My Hero (3 page)

Well
, read the screen,
I've been a fan of your stuff for ages
now. I think you characters are, you know, neat. My kind of people
.

‘Thank you.'

‘I see.'

Say it myself as shouldn't
, the screen read,
I do have a certain following. Just think how it looks to the boys and girls out there. Like for instance, there's the bit where I come up unexpectedly on the bad guy in the chapel?

‘I know the bit you mean.'

‘Um . . .'

And the women
, the screen continued, the words flashing up like a huge flock of rooks startled off a ploughed field.
Don't get me wrong, but they're just not my type. Not like the birds in your stuff. I mean, you wouldn't dream of pairing your hero off with some droopy bit with tits like goosepimples who goes around talking to the flowers, now would you?

‘Thank you,' said Jane. ‘I'll let you know.'

‘Goodbye.' She switched the machine off and pulled out the disk. As she did so, the printer suddenly screamed into life, shuttled the daisywheel a few times and went back to sleep. Jane pulled out the paper.

I ALSO DO COMEDY
, it read.
AND BAR MITZ-VAHS
.

Having binned the page, switched on again and deleted yesterday's effort, Jane sat for a moment, wondering what the hell she was supposed to do now. A long time ago she had decided that writing was like the school holidays: a noisy cluster of whining voices, saying that they're bored and demanding that she find them something to do.That's the trouble with characters. No bloody initiative.

 

Skinner leaned back against the rock, feeling dazed and extremely foolish, as befits a man who's just shot his own villain.

‘Told you,' crowed the Scholfield in his hand. ‘Piece of duff, I said. Easy as falling off a—'

‘Oh sure,' Skinner snapped. ‘Nothing to it really LaForce shoots, nearly takes my head off; I stagger back in terror, accidentally jarring my hand against the rock; you go off; the bullet ricochets off his left stirrup-iron, his belt-buckle, the other guy's wooden leg and a flat stone, and ends up going straight through the back of his head, thus producing the only known instance of a man being shot from behind by someone standing directly in front of him. I do that sort of thing for a pastime.'

‘Well,' sniffed the Scholfield, ‘on page 86 of
Painted Saddles
, you have the hero shoot at the villain's reflection in a mirror, through two locked doors and a piano.'

‘Yes,' Skinner shouted, ‘but that's
fiction
!'

‘So's this.'

Skinner sat down heavily and stared mournfully at the corpses littering the canyon floor. ‘Yes,' he muttered soberly, ‘I guess it is, at that.'

A revolver can't frown, but someone with an excessively vivid imagination might have thought he saw the trigger guard pucker slightly. ‘I don't know why you've suddenly come over all droopy,' the gun said. ‘Thought
you'd be pleased, your worst enemy dead and all. Should make life a bit easier all round.'

A bullet sang off the rock, six inches or so above Skinner's head. He jerked sideways, tripped over his feet and fell behind a small, round boulder.

‘You reckon?' he said.

‘Who the hell's that?'

‘This is pure conjecture on my part,' Skinner replied, ‘but maybe it's one of the posse members who rode away when you started shooting.'

‘And now you reckon they've come back.'

‘Fits all the known facts, don't you think?'

‘Yippee!'

An expression of revulsion passed over Skinner's face, and he glared at the pistol in his hand. ‘You bastard,' he said. ‘Don't you ever get tired of fighting?'

‘No. I'm a gun. Think about it.'

Skinner sighed. ‘Well,' he said, ‘I'm a human, and I do. Any ideas?'

The gun was silent for a moment.

‘You could try shooting back,' it said cheerfully.

‘I thought you'd say that.'

T
he pigeons were restless tonight.

They shifted uneasily on their perches as blue fangs of lightning gouged the night sky over the huddled suburbs of Dewsbury. Occasional flashes of livid incandescence, bright and sudden as a flashbulb, threw their long shadows against the far wall of Norman Frankenbotham's pigeon loft, making them look for all the world like roosting pterodactyls.

In his shed, Frankenbotham gazed up at the fury of the heavens through the thick lenses of his Specsavers reading glasses. He didn't smile - he was from Yorkshire, after all - but in some inner chamber of his heart he was satisfied. Very soon now, perhaps even tonight, and it would all be over.

He turned over the small brown paper parcel in his hands, noticing with dour approval the Sheffield post-mark, and then reached for a Stanley knife and started to cut through the packaging. It had taken him five years to find a lateral thermic transducer - five long years of combing the
Yellow Pages
, studying classified ads and newsagents' windows, enquiring in pubs and betting
shops the length and breadth of the three Ridings. Oh, he could have had one from Geneva or Kyoto by return of post, but that wouldn't have done at all. It would have defeated the whole object of the exercise.

Nothing but genuine parts. Genuine
Yorkshire
parts.

Six years ago, Norman Frankenbotham had sat in the stands at Headingley, watching the once invincible Yorkshire cricket team suffering ignominious defeat at the hands of some pack of Surrey mercenaries, captained by a renegade New Zealander; and he had sworn an oath by all his gods that he, personally, would do something about it. He would provide his country with the fast bowler they so desperately required.

Had he been thirty years younger, it would have been easy. Early morning training runs, hours of relentless practice in the nets behind the Alderman Dewhurst Memorial Pavilion, early nights and a diet of raw red meat, and he'd have done the job himself. But that was out of the question; and a few cursory inspections of the earring-wearing, gaudily-clad youths purporting to play cricket in the local parks and recreation grounds had convinced him that there was no hitherto undiscovered Trueman or Old waiting to be identified and brought to the attention of the selectors. In short, there was only one thing for it.

He'd have to make one. Out of bits.

Frankenbotham shook his head at the memory, and reached for a small screwdriver. Outside, the sky groaned like a great oak splitting in a hurricane. Calmly, he unscrewed an inspection panel and studied a wiring diagram.

Once the fateful decision had been taken, it had simply been a matter of applying himself and getting on with the
job. Six years, a broken marriage and his life savings later, he could see before him the final consummation of his dreams. A little solder, a few minor modifications, a lick of formaldehyde and a bloody great big bolt of lightning, and he'd be home and dry.

With a dispassionate eye he studied his creation, stretched out on the workbench in front of him, and came to a decision. He would call it, he decided, Stanley. Stanley Earnshaw.

Neatly, deftly, without hurrying, he soldered the last connector in place and screwed down the small metal plate to the back of Stanley's head. Five minutes with the formaldehyde bottle, a few last touches with the neutronic lancet - was he dawdling, he asked himself, finding things to do so as to postpone the moment of truth? - and a last systems check, ticking off each entry on the back of the dog-eared envelope that bore the master schematic; and he was ready. Slowly, his heart pounding, he taped the electrodes in place and waited.

A flash of lightning whitened out the world, and he counted - two, three, four - for the thunder. It was headed this way, getting nearer. Soon, soon. To occupy his mind, he checked the central neural directory one last time, flicking the feeler gauges in and out with the ease of long practice.
Flash!
one, two. The next one, he promised himself. The lightning was coming!

Steady, Norman lad, don't get carried away. With exaggerated care he armed the secondary relief circuits and engaged the main console. The air hummed and crackled.

First God, and now me, he thought. But God hadn't had to get all his supplies out of the back pages of the
Exchange and Mart
.

Now!
He could feel the lightning strike through the soles of his boots. With a quick, frantic movement he
threw the central switch, and was nearly thrown off his feet by the incredible surge of power running through the system. Fat worms of blue fire crawled up and down the wires connecting Stanley's wrists to the transformer. There was a sickening smell of burning.

‘Live!' he screamed. ‘Stanley, live! Stanley, tha daft bugger, get on wi' it!'

 

And God created Man in His own image.

God's image had been skilfully crafted for Him by Kraftig & Stein, public relations consultants to the
really
important (established -1). It had been a tricky assignment.

‘Sure,' the original Mr Stein had said, ‘we want omniscient. Sure, we want omnipresent and omnipotent. That's good. That's
you
. But is that going to be enough?'

‘Yeah.' Mr Stein put his fingertips together and leaned back in his chair. ‘Think about it. What I ask myself is, what does omnipotent
say
to me? What sort of aura has it got?'

‘Exactly,' interrupted Mr Kraftig, nodding. ‘Just what we were thinking. Which is why we think you should be more . . .'

The two image consultants exchanged the most fleeting of glances. They were, they knew, taking a risk here, but if you want to be known as daring and innovative, it goes with the territory.

‘More, kind of,
caring
,' cooed Mr Stein. ‘Compassionate. Accessible.'

‘Lovable.'

‘Cuddly.'

The burning bush arched two incandescent branches.
I SEE
.

Mr Kraftig took a deep breath. ‘Omniscient and omnipotent and omnipresent and stuff as well, of course. No question about that. We think you should be very big in all the omnis. But, at the same time . . .'

‘Cuddly.'

The bush crackled thoughtfully. This was, of course, probably the most significant pause in history.

I LIKE IT
.

‘That's great,' said Mr Stein, as the cosmos breathed a sigh of relief. ‘Now, as a first step . . .'

All that was, of course, a long time ago; to be precise, the breakfast meeting at 7 a.m. on the first day. The problems associated with creation have not, however, changed all that much since. In a sense, each subsequent act of creation has been a sort of rerun of the very first; a random dip into the Scrabble bag of potentiality, a wild guess in Destiny's endless game of Twenty Questions. The problem is, of course, that creation is irrevocable. Once a thing has been created, it's there, somewhere, for ever. No matter what you try and do about it subsequently, there'll always be some interfering bastard with an ark and a dove to make sure it survives.

 

Jane switched on and emptied her mind. Here, with nothing between her and her characters but a thin plate of glass and a few glowing green letters, she was once more alone and with nobody to turn to.

Well now, she thought. What the hell can I find for these idiots to do next?

She could feel the screen staring at her, like an over-efficient secretary waiting to take dictation from an unshaven, hung-over boss. She frowned.

Where the question came from, and what it was doing in her head in the first place, she had no idea. It ran
around inside her brain like an escaped dog, yapping and trailing its lead.

Profitable, she replied. I want this book to outsell David Eddings and Storm Constantine and Dragonlance
put together
. And that's all there is to it. Now, can we stop this nonsense and get on with some work, please?