The Woman Who Died a Lot

19. Tuesday: Home

“Holy cow!” said Landen when he saw me. “What happened to you?”

“Remember how Daisy Mutlar said she would devote her life to silent introspection of an obscure religion if she couldn’t marry you?”

“We all make threats like that. No one takes them seriously.”

“Daisy was totally serious. She’s now Mother Daisy over at the Salisbury Lobsterhood.”

“She always did want to be a mother. She did all this to you?”

“Only that one and . . . that one,” I replied, showing him the bruises that had been Daisy-inflicted.

“The rest was Jack Schitt and one of his cronies.”

“I’ve a feeling you weren’t reminiscing about the old days over a glass of wine.”

“Very astute of you.”

We went through to the kitchen, where we exchanged passwords before I sat at the large kitchen table and related all that had happened. While I talked, he fetched some antiseptic and a packet of cotton wool. I had numerous scratches, cuts and abrasions from when the trapdoor was blown open, and I winced as he tended to them. When I’d finished speaking, he stared at me for a while, concerned rather than shocked.

“Trouble really does follow you around, doesn’t it? Even when you’re just a librarian.”

“There’s nothing ‘just’ about being a librarian,” I corrected him. “And as for Jack Schitt—I’ve a feeling we’ve not heard the last of him.”

“It doesn’t make much sense, him allowing you to see his face and survive, does it?”

“None of it adds up,” I replied with another wince as he picked a splinter out of my head. “How have things been here?”

“The Wingco got through to Land’s End International. Neither Quinn, Highsmith nor Aornis ever got there.”

“It’s a long journey from Swindon to Cornwall,” I said. “They must have stopped for fuel.”

“Millon came up with these,” said Landen, laying some pictures on the table in front of me. They were grainy images from a security camera at a motorway services somewhere.

“What am I looking at?” I asked.

“These were taken at Agutter Services two hours after Aornis and the van left Swindon.”

He pointed to three figures—one, Aornis, being escorted by two others, recognizable as Quinn and Highsmith.

“Okay,” I said, “a toilet break. Now what?”

He showed me another taken a minute later, with Aornis on her own.

“Probably made them forget what they were doing,” said Landen. “The whole deafness-as-defense must have been totally wrong—she can manipulate memories in quite another way.”

“What happened to her after that?” I asked, and Landen showed me a picture of Aornis, this time getting into a Alfa-Morris Spyder. There was a road sign next to her, which indicated she was heading back the way she came.

“Okay,” I said, “so she headed back up the motorway. See what Millon can find from the motorway cameras. There can’t be many Alfa-Morris Spyders on the roads these days. It’s a start at least.”

“Why are we looking for Aornis again?” asked Landen. “I’m sure there’s a good reason, but I can’t remember what it is.”

“One of us has a mindworm. We have to kill Aornis to get rid of it.”

“Is it me?”

I nodded.

“Hmm. Wonder what it is? Don’t tell me! Will I forget about having one soon enough?”

“Pretty soon, yes.”

“Good.”

He returned his attention to the splinters stuck in my neck and shoulder.

“Ow!” I said as he wiped some dirt out of a wound, “Be careful. How did Tuesday feel about the failure of the defense shield?”

“She’s taking it well, but something’s brewing at the city council—she overheard them as they made their way out. Since they think it’s unlikely the Anti-Smite Shield will be operational by Friday, they said that Smite Solutions will have to be confirmed instead.”

“Is Smite Solutions an evacuation plan or something else?”

“Not sure,” he replied, “but even with an evacuation, the entire city center will still be destroyed in a firestorm. A billion pounds’ worth of damage, in less time than it takes to prepare ramer noodles—and no insurance due to the Act of God clause. Will you keep still?”

“You’re hurting me.”

“I didn’t tell you to go out and do fieldwork.”

“I was going to look at some books—it became fieldwork. Shit, I need a Dizuperadol patch the size of a washcloth. My leg is screaming at me like a stuck pig.”

“You’re not allowed to replace them until seven,” replied Landen, checking his watch.

“You’re my doctor now?”

“No, I’m your husband now. And you’re meant to have only three, changed every two days. Doctor’s orders.”

“Damn the doctor.”

Landen sighed. “I can run you down to Lola Vavoom Memorial,” he said. “You can argue with them instead. They’ll say the same—only with medical authority.”

“Never mind,” I muttered.

He glared at me. “There’s no point in grumping at everything and everyone, Thursday.”

I shot him an angry look. “Oh, and you weren’t grumpy when you lost your leg?”

“Yes, I was grumpy. Very grumpy. In fact, I was probably the biggest pain in the arse imaginable. But I had someone to tell me when I was being too grumpy for my own good.”

“That’s completely different.”

“No, it’s completely the same. You told me not be an arse then, and I’m telling you not to be an arse now.”

I took a deep breath and gave him a hug so my mouth was close to his ear.

“You were grumpier,” I whispered, and he laughed and threatened to tickle me, so I had to promise I’d be good. I hate being tickled.

“You two are so disgustingly fond of one another,” said Millon the Hermit as he shambled in the back door. “

You should try arguing once in a while. Good for marriages, apparently.

"Holy cow, Thursday, what happened to you?”

“An argument with a trapdoor. How’s your hermit exam revision going?”

He narrowed his eyes and waved his hands randomly in the air. “It is adrift on the sea of time, lost in the endless wastes of human vanity.”

Landen and I looked at one another and nodded.

“Not bad,” I said.

“Thank you. Want to hear what I found out about Krantz?”

Millon did indeed have some news. Jacob Krantz had worked for seventeen years on the Book Project—Goliath’s attempt to enter the BookWorld.

“Krantz was one of three scientists who had contributed significantly to the transfictional drive on the Austen Rover Transfictional Tour Bus,” said Millon. “He was professor of theoretical particle English at St. Broccoli’s in Oxford, so knew how to merge physics and literature. Loved both, they said.”

“And then what?”

“He was moved to the Synthetic Human Division. As soon as Synthetics were officially given banned chimera status, he was reassigned—but to where, I’m still trying to discover.”

“Why is he in Swindon with a stack of Thursday Next lookalikes?”

“He isn’t. He never left. He was found at home in Goliathopolis on Sunday morning—dead.”

“Murder?”

“Natural causes, it seems. A brain aneurysm. He was sixtyeight.”

“Well,” I said, “there was someone or something that looked a lot like him in the Finis Hotel this morning.”

“I’m not disputing that.”

We all fell silent. I tried to figure it out, but my brain felt fluffy, so I thanked Millon and invited him to stay for supper, which he said would be a great improvement on the breadless gruel sandwich he had planned. We made some tea, and he and Landen chatted about the conspiracy network. Not so much about the imminent smiting but more long-term stuff like HR-6984’s arrival in thirty-seven years. Namely, just what algorithms were being used by the Asteroid Strike Likelihood Committee to account for the 34 percent likelihood of a strike and why this might be important. I got bored just as Friday wandered in and started to rummage through the fridge. “How was work?” I asked.

“ ’S’kay,” he replied, taking random bites from things. “Any news?”

“Not really.”

“Anything cool happen at Home De pot?”

“Neh.”

“Something on your mind?”

“Why do you ask?”

“You’ve just eaten Pickwick’s pet food.”

“Ugh,” he said, and spit it in the bin.

“It’s the Destiny Aware Support Group meeting,” he said, after swilling his mouth out with water. “I’m not sure I want to go.”

“It might help to discover why you’re going to kill Gavin Watkins on Friday.”

He looked up at me. “I think that’s why I don’t want to go.”

“I’ll take you. We’ll leave at seven-thirty.”

He grumpily agreed, gave me a silent hug and was gone. I took Tuesday some hot chocolate to her in her lab and found the Wingco in with her. Despite Tuesday’s ongoing work to discover the value of the illusive U_c, she was also committed to helping the Wing Commander with his efforts to try to prove the existence of the Dark Reading Matter.

“What’s unique about early dodos is how they functioned with so few lines of code,” explained Tuesday when I asked them what they were doing. “Whoever first programmed the dodo’s brain must have discovered pretty quickly that it was possible to crash a dodo’s cortex simply by mild overstimulation. Watching a kitten while eating a cake and walking all at the same time would be enough to do it. And although a reboot would take only five minutes, the rebooted dodo would have forgotten everything it had ever learned, ever, which isn’t ideal. Rather than redesign the brain, they simply added a buffer to slow down the processing of information.”

I looked at Pickwick, who was sitting on the workbench with an uncomfortable “If you wanted a guinea pig, why not just buy a blasted guinea-pig?” look about her.

“Is that why she often reacts to stuff ten seconds late?”

“Exactly. But what’s more interesting for the Wingco is that we can pick up the buffered information on a wireless. The annoying static you get between Swindon-KZXY and Rant-AM is actually buffered dodo thoughts.”

“And this helps the Wingco and his Dark Reading Matter project . . . how?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“Not even the tiniest bit.”

“Watch.”

Tuesday carefully tuned in the Encephalovision through a standard wireless set, but this time without its being connected to Pickwick via the Avian Encephalograph.

“There’s nothing there,” I said, which was true, as only random static danced across the screen.

“Patience, Mum. We have to overstimulate her first.” It was surprisingly easy. While Tuesday showed Pickwick several marshmallows, the Wingco juggled some oranges, and then I, so as not to be simply a casual observer, recited the opening soliloquy to Richard III. Pickwick looked at all of us in turn, blinked twice and then stood stock-still.

“Ah!” said Tuesday. “She’s buffering. Wait for it.” We looked at the screen, and sure enough after about ten seconds there was a fuzzy interpretation of what Pickwick had seen. Juggling, a giant marshmallow and me, walking up and down. There was also more Dukes of Hazzard and her water dish. But then, after ten seconds, it faded. The buffering had ended.

“An ingenious discovery,” I murmured slowly, “but I still can’t see how this fits into the Dark Reading Matter.”

“We think a dodo’s buffered thoughts might be able to transit the Dark Barrier,” said the Wingco, “so all I need to find is an Imaginary Childhood Friend who is about to pass into the DRM with the death of its host and get the ICF to take a dodo with it. The dodo gets overstimulated by what it sees, and we read those buffered thoughts on the Encephalovision back home. It’s really very straightforward.”

“Is it?” I asked, not unreasonably, and both Tuesday and the Wingco went into a complex explanation of how a thing might be possible, which seemed to revolve around the fact that the ICF and the dodo would fuse into a transient state of semifictionalization that would permeate—at least temporarily—the Dark Barrier in two directions.

“I’m a fool not to have seen it myself,” I said, still not understanding it fully, then added, mildly suspicious, “Which dodo?”

“Don’t worry, we won’t use Pickwick,” said Tuesday. “There are plenty of other dodos around, and so long as we get one that is pre-V4 with the old-style brain, we’ll be laughing.”

“Okay, then,” I said as the security gate’s buzzer sounded. “Keep me posted.”

It was Stig outside the gate, so I let him in. He had a cup of tea and talked obsessively about the weather for ten minutes, something that, along with tea and kicking balls about, was very neanderthal, leading some paleontologists to speculate that neanderthal behavior might have somehow crossed over to the English in the distant past.

Millon and Landen came in to listen too, and the reason for Stig’s visit was not long in coming.

“That Synthetic Thursday we retired,” he said. “We made . . . discoveries.”

“Such as?”

“She low-budget, no-frills model. Nothing designed to last— skeleton, musculature, endocrine system—low-quality engineering. All internal organs not required removed and body cavity stuffed with slow-release glucose compound that looks and smells like nougat. She burn brightly twenty-four hours, then downhill. Within three days she poisoned by own waste products.”

“Unpleasant.”

“They designed to be euthanized after only twenty-four.”

“Okay, what else?”

“Disposable models like these called Day Players. They used internally at Goliath when extra staff needed daily basis. If lot of extra photocopying needed, chit for a Day Player made to stationery store—extra pair of hands. Makes much more financial sense than a temping agency, and no security issues.”

“It’s the reason they can’t regulate body heat that well,” added Millon. “Within an office environment, they never needed to.”

“Are they not illegal?” asked Landen. “Synthetics were banned almost as soon as they were invented.”

“There’s a loophole,” said Millon. “So long as they never leave the island of Goliathopolis, they’re quite legal.”

“Why would they have Day Players look like me?”

“A company in-joke most likely,” suggested Millon. “My sources tell me that Day Players have transferable skill adaptations, so you don’t have to teach them everyone’s name again and where the photocopier paper is stored. The technology might have advanced since then to a full Cognitive Transfer System.”

“Say that again?”

He did, and we pondered over the possibility of what a Cognitive Transfer System might potentially mean. At its most complex, eternal life in a series of hosts, and at its least complex a way to carry out potentially fatal repairs inside nuclear reactors.

“Krantz,” said Landen softly, “was probably a Day Player himself. It would explain why he’s down here alive and not up in Goliathopolis dead.”

“When precisely did he die?” I asked.

“Sunday morning.”

I looked at Krantz’s Gravitube ticket, the one I’d found in the Formby Suite.

I thought it over for a moment.

“Okay, how about this: He activates his own Day Player at least an hour before he dies of an aneurysm, so he achieves full consciousness and memory download, then the Day Player catches the midday Gravitube to Clary-Lamarr with five unactivated Synthetics in Tupperware sarcophagi on his baggage manifest. He checks in to the hotel and then activates the first Thursday this morning.”

“How did he know he was going to have a brain aneurysm?” said Millon. “It’s not something you can predict, is it?”

“You have something there.”

“And why is he on holiday in Swindon with five—now four— ersatz Thursdays fresh-packed in Tupperware?”

“You have something there, too,” I conceded. “But what we do know is that somewhere in the city is a Day Player who’s been going for two and a half days out of a maximum three. He’ll probably be in pain and a bit panicky and will certainly be dead by midnight—but he’ll have the answers.”

We all exchanged glances.

“Here’s the plan,” said Landen. “I’ll search hotels, Stig can check out boardinghouses, and Millon can put his ear to the ground. No one could move that amount of Tupperware around the city without arousing suspicions.”

“I don’t know,” said Millon. “This is Swindon, remember.”

“Agreed,” replied Landen, “but ask around nonetheless.”

“And me?” I asked.

“You’re accompanying Friday to his Destiny Aware Support group meeting.”