The Woman Who Died a Lot: A Thursday Next Novel (14 page)

“Is this important?”

“Funding’s about the most important thing there is.” 

“I suppose you should, then.”

I stared at the huge amount of meetings I still had to attend on my schedule.

“I’ve got an idea,” I said. “I’ll just turn up tomorrow morning and start having meetings until my brain turns to jelly. Then we’ll stop and I’ll hide for a bit, then do some more while thinking of other things, then forget it all by the evening, and we’ll do pretty much the same thing again the day after—and rely on subordinates and assistants to deal with actually running the place.”

“Thank goodness for that,” said Duffy with a sigh of relief. “I was worried you had no experience of running a large public department.”

There was a knock at the door, and a tall, fastidious-looking man appeared. “Am I disturbing anything?”

It was James Finisterre.

“Jim!”

We embraced, and he held my hands in his.

“Great to have you on board. We need some safe hands in the boardroom. Duffy looking after you well?”

“He has been exemplary.”

Finisterre had been one of our backroom boys at SO-27, one of the dependable brainiacs who rarely did fieldwork but could answer almost any literary question you might care to ask. His particular expertise was the nineteenth-century novel, but he was fully competent to professorial standard in almost all fields of literature, whether it be Sumerian laundry lists or the very latest Armitage Shanks Prize–winner. He spent his life immersed in books to the cost of everything else, even personal relationships. “Friends,” he’d once said, “are probably great, but I have forty thousand friends of my own already, and each of them needs my attention.”

I thanked Duffy for his time, then followed Finisterre to the elevators.

“Surprised to see you here,” he said. “I heard you were in the frame for heading up SO-27.”

“Overrated,” I replied. “Phoebe Smalls got it. She’ll be good.” 

“I’m sure she will. How long do you give her before she’s either killed in the line of duty or resigns a quivering wreck? A week?”

“A lot longer than
that,
I should imagine.”

“I’m not so certain. As soon as she opens for business, we’re dumping thirteen years of unsolved caseload at her feet. Up until this morning, there was no one to take responsibility for the wholesale theft and bootlegging, copyright infringement and larceny. We logged reports but didn’t do anything. It’s been a bibliothief’s smorgasbord for the past decade. Why do you think the library is so heavily armed?”

“It’s that bad?”

“You’ve been out of the loop for a while, haven’t you?” I stared at him. “I’ve been working more on the . . .
supply side
of the literary world.”

“Really? Well, Braxton was doing you a seriously big favor not giving you that job. Any idea how much of our budget is being transferred to SO-27?”

“Duffy says quite a lot. I’ll speak to Braxton.”

“Good luck with that. Want to see what I do here?” I nodded, and we descended in the lift to the basement.

We stepped out into a small lobby with a single armored door and an armed guard sitting behind a window of bulletproof glass. Finisterre licked his finger and held it in the DNA reader’s aperture. There was a puff of air, the light turned green, and I did the same. The door clicked open, and we stepped inside.

“Welcome to the antiquarian section,” said Finisterre, leading me along shiny white corridors. “The Swindon All-You-Can-Eat at Fatso’s Drink Not Included Library isn’t just a central lending library, but a repository of all the important documents currently in county of Wessex’s possession.”

He indicated a row of historic documents displayed in a glass cabinet that stretched down the corridor.

“That’s our copy of the Magna Carta,” he said, walking slowly past the treasures, “and this is a rare first edition of the
Mathematica Principia
dedicated ‘To dearest Googly-bear. Love, Newt.’ ” He moved to another glass case. “This is St. Zvlkx’s original list of Revealments, and over here as unique a treasure in the whole of Shakespeareana—a blindingly rare First Folio Advanced Reader’s Copy, still with the front page marked ‘Not for sale or quotation.’

We walked into a larger room in which a dozen conservators were working their way over a series of vellum parchments folded into books with flaking leather covers.

“This one’s from the eleventh century,” said Finisterre, showing me a volume that looked like a prayer book, “and we’ve two dozen or so from the ninth. Religious texts mostly, but we’re hoping for a few treasures.”

“In Wessex?” I asked, for the county was not noted for its stock of tenth-century manuscripts.

“We’ve your brother to thank. Now that religious orders are transferring their theological allegiances to the Global Standard Deity, they’ve thrown open their collections for scrutiny, and to be honest—no pun intended—it’s a godsend. We’re seeing stuff that we never thought existed. This one here,” he said, pointing to a badly water-damaged tome, “is Gerald of Wales’s book of recipes. It confirmed what nutritionists have long suspected: firstly, that celebrity chefs were as popular in the twelfth century as they are now and, second, that Welsh cuisine has not improved at all since then and may even have gotten worse.”

He pointed to another, equally worn book.

“Over here is an account of a night out in Copenhagen in 1182 with Saxo Grammaticus—boy, do the Danes know how to party.”

“You’re copying all these, yes?” I asked, for an original and unique work was at grave risk of literary extinction if anything happened to it.

“First thing we do,” he said, leading me into another room where each book was meticulously scanned once the conservators had decided it was robust enough.

“This is cutting-edge stuff, Thursday. Unique codices, right here in my lap—and we don’t have to be shot at to study them. Well, not much anyway.”

“I can’t argue with that.”

He looked at the trolleys full of old books. “The Sisterhood is opening its Salisbury collection for initial appraisal this afternoon,” he added. “Do you want to come along?”

I stared at him. By the Sisterhood he meant the Blessed Ladies of the Lobster, one of the most numerous, long-lived and secretive of Wessex’s religious orders. A lot of time and effort had been expended in defending the library against would-be thieves, eager to get their hands on a collection that was rumored to have treasures of almost incalculable value.

“What a question,” I replied. “Absolutely.”

“I’ll pick you up at your house at three,” he said. “And bring identification. The Sisters can be a bit trigger-happy with anyone they don’t know. I arrived unannounced last week and had to dodge a rocket-propelled grenade.”

“Employing mercenaries, are they?”

“No. The Lobsterhood has often been described as pious but rarely seen as restrained.”

13.

Tuesday: Next Thursday

The dismantling of S0-27 had some peculiar and unforeseen consequences, not least the legalizing of lethal force within libraries, “for the maintenance of the collections and public order.” Originally intended as a deterrent to thieves, the legislation quickly became known as the “Shush Law,” when overenthusiastic librarians invoked a “violent intervention” for loud talking. Libraries have never been quieter, and theft and vandalism dropped by 72 percent.

Mobie Drake,
Librarians: Heroes of the New Generation

I
was searched before leaving the library—no one was exempt. The stealing and selling of rare antiquarian books was still big business, and the library weren’t taking any chances. Recently a thief who’d attempted to steal a first edition of
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems had been shot dead
. Luckily for the librarian who fired the shot, the potential thief had fallen
within
the library boundary, allowing the killing to be categorized as “Justifiable Lethal Force by a State-Registered Librarian in the Course of His or Her Duties,” a misdemeanor that required only a few forms to be filled in. As it says on the T-shirts,
I DON
’
T SCARE EASILY
— I’
M A LIBRARIAN
, which was the polite version of the original:
DON
’
T GIVE ME ANY OF YOUR SHIT
— 
I
’
M A LIBRARIAN
.

I took the longer way back toward the Brunel Centre and was just passing the Swindon branch of Booktastic when I remembered I had walked that way
specifically
to drop in to the tattooist’s, and had forgotten again. It was a half mile back, and I could drop in when I drove past later. It was probably the Dizuperadol making me forgetful.

On a whim I walked into Booktastic to check on whether my books were still core stock. I took the lift to the third floor and was relieved to find they were. Relieved not for
personal
me but for written me inside the books, to whom I owed a huge debt of gratitude—a debt I hoped to repay by keeping her well read. I had changed my tune over the fictionalized account of my life, now being broadly in favor rather than wishing that it was quietly remaindered or, better still, pulped. I placed the books covers out at eye level, noted that there was another in the series, told a browsing couple that the books were probably “worth a look if you’ve nothing better to do,” then heard the cathedral clock begin to chime midday.

Soon after I trotted down from the third floor at Booktastic and made my way toward Shabitat, where Landen was hoping to buy one of their huge trademark Flipdate clocks. I found him in the glassware section. The trouble about having a huge house was that it was easier to double or triple up on things than carry them from the kitchen to the dining room and back again, which meant we needed three of everything.

“You can get an entire set of glassware for only fifty quid,” said Landen, looking at me for a moment before digging out his cell phone.

“It’s ugly,” I said.

“Ah, yes,” replied Landen, dialing a number. “But before it was expensive and ugly, and now it’s cheap and ugly. So everything’s changed.”

“Has it?”

“Sure. What was your new office like?”

“Pretty cool.”

“Describe it to me.”

“Windows . . . a door, a phone. A large red one. A hotline.” I narrowed my eyes as I tried to remember what else I had seen. “I bumped into Jim Finisterre. Who are you calling?”

“Stig.”

“What do you want to talk to him about?”

“Just a job we have to do. All three of us.”

“Can I know?”

“It’s a surprise.”

“I like surprises.”

“Stig?” said Landen. “It’s Landen. We need you.” He paused for a moment and looked at me. “We’re in Shabitat, glassware section. . . . Yes, I know they’re ugly. See you soon.”

He snapped the phone shut and looked at me with his head on one side. There was a brief silence. Not one of those companionable silences that are quite enjoyable but an empty, cold silence, of people soon strangers. And that was when I had a peculiar feeling. One I hadn’t had for a while.

“Landen?”

“Yes?”

I leaned closer and lowered my voice. “I want to make love to you.”

“What, here?”

“Well, no—we could find a hotel. I’ve not felt it this strong from well before the accident—probably that holiday in Greece when you’d lost ten pounds and we had dinner at Arturo’s. On our own. No kids.”

Landen said nothing and stared at me. I frowned. It wasn’t a bad feeling—quite the opposite, of course. But it was
unusual,
and that worried me. Even following the accident, I still wanted him in a “that would be nice if I weren’t feeling so shitty,” sort of way, but this was like being a teenager again—that sort of lusty yearning that is born of fresh discovery and young hearts bursting to be free.

“Say something,” I said.

“What do you want me to say?”

“Anything. ‘Me, too’ would be good for starters, rapidly followed by ‘Does the Finis Hotel rent rooms by the hour?’ To which the answer is ‘Yes, notorious for it.’”

Landen gave me a weary half smile.

“If I were to say, ‘Nothing should disturb . . .’” he asked, “what would you say in reply?”

“Nothing should disturb us . . . in the Finis?”

“No, it’s a password. The one we swapped on parting less than two hours ago.”

“Oh, yes. Nothing should disturb . . . that . . . No. I can’t remember.”

“And why do you think that might be?”

He said it in a sarcastic manner that he normally would never have used on me. Not unless we were having a serious, balls-out, door-slamming “I don’t know why I sodding married you” row. But then the penny dropped and I looked down. I wasn’t holding a walking stick, I felt no pain, and I was standing upright, without a stoop. No wonder Landen could tell I wasn’t the real one straightaway. I hadn’t walked this well for a while.

“Shit,” I muttered. “I’ve been replaced.” And I looked stupidly around to see if the real me might be somewhere close by. I wasn’t, so I looked back at Landen, who raised an eyebrow.

“This is a novel approach,” he said. “A Synthetic aware that it
is
a Synthetic?”

“Wait, wait,” I said, knowing only too well what we did with Synthetics. “This is different. I’m me. I’m conscious, I have some of the real me’s memories. Maybe not all of them, but some, and enough.”