The Woman Who Died a Lot: A Thursday Next Novel (35 page)

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” said the emcee, who had just strode onto the stage. “And welcome to day one of MadCon2004.”

There was a burst of applause, and the emcee went on to welcome everyone to the conference, and then followed five minutes of boring stuff about where the fire exits were in case someone tried to blow something up or create a white hole or a small bang or something, and then he listed the high points of the conference, such as tomorrow’s demonstration of AA-size Duraspin kinetic batteries, a new form of copperless copper and how earthquakes could be harnessed to prevent earthquakes.

He started to ramble after this, and I lost interest.

I was pondering over Jack Schitt’s curious behavior regarding the copied Zvlkx book when the emcee suddenly announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to call on . . . Tuesday Next!”

There was more applause, and Tuesday walked nervously onto the stage.

“It is a great honor to be here,” she began, “speaking at a conference that my great-uncle loved so much and gave so much energy toward. I’d like first to thank the staff of MadCon and the board of trustees for their generous help in . . .”

I moved closer to Landen and grasped his hand, and he squeezed mine in return. Despite recent events— the smiting, Goliath, HR-6984— all I could think of was how much I loved my children and how proud I was. I like to think I’m pretty resilient, but listening to Tuesday talk, I felt my my eyes water and my chest tighten. I remembered what a small baby she had been, how she had walked late, talked early. Of her first Erector Set at two, her first long-chain polymer at four, and of learning Latin at five, so she could better understand the
Principia Mathematica.
I remembered her first day at nursery school and how the teachers said how much they’d learned, her first patent application for an improved alphabet with only eighteen letters, her going up to collect her doctorate in mathematics at age eight.

But through all that she had been our little girl, and despite her dazzling intellect, we had endeavored to bring her up as normally as possible. And while I watched her fluff over her lines with the nervousness of a normal person rather than the detached and mechanical tone of her contemporaries, we knew at least that we had succeeded in attempting to make her as human as she was brilliant, and with that, we trusted, given her an ability to see beyond the pure science and the application of knowledge and to be able to make a distinction between what science could do and what it
should
do.

“Makes you proud, doesn’t it?” whispered Landen. We listened to the rest of her speech, but it had become increasingly technical, and by the end we could understand only one word in seventeen. But we were delighted to be on the list of people she thanked at the end, in particular for showing her “the value of normality.”

“That was really good,” said Landen as she came off the stage to thunderous applause. She hugged us both, then was whisked off to do a press conference, leaving us standing quite alone. We wouldn’t be telling her to go to school anymore. As far as we were concerned, our job was done.

“Well,” I said to Landen, “how are things with you?” 

He looked at the tattoo on my hand and said that he was fine, that Friday wouldn’t be back until late, given our last trip in to see the Manchild, and that we were parentally redundant. “I suppose that’s what we should be striving for,” I said.

“Thanks for telling Tuesday I was bringing Jenny.”

“What was I supposed to say?” replied Landen. “Tuesday wanted her to be here. Which reminds me, did you get into Image Ink this morning?”

“I forgot again.”

“Me, too. Twice. Hang on,” I added. “What’s Gavin Watkins doing here?”

I had seen him through the crowds, sitting quite alone at a small trade stand. We walked over.

“Hello, Gavin,” I said, using a conciliatory tone of voice. “Oh,” he said, glancing up dismissively, “it’s you. The tart’s mother.”

It wasn’t a good start.

“Okay,” I said, “we need to talk. You don’t want to be killed, and we don’t want to have to visit Friday in prison for the next three decades. Do you want some tea?”

He gave a resigned shrug.

“All right.”

33.

Thursday: Gavin Watkins

The content and use of slow-release patches was once totally deregulated, in order to allow those for whom drugs have an unavoidable lure a safer method of ingestion. The concept was simple in that it was thought impossible to overdose from a patch—but human ingenuity and stupidity know no bounds, and after two people were found dead covered in patches from head to toe in a steam room, the illegality in nonapproved patches was reconfirmed. They remain, of course, hugely popular.

Julia Scrott,
The Nonsense of Prohibition

W
e bought Gavin a cup of tea and a cupcake and sat in the canteen while a
Nemicolopterus Syntheticus
flapped around above us, part of a project to revitalize the ailing home-cloning industry. The tearooms were filled with mad scientists of one sort or another, many of whom had the unkempt “wild hair” and mismatched-clothes look that seemed never to go out of fashion. Some sat quietly, too shy to order or too unaware to know that it was self-service, while others could not stop themselves and insisted on regaling the staff with logical methods by which they could serve more efficiently.

Gavin sat slumped idly in his chair, his slovenly manner, ill temper and foul mouth endearing him to no one. But he knew as well as we that if he was going to survive the next twenty-four hours, we were going to have to at least pretend to get along.

“So if I’m
not
murdered, I turn out to be a serial killer in thirty-six years’ time?” said Gavin once we’d explained just what we’d found out. “But why do I kill those useless and boring people? Without that dumb meeting on Tuesday night, I’d not even know them—and more, not even
want
to know them. Worse, I end up buying a Vauxhall. I’d
never
buy a Vauxhall. Not even to kill someone with.”

He took a deep breath.

“Okay,” he added, “I admit it, I can be a bit intolerant toward the mendacious savages I call my fellow man, but there’s a big jump between that and serial killing. And if I
were
to survive your moronic son tomorrow, why would I wait until I’m fifty-six to start a rampage? What suddenly changes me?”

“We don’t know,” said Landen. “It could be anything: death of a loved one, passed over for promotion, brain abnormality, a bet, boredom. The list is long. And yes, Vauxhalls might be shit now, but in three decades they could be like Volkswagens are today.”

“You mean driven by smug, self-important, middle-class idiots with hideously spoiled children?

“It’s possible, yes.”

He thought about this for a moment. “But if those other potential ChronoGuard are
already
dead in
this
future, how will killing me change that?”

“Because at this precise moment in time,” I explained, “you’re still around to kill them.”

“But I’m not,” he insisted. “If both those events represent this timeline, killing me has no effect—if they were alive right now, then
not
killing me would guarantee their deaths.”

“There is something in what he says,” admitted Landen.

“But both those events do not represent one timeline. I can only think that we are seeing two timelines at once, with all events. Your murder is in
their
timeline, and
their
murder is in your timeline. Once a timeline is taken out, all will revert to as it should be.”

“Wow,” said Landen, clearly impressed with my explanation.

“Smart girls give me the horn too,” said Gavin sadly. “But they always ignore me. Tuesday ignores me.”

“Maybe you should try washing,” I said, “and keeping a civil tongue in your head.”

“Will that work?”

“Probably not in your case, but it’s certainly worth a try.”

He nodded reflectively. He responded well to straight talking, so I tried a different approach.

“Gavin, how did you turn out to be such a nasty piece of work?”

He shrugged. “I could blame my parents, but that’s just whiny victim bullshit. Some people are just naturally unpleasant. I’ve known for a long time that I’m something of a shit. I tried for years to hide it, but it never worked, so in the end I decided to just go with it, and see where it led me. What’s your excuse?”

We just laughed this time at his impertinence, and, surprisingly, he laughed, too.

“Okay,” he said, “what’s the deal tomorrow? Do I conveniently reveal my soft underbelly for that toe-rag Friday to gut, or do I run?”

“We don’t know,” said Landen, “but Friday is at this moment attempting to find out more. He thinks there might have been
sixteen
Destiny Aware ex-timeworkers and not fifteen.”

“How will that make a difference?”

“Someone may know something that we don’t. For it to be murder, then there has to be a
motive.
Without that, he can’t kill you.”

“So I should do nothing?”

“If you can.”

There was a pause.

“Why are you here anyway?” asked Landen. “Shouldn’t you be in school or breaking windows or pushing over grannies or something?”

“I’m a freelance mathematician,” he said loftily, “offering my unique services to those either too stupid or too lazy to work it out for themselves. Do you want to see something seriously batshit cool?”

“Okay.”

He took a grubby piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it to reveal a three-digit number. Landen and I stared at it for a moment.

“It’s an
even
prime number,”
¹
he announced. “It’s been lying there unnoticed since the dawn of math, and I found it. Archimedes, Euclid, Gauss, Fermat, Newton—they all missed it. How dumb were they?”

Landen and I were staring at the number. The thing was, now that he mentioned it, he was right—the number
was
prime and
was
even.

“That’s incredible,” I murmured. “Does anyone else know about this?”

He folded up the paper and put it back in his pocket. “No. I’m still studying the implications, since it renders two of Euclid’s axioms entirely fallacious. Much of the planet’s mathematics will have to be
completely
restructured.”

“Then you’re good?
Really
good?” asked Landen.

“Good? I’m the
best.
Euclidean, Riemannian, polytrop, differential, twenty-seven-dimension mapping, Advanced Nextian geometry and even Expectation-Influenced Probability. Tuesday did the groundwork, but I took it further.”

Landen and I exchanged glances. This sounded promising.

“What about a value for U
_c
?” I asked.

“Ah!” he said with a smile. “The ever-illusive Unentanglement Constant. I’ve been doing some initial work that looks promising, but I was distracted by the need to expand and catalog my collection of pornographic magazines.”

“How long would it take?” asked Landen.

“Alphabetically, about a week. If I do it by my favorites, then a lot longer.”

“Not the porn, the Unentanglement Constant.”

“Oh. A workable solution to U
_c
? About a month.”

Landen and I got to our feet.

“We don’t have a month. We don’t even have twenty-four hours. Come with us if you want to work with Tuesday.”

After some hunting we found Tuesday at the Anti-Smite stand, where she was chatting to some Americans who were keen on buying the system, due to one or two smitings that they’d so far managed to disguise as “another Barning Man that got out of hand.”

“Gavin?” said Tuesday, looking at him and then us in a quizzical manner. “What’s going on?”

I quickly explained what Gavin had told us and how he might possibly have the answer to the U
_c
. Tuesday looked doubtful.

“Listen,” she said, “only six people on the planet claim to understand Madeupion Quantum Unentanglement Theory, and five of them are mistaken.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Gavin. “It’s between six point four and six point six quintillionths of a second, right?”

“I never had it
that
accurate,” she replied, looking at him suspiciously, “and I’ve been working on the problem for two years.”

“Yes, but you’re a donkey,” remarked Gavin. “Look here, it’s obvious.”

He brought out a copy of
Big and Bouncy
from his jacket and started to write a long equation on the cover in felt-tip. Landen and I stared at each other, unable to comprehend what was going on, as Tuesday and Gavin were talking in an odd language full of Greek words and out-of-context nouns and adjectives. Tuesday was wary at first, expecting this to be one of Gavin’s tricks. But the explanation continued onto the next page, and the next, and soon to the letters to the editor, several trade ads for odd-looking devices, a lengthy dissertation on friction coefficients and most of “Readers’ Spouses” were covered in Gavin’s spidery algebraic notation. He and Tuesday argued at length, with Gavin often lapsing into insults and Tuesday hitting him hard on the side of the head when he did so. While this was going on, I, Landen and one of the Anti-Smite reps simply stood there and talked quietly about the weather, and the defense shield, and how Smite Solutions’ Sin Magnet was so stupendously brilliant in every single way—except for the bit regarding murder.

We had to wait forty minutes before Gavin finally declaimed with a flourish, “You see? Obvious!”

Tuesday stared at him, then at the notation, then at us, then at the mockup of the anti-smite tower.

“That’s . . .
brilliant,
” she breathed, giving Gavin one of those dreamy sixteen-year-old girl looks that can spell big trouble. She grasped him by the ears, pulled him toward her and started to kiss him, right there in front of us and thirty or forty MadCon delegates. We all looked away, hoping they would stop, but they didn’t, and after Landen had suggested a bucket of water and I had glared at him and mouthed “Do something,” he tapped Gavin quite hard on the shoulder and told him to cut it out.