A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5 (71 page)

“Who is the father of Pickwick's egg?”

I get asked some odd questions sometimes. But he was driving me across town, so I thought I would show him some slack.

“I think it was one of the feral dodos down at the park,” I explained. “I caught Pickwick doing a sort of coy come-hither dodo thing a month back, with a large male near the bandstand. Pickwick's amour plocked noisily outside the house for a week, but I didn't know anything had actually
happened
. Does that answer your question?”

“I guess.”

“Good. Okay, pull up over there. I'll walk the rest of the way.”

They dropped me by the side of the road, and I thanked them before running up the street. It was already quite dark and the streetlamps were on. It didn't look like the world was about to end in twenty-six minutes, but then I don't suppose it ever does.

After failing to get Landen back, dealing with Armageddon didn't really hold the same sort of
excitement
for me that it would later. They always say the first time you save the world is the hardest— personally I have
always
found it tricky, but this time, I don't know. Perhaps Landen's loss numbed my mind and immunized me against panic. Perhaps the distraction actually helped.

THURSDAY NEXT
,
Private Diaries

C
ONSOLIDATED
U
SEFUL
S
TUFF
was situated in a large complex on the airfield at Stratton. There was a guardhouse, but I had coincidence on my side—as I walked into the security building all three guards had been called away on some errand or other, and I was able to slip through unnoticed. I rubbed my arm, which had inexplicably twinged with pain, and followed the signs toward Mycro Tech Developments. I was just wondering how to get into the locked building when a voice made me jump.

“Hello, Thursday!”

It was Wilbur, Mycroft's boring son.

“No time to explain, Will—I need to get into the nanotechnology lab.”

“Why?” asked Wilbur, fumbling with his keys.

“There's going to be an accident.”

“Absolutely
impossible!
” he scoffed, throwing the doors open to reveal a mass of spinning red lights and the raucous sounding of a klaxon.

“Heavens!” exclaimed Wilbur. “Do you think it's meant to be doing that?”

“Call someone.”

“Right.”

He picked up the phone. Predictably enough, it was dead. He tried another but they were
all
dead.

“I'll get help!” he said, tugging at the doorknob, which came off in his hand. “What the—”

“Entropy's decreasing by the second, Will. Are you using Dream Topping in any of your nanomachines?”

He led me to a cabinet where a tiny drop of pink goo was suspended in midair by powerful magnets.

“There she is. The first of her kind. Still experimental, of course. There are a few problems with the discontinuation command string. Once it starts changing organic matter into Dream Topping,
it won't stop.
”

I looked at my watch and noticed that there were barely twelve minutes left.

“What's keeping it from working at the moment?”

“The magnetic field keeps the nanodevice immobilized, the refrigeration system is set below its activation temperature of minus ten degrees—what was that?”

The lights had flickered.

“Power grid failure.”

“No problem, Thursday—there are three backup generators. They can't
all
fail at the same time, that would be too much of a—”

“—coincidence, yes, I know. But they will. And when they do, that coincidence will be the biggest, the best—and the last.”

“Thursday, that's not possible!”

“
Anything
is possible right now. We're in the middle of an isolated high-coincidental localized entropic field decreasement.”

“We're in a
what?
”

“We're in a pseudoscientific technobabble.”

“Ah!” replied Wilbur, having witnessed quite a few at MycroTech Developments. “One of
those.
”

“What happens when the final backup fails, Wilbur?”

“The nanodevice will be expelled into the atmosphere,” said Wilbur grimly. “It is programmed to make strawberry-flavored pudding mix and will continue to do so as long as it has organic material to work with. You, me, that table over there—then when someone comes to let us out in the morning, the machine will get to work on the outside.”

“How quickly?”

“Well,” said Wilbur, thinking hard, “the device will make replicas of itself to carry out the work even faster, so the more organic material is swallowed up, the faster the process becomes. The entire planet? I'd give it about a week.”

“And nothing can stop it?”

“Nothing I know of,” he replied sadly. “The best way to stop this is to not allow it to start—sort of a minimum entry requirement for man-made disasters, really.”

“Aornis!” I shouted at the top of my voice.
“Where the hell are you?”

There was no reply.

“AORNIS!”

 

And then she answered. But it was from such an unexpected quarter that I cried out in fright. She spoke to me—
from my memory.
It was as though a barrier had been lifted in my mind. The day on the Skyrail platform. The moment I first set eyes on Aornis. I thought it had only been a glimpse, but it wasn't. We
had spoken together for several minutes as I waited for the shuttle. I cast my mind back and read the newly recovered memories as my palms grew sweaty. The answers had been there all along.

 

“Hello, Thursday,” said the young woman on the bench, dabbing her nose with a powder compact.

I walked over to her.

“You know my name?”

“I know a lot more than that. My name is Aornis Hades. You killed my brother.”

I tried not to let my surprise show.

“Self-defense, Miss Hades. If I could have taken him alive, I would have.”

“No member of the Hades family has been taken alive for over eighty-three generations.”

I thought about the twin puncture, the Skyrail ticket, all the chance happenings to get me on the platform.

“Are you manipulating coincidences, Hades?”

“Of course!” she replied as the shuttle hissed into the station. “You're going to get on that shuttle and be shot accidentally by an SO-14 marksman. An ironic end, don't you think? Shot by one of your own?”

“What if I don't get on the Skyrail? What if I take you in right here and now?”

Aornis sniggered at my naïveté.

“Dear Acheron was a fine and worthy Hades despite the fact he killed his brother—something Mother was very cut up about—but he was never truly
au fait
with some of the family's more diabolical attributes. You'll get on that train, Thursday—
because you won't remember anything about this conversation!
”

“Don't be ridiculous!” I laughed, but Aornis returned to her powder compact and I
had
got on the train.

“What is it?” asked Wilbur, who had been staring at me as the memories of Aornis came flooding back.

“Recovered memories,” I replied grimly as the lights flickered. The first backup generator had failed. I checked my watch. There were six minutes to go.

“Thursday?” murmured Wilbur, lower lip trembling. “I'm frightened.”

“Me too, Will. Quiet a sec.”

 

And I thought back to my next meeting with Aornis. At Uffington, when she posed as Violet De'ath. On this occasion we had been in company, so she hadn't said anything, but the next time, when I was in Osaka, she had sat next to me on the bench, just after the fortune-teller was struck by lightning.

“Clever trick,” she said, arranging her shopping bags so they wouldn't fall over, “using the coincidence in that way. Next time you won't be so lucky—and while we're on the subject, how did you get out of the jam on the Skyrail?”

I really didn't want to answer her questions.

“What are you doing to me?” I demanded instead. “What are you doing to my
head?
”

“A simple recollection erasure, Thursday. I'm a mnemenomorph. My particular edge is that I am instantly forgettable— you will
never
capture me because you will forget that we ever met. I can erase your memory of me so instantaneously I am rendered invisible. I can walk where I please, steal what I wish—I can even murder in broad daylight.”

“Very clever, Hades.”

“Please, call me Aornis—I'd like us to be pals.”

She pushed her hair behind her ear and looked at her nails for a moment before asking: “I saw a beautiful cashmere sweater just now; it's available in turquoise or emerald. Which do you think would suit me better?”

“I have no idea.”

“I'll get them both,” she replied after a moment of reflection. “It's on a stolen credit card, after all.”

“Enjoy your game, Aornis, it won't be forever. I defeated your brother—I'll do the same to you.”

“And how do you propose to do that?” she sneered. “When you can't recollect anything about our meetings at all? My dear, you won't even remember
this
one—until I want you to!”

And she gathered up her bags and walked off.

 

The lights in the nanotechnology lab flickered again. Wilbur and I looked at one another as the second backup generator failed. He tried the phones again in desperation, but everything was still dead. Death by coincidence. What a way to go. But it was now, with only two minutes to go, that Aornis lifted the last barrier and I clearly remembered the
last
occasion she and I had faced each other. It had occurred not twenty minutes before at the ConStuff reception. It hadn't been empty at all; Aornis had been there, waiting for me—ready to deliver the
coup de grâce.

 

“Well!” she exclaimed as I walked in. “Figured this one out, did you?”

“Damn you, Hades!” I retorted, reaching for my pistol. She caught my wrist and pulled me into a painful half nelson with surprising speed.

“Listen to me,” she whispered in my ear while holding my arm locked tightly behind me. “There's going to be an accident in the nanotechnology lab. Your uncle hoped to feed the world, when in fact he will be the father of its destruction. The irony is so heavy you could cut it with a knife!”

“Wait—!” I said, but she pulled my arm up harder and I yelped.

“I'm talking, Next.
Never
interrupt a Hades when they're
talking. You will die for what you have done to our family, but just to show I'm not a total fiend, I will allow you one last heroic gesture, something your pathetic self-righteous character seems to crave. At precisely six minutes before the accident, you will begin to remember all our little chats together.”

I struggled, but she held me tight.

“You'll remember this meeting last. So here's my offer. Take your pistol and turn it upon yourself—and I'll spare the planet.”

“And if I don't?” I shouted. “You'll die too!”

“No,” she laughed, “I know you'll do it.
Despite
the baby. Despite
everything.
You're a good person, Next. A
fine
human being. It will be your downfall. I'm counting on it.”

She leaned forwards and whispered in my ear.

“They're wrong, you know, Thursday. Revenge is
so
sweet!”

 

“Thursday?” asked Wilbur. “Are you all right?”

“No, not really,” I muttered as I saw the clock tick into the final minute. Acheron was nothing compared to Aornis, either in his powers or his sense of humor. I'd messed with the Hades family and now I was paying the price.

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.

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.