A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5 (184 page)

T
he stupidity surplus had been beaten into second place by the news that the militant wing of the no-choice movement had been causing trouble in Manchester. Windows were broken, cars overturned, and there were at least a dozen arrests. With a nation driven by the concept of choice, a growing faction of citizens who thought life was simpler when options were limited had banded themselves together into what they called the “no-choicers” and demanded the choice to have no choice. Prime Minister Redmond van de Poste condemned the violence but explained that the choice of choice over “just better services” was something the
previous
administration had chosen and was thus itself a no-choice principle for the current administration. Alfredo Traficcone, MP, leader of the opposition Prevailing Wind Party, was quick to jump on the bandwagon, proclaiming that it was the inalienable right of all citizens to have the chice over whether they have choice or not. The no-choicers had suggested that there should be a referendum to settle the matter once and for all, something that the opposition “choice” faction had no option but to agree with. More sinisterly, the militant wing known only as NOPTION was keen to go further and demanded that there should be only one option on the ballot paper—the no-choice one.

It was eight-thirty, and the girls had already gone to school.

“Jenny didn't eat her toast again,” I said, setting the plate with its uneaten contents next to the sink. “That girl hardly eats a thing.”

“Leave it outside Friday's door,” said Landen. “He can have it for lunch when he gets up—
if
he gets up.”

The front doorbell had rung, and I checked on who it might be through the front-room windows before opening the door to reveal…Friday. The
other
Friday.

“Hello!” I said cheerily. “Would you like to come in?”

“I'm in a bit of a hurry,” he replied. “I just wondered whether you'd thought about my offer of replacement yesterday. Hi, Dad!”

Landen had joined us at the door. “Hello, son.”

“This,” I said by way of introduction, “is the Friday I was telling you about—the one we were supposed to have.”

“At your ser vice,” said Friday politely. “And your answer? I'm sorry to push you on this, but time travel has still to be invented and we have to look very carefully at our options.”

Landen and I glanced at each other. We'd already made up our mind.

“The answer's no, Sweetpea. We're going to keep
our
Friday.”

Friday's face fell, and he glared at us. “This is so typical of you. Here I am a respected member of the ChronoGuard, and you're still treating me like I'm a kid!”

“Friday!”

“How stupid can you both be? The history of the world hangs in the balance, and all you can do is worry about your lazy shitbag of a son.”

“You talk like that to your mother and you can go to your room.”

“He
is
in his room, Land.”

“Right. Well…you know what I mean.”

Friday snorted, glared at us both, told me that I really shouldn't call him “Sweetpea” anymore and walked off, slamming the garden gate behind him.

I turned to Landen. “Are we doing the right thing?”

“Friday told us to dissuade him from joining the ChronoGuard, and that's what we're doing.”

I narrowed my eyes, trying to remember.

“He did? When?”

“At our wedding bash? When Lavoisier turned up looking for your father?”

“Shit,” I said, suddenly remembering. Lavoisier was my least favorite ChronoGuard operative, and on that occasion he had a partner with him—a lad of about twenty-five who'd looked vaguely familiar. We figured it out several years later. It was Friday
himself,
and his advice to us was unequivocal: “If you ever have a son who wants to be in the ChronoGuard, try to dissuade him.” Perhaps it wasn't just a complaint—perhaps it had been…a
warning.

Landen placed a hand on my waist and said, “I think we should follow his best advice and see where it leaves us.”

“And the End of Time?”

“Didn't your father say that the world was
always
five minutes from total annihilation? Besides, it's not until Friday evening. It'll work itself out.”

 

I took the tram into work and was so deep in thought I missed my stop and had to walk back from MycroTech. Without my TravelBook I was effectively stuck in the real world, but instead of feeling a sense of profound loss as I had expected, I felt something more akin to
relief
. In my final day as the LBOCS, I had scotched any chance of book interactivity or the preemptive strike on Speedy Muffler and the ramshackle Racy Novel, and the only worrying loose end was dealing with slutty bitchface Thursday1–4. That was if she hadn't been erased on sight for making an unauthorized trip to the Outland. Well, I could always hope. Jurisfiction had gotten on without me for centuries and would doubtless continue to do so. There was another big plus point, too: I wasn't lying to Landen quite as much. Okay, I still did a bit of SpecOps work, but at least this way I could downgrade my fibs from “outrageous” to a more manageable “whopping.” All of a sudden, I felt really quite happy—and I didn't often feel that way. If there hadn't been a major problem with Acme's overdraft and the potential for a devastating chronoclasm in two and a half days, everything might be just perfect.

“You look happy,” said Bowden as I walked into the office at Acme.

“Aren't I always?”

“No,” he said, “hardly at all.”

“Well, this is the new me. Have you noticed how much the birds are singing this morning?”

“They always sing like that.”

“Then…the sky is always that blue, yes?”

“Yes. May I ask what's brought on this sudden change?”

“The BookWorld. I've stopped going there. It's over.”

“Well,” said Bowden, “that's
excellent
news!”

“It is, isn't it? More time for Landen and the kids.”

“No,” said Bowden, choosing his words carefully, “I mean excellent news for Acme—we might finally get rid of the backlog.”

“Of undercover SpecOps work?”

“Of
carpets
.”

“You mean you can make a profit selling carpets?” I asked, having never really given it a great deal of thought.

“Have you seen the order books? They're full. More work than we can handle. Everyone needs floor coverings, Thurs—and if you can give some of your time to get these orders filled, then we won't need the extra cash from your illegal-cheese activities.”

He handed me a clipboard.

“All these customers need to be contacted and given the best deal we can.”

“Which is?”

“Just smile, chat, take the measurements, and I'll do the rest.”

“Then
you
go.”

“No, the big selling point for Acme is that Thursday Next—the Z-4
celebrity
Thursday Next—comes and talks to you about your floor-covering needs. That's how we keep our heads above water. That's how we can support all these ex-SpecOps employees.”

“C'mon,” I said doubtfully, “ex-celebrities don't do retail.”

“After the disaster of the
Eyre Affair
movie, Lola Vavoom started a chain of builders' merchants.”

“She did, didn't she?”

I took the clipboard and stared at the list. It was long. Business
was
good. But Bowden's attention was suddenly elsewhere.

“Is that who I think it is?” he asked, looking toward the front of the store. I followed his gaze. Standing next to the cushioned-linoleum display was a man in a long dark coat. When he saw us watching him, he reached into his pocket and flashed a badge of some sort.

“Shit,” I murmured under my breath. “Flanker.”

“He probably wants to buy a carpet,” said Bowden with a heavy helping of misplaced optimism.

Commander Flanker was our old nemesis from SO-1, the SpecOps department that policed other SpecOps departments. Flanker had adapted well to the disbanding of the ser vice. Before, he made life miserable for SpecOps agents he thought were corrupt, and now he made life miserable for
ex
-SpecOps agents he thought were corrupt. We had crossed swords many times in the past, but not since the disbandment. We regarded it as a good test of our discretion and secrecy that we had never seen him at Acme Carpets. Then again, perhaps we were kidding ourselves. He might know all about us but thought flushing out renegade operatives just wasn't worth his effort—especially when we were actually doing a ser vice that no one else wanted to do.

I walked quickly to the front of the shop.

“Good morning, Ms. Next,” he said, glancing with ill-disguised mirth at my name embroidered above the company logo on my jacket. “Literary Detective at SO-27 to carpet layer? Quite a fall, don't you think?”

“It depends on your point of view,” I said cheerfully. “Everyone needs carpets—but not everyone needs SpecOps. Is this a social call?”

“My wife has read all your books.”

“They're not
my
books,” I told him in an exasperated tone. “I had absolutely no say in their content—for the first four anyway.”

“Those were the ones she liked. The violent ones full of sex and death.”

“Did you come all this way to give me your wife's analysis of my books?”

“No,” he said, “that was just the friendly breaking-the-ice part.”

“It isn't working. Is there a floor covering I could interest you in?”

“Axminster.”

“We can certainly help you with
that,
” I replied professionally. “Living room or bedroom? We have some very hard-wearing wool/acrylic at extremely competitive prices—and we've a special this week on underlayment and free installation.”

“It was Axminster
Purple
I was referring to,” he said slowly, staring at me intently. My heart jumped but I masked it well. Axminster Purple wasn't a carpet at all, of course, although to be honest there probably
was
an Axminster in purple, if I looked. No, he was referring to the semi-exotic cheese, one that I'd been trading in only a couple of days ago. Flanker showed me his badge. He was CEA—the Cheese Enforcement Agency.

“You're not here for the carpets, are you?”

“I know you have form for cheese smuggling, Next. There was a lump of Rhayder Speckled found beneath a Hispano-Suiza in '86, and you've been busted twice for possession since then. The second time you were caught with six kilos of Streaky Durham. You were lucky to be fined only for possession and not trading without a license.”

“Did you come here to talk about my past misdemeanors?”

“No. I've come to you for information. While cheese smuggling is illegal, it's considered a low priority. The CEA has always been a small department more interested in collecting duty than banging up harmless cheeseheads. That's all changed.”

“It has?”

“I'm afraid so,” replied Flanker grimly. “There's a new cheese on the block. Something powerful enough to make a user's head vanish in a ball of fire.”

“That's a figure of speech for ‘really powerful,' right?”

“No,” said Flanker with deadly seriousness. “The victim's head really
does
vanish in a ball of fire. It's a killer, Next—and addictive. It's apparently the finest and most powerful cheese ever designed.”

This was worrying. I never regarded my cheese smuggling as anything more than harmless fun, cash for Acme and to supply something that should be legal anyway. If a cheese that I'd furnished had killed someone, I would face the music. Mind you, I'd tried most of what I'd flogged, and it was, after all, only cheese. Okay, so the taste of a particularly powerful cheese might render you unconscious or make your tongue numb for a week, but it never killed anyone—until now.

“Does this cheese have a name?” I asked, wondering if there'd been a bad batch of Machynlleth Wedi Marw.

“It only has a code name: X-14. Rumor says it's so powerful that it has to be kept chained to the floor. We managed to procure a half ounce. A technician dropped it by mistake, and this was the result.”

He showed me a photograph of a smoking ruin.

“The remains of our central cheese-testing facility.”

He put the photograph away and stared at me. Of course, I
had
seen some X-14. It'd been chained up in the back of Pryce's truck the night of the cheese buy. Owen had declined to even show it to me. I'd traded with him every month for over eight years, and I never thought he was the sort of person to knowingly peddle anything dangerous. He was like me: someone who just loved cheese. I wouldn't snitch on him, not yet—not before I had more information.

“I don't know anything,” I said at length, “but I can make inquiries.”

Flanker seemed to be satisfied with this, handed me his card and said in a stony voice, “I'll expect your call.”

He turned and walked out of the store to a waiting Range Rover and drove off.

 

“Trouble for us?” asked Bowden as soon as I returned.

“No,” I replied thoughtfully, “trouble for me.”

He sighed. “That's a relief.”

I took a deep breath and thought for a moment. Communications into the Socialist Republic of Wales were nonexistent—when I wanted to contact Pryce, I had to use a shortwave wireless transmitter at prearranged times. There was nothing I could do for at least forty-eight hours.

“So,” continued Bowden, handing me the clipboard with the list of people wanting quotes on it, “how about some Acme Carpets stuff?”

“What about SpecOps work?” I asked. “How's that looking?”