Lost in a good book (46 page)

I pulled out my automatic as the clock ticked into the last half minute.

“If Landen ever comes back, tell him I love him.”

Twenty seconds.

“If
who
ever comes back?”

“Landen. You’ll know him when you see him. Tall, one leg, writes daft books and had a wife named Thursday who loved him beyond comprehension.”

Ten seconds.

“So long, Wilbur.”

I closed my eyes and placed the gun to my temple.

33.
The Dawn of Life as We Know It

Three billion years ago the atmosphere on earth had stabilized to what scientists referred to as A-II. The relentless hammering of the atmosphere had created the ozone layer, which in turn now stopped new oxygen from being produced. A new and totally different mechanism was needed to kick-start the young planet into the living green ball that we know and enjoy today.

DR
.
LUCIANO SPAGBOG
,
How I Think Life Began on Earth

N
O NEED FOR THAT
,” said my father, gently taking the gun from my hand and laying it on the table. I don’t know whether he purposely arrived late to increase the drama, but there he was. He hadn’t frozen time—I think he was done with that. Whenever he had appeared in the past he had always been smiles and cheeriness, but today he was different. And he looked, for the first time ever,
old.
Perhaps eighty—maybe more.

He thrust his hand inside the nanodevice container as the final generator failed. The small blob of nanotechnology fell on his hand, and the emergency lights flicked on, bathing us all in a dim green glow.

“It’s cold,” he said. “How long have I got?”

“It has to warm up first,” replied Wilbur glumly. “Three minutes?”

“I’m sorry to disappoint you, sweetpea, but self-sacrifice is
not
the answer.”

“It was all I had left, Dad. Me alone or me
and
three billion souls.”

“You don’t get to make that decision, Thursday,
but I do.
You’ve got a lot of good work to do, and your son, too. Me, I’m just glad that it all ends before I become so enfeebled as to be useless.”

“Dad—!”

I felt the tears start to roll down my cheeks. There was so much I wanted to ask him. There always is.

“It all seems so clear to me now!” he said, smiling as he cupped his hand so none of the all-consuming Dream Topping would fall to the ground. “After several million years of existence I finally realized my purpose. Will you tell your mother there was
absolutely nothing
between me and Emma Hamilton?”

“Oh—Dad! Don’t, please!”

“And tell Joffy I forgive him for breaking the windows of the greenhouse.”

I hugged him tightly.

“I’ll miss you. And your mother of course, and Sévé, Louis Armstrong, the Nolan Sisters—which reminds me, did you get any tickets?”

“Third row, but—but—I don’t suppose you’ll need them now.”

“You never know,” he murmured. “Leave my ticket at the box office, will you?”

“Dad, there must be
something
we can do for you, surely?”

“No, my darling, I’m going to be out of here pretty soon.
The Great Leap Forward.
The thing is, I wonder where to? Was there anything in the Dream Topping that shouldn’t have been there?”

“Chlorophyll.”

He smiled and sniffed the carnation in his buttonhole. “Yes, I thought as much. It’s all
very
simple, really—and quite ingenious. Chlorophyll is the key—Ow!”

I looked at his hand. His skin and flesh were starting to swirl as the wayward nanodevice thawed enough to start work, devouring, changing and replicating with ever-increasing speed.

I looked at him, wanting to ask a hundred questions but not knowing where to start.

“I’m going three billion years in the past, Thursday, to a planet with only the
possibility
of life. A planet waiting for a miraculous event, something that has not happened, as far as we know it, anywhere else in the universe. In a word,
photosynthesis.
An oxidizing atmosphere, sweetpea—the ideal way to start an embryonic biosphere.”

He laughed.

“It’s funny the way things turn out, isn’t it? All life on earth descended from the organic compounds and proteins contained within Dream Topping.”

“And the carnation. And you.”

He smiled at me.

“Me. Yes. I thought this might be the ending,
the Big One
— but in fact it’s really only just the beginning. And I’m it. Makes me feel all sort of, well,
humble.
”

He touched my face with his good hand and kissed me on the cheek.

“Don’t cry, Thursday. It’s how it happens. It’s how it has
always
happened, always
will
happened. Take my chronograph; I’m not going to need it anymore.”

I unstrapped the heavy watch from his good wrist as the smell of artificial strawberries filled the room. It was Dad’s hand. It had almost completely changed to pudding. It was time for him to go, and he knew it.

“Goodbye, Thursday. I never could have wished for a finer daughter.”

I composed myself. I didn’t want his last memory of me to be of a sniveling wretch. I wanted him to see I could be as strong as he was. I pursed my lips and wiped the tears from my eyes.

“Goodbye, Dad.”

He winked at me.

“Well, time waits for no man, as we say.”

He smiled again and started to fold and collapse and spiral into a single dot, much like water escaping from a plughole. I could feel myself tugged into the event, so I took a step back as my father vanished into himself with a very quiet
plop
as he traveled into the deep past. A final gravitational tug dislodged one of my shirt buttons; the wayward pearl fastener sailed through the air and was caught in the small rippling vortex. It vanished from sight, and the air rocked for a moment before settling down to that usual state that we refer to as
normality.

My father had gone.

The lights flickered back on as entropy returned to normal. Aornis’s boldly audacious plan for revenge had backfired badly. She had, perversely enough, actually
given
us all life. And after all that talk about irony. She’d probably be kicking herself all the way to TopShop. Dad was right. It
is
funny the way things turn out.

I sat through the Nolan Sisters concert that evening with an empty seat beside me, glancing at the door to see if he would arrive. I hardly even heard the music—I was thinking instead of a lonely foreshore on a planet devoid of any life, a person who had once been my father sloughing away to his component parts. Then I thought of the resultant proteins, now much replicated and evolved, working on the atmosphere. They released oxygen and combined hydrogen with carbon dioxide to form simple food molecules. Within a few hundred million years the atmosphere would be full of free oxygen; aerobic life could begin—and a couple of billion years after that, something slimy would start wriggling onto land. It was an inauspicious start, but now there was a sort of family pride attached to it. He wasn’t just
my
father but
everyone’s
father. As the Nolans performed “Goodbye Nothing to Say,” I sat in quiet introspection, regretting, as children always do upon the death of a parent, all the things we never said nor ever did. But my biggest regret was far more mundane: Since his identity and existence had been scrubbed by the ChronoGuard, I never knew, nor ever asked him—
his name.

34.
The Well of Lost Plots

Character Exchange Program:
If a character from one book looks suspiciously like another from the same author, more than likely, they are. There is a certain degree of economy that runs through the bookworld, and personages from one book are often asked to stand in for others. Sometimes a single character may play another in the same book, which lends a comedic tone to the proceedings if they have to talk to themselves. Margot Metroland once told me that playing the same person over and over and over again was as tiresome as “an actress condemned to the same part in a provincial repertory theater for eternity with no holiday.” After a spate of illegal PageRunning (q.v.) by bored and disgruntled bookpeople, the Character Exchange Program was set up to allow a change of scenery. In any year there are close to ten thousand exchanges, few of which result in any major plot or dialogue infringements. The reader rarely suspects anything at all.

UNITARY AUTHORITY OF WARRINGTON CAT
,
The Jurisfiction Guide to the Great Library
(glossary)

I
SLEPT OVER
at Joffy’s place. I say slept, but that wasn’t entirely accurate. I just stared at the elegantly molded ceiling and thought of Landen. At dawn I crept quietly out of the vicarage, borrowed Joffy’s Brough Superior motorcycle and rode into Swindon as the sun crept over the horizon. The bright rays of a new day usually filled me with hope, but that morning I could think only of unfinished business and an uncertain future. I rode through the empty streets, past Coate and up the Marlborough road towards my mother’s house. She had to know about Dad, however painful the news might be, and I hoped she would take solace, as I did, in his final selfless act. I would go to the station and hand myself in to Flanker afterwards. There was a good chance that SO-5 would believe my account of what happened with Aornis, but I suspected that convincing SO-1 of Lavoisier’s chronuption might take a lot more. Goliath and the two Schitts were a worry, but I was sure I would be able to think of
something
to keep them off my back. Still, the world hadn’t ended yesterday, which was a big plus—and Flanker couldn’t exactly charge me with “failing to save the planet
his
way,” no matter how much he might want to.

As I approached the junction outside Mum’s house I noticed a car that looked suspiciously Goliathesque parked across the street, so I rode on and did a wide circuit, abandoning the motorcycle two blocks away and treading noiselessly down the back alleys. I skirted around another large dark blue Goliath motorcar, climbed over the fence into Mum’s garden and crept past the vegetable patch to the kitchen door. It was locked, so I pushed open the large dodo flap and crawled inside. I was just about to switch on the lights when I felt the cold barrel of a gun pressed against my cheek. I started and almost cried out.

“Lights stay
off,
” growled a husky woman’s voice, “and don’t make any sudden moves.”

I dutifully froze. A hand snaked into my jacket and removed Cordelia’s pistol. DH-82 was fast asleep in his basket; the idea of being a fierce guard-Taswolf had obviously not entered his head.

“Let me see you,” said the voice again. I turned and looked into the eyes of a woman who had departed more rapidly into middle age than years alone might allow. I noticed that her gun arm wavered slightly, she had a slightly florid appearance and her hair had been clumsily brushed and pulled into a bun. But for all that it was clear she had once been beautiful; her eyes were bright and cheerful, her mouth delicate and refined, her bearing resolute.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded.

“This is my mother’s house.”

“Ah!” she said, giving a slight whisper of a smile and raising an eyebrow. “You must be Thursday.”

She returned her pistol to a holster that was strapped to her thigh beneath several layers of her large brocade dress and started to rummage in the cupboards.

“Do you know where your mother keeps the booze?”

“Suppose you tell me who
you
are?” I demanded, my eyes alighting on the knife block as I searched for a weapon—just in case.

The woman didn’t give me an answer, or, at least, not to the question I’d asked.

“Your father told me Lavoisier eradicated your husband.”

I halted my surreptitious creep towards the carving knives.

“You know my father?” I asked in some surprise.

“I do so hate that term
eradicated,
” she announced grimly, searching in vain amongst the tinned fruit for anything resembling alcohol. “It’s murder, Thursday—nothing less. They killed my husband, too—even if it did take three attempts.”

“Who?”

“Lavoisier and the French revisionists.”

She thumped her fist on the kitchen top as if to punctuate her anger and turned to face me.

“You have memories of your husband, I suppose?”

“Yes.”

“Me too,” she sighed. “I wish to heaven I hadn’t, but I have. Memories of things that
might
have happened. Knowledge of the loss. It’s the worst part of it.”

She opened another cupboard door, revealing still more tinned fruit.

“I understand your husband was barely two years old— mine was forty-seven. You might think that makes it better, but it doesn’t. The petition for his divorce was granted and we were married the summer following Trafalgar. Nine years of glorious life as Lady Nelson—then I wake up one morning in Calais, a drunken, debt-ridden wretch, and with the revelation that my one true love died a decade ago, shot by a sniper’s bullet on the quarterdeck of the
Victory.
”

“I know who you are,” I murmured. “You’re Emma Hamilton.”

“I
was
Emma Hamilton,” she replied sadly. “Now I’m a broke out-of-timer with a dismal reputation, no husband and a thirst the size of the Gobi.”

“But you still have your daughter?”

“Yes,” she groaned, “but I never told her I was her mother.”

“Try the end cupboard.”

She moved down the counter, rummaged some more and found a bottle of cooking sherry. She poured a generous helping into one of my mother’s teacups. I looked at the saddened woman and wondered if I’d end up the same way.