A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5 (129 page)

 

 

 

 

T
he Isle of Man had been an independent corporate state within England since it was appropriated for the greater fiscal good in 1963. The surrounding Irish Sea was heavily mined to deter unwanted visitors and the skies above protected by the most technologically advanced antiaircraft system known to man. It had hospitals and schools, a university, its own fusion reactor and also, leading from Douglas to the Kennedy Graviport in New York, the world's only privately run Gravitube. The Isle of Man was home to almost two hundred thousand people who did nothing but support, or support the support, of the one enterprise that dominated the small island: the Goliath Corporation.

The old Manx town of Laxey was renamed Goliathopolis and was now the Hong Kong of the British archipelago, a forest of glassy towers striding up the hillside towards Snaefell. The largest of these skyscrapers rose higher even than the mountain peak behind and could be seen glinting in the sunlight all the way from Blackpool, weather permitting. In this building was housed the inner sanctum of the whole vast multinational, the cream of Goliath's corporate engineers. An employee could spend a lifetime on the island and never even get past the front desk. And it was on the ground floor of this building, right at the heart of the corporation, that I found the Goliath Apologarium.

I joined a small queue in front of a modern glass-topped table where two happy, smiling Goliath employees were giving out questionnaires and numbered tickets.

“Hello!” said the clerk, a youngish girl with a lopsided smile. “Welcome to the Goliath Corporation's Apology Emporium. Sorry you had to wait. How can we help you?”

“The Goliath Corporation murdered my husband.”

“How simply dreadful!” she responded in a lame and insincere display of sympathy. “I'm
so
sorry to hear that. Goliath, as part of our move to a faith-based corporate-management system, is committed to reversing all the unpleasant matters we might have previously been engaged in. You need to fill in this form, and this form—and Section D of this one—and then take a seat. We'll get one of our highly trained apologists to see you just as soon as they can.”

She handed me several long forms and a numbered ticket, then indicated a door to one side. I opened the door of the Apologarium and walked in. It was a large hall with floor-to-ceiling windows that gave a serene view of the Irish Sea. On one side was a row of perhaps twenty cubicles containing suited apologists, all listening intently to what they were being told with the same sad and contrite expression. On the other side were rows upon rows of wooden seating that held eager and once bullied citizens, anxiously clasping their numbered tickets and patiently waiting their turn. I looked at my ticket. It was number 6,174. I glanced up at the board, which told me that number 836 was now being interviewed.

“Dear, sweet people!” said a voice through a tannoy. “Goliath is deeply sorry for all the harm it might inadvertently have caused you in the past. Here at the Goliath Apologarium we are only too happy to assist in your problem, no matter how small—”

“You!” I said to a man who was hobbling past me towards the exit. “Has Goliath repented to your satisfaction?”

“Well, they didn't really need to,” he replied blandly. “It was I who was at fault—in fact,
I
apologized for wasting their valuable time!”

“What did they do?”

“They bathed my neighborhood with ionizing radiation, then denied it for seventeen years, even after people's teeth fell out and I grew a third foot.”

“And you forgave them?”

“Of course. I can see now that it was a genuine accident and the public has to accept equal risks if we are to have abundant clean energy, limitless food and household electrodefragmentizers.”

He was carrying a sheaf of papers, not the application form that I had to fill out but leaflets on how to join New Goliath. Not as a consumer but as a
worshipper.
I had always been deeply distrustful of Goliath, but this whole “repentance” thing smelt worse than anything I had so far witnessed. I turned, tore up my numbered ticket and headed for the exit.

“Miss Next!” called out a familiar voice. “I say, Miss Next!”

A short man with pinched features and a rounded head covered with the fuzz of an aggresively short crew cut was facing me. He was wearing a dark suit and heavy gold jewelry and was arguably the person I liked least—this was Jack Schitt, once Goliath's top advanced-weapons guru and ex-convict of “The Raven.” This was the man who had tried to prolong the Crimean War so he could make a fortune out of Goliath's latest superweapon, the Plasma Rifle.

Anger rose quickly within me. I turned Friday in the other direction so as not to give his young mind any wrong ideas about the use of violence and then grasped Schitt by the throat. He took a step back, stumbled and collapsed beneath me with a yelp. Sensing I had been in this position before, I released him and placed my hand on the butt of my automatic, expecting to be attacked by a host of Jack's minders. But there was nothing. Just sad citizens looking on sorrowfully.

“There is no one here to help me,” said Jack Schitt, slowly getting to his feet. “I have been assaulted eight times today—I count myself fortunate. Yesterday it was twenty-three.”

I looked at him and noticed, for the first time, that he had a black eye and a cut on his lip.

“No minders?” I echoed. “Why?”

“It is my absolution to face those I have bullied and harangued in the past, Miss Next. When we last met, I was head of Goliath's Advanced Weapons Division and corporate laddernumber 329.” He sighed. “Now, thanks to your well-publicized denouncement of the failings of our Plasma Rifle, the corporation decided to demote me. I am an Apology Facilitation Operative Second Class, laddernumber 12,398,219. The mighty has fallen, Miss Next.”

“On the contrary,” I replied, “you have merely been moved to a level more fitting for your competence. It's a shame. You deserved much worse than this.”

His eyes twitched as he grew angry. The old Jack, the homicidal one, returned for a moment. But the feelings were short-lived, and his shoulders fell as he realized that without the Goliath Security Service to back him up, his power over me was minimal.

“Maybe you are right,” he said simply. “You will not have to wait your turn, Miss Next. I will deal with your case personally. Is this your son?” He bent down to look closer. “Cute fellow, isn't he?”

“Eiusmod tempor incididunt adipisicing elit,” said Friday, glaring at Jack suspiciously.

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘If you touch me, my mum will break your nose.' ”

Jack stood up quickly. “I see. Goliath and myself offer a full, frank and unreserved apology.”

“What for?”

“I don't know. Have it on account. Would you care to come to my office?”

He beckoned me out the door, and we crossed a courtyard with a large fountain in the middle, past a few suited Goliath officials chattering in a corner, then through another doorway and down a wide corridor full of clerks moving backwards and forwards with folders tucked under their arms.

Jack opened a door, ushered me in, offered me a chair and then sat himself. It was a miserable little office, devoid of any decoration except a shabby Lola Vavoom calendar on the wall and a dead plant in a pot. The only window looked out onto a wall. He arranged some papers on his desk and spoke into the intercom.

“Mr. Higgs, would you bring the Thursday Next file in, please?”

He looked at me earnestly and set his head at a slight angle, as though trying to affect some sort of apologetic demeanor.

“None of us quite realized,” he began in the sort of soft voice that undertakers use when attempting to persuade you to buy the deluxe coffin, “just how appalling we had been until we started asking people if they were at all unhappy with our conduct.”

“Why don't we cut the cr—” I looked at Friday, who looked back at me. “Cut the . . . cut the . . .
nonsense
and go straight to the place where you atone for your crimes.”

He sighed and stared at me for a moment, then said, “Very well. What did we do wrong again?”

“You can't remember?”

“I do lots of wrong things, Miss Next. You'll excuse me if I can't remember details.”

“You eradicated my husband,” I said through gritted teeth.

“Of course! And what was the name of the eradicatee?”

“Landen,” I replied coldly. “Landen Parke-Laine.”

At that moment a clerk arrived with a pile of papers and laid them on his desk. Jack opened the file, which was marked “Most Secret,” and leafed through them.

“The record shows that at the time you say your husband was eradicated, your case officer was operative Schitt-Hawse. It says here that he pressured you to release operative Schitt—that's me—from within the pages of ‘The Raven' by utilizing an unnamed ChronoGuard operative who
volunteered
his services. It says that you complied but our promise was revoked due to an unforeseen and commercially necessary overriding blackmail-continuance situation.”

“You mean corporate greed, don't you?”

“Don't underestimate greed, Miss Next—it's commerce's greatest motivating force. In this context it was probably due to our plans to use the BookWorld to dump nuclear waste and sell our extremely high-quality goods and services to characters in fiction. You were then imprisoned in our most inaccessible vault, from where you escaped, methodology unknown.”

He closed the file.

“What this means, Miss Next, is that we kidnapped you, tried to kill you, and then had you on our shoot-on-sight list for over a year. You may be in line for a generous cash settlement.”

“I don't want cash, Jack. You had someone go back in time to kill Landen. Now you can just get someone to go back again and
unkill
him!”

Jack Schitt paused and drummed his fingers on the table for a moment.

“That's not how it works,” replied Schitt testily. “The apology and restitution rules are very clear—for us to repent, we must agree as to what we have done wrong, and there's no mention of any Goliath-led illegal-time-related jiggery-pokery in our report. Since Goliath's records are time-audited on a regular basis, I think that proves conclusively that if there
was
any timefoolery, it was instigated by the ChronoGuard—Goliath's chronological record is above reproach.”

I thumped the table with my fist, and Jack jumped. Without his henchmen around him, he was a coward, and every time he flinched, I grew stronger.

“This is complete and utter sh—” I looked at Friday again. “
Rubbish,
Jack. Goliath and the ChronoGuard eradicated my husband. You had the power to remove him—you can be the ones that put him back.”

“That's not possible.”

The anger in Jack returned. He also rose and pointed an accusing finger at me. “Have you even the
slightest
idea how much it costs to bribe the ChronoGuard? More money than we care to spend on the sort of miserable, halfhearted forgiveness you can offer us. And another thing, I—Excuse me.”

The phone had rung, and he picked it up, his eyes flicking instantly to me as he listened.

“Yes, it is. . . . Yes, she is. . . . Yes, we do. . . . Yes, I will.”

His eyes opened wide, and he stood up.

“This is indeed an honor, sir. . . . No, that would not be a problem at all, sir. . . . Yes, I'm sure I can persuade her about that, sir. . . . No, it's what we all want. . . . And a very good day to you, sir. Thank you.”

He put down the phone and fetched an empty cardboard box from the cupboard with a renewed spring in his step.

“Good news!” he exclaimed, taking some junk out of his desk and placing it in the box. “The CEO of New Goliath has taken a special interest in your case and will personally guarantee the return of your husband.”

“I thought you said that timefoolery had nothing to do with you?”

“Apparently I was misinformed. We would be very happy to reactualize Libner.”

“Landen.”

“Right.”

“What's the catch?” I asked suspiciously.

“No catch,” replied Jack, picking up his desk nameplate and depositing it in the box along with the calendar. “We just want you to forgive us and
like
us.”

“Like you?”

“Yes. Or pretend to anyway. Not so very hard, now, is it? Just sign this Standard Forgiveness Release Form at the bottom
here,
and we'll reactualize your hubby. Simple, isn't it?”

I was still suspicious.

“I don't believe you have any intention of getting Landen back.”

“All right, then,” said Jack, taking some files out of the filing cabinet and dumping them in his cardboard box, “don't sign and you'll never know. As you say, Miss Next—we got rid of him, so we can get him back.”

“You stiffed me once before, Jack. How do I know you won't do it again?”

Jack paused in his packing and looked slightly apprehensive.

“Are you going to sign?”

“No.”

Jack sighed and started to take things back out of the cardboard box and return them to their places.

“Well,” he muttered, “there goes my promotion. But listen, whether you sign or not, you walk out of here a free woman. New Goliath has no argument with you any longer. Besides, what do you have to lose?”

“All I want,” I replied, “is to get my husband back. I'm not signing anything.”