The Woman Who Died a Lot Read online

  “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to one of them.

  “Either a small ottoman or a large marshmallow,” said Tuesday. “That blurry thing down there is the cat next door, this is a supper dish, that’s you and me, and that folder in the corner is all her system files. I’m not sure, but I think she’s running on software modified from a program that used to run domestic appliances. Washing machines, toasters, food mixers and so forth.”

  “That might explain why she caused such a fuss when we got rid of the old Hoovermatic. What do you think that is?” I pointed to an image on the screen that looked like a large red car leaping through the air.

  “I think it’s an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard.”

  “She used to like watching that,” I said. “Never thought it went in, though. Just a simple question: Is there any useful purpose in knowing what a dodo is thinking?”

  “Not at all. It’s simply part of wider research on a neural expansifier that increases the synaptic pathways in the brain. Aside from repairing traumatic damage and reversing the effects of dementia, it can potentially make dumb people smart.”

  “I’m trying hard, but I’m not sure I can think of a more useful invention.”

  “Me neither—but it’s a long way from testing on humans. This is just a crude device to test proof of concept. This afternoon I successfully increased Pickwick’s intelligence by a factor of a hundred.”

  This was astonishing indeed. I stared at Pickwick, whose small black eyes stared back at me, and she cocked her head to one side.

  “Hello, Pickwick,” I said.

  “Plock,” said Pickwick. I took a marshmallow from my pocket, showed it to the dodo, hid it in my left palm in full view and then displayed both fists to her.

  “Where’s the marshmallow?”

  Pickwick stared at both my hands, then at me, then at Tuesday. She blinked twice and scratched the side of her head with her claw.

  “Hm,” I said, “she doesn’t seem much different to me.”

  “I admit it’s not a blazing success,” agreed Tuesday, “but I think the problem lies in Pickwick. Because her intelligence is on a par with a dishwasher’s, making her brain a hundred the times the size creates no appreciable difference. D’you think I should have made it a thousand times smarter than it was?”

  “I think you should leave her alone. Having almost no brain doesn’t seem to have stopped her enjoying a long and successful life.”

  “I suppose so,” agreed Tuesday, switching off the machine.

  “How’s the keynote speech for MadCon on Thursday?”

  “Going pretty well,” she replied, patting a pile of much-corrected papers that were lying on the desk next to her. “I’m just not sure whether I should open directly with my algorithm that can predict the movement of hyperactive cats, discuss the possibilities of Encephalovision Entertainment System— where we beam the thoughts of vain idiots straight into the nation’s homes— or go straight to the Madeupion Field Theory, by which I hope to power up the Anti-Smite Shields.”

  I thought for a moment. Although I didn’t have a clue how her ideas worked, I knew what they did—kind of—and could understand their importance.

  “The work on predicting the chaotic was your breakout paper,” I said, “so you should allude to that, I think. I’m not sure about the Anti-Smite device. After all, we’ve yet to see it work. What about your pioneering work on finding a way by which people can tickle themselves? That was pretty groundbreaking.”

  “You’re right,” she said, “it still needs work, but once self-tickling is possible, the home-entertainment and psychotherapy industries can take a running jump. I’ve already had a call from Cosmos Pictures asking if I wouldn’t consider dropping the research in exchange for a signed picture of Buck Stallion and a walk-on part in Bonzo—the Movie.”

  “Meeting Bonzo could be cool,” I said, as the long-running TV series was very much a cultural icon, “but to be honest, being asked to do the keynote speech at MadCon is probably more about saying a few jokes and getting the delegates in a good mood than delivering a doctoral thesis.”

  “You’re right. I could do the joke about the three paradigm shifts at the races. That always brings the house down. Will Dad come?”

  “He won’t miss it for the world, although one of us should stay back to keep an eye on Jenny.”

  “The Wingco can look after her,” replied Tuesday. “They get on very well together. You know how he likes to talk about the power of the imagination and how it has the potential to make things real.”

  “Only too well,” I replied. “Dinner at seven, Sweetpea.”

  8.

  Monday: Friday

  The danger from Asteroid HR-6984 was first noted in 1855, when calculations showed this to be the same asteroid that was observed in both 1793 and 1731 and was missing the earth by the astronomical equivalent of a coat of paint every sixty-two years. Observations during the last flyby in 1979 proved what scientists had already feared: that the Isle of Wight–size lump of debris was traveling at over forty-two thousand miles per hour and would one day strike earth. The question of whether it would or not in 2041 was calculated by the International Asteroid Risk Likelihood Calculation Committee to be “around 34 percent.”

  Dr. S. A. Orbiter, The Earthcrossers

  "I spoke to Braxton Hicks today,” I said as Friday and I went into the dining room to set the table. “He tells me his daughter, Imogen, is looking for a ‘steady hand on the tiller.’ I said I’d mention it to you.”

  “I don’t need my mother to set me up on dates,” he retorted.

  “Besides, Mimi is totally bonkers. She surfed on the roof of a speeding car between junctions thirteen and fourteen of the M4. How insane do you have to be to do something like that? If she’d slipped, she’d have killed herself instantly.”

  “You need a careful driver and soft-soled shoes,” I replied thoughtfully.

  Friday looked at me with horror. “You didn’t?”

  “I did. The flush of youth.”

  “Does Dad know about this?”

  “I think he was driving.”

  “For God’s sake, Mother,” he said in an exasperated tone, “is there nothing dumb, daft or dangerous that you haven’t tried at some point?”

  I thought for a moment. “I’ve never tried oysters. They can be quite dangerous.’

  Friday shook his head sadly. To most of his and Tuesday’s friends, I was considered about the coolest parent one could have, but to Tuesday and Friday I was simply embarrassing.

  “So . . . how many are we for supper?” he asked, counting out the cutlery.

  “Joffy and Miles are in town and want to speak to your sister about the defense shield. All of us, of course, but maybe not Polly or Gran. Granddad will be coming.”

  “Do you think he will want to talk endlessly about the good old never-happened days at the ChronoGuard?”

  “Probably. Try to steer him onto plumbing. Which reminds me, Jimmy-G and Shazza both wanted to be remembered to you. Shazza said, ‘It would have been seriously good.’ And she raised her eyebrows in that sort of way when she said ‘seriously.’”

  “Sharon ‘Steggo’ deWitt,” he murmured with a smile. “She would have been known as the ‘Scourge of the Upper Jurassic.’”

  “Curiosity insists that I inquire why.”

  “It was a popular place for timejackers to hang out. The Epochal Badlands, we would have called them. A jump into the Upper Jurassic was usually a safe escape. Not for deWitt. Twenty million years, and she knew each hour like the back of her hand. She was the one who tracked down ‘Fingers’ Lomax, hiding out after the Helium Heist of ’09. Or at least she would have.”

  “She said you were going to have a weekend retreat in the Late Pleistocene.”

  “I was going to have a lot of things. She and I would have been very close, so I got some of her potential future in my own Letter of Destiny. How will she turn out now?”

  “Not grea
t,” I replied, handing him the forks. “Two unremarkable kids, a husband she doesn’t like—and then she gets hit by a car in 2041.”

  “Same year as me,” mused Friday.

  I stopped folding the napkins. “You never told me you only make it to fifty-five.”

  “Bummer, isn’t it?” said Friday with a shrug. “Thirty-seven years to go and counting.”

  I stared at him for a while and felt a heavy feeling of grief in my heart. It was over three decades away, so I didn’t feel the loss quite yet, just the notion that I was going to outlive him. And that wasn’t how it was meant to happen.

  “But there’s an upside,” he added.

  “There is?”

  “Sure. I miss HR-6984 slamming into the earth by three days.”

  “That might not happen.”

  “I’ll never know whether it does or it doesn’t.”

  “What else happens to you?”

  “My future’s my own, Mum.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said quickly, since we’d covered this ground before, “forget I asked. Have you thought any more about university or a career?”

  “No.”

  I pondered for a moment.

  “You know, your sister needs a lab assistant she can trust,” I said, “and she’ll pay you well. There’s a career there ready and waiting.”

  “Mum, Tuesday’s work is Tuesday’s work. My life lies along a different path. I was going to be important—I was going to do wonderful things. I would have been head of the ChronoGuard and saved an aggregate seventy-six billion lives. Shazza and I would have made love on the veranda of my place in the Pleistocene while the mastodons bellowed at one another across the valley. I would have been there at Mahatma Winston Smith Al-Wazeed’s historic speech to the citizens of the world state at Europolis in 3419, and listened to his last words as he lay dying in my arms, and then implemented them. But now I don’t. All gone. Not going to happen. Mum, I don’t have any function. No kids, no wife, no achievements, nothing. I die aged fifty-five, my life essentially . . . wasted.”

  There was silence for a moment. We stopped setting the table, and I gave him a hug. One of those strong Mum hugs that always do some good, no matter how bad things happen to be.

  “Listen,” I said, “you don’t know for certain there are no good times. They didn’t give you a full view of the future, did they?”

  “No,” he said, “it’s always a summary. A side of letter-size paper on what we would have done and the same again of what we will. An entire life compressed into barely five hundred words.”

  “Right,” I said, “so you don’t know for certain you won’t a have a few boffo laughs and some good times, now, do you?”

  “What’s going on?” asked Landen, who happened to be walking past the open door of the dining room.

  “Friday’s lost his life function,” I said.

  “He looks fairly alive to me.”

  “No, no, his purpose. His raison d’être.”

  “Everyone has a function,” said Landen, coming in to lay a comforting hand on his son’s shoulder, “even if he doesn’t know what it is. Some of us are lucky enough to have a clear function. I wasn’t sure what mine was for a while, until I realized it was to support your mother—and make sure you and Tuesday survived into adulthood.”

  “Don’t forget Jenny,” I said.

  “Yeah, her, too. Yours might not be obvious right now or even known—but it’s there. Everyone has a function. A small role to play in the bigger picture.”

  Friday detached himself from my arms and continued to set the table. “You’re wrong, both of you. Here’s the thing: My life didn’t even warrant a full sheet of paper. This Friday at 1402 and four seconds, I murder someone. I’m in custody by the evening. In three months’ time, I’m sentenced to twenty-two years in the clink. Fifteen years into my sentence, I stab Danny ‘The Horse’ Bomperini to death in the prison laundry. It was self-defense but the courts don’t see it that way. My sentence is extended. I finally get out on February first, 2041. A few days later, I’m found in the car park of Sainsbury’s. It looks like they used a baseball bat, and the police never find who did it.”

  There was silence. It explained the sullen mood he’d been in ever since his future had arrived from the Union of Federated Timeworkers.

  “My money’s on the Bomperini family,” said Landen thoughtfully. “Payback for offing the Horse, y’know.”

  “Landen!” I scolded. “This is serious shit we’re talking here.”

  “I beg to differ, wifey darling,” he replied emphatically, “but it’s not. You can change it. The Standard History Eventline’s not fixed. If we’ve learned anything over the past two decades, it’s precisely that. Yes, it follows a general course that remains the same, but detail can be changed. We’ve all altered the future— and the past, on occasion—and so can he.”

  “I could,” replied Friday, “but I have this strange feeling that I won’t. That I’ll let it go ahead.”

  There was a pause.

  “Do you know who you’re going to murder on Friday?”

  “Yes. It’s . . . Gavin Watkins.”

  “Gavin Watkins?”

  “Do you know him?” Lande asked me.

  “A boy in Tuesday’s year,” I replied, “not very pleasant. He paid fifty p to see her boobs.”

  “I might have to kill him myself,” said Landen. “Does that have something to do with it?” he asked Friday.

  “I don’t think so,” said Friday with a shrug, “but I’m amazed she didn’t hold out for at least a pound.”

  “Market forces,” I observed. “We’ve already established that the boob-flashing market isn’t what it used to be. But we can warn the Watkinses. Have him taken into protective custody or something.”

  “I’ve got four days,” said Friday, “so we might learn some more before it happens. Who else did you say sent their regards to me?”

  “ Jimmy-G at TJ-Maxx,” I replied. “He’s setting up a Destiny Aware Support Group for those who have been summarized, and he wanted to know if you would attend. Eight P.M. at the sports center tomorrow.”

  “I’m not really into support groups,” Friday grumbled. “Are we going to get this table set or not?”

  So we did, and chatted of lighter things, such as Friday’s part-time job at B&Q and whether his fellow workers actively pursued a policy of looking busy when customers needed assistance.

  “It’s the first thing we learn,” he said. “But you have to remember that most customers are as dumb as pig shit and couldn’t find the floor if they fell on it, so there’s a sound reason behind it.”

  Once the table was set, Friday went off to tinker with his motorbike, and Landen and I managed to have a few words in the kitchen together. Friday’s future looked bleak, but he was right— we’d changed the timeline before and could do it again.

  “What do you think Gavin Watkins will do to make Friday murder him, just supposing he does?” asked Landen.

  “What could a sixteen-year-old do?” I replied.

  We thought for a moment.

  “Do we intervene?” said Landen.

  “We can try,” I said, “but the eventline can be a tricksy beast. Push it too hard and it will push back—and almost guarantee that you complete the event you were trying to avoid.”

  “It’s annoying,” said Landen.

  “What is?”

  “I thought we’d seen the back of all this time-travel nonsense.”

  “Even when it’s not there,” I murmured, “it still is.”

  “Like forgotten dreams,” said Landen.

  9.

  Monday: The Madeupion

  Thursday’s father was a retired ChronoGuard operative whose nebulous state of semiexistence was finally resolved when the time engines at Kemble were disabled. As part of the downstream erasure of the fact that there had ever been a time industry, his career had been replaced with something immeasurably more mundane. He was, and now had always be
en, a plumber. Only one with no name, which made paying by check somewhat tiffy and word-of-mouth recommendations almost impossible. But despite his new past, he also kept the old one. Few of us are so lucky as to draw experience from two lives.

  Millon de Floss, Thursday Next: A Biography

  As it turned out, we were eight for dinner. Landen and myself, obviously, and Friday and Tuesday, equally obviously. My brother Joffy and his partner, Miles, also made it, as did my dad. Mum and Polly, more inseparable as the years went by, were going to listen to the live studio taping of Avoid the Question Time. The Wing Commander would always sit down to talk, but he never ate as he didn’t need to, being fictional. Jenny would have been there—for the starters at any rate—but still had the flu and so was confined to her room.

  But Friday was right. My father did want to talk about matters ChronoGuard.

  “Get your future in the post?” he asked, sitting down next to his grandson.

  “Last week.”

  “Any good?”

  “It’ll be . . . challenging.”

  My father had also worked in the time industry, but unlike Friday, who now no longer had the future he was going to have, my father no longer had the past to which he was entitled. ChronoGuard agents who were active during the shutdown were offered a replacement past career to replace their theoretically unsustainable ones, and most chose something in the arts, sciences or politics. My father, ever the maverick, had opted for a fifty-seven-year career in plumbing. The reason, he stated, was so his new memories would have him at home as much as possible, to better reminisce about his family. This worked well for him, but not for us—we retained only those memories of his first career as a time-traveling knight-errant. As far as we were concerned, he’d turned up the day after the time engines were shut down, full of fond memories of us that we couldn’t remember but he could— sort of like having an aged parent with a bad memory, only the other way round.

  “Challenging is good,” said Dad. “I used to take your mother and her brothers on long hiking holidays in Scotland. Now, that was challenging. Do you remember that time when we got lost on Ben Nevis, Thursday, and had to be rescued by several men in beards, all of whom smelled of pipe tobacco and York Peppermint Patty?”