Something rotten (37 page)

It was in a glorious location, right on the edge of the reservoir. But from what we had been led to expect from Millon’s hyperactive imagination and a tatty photograph taken in its heyday, it was something of a disappointment. The plant had once been a vast, sprawling complex, built in the art deco style popular for factories in the thirties, but now it looked as though a hurried and not entirely successful effort had been made to demolish it a long time ago. Although much of the building had been destroyed or collapsed, the east wing looked as though it had survived relatively unscathed. Even so, it didn’t appear that anyone had been there for years, if not decades.

“What was that?” said Millon.

“What was what?”

“A sort of
yummy
noise.”

“Hopefully just the wind. Let’s have a closer look at the plant.” We motored down the hill and parked in front of the building. The front facade was still imposing, though half collapsed, and even retained much of the ceramic tile exterior and decoration. Clearly Goliath had great things planned for this place. We picked our way amongst the rubble that lay strewn across the steps and approached the main doors. They had both been pushed off their hinges, and one of them had large gouge marks, something that Millon was most interested in. I stepped inside. Broken furniture and fallen masonry lay everywhere in the oval lobby. The once fine suspended glass ceiling had long since collapsed, bringing natural light to an otherwise gloomy interior. The glass squeaked and cracked as we stepped across it.

“Where are the main labs?” I asked, not wanting to be here a minute longer than I had to.

Millon unfolded a blueprint.

“Where do you get all this stuff?” asked Bowden incredulously.

“I swapped it for a Cairngorm yeti’s foot,” he replied, as though talking about bubble-gum cards. “It’s this way.”

We walked through the building, amongst more fallen masonry and partially collapsed ceilings towards the relatively undamaged east wing. The roof was more intact here, and our torches flicked into offices and incubating rooms where rows upon rows of abandoned glass amniojars were lined up against the wall. In many of them, the liquefied remnant of a potential life-form had pooled in the bottom. Goliath had left in a hurry.

“What was this place?” I asked, my voice barely louder than a whisper.

“This was,” muttered Millon, consulting his blueprint, “the main saber-toothed tiger manufacturing facility. The neanderthal wing should be through there and the first on the left.”

The door was locked and bolted, but it was dry and rotten, and it didn’t take much to force it open. There were papers scattered everywhere, and a halfhearted attempt had been made to destroy them. We stopped at the doorway and let Stiggins walk in alone. The room was about a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide. It was similar to the tiger facility next door, but the amniojars were larger. The glass nutrient pipes were still in evidence, and I shivered. To me the room was undeniably creepy, but to Stig it was his first home. He, along with many thousands of his fellow extinctees, had been grown here. I had sequenced Pickwick at home using nothing more complex than average kitchen utensils and cultivated her in a denucleated goose egg. Birds and reptiles were one thing, umbilical cultivation of mammals quite another. Stig trod carefully amongst the twisted pipes and broken glass to a far door and found the decanting room, where the infant neanderthals were taken out of their amniojars and breathed for the first time. Beyond this the nursery, where the young had been brought up. We followed Stig through, and he stood at the large window that overlooked the reservoir.

“When we dream, it is of this,” he said quietly. Then, obviously feeling that he was wasting time, he strode back to the incubating room and started rummaging in filing cabinets and desk drawers. I told him we’d meet him outside and rejoined Millon, who was trying to make sense of his floor plan.

After walking in silence through several more rooms with even more ranks of amniojars, we arrived at a steel-gated secure area. The gate was open, and we stepped through, entering what had once been the most secret area of the entire plant.

A dozen or more paces farther on, the corridor led into a large hall, and we knew we had found what we had been looking for. Built within the large room was a full-scale copy of the Globe Theatre. The stage and groundling area were strewn with torn-out pages of Shakespeare’s plays, heavily annotated in black ink. In a room leading off, we found a dormitory that might have contained two hundred beds. All the bedding was upended in a corner, the bedsteads broken and lying askew.

“How many do you think went through here?” asked Bowden in a whisper.

“Hundreds and hundreds,” replied Millon, holding up a battered copy of
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
with the name “Shaxpreke, W, 769” written on the inside front cover. He shook his head sadly.

“What happened to them all?”

“Dead,” said a voice, “dead as a ducat!”

33.

Shgakespeafe

“All the World’s a Stage,” Claims Playwright

That was the analogy of life offered by Mr. William Shakespeare yesterday when his latest play opened at the Globe. Mr. Shakespeare went on to further compare plays with the seven stages of life by declaring “all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts.” Mr. Shakespeare’s latest offering, a comedy entitled
As You Like It,
opened to mixed reviews with the
ƒouth-wark Gazette
calling it “a rollicking comedy of the highest order,” while the
Westminster Evening News
described it as “tawdry rubbish from the Warwickshire shithouse.” Mr. Shakespeare declined to comment, as he is already penning a follow-up.

Article in
Blackfriars News,
September 1589

W
e turned to find a small man with wild, unkempt hair standing at the doorway. He was dressed in Elizabethan clothes that had seen far better days, and his feet were bound with strips of cloth as makeshift shoes. He twitched nervously, and one eye was closed—but beyond this the similarity to the Shakespeares Bowden had found was unmistakable. A survivor. I took a step closer. His face was lined and weathered, and those teeth he still possessed were stained dark brown and worn. He must have been at least seventy, but it didn’t matter. The genius that had been Shakespeare had died in 1616, but genetically speaking, he was with us right now.

“William Shakespeare?”

“I
am
a William, sir, and my name is Shgakespeafe,” he corrected.

“Mr. Shgakespeafe,” I began again, unsure of how to explain exactly what I wanted, “my name is Thursday Next, and I have a Danish prince urgently in need of your help.”

He looked from me to Bowden to Millon and back to me again. Then a smile broke across his weathered features.

“O wonder!” he said at last. “How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world that has such people in’t!”

He stepped forward and shook our hands warmly; it didn’t look as though he had seen anyone for a while.

“What happened to the others, Mr. Shgakespeafe?”

He beckoned us to follow him and then was off like a gazelle. We had a hard job keeping up with him as he darted down the labyrinthine corridors, nimbly avoiding the rubbish and broken equipment. We caught up with him when he stopped at a smashed window that overlooked what had once been a large exercise compound. In the middle were two grassy mounds. It didn’t take a huge amount of imagination to guess what was underneath them.

“O heart, heavy heart, why sigh’st thou without breaking?” murmured Shgakespeafe sorrowfully. “After the slaughter of so many peers by falsehood and by treachery, when will our great regenitors be conquered?”

“I only wish I could say your brothers would be avenged,” I told him sadly, “but in all honesty, the men who did this are now dead themselves. I can only offer yourself and those who survive my protection.”

He took in every word carefully and seemed impressed by my candor. I looked beyond the mass graves of the Shakespeares to several other mounds beyond. I had thought they might have cloned two dozen or so, not hundreds.

“Are there any other Shakespeares here?” asked Bowden.

“Only myself—yet the night echoes with the cries of my
cousins,
” replied Shgakespeafe. “You will hear them anon.”

As if in answer, there was a strange cry from the hills. We had heard something like it when Stig dispatched the chimera back in Swindon.

“We are not safe, Clarence, we are not safe,” he said, looking around nervously. “Follow me and give me audience, friends.”

Shgakespeafe led us along the corridor and into a room that was full of desks set neatly in rows, each with a typewriter upon it. Only one typewriter was anything like still functioning; around it stood stacks and stacks of typewritten sheets of paper—the product of Shgakespeafe’s outpourings. He led us across and gave us some of his work to read, looking on expectantly as our eyes scanned the writing. It was, disappointingly, nothing special at all—merely scraps of existing plays cobbled together to give new meaning. I tried to imagine the whole room full of Shakespeare clones clattering away at their typewriters, their minds filled with the Bard’s plays, and scientists moving amongst them trying to find one, just
one,
who had even one half the talent of the original.

Shgakespeafe beckoned us to the office next to the writing room, and there he showed us mounds and mounds of paperwork, all packaged in brown paper with the name of the Shakespeare clone who had written it printed on a label. As the production of writing outstripped the ability to evaluate it, the people working here could only file what had been written and then store it for some unknown employee in the future to peruse. I looked again at the piles of paperwork. There must have been twenty tons or more in the storeroom. There was a hole in the roof, and the rain had got in; much of this small mountain of prose was damp, moldy and unstable.

“It would take an age to sort through it for anything of potential brilliance,” mused Bowden, who had arrived by my side. Perhaps, ultimately, the experiment had succeeded. Perhaps there
was
an equal of Shakespeare buried in the mass grave outside, his work somewhere deep within the mountain of unintelligible prose facing us. It was unlikely we would ever know, and if we did, it would teach us nothing new—except that it could be done and others might try. I hoped the mound of paperwork would just slowly rot. In the pursuit of great art, Goliath had perpetrated a crime that far outstripped anything I had so far seen.

Millon took pictures, his flashgun going off in the dim interior of the scriptorium. I shivered and decided I needed to get away from the oppressiveness of the interior. Bowden and I walked to the front of the building and sat amongst the rubble on the front steps, just next to a fallen statue of Socrates that held a banner proclaiming the value of the pursuit of knowledge.

“Do you think we’ll have trouble persuading Shgakespeafe to come with us?” he asked.

As if in answer, Shgakespeafe walked cautiously from the building. He carried a battered suitcase and blinked in the harsh sunlight. Without waiting to be asked, he got into the back of the car and started to scribble in a notebook with a pencil stub.

“Does that answer your question?”

The sun dropped below the hill in front of us, and the air suddenly felt colder. Every time there was a strange noise from the hills, Shgakespeafe jumped and looked around nervously, then continued to scribble. I was just about to fetch Stig when he appeared from the building carrying three enormous leatherbound volumes.

“Did you find what you needed?”

He passed me the first book, which I opened at random. It was, I discovered, a Goliath BioTech manual for building a neanderthal. The page I had selected gave a detailed description of the neanderthal hand.

“A complete manual,” he said slowly. “With it we can make children.”

I handed back the volume, and he placed it with the others in the boot of the car just as there was another unearthly wail in the distance.

“A deadly groan,” muttered Shgakespeafe, sitting lower in his seat, “like life and death’s departing!”

“We had better get going,” I said. “There is something out there, and I’ve a feeling we should leave before it gets too inquisitive.”

“Chimera?” asked Bowden. “To be honest, we’ve seen the grand total of none from the moment we came in here.”

“We do not see them because they do not wish to be seen,” observed Stig. “There is chimera here.
Dangerous
chimera.”

“Thanks, Stig,” said Millon, dabbing his brow with a handkerchief, “that’s a real help.”

“It is the truth, Mr. de Floss.”

“Well, keep the truth to yourself in future.”

I shut the rear door as soon as Stig had wedged himself in next to Shgakespeafe, and then I climbed into the front passenger seat. Bowden drove off as rapidly as the car would allow.

“Millon, is there any other route out that doesn’t take us through that heavily wooded area where we found the other cars?”

He consulted the map for a moment. “No. Why?”

“Because it looked like a good place for an ambush.”

“This really gets better and better, doesn’t it?”

“On the contrary,” replied Stig, who took all speech on face value, “this is not good at all. We find the prospect of being eaten by chimeras extremely awkward.”

“Awkward?” echoed Millon. “Being eaten is
awkward?
”

“Indeed,” said Stig, “the neanderthal instruction manuals are far more important than we.”

“That’s
your
opinion,” retorted Millon. “Right now there is nothing more important than me.”

“How very
human,
” replied Stig simply.