through the air and was caught in the small rippling vortex. It vanished from sight and the air rocked for a moment before settling down to that usual state we refer to as normality.

  My father had gone.

  The lights flickered back on as entropy returned to normal. Aornis's boldly audacious plan for revenge had backfired badly. She had, perversely enough, actually given us all life. And after all that talk about irony. She'd probably be kicking herself all the way to Top Shop. Dad was right. It is funny the way things turn out.

  I sat through the Nolan Sisters' concert that evening with an empty seat beside me, glancing at the door to see whether he would arrive. I hardly even heard the music – I was thinking instead of a lonely foreshore on a planet devoid of any life, a person who had once been my father sloughing away to his component parts. Then I thought of the resultant proteins, now much replicated and evolved, working on the atmosphere. They released oxygen and combined hydrogen with carbon dioxide to form simple food molecules. Within a few hundred million years the atmosphere would be full of free oxygen; aerobic life could begin – and a couple of billion years after that something slimy would start wriggling onto land. It was an inauspicious start but now there was a sort of family pride attached to it. He wasn't just my father but everyone's father. As the Nolans performed 'Goodbye Nothing To Say', I sat in quiet introspection, regretting, as children always do upon the death of a parent, all the things we never said and never did. But my biggest regret was far more mundane – since his identity and existence had been scrubbed by the ChronoGuard, I never knew, nor ever asked him, his name.

  34

  The Well of Lost Plots

  * * *

  'Character Exchange Programme: If a character from one book looks suspiciously like another from the same author, chances are they are. There is a certain degree of economy that runs through the book world and personages from one book are often asked to stand in for others. Sometimes a single character may play another in the same book, which lends a comedic tone to the proceedings if they have to talk to themselves. Margot Metroland once told me that playing the same person over and over and over again was as tiresome as "an actress condemned to the same part in a provincial repertory theatre for eternity with no holiday". After a spate of illegal PageRunning (q.v.) by bored and disgruntled bookpeople, the Character Exchange Programme was set up to allow a change of scenery. In any year there are close to ten thousand exchanges, few of which result in any major plot or dialogue infringements. The reader rarely suspects anything at all.'

  UA OF W CAT – The Jurisfiction Guide to the Great Library (glossary)

  I slept over at Joffy's place. I say slept but that wasn't entirely accurate. I just stared at the elegantly moulded ceiling and thought of Landen. At dawn I crept quietly out of the vicarage, borrowed Joffy's Brough Superior motorcycle and rode into Swindon as the sun crept over the horizon. The bright rays of a new day usually filled me with hope but that morning I could think only of unfinished business and an uncertain future. I rode through the empty streets, past Coate and up the Marlborough road towards my mother's house. She had to know about Dad however painful the news might be, and I hoped she would take solace, as I did, in his final selfless act. I would go to the station and hand myself into Flanker afterwards. There was a good chance that SO-5 would believe my account of what happened with Aornis but I suspected that convincing SO-1 of Lavoisier's chronuption might take a lot more. Goliath and the two Schitts were a worry but I was sure I would be able to think of something to keep them off my back. Still, the world hadn't ended yesterday which was a big plus – and Flanker couldn't exactly charge me with 'failing to save the
planet his way', no matter how much he might want to.

  As I approached the junction outside Mum's house I noticed a suspiciously Goliath-looking car parked across the street, so I rode on and did a wide circuit, abandoning the motorcycle two blocks away and treading noiselessly down the back alleys. I skirted around another large dark-blue Goliath motor-car, climbed over the fence into Mum's garden and crept past the vegetable patch to the kitchen door. It was locked so I pushed open the large dodo-flap and crawled inside. I was just about to switch on the lights when I felt the cold barrel of a gun pressed against my cheek – I started and almost cried out.

  'Lights stay off,' growled a husky woman's voice, 'and don't make any sudden moves.'

  I dutifully froze. A hand snaked into my jacket and removed Cordelia's automatic.

  DH-82 was fast asleep in his basket, the idea of being a fierce guard-Tastiger had obviously not entered his head.

  'Let me see you,' said the voice again. I turned and looked into the eyes of a woman who had departed more rapidly into middle age than years alone might allow. I noticed that her gun arm wavered slightly, she had a slightly florid appearance and her hair had been clumsily brushed and pulled into a bun. But for all that it was clear she had once been beautiful; her eyes were bright and cheerful, her mouth delicate and refined, her bearing resolute.

  'What are you doing here?' she demanded.

  'This is my mother's house.'

  'Ah!' she said, giving a slight smile and raising an eyebrow. 'You must be Thursday.'

  She returned her pistol to a holster that was strapped to her thigh beneath several layers of her large brocade dress and started to rummage in the cupboards.

  'Do you know where your mother keeps the booze?'

  'Suppose you tell me who you are?' I demanded, my eyes alighting on the knife block as I searched for a weapon – just in case.

  The woman didn't give me an answer, or at least, not to the question I'd asked.

  'Your father told me Lavoisier eradicated your husband.'

  I halted my surreptitious creep towards the carving knives.

  'You know my father?' I asked in some surprise.

  'I do so hate that term eradicated,' she announced grimly, searching in vain amongst the tinned fruit for anything resembling alcohol. 'It's murder, Thursday – nothing less. They killed my husband, too – even if it did take three attempts.'

  'Who?'

  'Lavoisier and the French revisionists.'

  She thumped her fist on the kitchen top as if to punctuate her anger and turned to face me.

  'You have memories of your husband, I suppose?'

  'Yes.'

  'Me too,' she sighed. 'I wish to heaven I hadn't, but I have. Memories of things that might have happened. Knowledge of the loss. It's the worst part of it.'

  She opened another cupboard door revealing still more tinned fruit.

  'I understand your husband was barely two years old – mine was forty-seven. You might think that makes it better but it doesn't. The petition for his divorce was granted and we were married the summer following Trafalgar. Nine years of glorious life as Lady Nelson – then I wake up one morning in Calais, a drunken, debt-ridden wretch and with the revelation that my one true love died a decade ago, shot by a sniper's bullet on the quarter-deck of the Victory.'

  'I know who you are,' I murmured, 'you're Emma Hamilton.'

  'I was Emma Hamilton,' she replied sadly. 'Now I'm a broke out-of-timer with a dismal reputation, no husband and a thirst the size of the Gobi.'

  'But you still have your daughter?'

  'Yes,' she groaned, 'but I never told her I was her mother.'

  'Try the end cupboard.'

  She moved down the counter, rummaged some more and found a bottle of cooking sherry. She poured a generous helping into one of my mother's teacups. I looked at the saddened woman and wondered if I'd end up the same way.

  'We'll sort out Lavoisier eventually,' muttered Lady Hamilton sadly, downing the cooking sherry. 'You can be sure of that.'

  'We?'

  She looked at me and poured another generous – even by my mother's definition – cup of sherry.

  'Me – and your father, of course.'

  I sighed. She obviously hadn't heard the news.

  'That's what I came to talk to my mother about.'

  'What did you come to talk to me about?'

  It was my mother. She had just walked in wearing a quilted dressing gown and her hair sticking out in all directions. For someone usually so suspicious of Emma Hamilton, she seemed quite cordial and even wished her 'Good morning' – although she swiftly removed the sherry from the counter and replaced it in the cupboard.

  'You early bird!' she cooed. 'Do you have time to take DH-82 to the vet's this morning? His boil needs lancing again.'

  'I'm kind of busy, Mum.'

  'Oh!' she exclaimed, sensing the seriousness in my voice. 'Was that business at Vole Towers anything to do with you?'

  'Sort of. I came over to tell you—'

  '—Yes?'

  'That Dad has— Dad is— Dad was—'

  Mum looked at me quizzically as my father, large as life, strode into the kitchen.

  '—is making me feel very confused.'

  'Hello, Sweetpea!' said my father, looking considerably younger than the last time I saw him. 'Have you been introduced to Lady Hamilton?'

  'We had a drink together,' I said uncertainly. 'But— You're— you're – alive!'

  He stroked his chin and replied: 'Should I be something else?'

  I thought for a moment and furtively shook my cuff down to hide his chronograph on my wrist.

  'No— I mean, that is to say—'

  But he had twigged me already.

  '—don't tell me! I don't want to know!'

  He stood next to Mum and placed an arm round her waist. It was the first time I had seen them together for nearly seventeen years.

  'But—'

  'You mustn't be so linear,' said my father. 'Although I try to visit only in your chronological order, sometimes it's not possible.'

  He paused.

  'Did I suffer much pain?'

  'No – none at all,' I lied.

  'It's funny,' he said as he filled the kettle, 'I can recall everything up until final curtain-minus-ten, but after that it's all a bit fuzzy – I can vaguely see a rugged coastline and the sunset on a calm ocean, but other than that, nothing. I've seen and done a lot in my time, but my entry and exit will always remain a mystery. It's better that way. Stops me getting cold feet and trying to change them.'

  He spooned some coffee into the cafetiere. I was glad to see that I had only witnessed Dad's death and not the end of his life – as the two, I learned, are barely related at all.

  'How are things, by the way?' he asked.

  'Well,' I began, unsure of where to start, 'the world didn't end yesterday.'

  He looked at the low winter sun that was shining through the kitchen windows.

  'So I see. Good job too. An armageddon right now might have been awkward – have you had any breakfast?'

  'Awkward? Global destruction would be awkward?'

  'Decidedly so. Tiresome almost,' replied my father thoughtfully. 'The end of the world could really louse up my plans to get both your husbands back, and you wouldn't like that, now, would you? Tell me, did you manage to get me a ticket to the Nolans' concert last night?'

  I thought quickly.

  'Er – no, Dad – sorry. They'd all sold out.'

  There was another pause. Mum nudged her husband, who looked at her oddly. It looked as if she wanted him to say something.

  'Thursday,' she began when it became obvious that Dad wasn't going to take her cue, 'your father and I think you should take some leave until our first grandchild is born. Somewhere safe. Somewhere other.'

  'Oh yes!' added Dad with a start. 'With Goliath, Aornis and Lavoisier after you, the herenow is not exactly the best place to be.'

  'I can look after myself.
>
  'I thought I could too,' grumbled Lady Hamilton, gazing longingly at the cupboard where the cooking sherry was hidden.

  'I will get Landen back,' I replied resolutely.

  'Perhaps now you might be physically up to it – but what happens in six months' time? You need a break, Thursday, and you need to take it now. Of course, you must fight – but fight with a level playing field.'

  'Mum?'

  'It makes sense, darling.'

  I rubbed my head and sat on one of the kitchen chairs. It did seem to be a good idea.

  'What have you in mind?'

  Mum and Dad exchanged looks.

  'I could downstream you to the sixteenth century or something but good medical care would be hard to come by. Upstreaming is too risky – and besides, SO-12 would soon find you. No, if you're going to go anywhere, it will have to be sideways.'

  He came and sat down next to me.

  'Henshaw at SO-3 owes me a favour. Between the two of us we could slip you sideways into a world where Landen doesn't drown aged two.'

  'You could?' I replied, suddenly perking up.

  'Sure. But steady on. It's not so simple. A lot will be … different.'

  My euphoria was short lived. A prickle rose on my scalp.

  'How different?'

  'Very different. You won't be in SO-27. In fact, there won't be any SpecOps at all. The Second World War will finish in 1945 and the Crimean conflict won't last much beyond 1854.'

  'I see. No Crimean war? Does that mean Anton will still be alive?'

  'It does.'

  'Then let's do it, Dad.'

  He laid a hand on mine and squeezed it.

  'There's more. It's your decision and you have to know precisely what is involved. Everything will be gone. All the work you've ever done, all the work you will do. There will be no dodos or Neanderthals, no Willspeak machines, no Gravitube—'