The well of lost plots (19 page)

“Why?”

“For a date?”

“Good. What am I saying to him?”

Ibb and Obb thought hard. “If you didn’t want to see him, you’d have told him to go away, so you might be the tiniest bit interested.”

“Excellent!” I told them. “Let’s see what happens next.”

I opened the door again to a confused-looking Arnold, who broke into a wide smile.

“Well,” he said, “no message for Mary — it’s just — we had planned to see Willow Lodge and the Limes this evening . . .”

I turned to Ibb and Obb, who shook their heads. They didn’t believe it, either.

“Well,” said Arnold slowly, “. . . perhaps
you
might like to come with me to the concert?”

I shut the door again.

“He
pretended
to have the idea about going to see Willow Lodge tonight,” said Ibb slowly and more confidently, “when in fact I think he had it planned all along that way. I think he fancies you big time.”

I opened the door again.

“I’m sorry, no,” I told him hastily, “happily married.”

“It’s not a date,” exclaimed Arnold quickly, “just a lift to a concert. Here, take the ticket anyway. I’ve no one else to give it to; if you don’t want to go, just bin it.”

I shut the door again.

“Ibb’s wrong,” said Obb, “he
really
fancies you — but he’s blown it by being
too
desperate — it would be hard for you to respect someone who would almost start begging.”

“Not bad,” I replied, “let’s see how it turns out.”

I opened the door again and stared into Arnold’s earnest eyes.

“You miss her, don’t you?”

“Miss who?” asked Arnold, seemingly nonchalant.

“Denial of love!” yelled Ibb and Obb from behind me. “He doesn’t really fancy you at all — he’s in love with Mary and wants a date on the rebound!”

Arnold looked suspicious. “What’s going on?”

“Subtext classes,” I explained, “sorry for being rude. Do you want to come in for a coffee?”

“Well, I should be going really—”

“Playing hard to get!” hooted Ibb, and Obb added quickly, “The balance of power has tipped in his favor because you’ve been rude to him with all that door nonsense, and now you’re going to have to
insist
that he come in for coffee, even if that means being nicer to him than you originally intended!”

“Are they always like this?” inquired Arnold, stepping inside.

“They learn quick,” I observed. “That’s Ibb and that’s Obb. Ibb and Obb, this is Arnold.”

“Hullo!” said Arnold, thinking for a moment. “Do you Generics want to go and see Willow Lodge and the Limes?”

They looked at one another for a moment, realized they were sitting just that little bit too close and moved apart.

“Do you?” said Ibb.

“Well, only if you want to—”

“I’m easy — it’s your decision.”

“Well y-es, I’d really like to.”

“Then let’s go — unless you’ve made other plans — ?”

“No, no, I haven’t.”

They got up, took the tickets from Arnold and were out the door in a flash.

I laughed and went though to the galley.

“Who’s the elderly woman?” asked Arnold.

“It’s my Gran,” I replied, switching on the kettle and getting out the coffee.

“Is she — you know?”

“Goodness me, no! She’s only asleep. She’s one hundred and eight.”

“Really? Why is she dressed in this dreadful blue gingham?”

“Has been for as long as I can remember. She came here to make sure I didn’t forget my husband. Sorry. That makes me sound as though I’m laboring the point, doesn’t it?”

“Listen, don’t worry. I didn’t mean to come over all romantic just then. But, Mary, well, she’s quite something, you know — and I’m not just in love with her because I was written that way. This one’s for real. Like Nelson and Emma, Bogart and Bacall—”

“Finch Hatton and Blixen. Yes, I know. I’ve been there.”

“Denys was in love with Baron Blixen?”

“
Karen
Blixen.”

“Oh.”

He sat down and I placed a coffee in front of him.

“So, tell me about your husband.”

“Hah!” I said, smiling. “You don’t want me to bore you about Landen.”

“It’s not boring. You listen to me when I hark on about Mary.”

I stirred my coffee absently, running through my memories of Landen to make sure they were all there. Gran mumbled something about lobsters in her sleep.

“It must have been a hard decision to come and hide out here,” said Arnold quietly. “I don’t imagine Thursdays generally do that sort of thing.”

“You’re right, they don’t. But sometimes falling back and regrouping is not the same as running away.”

“Tactical withdrawal?”

“Right. What would you do to get together with Mary again?”

“Anything.”

“And I with Landen. I
will
get him back — just not quite yet. But the strange thing is,” I added slightly wistfully, “when he comes back, he won’t even know he’d been gone — it’s not as though he’s waiting for me to reactualize him.”

We chatted for about an hour. Arnold told me about the Well and I talked about the Outland. He was just trying to get me to repeat “irrelevant benevolent elephant” when Gran woke up with a yell shouting, “The French! The French!” and had to be calmed down with a glass of warm whiskey before I put her to bed.

“I’d better be going,” said Arnold. “Mind if I drop round again?”

“Not at all,” I replied. “That would be nice.”

I went to bed after that and was still awake when Ibb and Obb returned from the concert. They were giggling and made a noisy cup of tea before retiring. I lay back and tried to sleep, hoping that I would dream of being back at our house, the one that Landen and I shared when we were married. Failing that, on holiday somewhere. Failing
that
, when we first met — and if that wasn’t available, an argument — and lastly, anything with Landen in it at all. Aornis had other ideas.

Before Aornis Hades, the existence of mnemonomorphs was suspected only to SO-5, who, through deceit, idleness or forgetfulness, never told anyone else. The files on mnemonomorphs are kept in eight different locations and updated automatically between each location every week. An ability to control entropy does not necessarily go with the skill to alter memories; indeed, Aornis has been the only entity (thus far that we know about) who can do such a thing. As Miss Next demonstrated between 1986–87, mnemonomorphs are not without their Achilles’ heel. There is one question we would all like answered about Aornis, however, since no physical evidence of her remains: Was she real, or just a bad memory?

BLAKE LAMME, (EX-SO-5)
Remember Them? A Study of Mnemonomorphs

DEAR, SWEET THURSDAY!” muttered a patronizing voice that was chillingly familiar.

I opened my eyes. I was on the roof of Thornfield Hall, Rochester’s house in
Jane Eyre
. It was the time and place of my final showdown with Acheron Hades. The old house was on fire and I could feel the roof growing hot beneath my feet. I coughed in the smoke and felt my eyes begin to smart. Next to me was Edward Rochester, cradling a badly wounded hand. Acheron had already thrown Rochester’s poor wife, Bertha, over the parapet and was now preparing to finish us both off.

“
Sweet madness
, eh?” Acheron laughed. “Jane is with her cousins; the narrative is with her. And I have the manual!” He waved it at me, deposited it in his pocket and picked up his gun. “Who’s first?”

I ignored Hades and looked around. The patronizing “Dear, sweet Thursday!” voice had not been his — it had belonged to Aornis. She was wearing the same designer clothes as when I last saw her — she was only my memory of her, after all.

“Hey!” said Acheron. “I’m talking to you!”

I turned and dutifully fired, and Hades caught the approaching bullet — as he had when this had happened for real. He opened his fist; the slug was flattened into a small lead disk. He smiled and a shower of sparks flew up behind him.

But I wasn’t so interested in Acheron this time around.

“Aornis!” I shouted. “Show yourself, coward!”

“No coward, I!” said Aornis, stepping from behind a large chimney piece.

“What are you doing to me?” I demanded angrily, pointing my gun at her. She didn’t seem to be in the least put out — in fact, she seemed more concerned with preventing the dirt from the roof soiling her suede shoes.

“Welcome” — she laughed — “to the museum of your mind!”

The roof at Thornfield vanished and was replaced by the interior of the abandoned church where Spike and I were about to do battle with the Supreme Evil Being that was stuck in his head. It had happened for real a few weeks ago; the memories were still fresh — it was all chillingly lifelike.

“I am the curator in this museum,” said Aornis as we moved again, to the dining room at home when I was eight, a small girl with pigtails and as precocious as they come. My father — before his eradication, of course — was carving the roast and telling me that if I kept on being a nuisance, I would be made to go to my room.

“Familiar to you?” asked Aornis. “I can call on any exhibit I want. Do you remember this?”

And we were back on the banks of the Thames, during my father’s abortive attempt to rescue the two-year-old Landen. I felt the fear, the hopelessness, squeezing my chest so tight I could barely breathe. I sobbed.

“I can run it again if you want to. I can run it for you every night
forever
. Or I can delete it completely. How about this one?”

Night came on and we were in the area of Swindon that young couples go with their cars to get a bit of privacy. I had come here with Darren, a
highly
unlikely infatuation kindled in the furnace of parental disapproval. He loomed close to me in an amorous embrace in the back of his Morris 8. I was seventeen and impulsive — Darren was eighteen and repulsive. I could smell his beery breath and a postadolescent odor that was so strong you could have grabbed the air and wrung the stench from it with your bare hands. I could see Aornis outside the car, grinning at me, and through the labored panting of Darren, I screamed.

“But this isn’t the
worst
place we could go.” Aornis grinned through the window. “We can go back to the Crimea and unlock memories that have been too terrifying even for you. The suppressed memories, the ones you block out to let you carry on the day.”

“No, Aornis, not the charge — !”

But there we were, in the last place I wanted to be, driving my APC into the massed field artillery of the Russian army that August afternoon in 1973. Of the eighty-four APCs and light tanks that advanced into the Russian guns, only two vehicles returned. Out of the 534 soldiers involved, 51 survived.

It was the moment before the barrage began. My CO, Major Phelps, was riding on the outside as he liked to do, foolhardy idiot that he was, and to my left and right I could see the other armored vehicles throwing up large swathes of summer dust from the parched land. We could be seen for miles. The first salvo was so unexpected that I thought the munitions in a light tank had simply ignited by accident; the whine of a near miss made me realize that it hadn’t. I changed direction instantly and started to zigzag. I looked to Phelps for orders, but he was slumped in the hatch; he had lost the lower part of his arm and was unconscious. The barrage was so intense that it became a single rumbling growl, the pressure waves thumping the APC so hard that it was all I could do to keep my hands on the controls.

I read the official report two years later. Forty-two guns had been trained on us from a thousand yards, and they had expended 387 rounds of high-explosive shells — about four to each vehicle. It had been like shooting fish in a barrel.

Sergeant Tozer took command and ordered me to an APC that had lost its tracks and been thrown upside down. I parked behind the wrecked carrier as Tozer and the squad jumped out to retrieve the wounded.

“But what were you
really
thinking about?” asked Aornis, who was beside me in the carrier, looking disdainfully at the dust and oil.

“Escape,” I said. “I was terrified. We all were.”

“Next!” yelled Tozer. “Stop talking to Aornis and take us to the next APC!”

I pulled away as another explosion went off. I saw a turret whirling through the air, a pair of legs dangling from beneath it.

I drove to the next APC, the shrapnel hitting our carrier almost continuously like hail on a tin roof. The survivors were firing impotently back with their rifles; it wasn’t looking good. The APC was filled with the wounded, and as I turned round, something hit the carrier a glancing blow. It was a dud; it had struck us obliquely and bounced off — I would see the yard-long gouge in the armor plate the following day. Within a hundred yards we were in relative safety as the dust and smoke screened our retreat; pretty soon we had passed the forward command post, where all the officers were shouting into their field telephones, and were on to the dressing areas beyond. Even though I knew this was a dream, the fear felt as real as it had on the day, and tears of frustration welled up inside me. I thought Aornis would carry on with this memory for the return run to the barrage, but there was clearly a technique behind her barbaric game. In a blink we were back on the roof at Thornfield Hall.

Acheron was looking at me with a triumphant expression and carried on where he had left off:

“It may come as some consolation that I planned to bestow upon you the honor of becoming Felix9 — Who are you?”

He was looking at Aornis.

“Aornis,” she said shyly.

Acheron gave a rare smile and lowered his gun.

“Aornis?” he echoed. “
Little
Aornis?” She nodded and ran across to give him a hug.

“My goodness!” he said, looking her over carefully. “How you have grown! Last time I saw you, you were this high and had barely even
started
torturing animals. Tell me, did you follow us into the family business or did you flunk out like that loser Styx?”