The Woman Who Died a Lot: A Thursday Next Novel (5 page)

“I think you’ll find it says ‘bullet.’ ”

“Oh, yes,” he said, peering closer. “That makes a lot more sense.”

“Acheron’s sister wasn’t best pleased that I did,” I said. “In fact—”

“Can I stop you there?” said Chumley abruptly. “I’d be happier not knowing who Acheron’s sister is. My job is to give Commander Hicks an appraisal of your psychological well-being. Now, do you have any delusions, hallucinations, unresolved and deep-seated personal issues, inexplicable phobias or any other related aberrations that might negatively affect your working efficiency?”

“I don’t . . . think so.”

“Thank heavens,” he said with a contented sigh as he produced a small book of certificates. “I’m going to mark you NUT-1 on the internationally recognized but tactlessly named scale of psychological normality: ‘disgustingly healthy and levelheaded.’ There, that was easy. I can have a break until my twelve-o’clock—she had to kill a man with her thumb and now can’t tie her shoelaces or change her mind without losing her temper. Well, nice meeting you. Close the door on your way out. Cheerio.”

But I didn’t get up. No one I knew in SpecOps had been given a clear bill of mental health for decades. In fact, it struck me now that it was possibly a disadvantage. After all, who would ever do the stuff we did without being a little bit nuts? Victor Analogy had run SO-27 for twenty-six years and was never ranked higher than a NUT-4: “prone to strange and sustained delusional outbursts but otherwise normal in all respects.” I had respected Analogy a great deal, but even I felt slightly ill at ease when he confided in me with all seriousness that he was pregnant with an elephant, foisted on him by an overamorous server at Arby’s.

“Actually,” I began, “I think someone might be trying to kill me.”

Chumley stopped what he was doing and stared at me over the top of his spectacles. “Oh, no,” he said, “I’m not falling for that. First you say you’re fine, then you say your not. We call it Hamlet syndrome—an attempt to get your own way by feigning insanity, generally by saying what comes into your head and talking a lot. Mind you,” he added thoughtfully, “it works a lot better if you’re a prince.”

“I’m not kidding,” I replied. “Goliath is out to cause me harm.”

I stared at him earnestly, and he narrowed his eyes. It was true, too. The Goliath Corporation and I had not seen eye to eye over the past two decades. They no longer controlled SpecOps but had run the police force ever since the entire service had been privatized.

“In my experience that’s hardly evidence of delusion,” he said. “Goliath is out to get lots of people. Being wary of multinationals shouldn’t be paranoia, and more a case of standard operating procedure.”

Goliath wasn’t universally loved, but since it employed almost a fifth of England’s workforce, no one was keen to rock the boat. Few ever dared to speak out against the behemoth.

“I see,” Chumley said, pen poised above the “signature” part of the certificate. “And what form does this harm take? Assassination?”

“I’m too valuable to assassinate,” I told him. “They’re more interested in attempting to access information by
impersonation.
There are people who might talk only to me about information that Goliath is after.”

“They’d have to be good impersonators to fool people who know you well.”

I thought for a moment. I wanted to aim for what Analogy had been given: a NUT-4. Anything saner and I was probably too normal; anything more insane and I’d be disqualified. I wondered what Phoebe Smalls had been given. She was utterly sane—but smart, too, so I’d have to assume that she knew the system as well as I did. She’d probably go for the same. It would be a delicate task not merely to feign madness but just the right
level
of madness. I leaned forward.

“It’s not the sort of impersonators you imagine. The Goliath Corporation has made considerable advances in the manufacture of
Homo syntheticus,
” I told him, “and for a few years now they’ve been manufacturing Thursdays who try to pass themselves off as me—six times that we know of.”

“Did you take these synthetics to the police?”

“The police are run by Goliath. I have a feeling we’d be wasting our time.”

“I see. And where are those Synthetics now?”

I stared at him thoughtfully. Although the
Homo syntheticus
were wholly artificial, they
appeared
sentient. If they were shown to be legally equivalent to neanderthals, we could be convicted of murder. If they were deemed illegally spliced chimeras, we were in no trouble at all—and could even claim a bounty by presenting an eyelid as proof. I decided to play it safe.

“I have no idea of their precise whereabouts.”

He stared at me for a moment, attempting to gauge if this idea could be real or was only a complex delusion.

“Okay,” he said, “I’m going to make you a NUT-2: ‘generally sane.’ Seven Thursdays? Interesting.”

It was a step in the right direction, but it wasn’t enough.

“There weren’t seven,” I said quickly. “There were ten.”

“Ten?”

I counted them out on my fingers. “Six synthetics, two fictional Thursdays, me and my gran, who wasn’t
actually
my gran— just a version of me that I
thought
was my gran, hiding in our present rather than hers. She had to spend the last twenty years of her life in gingham and read the ten most boring classics.”

“I’m sure there was a good reason.”

“Because she—I—changed the ending of
Jane Eyre.
It was an Illegal Narrative Flexation; they would have liked to let me off, but the law is the law. Oh, perhaps I should have added that for much of my career I’ve worked for Jurisfiction. It’s a sort of policing agency in the BookWorld, the realm that exists beyond the other side of the printed page.”

“You’ve been there?”

“Many times. I can read my way across, or at least I could before the accident. My mentor was Miss Havisham, who was terrific so long as you didn’t mention the wedding, and Emperor Zhark, who is a barrel of laughs when he’s not subjugating entire star systems in his tyrannical and inadequately explained quest for galactic domination.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Remember how two weeks went missing out of Samuel Pepys’s diary a few years back? That was me having an off day.”

I continued in this vein for a while, outlining various adventures I’d had in the BookWorld. I talked about the ongoing metaphor shortage, Speedy Muffler, the witheringly tiresome internal politics at the Council of Genres, about imaginotransference engines, UltraWord, Commander Bradshaw’s gorilla wife, Melanie, and the first time I was attacked by grammasites. I ended with an account of the reason for my current physical state during an assassination attempt in a quiet corner of the Thriller genre and how Red Herring had been responsible.

“Was Red Herring a red herring?” asked Chumley in some confusion.

“No,” I replied reflectively, “but his name was. By calling Red Herring Red Herring, it made people think that he couldn’t be a red herring as it was too obvious, so his name—Red Herring— then became the red herring when we found out he wasn’t a red herring. Simple, yes?”

“No.”

“I agree it’s complicated,” I said with a shrug. “Working in fiction does gives one a somewhat tenuous hold on reality, but it’s not the hold that’s tenuous—it’s the
reality:
Which reality? Whose reality? Does it matter anyway? And will there be cake?” “And was there?”

“Was there what?”

“Cake.”

“Generally speaking, yes.”

Dr. Chumley rubbed his temples. “I think I preferred Spike’s sharpened spade earlier. At least that had a sort of uncomplicated creeping menace about it. The BookWorld? It’s all
very
confusing.”

“I’ve spent most of my life confused,” I replied. “You get used to it after a while. There’s a lot to be said about merely having a hazy idea of what’s going on but generally reaching the right outcome by following broad policy outlines. In fact, I’ve a sneaky suspicion that it’s the
only
way of getting things done. Once the horror and unpredictability of unintended consequences gets a hold, even the best-intentioned and noblest of plans generally descend to mayhem, confusion and despair.”

“I see,” said Dr. Chumley, tearing off another certificate and scrunching it up. “I’m going to lower you to a NUT-3: ‘mildly aberrant behavior with occasional long stretches of lucidity.’”

It still wasn’t enough.

“So the whole BookWorld thing doesn’t make me nuts?” I asked, semisarcastically.

“We do try to avoid that particular word when making a diagnosis in our profession,” said Dr. Chumley with a sigh, “but sometimes I wonder if the human race isn’t collectively as mad as a sack of doorknobs. Where does that put me and my profession? Trying to sort out the real nutjobs from the partial nutjobs? Or just in a state of muddled damage limitation?”

He took another deep breath and slumped facedown on the table.

“Don’t tell anyone I told you that. We’re really just meant to nod and say things like ‘Aha’ and ‘Go on’ and ‘How does that make you feel?’ It would have helped me a lot more if Spike had told me he baked novelty cakes rather than killed the undead. And no, it doesn’t make you nuts—as you suggest, it might actually be true.”

Damn. He partially believed me.

“Before I worked here,” he said with another sigh, “I would certainly have thought you dangerously delusional, but the SpecOps standards of reality are pretty broad. Here’s an example: I had Captain Henshaw of the Odd Squad in here yesterday. But it wasn’t
our
Captain Henshaw, it was Captain Henshaw
^F76+
, apparently on an important trade delegation from Reality-F76+, where everything is pretty much identical to here—only everyone has two heads.”

“That’s a bigger and more bizarre claim than the BookWorld?”

“Not really, because Henshaw
^F76+
actually
had
two heads.”

“Did he argue with himself? I always wondered about that.”

“Quite a lot actually— that’s why he came to see me. But there they were. Two heads. So, you see, what you say might actually be true. Might not be. But might. There you have it. NUT-3.”

It wasn’t going well. I had lose that extra ranking. NUT-4 or nothing.

“I have something else I need to share,” I said.

“Yes?” replied Dr. Chumley from where he was still resting facedown on the table.

“Yes. I . . . think I’m pregnant with an elephant.”

“An elephant?” he asked, lifting his face from the table to stare at me.

“Yes—foisted on me by an overamorous server at Greggs.”

He shook his head sadly. “Now I know you’re trying to pull a fast one.
Everyone
uses the ‘pregnant with an elephant’ gambit to be downranked. I think Victor Analogy used it first.”

He smiled triumphantly and pulled the pad of certificates toward him again.

“You’re a NUT-3, my girl, and nothing you can say will change my mind.”

“What about the fact that I think my mother was a snail named Andrew?”

“ NUT-3,” he said firmly, and continued to write.

“That I have a dodo named Pickwick, who is the oldest in existence?”

“Perfectly plausible,” he replied.

“How about the fact that my son would have been given the job of ChronoGuard director general due to his expert handling of Asteroid HR-6984 that hasn’t happened?”

Dr. Chumley looked up at me and smiled. “Listen,” he said, “if you give me any more of that ‘pretending to be mad’ act, I’ll disregard all that BookWorld stuff and you’ll be upgraded back to a NUT-2.”

Blast. Foiled.

“Okay then,” I said, and sat quietly while Dr. Chumley filled out the form. I was just wondering—in vain—what else I could to lessen the fact that I might not be mad enough to run SpecOps when I noticed that the previous certificate had Detective Smalls’s name on it, and by expertly reading upside down—a skill I’d advise to anyone working in a wheezing bureaucracy—I saw that she had indeed been listed as NUT-4. She must have thought up something
really
wacky. Smart, young, driven, insane— the SpecOps job was almost hers. I was just thinking about whether I could function under Smalls’s leadership when Dr. Chumley stopped and stared at me.

“Why do you have ‘Jenny is a mindworm’ written on the back of your hand?”

“I don’t.”

“You do.”

I looked down, and he was right—there it was. I frowned for a moment as I tried to remember who had written it and when. I licked my fingers and rubbed pointlessly at the writing—it was a tattoo, but one I couldn’t remember getting. I felt confused, angry, and my eyes moistened as I realized what was going on. The daughter Jenny I remembered—the twelve-year-old with the infectious laugh and freckled nose who had taken twenty-two hours of labor to push out wasn’t real at all. She didn’t fall off a wall when she was eight years old and didn’t have nightmares about foxes in her bedroom. Never had. Never would. As the realization dawned, I felt a sudden and overwhelming stab of grief—loss and bereavement that gave way to anger, then a sense of sad awareness that I went through this many times a day and that Landen, the kids and I had agreed that the tattoo was for the best. I knew, too, with a falling heart that this moment of clarity would be fleeting, and my eyes filled with tears.

“Acheron Hades’ little sister,” I told him as reason momentarily filtered into my head. “She gave me a mindworm before going down for life. We’re making inquiries at TJ-Maxx as to what happened to her. We’re hoping the tattoo will remind me often enough to break it. As it stands at the moment, I can forget I have the mindworm almost midsentence.”

“Does it affect your work?”

“Does what effect my work?”

“The mindworm.”

“What mindworm?” I asked, unsure of whom he was referring to. “Has Aornis been up to her tricks again?”

“You’re joking, right?” he asked.

“What would I joke about?” I asked, truthfully enough. “You’re here to rate me at Braxton’s request—hardly the time to piss about.”