The Woman Who Died a Lot: A Thursday Next Novel (40 page)

“She’s taking it quite well, isn’t she?” said Landen.

“Resigned to it, I guess,” I replied. “It must be her scientific mind. Once she feels that something is inevitable, then worrying is a waste of time. Mycroft was the same.”

“I wish I could feel the same way,” grumbled Friday.

My cell phone rang. It was Joffy. I paused for a moment, unwilling to answer it. I’d not spoken to Joffy since Miles had told me he was going to stay in his cathedral to be vaporized with it, and I wasn’t sure what I could say, given that my actions might assist his demise. But I wasn’t going to
not
answer it. I flipped open the phone to hear him laughing.

“Hello?” I said, but the laughing continued for a moment until he came onto the line.

“Hi, Thursday?”

I told him it was me and asked him with rising hope if the smiting had been canceled.

“Sadly, no,” he answered. “We were just running through the ten Bastions of the GSD and had gotten to Moment of Levity.”

He asked me if there was a chance that the Anti-Smite Shield would be up and running by midday, and I had to admit I wasn’t that hopeful, even though our best minds were working on it. I then asked him if he would reconsider leaving the Smite Zone.

“It’s complicated,” he said, “but the bottom line is this: Unless we at least get an
indication
of when talks might begin as to seeking the Ultimate Question of Existence, this flock might have to look for another shepherd who is more willing to listen to our requests.”

It was a dramatic disclosure and presumably, given His omniscience, would already be known to Him.

“You’re threatening to switch allegiances?” I asked incredulously.

“Nothing’s off the table,” he replied. “We thought Diana the Huntress might make a solid alternative. Strong, a good looker and more feminist in her views. Smiting would be off the agenda, and we might tip the current gender imbalance away from the malecentric.”

It was a radical notion, and not one that I thought God would accept without some degree of anger,
especially
as it flagrantly contravened Article One. I suggested this, but Joffy was well ahead of me.

“According to Expectation-Influenced Probability, if we stop believing in Him, He will cease to exist. It’s a last resort, of course, so He has to know we are serious, and my sacrifice would do it.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“Me neither, but He’s big on self-sacrifice, martyrdom and extreme signs of loyalty. Put it this way,” added Joffy. “I’ve run out of ideas, and this seems the best bet.”

“Joffy . . . ?”

He guessed what I was thinking of.

“I know I’m asking you to do a lot,” he said, “but I can’t have Smite Solutions use the sinful as a smite magnet. You’re going to have to do your best work with this righteous man. We asked you to do it for a reason. Well,” he added with an air of finality, “I guess this is good-bye.”

“The hell it is,” I responded. “I’ll figure something out.”

He laughed, told me he loved me, that I was a good sister, none better, and that Miles would call me nearer the time to tell me where to find the righteous man—but that if I positioned myself near Chiseldon from eleven onward, it might help.

I said I would, and he hung up.

I snapped the phone shut and looked at Landen.

“He’s serious, isn’t he?”

I nodded and called Phoebe. Chiseldon was about ten minutes’ drive from the Wroughton airfield, and I’d doubtless have to fight every step of the way. Goliath would be taking no chances.

“Hey,” I said, “it’s Thursday. Do you have access to a sniper rifle?”

“Of course. What Swindon girl doesn’t?”

“I’m serious.”

“So am I.”

“Oh—right. Well, I need someone to cover my back.” “Is it illegal?”

“Quite possibly.”

“Might I have to kill someone?”

“I’m hoping not,” I said, “but can’t guarantee it.”

There was a pause, and I could sense her reticence. The last time I’d asked her for help, we had—technically speaking at least—sexually assaulted a Goliath Top One Hundred at gunpoint, a consequence of which Judith Trask had been murdered.

“It will involve causing a serious amount of grief for Goliath,” I said, “not to mention humiliation and a potential hundred million-pound loss.”

“Ah!” said Phoebe in a happier tone. “I’m in.”

I told her where to position herself, but after that there was little to do except wait, so once I’d checked that Gavin and Tuesday were working on U
_c
— they were, I was relieved to find—I made myself a coffee out of habit, then realized I couldn’t drink it, so I smelled it instead. I was amused, in an abstract kind of way, to discover that I could not tell only which country the coffee came from but also the probable region and year of cultivation. I then tuned the wireless to Toad-AM and listened to Lydia Startright’s live broadcast from just outside the Smite Zone. Little seemed to have changed— Lupton Cornball of Goliath came on air to reiterate the lie that the murderers were all willing adherents to their own destruction—and after that I listened to a spokesperson for the GSD, who confirmed that Joffy would indeed be in the cathedral at the Time of Smite and that a last-minute reprieve of the smiting had been turned down due to issues regarding infallibility.

I paced around the kitchen for the next hour and a half, interrupted variously by either Millon, who was still cramming for his hermiting certificate and who wanted testing on logical positivism, or the Wingco, who despite Tuesday’s expectations had been receiving sporadic images all morning from the Dark Reading Matter through Daphne the dodo’s buffer, which was still transmitting sporadically.

I told him I had a moment, so he showed Landen and me the images that had been sent back. The pictures were again fuzzy and indistinct and difficult to interpret. I could see what I
thought
were mountains and streams and clouds and a unicorn or two, then explosions and large tracked vehicles.

“Do those look like battle tanks to you?” said Landen.

“I’ve been watching glimpses of conflict all morning,” replied the Wingco. “Things don’t look good in there.”

“Can we get another dodo inside to see some more?”

“Interesting point. I spoke to the Swindon Dodo Fanciers Club, who tell me that pre-V2 dodos have almost four times the sensory bit rate and a larger buffer. If we could get a Version Two or lower in there, we might get some better images—and sound.”

“You wouldn’t get a Version Two in any condition these days for less than half a million,” I replied, a comment that reflected the greatly increasing value of early home-builds.

“It was just an idea,” replied the Wingco, “but a sound one. I would even volunteer to take it myself.”

“How would you enter the DRM?” I asked.

He gave a few instances of how it might be done, and I froze as a sudden thought struck me. Jack Schitt’s inexplicable behavior of late—in having an assistant destroy the pages with the lost works of Homer written beneath the later, crappier works— might not be so inexplicable after all, and it might just explain why the pro-literature Krantz was so willing to help us by supplying Day Players on a regular basis.

“By the Gods,” I murmured. “I think I know what Jack Schitt and Goliath are up to.”

The Wingco and Landen looked at me.

“Krantz worked for decades on the Book Project at Goliath, and it was his love of literature and the written word that set him on his self-destructive course.”

“I hope you’re not going to do one of those bullshit ‘I’ll tell you more when I know for sure’ deals,” said Landen. “That could be a
serious
annoyance.”

“Not at all,” I replied. “As the Wingco will tell you, travel to the Dark Reading Matter is a one-way journey. You can
never
get back. Unless you have one of these.” I pointed to myself.

“A left breast?” said Landen.

“No,
clot,
a Day Player. What I’m walking around in here might have been designed to be a twenty-four-hour disposable office worker or soldier, but it’s also the perfect way of getting into the Dark Reading Matter.”

I paused for a moment, waiting for this to filter in.

“Nope,” said Landen, “not getting this at all.”

“Okay, let’s start with his apparent escape from the Lobsterhood. He didn’t fast descend to escape and he didn’t BASE jump.
He read his way into the lost work on the palimpsest
. He then had his confederate destroy the pages. It was the only copy, so, once destroyed, the now-deleted work entered the Dark Reading Matter,
with Jack in it.
”

They stood and stared at me in silence.

“Jack could read himself into a book?” said Landen. “I thought that was something only you could do?”

“A Day Player can do almost anything. I’d say we were almost
designed
to be able to cross the transfictional border. Jack could stay for as long as his Day Player holds out, then die or be killed—and come straight back out of the DRM and into the RealWorld, memories and consciousness intact.”

“I think you might be right,” said Landen. “But why Krantz?” “He spent fifteen years on the Book Project ostensibly because he loved literature. I guess he didn’t want to see mankind’s lost works defiled and exploited.”

There was a long pause while we all thought about what this might mean. The Wingco broke the silence.

“What are they up to in there?”

“I’m only guessing here,” I said, “but past experience might indicate there is a seriously large pot of cash involved. They’ve probably been infiltrating the BookWorld for months. All those tanks we saw could well be Goliath—attempting to subjugate the Dark Reading Matter. I’ll find out more the next time I meet Jack Schitt.”

“I need to report this to Commander Bradshaw,” said the Wingco. “We may have to start sending troops in on a one-way journey. I don’t think it’ll be considered a suicide mission any longer—just a permanent reassignment.”

“And I’ve got to go,” I said, glancing at the clock. “Joffy told me I should be ready and waiting at Chiseldon from eleven.”

Landen asked me if I was going to be okay, which seemed a bit daft, to be honest. The only thing to fear was the failure of my set task—the good thing about being a Day Player was that death was downgraded from a vexatious lack of existence to merely a temporary inconvenience.

“If the worst comes to the worst,” I said, “you’ll know about it, because I’ll be yelling for a cup of tea from the guest room.”

I kissed Landen, checked that both my pistols were fully loaded and took spare clips from the gun safe, slipped a dagger into my sock and then popped my head around the door of Tuesday’s lab. To my silent question, she simply shook her head, and once back in the kitchen I asked Friday if I could borrow the Sportina.

“Why?”

“It’s the closest thing we have to a tank, and I could really do with one of those right now.”

“Game on, Mum,” he said, tossing me the keys.

“Thanks—and don’t do any murdering until I get back. Promise?”

“Promise.”

37.

Friday: The Righteous Man

The size of the righteous-person sector within the population is difficult to estimate, but calculations extrapolated from charity work, donations and the Samaritan Index might indicate an occurrence of about 11 per 100,000 population. Of these, perhaps only 2 percent might be considered
truly
righteous, wholly selfless and without a shred of sin—a total of about 100 people living in England today. Who they might be, it is difficult to say. They don’t advertise the fact.

James Hidden,
The Good Amongst Us

A
s I headed toward Chiseldon, I could see that the hillsides surrounding Swindon were filled with spectators, eager to see the smiting firsthand, as no broadcast images could ever do justice to the terrifying beauty of a pillar of fire descending from on high. Many people had tried to describe it adequately, but usually without success. My favorite description was this: “The sort of spectacle that married the bold elegance of a solar eclipse with the visceral thrills of bare-knuckle croquet.”

Chiseldon is a small village on the Swindon-Marlborough Road comprising a few houses, a gas station, a shop, and a railway station. There had been a basic-training camp for Crimean conscripts nearby, to which I had myself been assigned before moving to the plain for vehicle training. The camp reverted to farmland once the conflict had ended, but the iron gates were still present, along with a large bronze statue of Colonel “Trigger” Dellalio, now covered with ivy and graffiti.

I stopped at the deserted gas station and climbed out of the car to have a look around. I walked to the road and glanced up and down the dead-straight highway. There was traffic, but it was all heading into town, presumably latecomers wanting to indulge in what had been sniffily dubbed “Smite tourism.” Even though there was an hour to go, the clouds had begun to heap high above the Swindon Financial Center. The Smite Solutions “honeypot” of hardened criminals would theoretically attract the pillar of fire as it descended in a sinuous curve, similar to the twisting nature of a waterspout.

I checked my watch again and nodded to Phoebe, who was parked in the entranceway to the abandoned Chiseldon camp three hundred yards off. The clock ticked by until it was eleven, then eleven-fifteen. The traffic died down, as presumably everyone was in place to watch the spectacle, and even the staff in the gas station closed up the shop to go watch. Within a few minutes, I was completely alone.

As I stood there, I noticed a large Pontiac driving along the road in a slower-than-normal fashion. It pulled in to the gas station’s forecourt and stopped, just the other side of the pumps. I walked cautiously toward it and soon noticed that the engine was still running and that the windows were tinted.