Lost in a good book (9 page)

We returned the wave and watched him pedal off.

“Don’t you stop him?”

“Tried. Doesn’t work. Stole his bike—he borrowed a friend’s. Diversion signs he ignored and the pools win didn’t stop him either. I’ve tried everything. Time is the glue of the cosmos, Thursday, and it has to be
eased
apart—try to force events and they end up whacking you on the frontal lobes like a cabbage from six paces. I thought you might have better luck. Lavoisier will have locked on to me by now. The car is due in thirty-eight seconds. Hitch a ride and do your best.”

“Wait!” I said. “What about me?”

“I’ll take you out again after the cyclist is safe.”

“Back to where?” I asked suddenly. I had
no
desire to return the moment I’d left. “The SpecOps marksman, Dad, remember? Can’t you put me back, say, thirty minutes earlier?”

He smiled and gave me a wink.

“Give my love to your mother. Thanks for helping out. Well,
Time waits for no man,
as we—”

But he was gone, melted into the air about me. I paused for a moment and put out a thumb to hail the approaching Jaguar. The car slowed and stopped and the motorist, oblivious to the impending accident, smiled and asked me to hop aboard.

I said nothing, jumped in, and we roared off.

“Just picked the old girl up this morning,” mused the driver, more to himself than me. “Three point eight liters with triple DCOE Webers. Six cylinders of big cat—lovely!”

“Mind the cyclist,” I said as we rounded the corner. The driver stamped on the brake and swerved past the man on the bike.

“Bloody cyclists!” he exclaimed. “A danger to themselves and everyone else. Where are you bound, little lady?”

“I’m, ah ... visiting my father,” I explained, truthfully enough.

“Where does he live?”

“Everywhere,” I replied—

“Wireless seems to be dead,” Bowden announced, keying the mike and turning the knob. “That’s odd.”

“No more odd than a double blowout,” I told him, walking a few paces to the handy phone booth and picking up the Skyrail ticket.

“What have you found?” asked Bowden.

“A Skyrail day pass,” I replied slowly, the broken images in my head that much clearer. “I’m going to take the Skyrail— there’s a neanderthal in trouble.”

“How do you know?”

“Call it
déjà vu
this time. Something’s going to happen—and I’m part of it.”

I left my partner and walked briskly up to the station, showed my ticket to the inspector and climbed the steel steps to the platform. The doors of the shuttle hissed open and I stepped inside, this time knowing
exactly
what I had to do.

4a.
Five Coincidences, Seven Irma Cohens and One Confused Thursday Next

The neanderthal experiment
was simultaneously the high and low point of the genetic revolution. Successful in that a long-dead cousin of
Homo sapien
was brought back from extinction, yet a failure in that the scientists, so happy to gaze upon their experiments from their ever lofty ivory towers, had not seen so far as to consider the social implications that a new species of man might command in a world unvisited by their like for over thirty millennia. It was little surprise that so many neanderthals felt confused and unprepared for the pressures of modern life. It was
Homo sapien
at his least sapient.

GERHARD VON SQUID
,
Neanderthals: Back After a Short Absence

C
OINCIDENCES ARE
strange things. I like the one about the poker player named Fallon, shot dead for cheating in San Francisco in 1858. It was considered unlucky to split the dead man’s $600 winnings, so they gave the money to a passerby, hoping to win it back. The stranger converted the $600 to $2,200 and when the police arrived, was asked to hand over the original $600, as it was to be given to the dead gambler’s next of kin. After a brief investigation, the money was returned to the passerby, as he turned out to be Fallon’s son, who hadn’t seen his father for seven years.

My father told me that for the most part coincidences could be safely ignored. “It would be
much
more remarkable,” he would say, “if there
weren’t
any coincidences.”

I stepped into the Skyrail car and pulled the emergency lever. The neanderthal operator looked at me curiously as I jammed a foot in the open door of his driver’s cubicle. I hauled him out and thumped him on the jaw before handcuffing him. A few days in the cooler and he would be back to Mrs. Kaylieu. The group of women in the Skyrail sat silent and shocked as I searched him and found—nothing. I looked in the cab and his sandwich box but the carved-soap gun wasn’t there either.

The well-heeled woman who had earlier been so keen to jab the driver with her umbrella was now full of self-righteous indignation:

“Disgraceful! Attacking a poor defenseless neanderthal in this manner! I shall speak to my husband about this!”

One of the other women had called SpecOps-21 and a third had given the neanderthal a handkerchief to dab his bleeding mouth. I uncuffed Kaylieu and apologized, then sat down and put my head in my hands, wondering what had gone wrong. All the women were called Irma Cohen, but none of them would ever know it; Dad said this sort of thing happens all the time.

“You did
what?
” asked Victor, a few hours later at the Litera Tec office.

“I punched a neanderthal.”

“Why?”

“I thought he had a gun on him.”

“A neanderthal? With a gun? Don’t be ridiculous!”

I was in Victor’s office with the door closed—a rarity for him. I had been arrested, charged, processed—and delivered under guard to Victor, who vouched for me before I was released. I would have been indignant had I not been so confused. And I was sorry for Kaylieu, too—I had knocked out one of his teeth.

“If the gun
had
been there it would have been carved from soap,” I continued. “He wanted SO-14 to kill him. But that’s not the half of it. The intended victim was
me.
If I had journeyed on the Skyrail it would have been Thursday in the body bag, not Kaylieu. I was set up, Victor. Someone manipulated events to try and bump me off with a stray SpecOps bullet—maybe that was their idea of a joke. If it hadn’t been for Dad taking me out I’d be playing a harp by now.”

Victor had been staring out of the window, his back to me.

“And there were the crossword clues—!”

Victor turned and walked back to his desk, picked up the paper and read the answers outlined in green.

“Meddlesome, Thursday, Goodbye.”

He shrugged.

“Coincidence. I could make any sentence I wanted from any other clues just as easily. Look here.”

He scanned the answers for a moment.

“
Planet, Destroyed, Soonest.
What does that mean? The world’s about to end?”

“Well—”

He dumped my arrest report in his out tray and sat down.

“Thursday,” he said quietly, staring at me soberly, “I’ve been in law enforcement for most of my life and I will tell you right now there is no such offense as ‘attempted murder by coincidence in an alternative future by person or persons unknown.’ ”

I sighed and rubbed my face with my hands. He was right, of course.

“O-kay,” he sighed. “Take my advice, Thursday. Tell them you thought the neanderthal was a felon, that he reminded you of the bogeyman—
anything.
Mention any unauthorized ChronoGuard shenanigans and Flanker will have your badge as a paperweight. I’ll write a good report to SO-1 about your work and conduct so far. With a bit of luck and some serious lying on your behalf, maybe you can get away with a reprimand. For goodness sake, didn’t you learn
anything
from that bad time junket on the M1?”

He got up and rubbed his legs. His body was failing him. The hip he’d had replaced four years ago needed to be replaced. Bowden joined us from where he had been running the copied pages of
Cardenio
through the Verse Meter Analyzer. Unusually for him he seemed to be showing some form of outward excitement. Bouncing, almost.

“How does it look?” I asked.

“Astounding!” replied Bowden as he waved a printed report. “94% probability of Will being the author—not even the best fake
Cardenio
managed higher than a 76. The VMA detected slight traces of collaboration, too.”

“Did it say who?”

“73% likelihood of Fletcher—something that would seem to bear out against historical evidence. Forging Shakespeare is one thing, forging a collaborated work is
quite
another.”

We all fell silent. Victor rubbed his forehead in contemplation and chose his words carefully.

“Okay, strange and impossible as it might seem, we may have to accept that this is the real thing. This could turn out to be the biggest literary event in history,
ever.
We keep this quiet and I’ll get Professor Spoon to look it over. We will have to be 100% sure. I’m not going to suffer the same embarrassment we had over that
Tempest
fiasco.”

“Since it isn’t in the public domain,” observed Bowden, “Volescamper will have the sole copyright for the next seventy-six years.”

“Every playhouse on the planet will want to put it on,” I added. “And think of the movie rights.”

“Exactly,” replied Victor. “He’s sitting on not only the most fantastic literary discovery for three centuries but also a keg of purest gold. The question is, how did it languish in his library undiscovered all this time? Scholars have studied there since 1709. How on earth was it overlooked? Ideas, anyone?”

“Retrosnatch?” I suggested. “If a rogue ChronoGuard operative decided to go back to 1613 and steal a copy he could have a tidy little nest egg on his hands.”

“SO-12 take retrosnatch very seriously and they assure me that it is
always
detected, sooner or later or both—and dealt with severely. But it’s possible. Bowden, give SO-12 a call, will you?”

Bowden put out his hand to pick up the phone just as it started to ring.

“Hello? . . . It’s not, you say? Okay, thanks.”

He put the phone down.

“The ChronoGuard say not.”

“How much do you think it’s worth?” I asked.

“Hundred million,” replied Victor. “Two hundred. Who knows. I’ll call Volescamper and tell him to keep quiet about it. People would kill to even read it. No one else is to know about it, do you hear?”

We nodded our agreement.

“Good. Thursday, the network takes internal affairs very seriously. SO-1 will want to speak to you here tomorrow at four about the Skyrail thing. They asked me to suspend you, but I told them bollocks. Just take some leave until tomorrow. Good work, the two of you. Remember,
not a word to anyone!
”

We thanked him and he left. Bowden stared at the wall for a moment before saying: “The crossword clues bother me, though. If I wasn’t of the opinion that coincidences are merely chance or an overused Dickensian plot device, I might conclude that an old enemy of yours wants to get even.”

“One with a sense of humor, obviously,” I murmured in agreement.

“That rules out Goliath, I suppose,” mused Bowden. “Who are you calling?”

“SO-5.”

I dug Agent Phodder’s card out of my pocket and rang the number. He had told me to call him if “an occurrence of unprecedented
weird
” took place, so I was doing precisely that.

“Hello?” said a brusque voice after the telephone had rung for a long time.

“Thursday Next, SO-27,” I announced. “I have some information for Agent Phodder.”

There was a long pause.

“Agent Phodder has been reassigned.”

“Agent Kannon, then.”

“Both Phodder
and
Kannon have been reassigned,” replied the man sharply. “Freak accident laying linoleum. The funeral’s on Friday.”

This was unexpected news. I couldn’t think of anything intelligent to say, so I mumbled: “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Quite,” said the brusque man, and put the phone down.

“What happened?” asked Bowden.

“Both dead,” I said quietly.

“Hades?”

“Linoleum.”

We sat in silence for a moment, unnerved by the news.

“Does Hades have the sort of powers that might be necessary to manipulate coincidences?” asked Bowden.

I shrugged.

“Perhaps,” said Bowden thoughtfully, “it
was
a coincidence after all.”

“Perhaps,” I said, wishing I could believe it. “Oh—I almost forgot. The world’s going to end on the 12th December at 20:23.”

“Really?” replied Bowden in a disinterested tone. Apocalyptic pronouncements were nothing new to any of us. The world had been predicted as about to be destroyed almost every year since the dawn of man.

“Which one is it this time?” asked Bowden. “Plague of mice or the wrath of God?”

“I’m not sure. I’ve got to be somewhere at five. Do us a favor, would you?”

I reached into my pocket and retrieved the small evidence bag my father had given to me. Bowden took the bag from my outstretched arm and looked at it curiously.

I checked the time and rose to leave.

“What is it?” he asked, staring at the pink goo.

“That’s what I need to know. Will you have the labs analyze it?”

We bade each other goodbye and I trotted out of the building, bumping into John Smith, who was maneuvering a wheelbarrow with a carrot the size of a vacuum cleaner in it. There was a big label attached to the oversized vegetable that read
evidence,
and I held the door open for him.

“Thanks,” he panted.

I jumped in my car and pulled out of the car park. My appointment at five was at the doctor’s, and I wasn’t going to miss it for anything.

6.
Family