The Woman Who Died a Lot: A Thursday Next Novel (17 page)

“Every journey begins with the first step,” came a deep voice tinged with wisdom and august pronouncements.

“Hello, Millon,” I said, greeting our ornamental hermit with a friendly nod. “How’s the hermitage?”

“Drafty,” he said simply, “but the discomfort of one man is mere sand upon the beach to the iniquities undertaken by the few to many.”

“You won’t want central heating put in, then?”

“Comfort is the measles of modern man,” he said in a halfhearted manner, “and only through cheerless discomfort will the mind be clear and unfettered.”

I smiled. My ex-stalker and biographer Millon de Floss had recently volunteered to be our ornamental hermit, part of the Commonsense Party’s Inverse Consequences directive. If we were going to have someone living on the estate who was to wander around aimlessly spouting quasi-philosophical nonsense, we far preferred it to be someone we knew.

“When’s the hermit exam?” I asked.

“Next week,” he said nervously. “How am I sounding?”

“I’ll be honest—not great.”

“Really?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Damn! I was hoping six months of silent contemplation would suddenly imbue me with sagelike intelligence, but all I seem to be able to manage is a strange fungal growth on my shins caused by the damp and lukewarm aphorisms that would scarcely do good favor to the back of a matchbox.”

“I don’t really get the whole intellect-through-isolation thing,” I said. “I’m not sure anyone can claim to understand the human condition until he’s talked two people out of a fight, smoothed over a best friend’s marital breakup or dealt effectively with a teenager’s huffy silence.”

“I’d include an appreciation of Tex Avery cartoons in that list,” added Millon sadly, “along with Gaudí, David Lean’s later movies and a minimum of one evening with Emo Philips. But the hermit elders are traditionalists. The City&Guilds Higher Hermiting Certificate is based mostly around Horace, the Old Testament, Descartes and Marx.”

“Groucho or Karl?”

“Harpo. I think it reflects the ‘silent’ aspect.”

“Ah. Couldn’t you just smear yourself with mud and excrement and mumble Latin to yourself in a corner?”

“What, now?”

“No, no—during the exam.”

Millon shook his head. “
Everyone
tries that old chestnut. Instant disqualification.” He nodded toward the far paddock. “What’s Tuesday up to?”

“Another Anti-Smite Shield test.”

“Will this one work?”

“Hope springs eternal.”

We watched as the observers were shepherded into the concrete viewing bunker while Tuesday made some trifling adjustments to the defense shield. It was identical to the full-size versions dotted around the country—a large copper-domed head like a mushroom atop a lattice tower. Above the test rig was the smite simulator, a single electrode twenty feet higher than the copper dome, suspended from three towers. This was charged to several trillion volts and would discharge on cue in an attempt to simulate the sort of high-power groundburst that was the Almighty’s favored attempt at cleansing.

As we watched, Tuesday walked to the concrete bunker herself, and a few moments later the domed copper hat of the shield began to rotate slowly. It moved faster and faster until small crackles of electricity started to fire off around the edges and a bluish field began to form in a soft, undulating canopy that reached beyond the tower and to the ground, like a large umbrella.

“Fingers in ears,” I said, and a second or two later a blue flash of lightning descended from the simulator, followed a millisecond later by a loud crack. For a moment I thought the shield had held, but then the spinning copper dome disintegrated into thousands of fragments, some of which were thrown hundreds of feet in the air. Millon and I ducked behind the golf buggy as the worthless shrapnel fell to the ground around us.

“She’ll be disappointed,” I said.

“Always expect a kick in the teeth,” said Millon, “so that when you get a slap in the chops, it seems like a triumph.”

“Listen,” I said, “what do you know about a Goliath employee named Jacob Krantz?”

Before his days as a hermit, Millon de Floss had been editor of
Conspiracy Theorist
magazine, a position that necessitated he keep a somewhat lower profile these days, as some of his wackier “exclusives” had turned out to be far truer than expected— much to the displeasure of Goliath, who was implicated in almost every conspiracy you cared to invent.

“Krantz?” said Millon. “Doesn’t ring a bell. Does he have a Laddernumber?”

“It’s 673.”

“Wow.”

“Wow indeed. He might be working in the Synthetic Human Division.”

“According to Goliath, there is no Synthetic Human Division. Let me make a few calls.”

He disappeared back into his hermitage, and I watched as the observers trailed out of the bunker to stare sadly at the remains of the defense shield. They had all been driven away by the time I got down there, and I found Tuesday in the bunker, trying to make sense of the vast amount of telemetry generated by the test.

“I’m sorry, Sweetpea,” I said. “It must be a huge disappointment.”

She turned to glower at me. “If you hadn’t sent me to school this morning to prove I was a
real
teenager, then I might have made this bloody thing work.”

“Really?”

“No, not really. This is me being angry and you being gullible and sensitive when reacting negatively to my wild accusations.”

Tuesday could be very direct when angry—but also quite honest.

“I can think of three things at once, so school isn’t usually a problem,” she said as she calmed. “I’ve just got to fine-tune the algorithm to better predict the Madeupion Field. Do it right and we have over twenty gigawatts of free energy and a vexed deity. Get it wrong and we’ve got seven tons of the most expensive scrap on record.”

“Will you be able to get it finished by Friday?” I asked. “I’m not keen to see Swindon’s downtown disappear in a flash of blue wrath.”

“I’ll figure it out, Mum,” she said with a sigh. “You should have seen their faces. That mockup cost them sixty million to build, and it’s the tenth I’ve destroyed.”

“So you’re sure you’re okay?” I asked as a distinctive
thupthup-thup
sound heralded the arrival of a tiltrotor aircraft.

“I’ll be fine,” said Tuesday as the small craft appeared above the tree line and folded its rotor panels to landing configuration.

“That’ll be my ride.”

“Where are you going?”

“The Sisterhood is opening their library for scrutiny.”

“Oooh,” said Tuesday, “if you see a copy of Archimedes’ fifth issue of
Practical Mechanical Theorems,
the one where he outlines how to build a tumble dryer, I’d love a copy.”

17.

Tuesday: The Sisterhood

The first tiltrotor was designed in the early twenties as a novel method of using a ducted fan as a propulsion and lifting mechanism. It took thirty years for a powerful enough engine to be introduced, and even then the craft was not a serious proposition until the introduction of a light and powerful nuclear reactor. Of the craft’s benefits, vertical takeoff and ease of use is their two best, and reactor leaks and the ability to drop out of the sky unannounced their two least.

Jane’s Aviation Digest

T
he small craft had landed on the front lawn, and Landen was chatting to Finisterre about how the technology had progressed since tiltrotors were used in the Crimea as spotter aircraft, a role in which they had been less than successful. The joke at the time had been “How do you get to own a tiltrotor?” and the answer was “Buy an acre of land in the Crimea and wait.”

“We’d better be going if we’re to make our appointment,” said Finisterre as I arrived. “The Sisterhood can’t abide impunctuality. Will you be coming?”

He was talking to Landen, but I already knew that Landen wouldn’t ever get into one again. Although his initial leg injury had been caused by to a land mine, it was the evac on a medical tiltrotor that had necessitated the partial amputation—the craft had crashed due to a gearbox failure sixteen miles short of the military hospital in Sevastopol, and those jeep-ridden sixteen miles, said Landen, were the most excruciating he had ever known. Still, that was almost thirty years ago, and tiltrotor technology had grown by leaps and bounds since then—especially after Mycroft became involved, which explained why they are no longer used militarily. I kissed Landen, we exchanged passwords again, and I climbed aboard the small craft as Finisterre spooled up the reactor, and few minutes later we had left Aldbourne behind us, passed overhead Marlborough and were skimming low across the Downs.

“How’s your day going?” asked Finisterre.

“Interesting so far,” I replied, and he smiled knowingly. “Wouldn’t want you to get bored.”

“No indeed,” I replied.

We swept past the single induction rail of the Southern Bullet Route and dropped down into the Vale of Pewsey. We flew on in silence for a few minutes until Finisterre called air-traffic control for transit permission into the Salisbury Danger Area and orbited twice around Urchfont while we waited for clearance. I had trained on Salisbury Plain myself on tracked vehicles before being dispatched to the Crimea aged only eighteen. We had been briefed never to stray near the Sisterhood’s hundredacre enclave, and it was hard to claim you didn’t know if you did— the convent’s tower soared two hundred feet above the plains, and the main Venerating Chamber was the size of an airship hangar.

“We’re in,” said Finisterre, and we headed off toward the convent, which even now dominated the landscape, though we were still five miles away. We circled the tower once before coming into a neat landing near the entrance, and while Finisterre conducted the power-down checks, I stepped clumsily out and looked around.

I had never been here before; few had. The Salisbury Plain order of the Blessed Ladies of the Lobster was the hub from where all other orders received instructions and to where all funds were sent. The Lobsterhood had been the nation’s most populous religious order, with over a hundred convents across the land, and although the Global Standard Deity’s unifying action had subsumed many of those within the order, a few had held out, Salisbury among them. But all that defiance had come to nought the day that He had revealed Himself and confirmed that yes, the game was up, there was only One, and all the silly lobster stuff was indeed transparent nonsense, and cower in the presence of Him. The fact that it was a He after all caused a lot of problems with the feminists. But it might have been worse— He could have turned out to have been French, too.

“My name is Sister Megan,” said the greeter nun who had stepped ahead to receive us, “and you are fourteen seconds late. We cannot abide unpunctuality here in the Lobsterhood.”

“We had to orbit for clearance into the zone,” I explained. “My name is Thursday Next.”

Sister Megan gave a sharp cry and covered her mouth with her hand. I had to get used to this. Joffy’s efforts with the GSD had not always been welcomed, and indeed, before the Lord’s Revealment, over a billion people had wanted him shredded as a heretic.

“Causing trouble already?” asked Finisterre as the greeter nun ran back inside the lobster-shaped double doors.

“I think it’s the connection with my brother. There were many religious orders who found it difficult to accept that they had been idolizing clearly demonstrable falsehoods for hundreds of years.”

“Like the notion of the all-redeeming, ever-knowing and oftnipping ‘Big Lobster’?”

“One of the more sensible ones,” I replied. “You’d better do the talking from now on, and refer to me by my married name.”

But it didn’t come to that. No sooner had we taken two steps toward the convent than another nun had come running out of the doors firing a small pistol and screaming at the top of her voice that I was a ‘procreating girl dog,’ but not using those
precise
words. I was used to being called that, of course, but rarely by a nun. She had loosed off two shots by the time she’d been adroitly rugger-tackled to the ground by two other nuns, and Finisterre and I, caught out by the sudden violence, had not had time to move a muscle and had simply stood there as one of the shots passed between us at head level with a
zip
and the second passed cleanly through my shoulder bag, penetrating not just my purse and notebook but also a picture of Landen.

Finisterre and I stared at each other as an unseemly fight developed in front of us, our assailant being finally subdued by two additional nuns, both of whom I suspected might actually be men. The gun was wrested from her hands, and she was sat upon while she struggled, howled and screamed the sorts of obscenities that would embarrass a docker.

“I’m sorry about that,” said one of the other nuns, who had a cut lip and a wimple now dented and askew, “but we all joined the order for different reasons, and . . . well, some of us have a lot of repressed anger.”

“Against me?” I asked.

“I’m afraid so. Daisy always swore to kill you the next time you met—that was why she has closeted herself here. To protect herself and you from her rage.”

“Should we take this up with the mother superior?”

“Daisy
is
the mother superior. We’ll have to wait until she calms down. By the way, we all think Joffy is remarkable even if he is a man.”

“No one’s perfect.”

“Right. And we thank him for pointing out the error of our veneration. We all felt a bit silly to begin with, but when our mistake was plainly spelled out, we were more than happy to change four centuries of loyal tradition.”

“Perhaps I should leave?” I said. “And let Finisterre speak to Mother Daisy on his own?”

“No, no, no,” replied the nun, “she’ll be fine. She just has to compose herself. Forgiveness, companionship, self-control and not reading in the toilet are but four of the ninety-seven simple rules we live our lives by.”