The Woman Who Died a Lot: A Thursday Next Novel (10 page)

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 been, 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

A
s 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?”

“No.”

“I saw a few posters up in town about the smiting,” said Landen. “The city council doesn’t seem to be taking it very seriously. Are we sure it’s still on?”

Joffy and Miles exchanged nervous glances.

“It’s on, all right,” replied Miles. “When He announced the smiting to a state-registered Meek Person in a lonely gas station in the small hours, He had the Meek write it down so he wouldn’t forget and then went and told another Meek just in case. After that He reiterated His plans in the pips of a cucumber and burned them into the side of Haytor on Dartmoor.”

“He’s kind of done with ambiguity, isn’t He?” I said.

“Pretty much,” said Joffy. “Since His Revealment He’s kind of ditched the idea of subtle signs or obscure clues. Burning His intentions into granite is a lot more direct, and it certainly makes people take notice, although the Dartmoor Parks Authority was none too pleased. But there it was: Swindon will be hit with a Grade-III Smite on Friday at midday.”

We all fell silent. It kind of sounded more ominous coming from Joffy, even if a Grade-III was not the worst. More to do with cleansing fire and none of the mass murder, lava and pillar-of-salt stuff.

“Why Swindon anyway?” asked Friday. “In the National Sinful City Stakes, Swindon sits only fifty-seventh.”

“The cleansings aren’t always just about sin,” said Joffy quietly. “Sometimes they’re about unimaginative architecture, poor restaurants or even an overly aggressive parking-fine regime. This time it’s none of those. I think He aims to hit Swindon because He knows it’s my hometown and wants to make a point.”

“What sort of point?”

“I’m not sure. It’s all very mysterious.”

Joffy was my eldest and only surviving brother, and he was supreme head of the Church of the Global Standard Deity, a sort of homogeny of faiths that hoped to bring peace and prosperity, consensus, harmony, tolerance of diversity and social inclusion to all His creations. Joffy had decided many years before that the problem with religion wasn’t religion itself but its flagrant misuse as an absolutist argument against narrow tribal agendas. Joffy argued—as had many before him—that one religion would be a much better idea. But instead of going on a murderous ideological rampage to bend others to his will, he used arguments of such clarity and reasoned debate that even the most hardened nutjobs finally came over to his way of thinking. It had taken him and his network of fearless Unifiers only thirty years to accomplish, a staggering achievement that most would agree “could only possibly exist in fiction,” if they hadn’t seen it with their own eyes.

The other big plus of Global Religious Unification was for collective-bargaining powers. Before, dialogue with the Almighty was unclear and centered on unworthiness and mumbling inside large buildings, but following unification the GSD was in a strong position to ask clear and unambiguous questions of the Almighty, such as “What, precisely, is the point of all this?”

Unfortunately, this angered His Mightiness, as theological unity was emphatically
not
part of His plan, and a series of cleansings took place around the globe—mostly as a warning to His creations that messing with the Big Guy’s Ultimate and Very Important and Unknowable Plan was not going to be tolerated.

“We’re in talks with the Almighty to bring Him to the negotiating table,” said Joffy, “but we’re not prepared to talk until He agrees to stop incinerating the unrighteous in an all-consuming column of cleansing fire.”

“Maybe He doesn’t have a plan and there is no answer,” said Landen. “Perhaps that’s why He appeared to all those different religious leaders with subtly different messages—in order to divide mankind and keep us from adopting a united front to demand an answer to the question of existence.”

“Even if there is no answer to the riddle of existence and we are all random packets of replicating cell structure in a dying universe devoid of meaning,” added Miles, “we have a right to know that. Five thousand years of prayer, conflict, self-sacrifice and being tested daily must count for
something.
”

“I always thought His plan for mankind was ‘Let’s just muddle through and see what happens,’ ” said Friday. “And historically speaking, it’s a sound one—it’s worked on thousands of occasions.”

“There must be more to the ultimate meaning and purpose of existence than muddling through,” said Tuesday with disdain. “If that’s all it was, there’s
no
reason for the eternal quest for knowledge and
every
reason for celebrity biographies and daytime soaps.”

“So religion
could
trump science after all,” said Miles with a smile. “That’ll be one for the books.”

“Mind you,” added my father, “at least you forced His hand into revealing His existence.”

“That
was
unexpected,” admitted Joff y. “A nd very welcome— the billion or so former atheists now on board really boosted the membership and bargaining powers.”

“Didn’t Dawkins shoot himself when he found out?”

“Yes,” replied Miles sadly, “a great shame. He would have been
excellent
GSD bishop material. Single-minded, a good orator and eyebrows that were pretty much perfect.”

“So why destroy Swindon just to annoy you?” I asked. “It doesn’t sound like a very responsible use of resources.”

“I think it’s probably more to do with setting the tone of our first meeting. We’ve been trying to get Him to the negotiating table to thrash out our grievances, and I think He just wants to show who’s boss and to set the ambience for the meeting—like when criminal overlords have their hideouts in hollowed-out volcanoes. Highly impractical and the heating bills astronomical, but good for the overall
ambience.
”