Authors: Jasper Fforde
“Anyone home?” shouted Jack through the open door.
“I’m on the flight deck!” said a voice that echoed down through the flying boat.
Jack stepped inside the hull and picked his way over the heaps of building materials and rolls of insulation that were piled up inside the cavernous hull. She had as yet converted only the prow. Jack climbed the spiral staircase to the navigator’s office that Mary used as a kitchen.
“There’s some coffee on the stove!” she called out. He helped himself and joined her on the flight deck, a large room roofed in sun-clouded Plexiglas. Mary was sitting in the left-hand seat with her feet up on the remains of the instrument panel.
“Good morning,” said Jack. “How’s the acting head of the NCD?”
“She’s fine,” replied Mary with a smile. “How’s the NCD’s unofficial full-time consultant?”
“He’s all right.”
Jack sat down on the copilot’s seat and balanced his mug on the throttle quadrant. They were at least twelve feet above the water level and were afforded a good view of the lake. To the left of them they could see Captain Nemo hanging up his socks on a makeshift washing line strung between the conning tower and tail of his rusty craft, and to their right was the lake, a full mile of open water, the glassy surface interrupted only by the marker buoys for the dinghy racing. It was quiet and peaceful, and Jack could see why people would forgo the luxuries of land-based dwelling for a life on the water.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” murmured Mary. “I wouldn’t live anywhere else for all the money there is.”
Jack took a swig of coffee. “I think you’re right. Me, I’d worry about the kids falling in the drink.”
“If you brought them up to regard water the same way as they regard roads, I don’t think you’d have a problem.”
“I suppose so.”
“Everything okay at the office?” asked Jack.
“Fine. We were sorting through the statements for the Scissor-man’s pretrial hearing after you left. The prosecution has asked for more witnesses and the thumbless victims of previous scissorings to try to create a cast-iron case against him.”
“Anything else?”
“I think Ashley was serious about that date.”
Jack shrugged. “So? It only has to be a drink or something.”
“
Do
aliens drink?” she asked, not really knowing much about Rambosians, never having really considered them at all. “I mean, what if he tries to kiss me or something?”
“Then call it off. After all, you’re something of an expert when it comes to wriggling out of dates.”
Mary smiled. “I am, aren’t I? So… what’s with this early visit, Jack?”
“I bumped into Josh Hatchett at the Déjà Vu last night.”
She made a face. “What joy. I hope you wished him all the worst.”
“He has a missing sister.”
“If I were his sister, I’d post myself missing, too.”
“And we’re going to find her.”
Mary stared at him. “We’re going to help the person instrumental in your enforced sick leave and effective demotion? Who got you reprimanded over the Scissor-man case? Are you nuts?”
“Yes, yes and quite possibly, in that order. Look upon it as a long-term strategic operation to bring about a quantum change in press relations as regards the continuing effectiveness of the NCD.”
“We’re cozying up to Josh to get better press coverage?”
“More or less. I think it might be an NCD case. Her name’s Goldilocks.”
“So? She could be
a
Goldilocks, not
the
Goldilocks. There’s probably hundreds of people with that name.”
“We have a vague bear connection—and she’s fussy.”
“Ah. A not-too-hot-not-too-cold-just-right sort of fussy?”
“In one. She may have found out some answers about the blast at Obscurity and three other unexplained explosions around the globe.” He handed her the manila folder that Josh had given him.
“Hmm,” she said, looking at the “Important” written on the front, “this could be important.”
“I did that joke already.”
“Sorry.”
She opened the folder. It contained newspaper clippings. The most recent explosion was at Obscurity, and it had attracted a lot of competing theories from news sources of varying reliability. The Obscurity “event” had been catnip for conspiracy theorists, who generally liked things going bang for no clearly explained reason. Mary flicked through the clippings to find an article about a detonation in the Nullarbor Plain, a lonely area in the vast emptiness of the Australian desert.
“September 1992,” she observed, “twelve years ago.”
“The Australian government denied that any tests had been undertaken,” said Jack, who had been reading the clippings the previous evening, “and no explanation was forthcoming.”
Mary turned over another clipping to reveal a faxed extract from the
Pasadena Herald
dated March 1999. It, too, described an explosion, this time in a neighborhood on the edge of town. The detonation had shattered windows up to three miles away and tossed debris over a thousand feet into the air. The owner of the house, who died, had been retired mathematician Howard Katzenberg. There were more clippings about a blast in Tunbridge Wells, where someone named Simon Prong had perished in an unexplained fireball, and that was it. Four explosions with no link that they could see other than that they were all reported as “strange” or “unexplained.”
“What do you think?” asked Mary.
“No idea. Josh seemed to think she was looking for a link between them.”
“And how is this related to bears?”
“I’m not sure. On Monday she meets up with Cripps in Obscurity. Six hours later he’s dead in the blast. She tells her brother she’s onto something big, and he last hears from her Thursday afternoon.”
Mary shrugged. “She might be on holiday.”
“And she might not.”
They both sat in silence and watched a pair of swans attempt a long and slow takeoff from the surface of the lake. As soon as they were airborne, they landed again with a flurry of spray. It seemed a lot of effort to travel three hundred yards.
“I don’t like station politics,” said Mary a half hour later. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Listen: The longer that twit Copperfield is playing hunt-the-cookie, the more victims there will be. Look upon it as a back door to the natural order of things.”
“I don’t like it, Jack.”
“It’s NCD, Mary. It’s what we do.”
“No, I mean I don’t like your car.”
They were driving across Reading toward Shiplake and the industrial unit that Tarquin had told them was the place where he had picked up the porridge oats. It was the first time that Mary had driven the new Allegro.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Couldn’t I explain what’s
right
with it? It’ll take a lot less time. Why don’t you get a proper car?”
“A car without porous alloy wheels that let the tires go flat overnight?” asked Jack, smiling. “A car whose drag coefficient is better forward than in reverse? A car whose rear window doesn’t pop out when you jack up the back tires?”
“Anything. I’d prefer to be seen in a wheelbarrow.”
“It could be arranged.”
They picked up Ashley, who was waiting for them at a prearranged street corner. He wished Mary a very good morning and inquired meticulously after her health, and Jack smiled to himself. Quite unlike Mary, Ashley was dead impressed with his new Allegro, and since he had memorized all the chassis numbers of every British car built between the years 1956 and 1985, he could proudly announce that the car came off the production line at Long-bridge on September 10, 1979.
“Really?” said Jack, amazed at Ashley’s ability to recall utterly pointless facts. “How do you remember all this stuff?”
“Very easily,” he replied with a shrug. “Humans rely on a pattern of charged neurons to build up a picture that is revived by association. If the memory is not recalled now and again, it fades—if it is retained at all. Our memory works
quite
differently. Every image, fact or sound is translated to binary notation and then stored in molecular on/off gates within the liquid interior of our bodies. Since each teaspoon of
rambosia vitae
contains more molecular gates than there are visible stars, the extent of our memory is extraordinarily large. Best of all, we can erase what we don’t need. Important memories are stored near our core, but the boring stuff migrates to the extremities. If we run out of memory, we simply reformat an arm.”
“You best be careful not to delete the wrong arm,” said Jack with a smile.
“Even if I did,” replied Ashley without seeing the joke, “I’d be okay—I’ve got my core memories backed up at home in a jar.”
They pulled up outside the Shiplake industrial estate office a few minutes later.
“I’ll have a word with the site manager,” said Mary, and she climbed out of the car. Jack and Ashley sat there in silence for a while, Jack thinking about how he was going to pass the psychological appraisal that he’d arranged for that afternoon. He’d only have to outline a typical case to a police shrink to be branded B-4: “unfit for duty on mental grounds.”
Ashley, on the other hand, had no particular worries—few Rambosians ever did. He was amusing himself by calculating the cube root to eight decimal places of every number under a million, and when he’d done that, he said, “Sergeant Mary is very attractive in a pink, fleshy, hairy, forgetful sort of way.”
“I never thought of Mary as hairy,” admitted Jack.
“Oh, it’s strictly relative,” said Ashley, whose own skin was totally hairless, pliant and shiny, a bit like a transparent beach ball.
“Do you think she’s really over this Arnold chap?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that
he
doesn’t seem to be able to understand no and
she
doesn’t seem to be able to stop wanting to tell him.”
“It all sounds very complicated,” said the alien. “Where I come from, we just agree to a mutual memory erasure, and neither of us knows we’ve even met. In fact, it’s possible to fall in love with someone you once hated—several thousand times.”
“Ash,” said Jack, unable to contain his curiosity any longer.
“Yes?”
“How do aliens… do it?”
“Do what?”
“You know. It.
Thing.
Have babies.”
“We don’t have babies. Humans have babies.”
“You know what I mean—
reproduce.
”
“We swap egg and sperm sacs,” he said matter-of-factly and without the slightest trace of embarrassment. “We can do it by mail if we wish, and the sacs will keep in a dry airing cupboard for anything up to nine centuries—it’s very convenient.”
“It must be,” replied Jack.
“What about you?” asked Ashley. “How do mammals propagate?”
As Jack told him, the few features Ashley did have scrunched into the vague semblance of a frown. When Jack had finished, Ashley gave out a laugh that was something very like the noise a squeaky toy makes when someone heavy sits on it, and he said, “Get
out
of here! What utter nonsense—you think I was hatched yesterday?”
“It’s true.”
“It is?” replied Ashley, his eyes opening wide in a mixture of wonderment and shock. “And the baby comes out
where?
”
Luckily, Mary had returned to the car.
“Rented to a company named Three Monkeys Trading. A ‘Mr. Guy Gorilla’ signed a three-year contract eighteen months ago.”
“Much traffic?”
“For all he’s seen of them, he said, it might as well be the Tooth Fairy who leased it.”
“It won’t be her,” said Jack after giving the matter some thought. “She’s doing four years in Holloway over that regrettable incident with the pliers.”
“What do you want to do?” asked Mary.
“We’ll take a look.”
They drove on into the industrial estate. Unit sixteen was sandwiched between a cut-price carpet showroom and a motorcycle-repair specialist. The windows were grimy and unwashed, and even up close it was difficult to see inside. Jack consulted the entry-code numbers Tarquin had jotted down and punched them into the keypad. There was a soft click and a buzz, and the door swung open.
They stepped into the gloom, and Jack hit the switch. The strip lights flickered on to reveal a lot of not very much at all. The unit was deserted apart from a Dumpster full of rubbish.
“If this is used as a distribution warehouse, they’re a bit low on stock,” murmured Jack.
“But they
were
here,” replied Mary, showing him a couple of rolled oats that had been trodden into the dust on the floor, “so Tarquin wasn’t lying.”