The Woman Who Died a Lot

by Jasper Fforde

  “Makes you proud, doesn’t it?” whispered Landen. We listened to the rest of her speech, but it had become increasingly technical, and by the end we could understand only one word in seventeen. But we were delighted to be on the list of people she thanked at the end, in particular for showing her “the value of normality.”

  “That was really good,” said Landen as she came off the stage to thunderous applause. She hugged us both, then was whisked off to do a press conference, leaving us standing quite alone. We wouldn’t be telling her to go to school anymore. As far as we were concerned, our job was done.

  “Well,” I said to Landen, “how are things with you?”

  He looked at the tattoo on my hand and said that he was fine, that Friday wouldn’t be back until late, given our last trip in to see the Manchild, and that we were parentally redundant. “I suppose that’s what we should be striving for,” I said.

  “Thanks for telling Tuesday I was bringing Jenny.”

  “What was I supposed to say?” replied Landen. “Tuesday wanted her to be here. Which reminds me, did you get into Image Ink this morning?”

  “I forgot again.”

  “Me, too. Twice. Hang on,” I added. “What’s Gavin Watkins doing here?”

  I had seen him through the crowds, sitting quite alone at a small trade stand. We walked over.

  “Hello, Gavin,” I said, using a conciliatory tone of voice. “Oh,” he said, glancing up dismissively, “it’s you. The tart’s mother.”

  It wasn’t a good start.

  “Okay,” I said, “we need to talk. You don’t want to be killed, and we don’t want to have to visit Friday in prison for the next three decades. Do you want some tea?”

  He gave a resigned shrug.

  “All right.”

  33.

  Thursday: Gavin Watkins

  The content and use of slow-release patches was once totally deregulated, in order to allow those for whom drugs have an unavoidable lure a safer method of ingestion. The concept was simple in that it was thought impossible to overdose from a patch—but human ingenuity and stupidity know no bounds, and after two people were found dead covered in patches from head to toe in a steam room, the illegality in nonapproved patches was reconfirmed. They remain, of course, hugely popular.

  Julia Scrott, The Nonsense of Prohibition

  We bought Gavin a cup of tea and a cupcake and sat in the canteen while a Nemicolopterus Syntheticus flapped around above us, part of a project to revitalize the ailing home-cloning industry. The tearooms were filled with mad scientists of one sort or another, many of whom had the unkempt “wild hair” and mismatched-clothes look that seemed never to go out of fashion. Some sat quietly, too shy to order or too unaware to know that it was self-service, while others could not stop themselves and insisted on regaling the staff with logical methods by which they could serve more efficiently.

  Gavin sat slumped idly in his chair, his slovenly manner, ill temper and foul mouth endearing him to no one. But he knew as well as we that if he was going to survive the next twenty-four hours, we were going to have to at least pretend to get along.

  “So if I’m not murdered, I turn out to be a serial killer in thirty-six years’ time?” said Gavin once we’d explained just what we’d found out. “But why do I kill those useless and boring people? Without that dumb meeting on Tuesday night, I’d not even know them—and more, not even want to know them. Worse, I end up buying a Vauxhall. I’d never buy a Vauxhall. Not even to kill someone with.”

  He took a deep breath.

  “Okay,” he added, “I admit it, I can be a bit intolerant toward the mendacious savages I call my fellow man, but there’s a big jump between that and serial killing. And if I were to survive your moronic son tomorrow, why would I wait until I’m fifty-six to start a rampage? What suddenly changes me?”

  “We don’t know,” said Landen. “It could be anything: death of a loved one, passed over for promotion, brain abnormality, a bet, boredom. The list is long. And yes, Vauxhalls might be shit now, but in three decades they could be like Volkswagens are today.”

  “You mean driven by smug, self-important, middle-class idiots with hideously spoiled children?

  “It’s possible, yes.”

  He thought about this for a moment. “But if those other potential ChronoGuard are already dead in this future, how will killing me change that?”

  “Because at this precise moment in time,” I explained, “you’re still around to kill them.”

  “But I’m not,” he insisted. “If both those events represent this timeline, killing me has no effect—if they were alive right now, then not killing me would guarantee their deaths.”

  “There is something in what he says,” admitted Landen.

  “But both those events do not represent one timeline. I can only think that we are seeing two timelines at once, with all events. Your murder is in their timeline, and their murder is in your timeline. Once a timeline is taken out, all will revert to as it should be.”

  “Wow,” said Landen, clearly impressed with my explanation.

  “Smart girls give me the horn too,” said Gavin sadly. “But they always ignore me. Tuesday ignores me.”

  “Maybe you should try washing,” I said, “and keeping a civil tongue in your head.”

  “Will that work?”

  “Probably not in your case, but it’s certainly worth a try.”

  He nodded reflectively. He responded well to straight talking, so I tried a different approach.

  “Gavin, how did you turn out to be such a nasty piece of work?”

  He shrugged. “I could blame my parents, but that’s just whiny victim bullshit. Some people are just naturally unpleasant. I’ve known for a long time that I’m something of a shit. I tried for years to hide it, but it never worked, so in the end I decided to just go with it, and see where it led me. What’s your excuse?”

  We just laughed this time at his impertinence, and, surprisingly, he laughed, too.

  “Okay,” he said, “what’s the deal tomorrow? Do I conveniently reveal my soft underbelly for that toe-rag Friday to gut, or do I run?”

  “We don’t know,” said Landen, “but Friday is at this moment attempting to find out more. He thinks there might have been sixteen Destiny Aware ex-timeworkers and not fifteen.”

  “How will that make a difference?”

  “Someone may know something that we don’t. For it to be murder, then there has to be a motive. Without that, he can’t kill you.”

  “So I should do nothing?”

  “If you can.”

  There was a pause.

  “Why are you here anyway?” asked Landen. “Shouldn’t you be in school or breaking windows or pushing over grannies or something?”

  “I’m a freelance mathematician,” he said loftily, “offering my unique services to those either too stupid or too lazy to work it out for themselves. Do you want to see something seriously batshit cool?”

  “Okay.”

  He took a grubby piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it to reveal a three-digit number. Landen and I stared at it for a moment.

  “It’s an even prime number,”1 he announced. “It’s been lying there unnoticed since the dawn of math, and I found it. Archimedes, Euclid, Gauss, Fermat, Newton—they all missed it. How dumb were they?”

  Landen and I were staring at the number. The thing was, now that he mentioned it, he was right—the number was prime and was even.

  “That’s incredible,” I murmured. “Does anyone else know about this?”

  He folded up the paper and put it back in his pocket. “No. I’m still studying the implications, since it renders two of Euclid’s axioms entirely fallacious. Much of the planet’s mathematics will have to be completely restructured.”

  “Then you’re good? Really good?” asked Landen.

  “Good? I’m the best. Euclidean, Riemannian, polytrop, differential, twenty-seven-dimension mapping, Advanced Nextian geometry and ev
en Expectation-Influenced Probability. Tuesday did the groundwork, but I took it further.”

  Landen and I exchanged glances. This sounded promising.

  “What about a value for Uc?” I asked.

  “Ah!” he said with a smile. “The ever-illusive Unentanglement Constant. I’ve been doing some initial work that looks promising, but I was distracted by the need to expand and catalog my collection of pornographic magazines.”

  “How long would it take?” asked Landen.

  “Alphabetically, about a week. If I do it by my favorites, then a lot longer.”

  “Not the porn, the Unentanglement Constant.”

  “Oh. A workable solution to Uc? About a month.”

  Landen and I got to our feet.

  “We don’t have a month. We don’t even have twenty-four hours. Come with us if you want to work with Tuesday.”

  After some hunting we found Tuesday at the Anti-Smite stand, where she was chatting to some Americans who were keen on buying the system, due to one or two smitings that they’d so far managed to disguise as “another Barning Man that got out of hand.”

  “Gavin?” said Tuesday, looking at him and then us in a quizzical manner. “What’s going on?”

  I quickly explained what Gavin had told us and how he might possibly have the answer to the Uc. Tuesday looked doubtful.

  “Listen,” she said, “only six people on the planet claim to understand Madeupion Quantum Unentanglement Theory, and five of them are mistaken.”

  “Oh, yeah?” said Gavin. “It’s between six point four and six point six quintillionths of a second, right?”

  “I never had it that accurate,” she replied, looking at him suspiciously, “and I’ve been working on the problem for two years.”

  “Yes, but you’re a donkey,” remarked Gavin. “Look here, it’s obvious.”

  He brought out a copy of Big and Bouncy from his jacket and started to write a long equation on the cover in felt-tip. Landen and I stared at each other, unable to comprehend what was going on, as Tuesday and Gavin were talking in an odd language full of Greek words and out-of-context nouns and adjectives. Tuesday was wary at first, expecting this to be one of Gavin’s tricks. But the explanation continued onto the next page, and the next, and soon to the letters to the editor, several trade ads for odd-looking devices, a lengthy dissertation on friction coefficients and most of “Readers’ Spouses” were covered in Gavin’s spidery algebraic notation. He and Tuesday argued at length, with Gavin often lapsing into insults and Tuesday hitting him hard on the side of the head when he did so. While this was going on, I, Landen and one of the Anti-Smite reps simply stood there and talked quietly about the weather, and the defense shield, and how Smite Solutions’ Sin Magnet was so stupendously brilliant in every single way—except for the bit regarding murder.

  We had to wait forty minutes before Gavin finally declaimed with a flourish, “You see? Obvious!”

  Tuesday stared at him, then at the notation, then at us, then at the mockup of the anti-smite tower.

  “That’s . . . brilliant,” she breathed, giving Gavin one of those dreamy sixteen-year-old girl looks that can spell big trouble. She grasped him by the ears, pulled him toward her and started to kiss him, right there in front of us and thirty or forty MadCon delegates. We all looked away, hoping they would stop, but they didn’t, and after Landen had suggested a bucket of water and I had glared at him and mouthed “Do something,” he tapped Gavin quite hard on the shoulder and told him to cut it out.

  They disengaged, and Gavin turned to Landen with a scowl on his face. “What is your problem, man?”

  “My problem? My problem is this: An unwashed lout with a foul mouth and an unhealthy porn obsession is snogging my daughter, that’s what.”

  “And . . . ?”

  I almost thumped him, but it was Tuesday who intervened.

  “Oh, Dad!” she said. “Don’t be so hideously old-fashioned. Gavin is a genius. Do you know how lonely it is on this planet if you have an IQ of two-forty?”

  “Yeah,” agreed Gavin, “so back off, dorkwad.”

  “Steady, angelcake,” said Tuesday, laying an affectionate hand on Gavin’s cheek. “You will apologize to my parents. If you don’t, I will never speak to you again—genius or no genius.”

  Gavin thought about it for a moment, then hung his head and mumbled, “Sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Parke-Laine.”

  We told him it would be okay but to mind his mouth, and Tuesday told us that she and “Gav” could probably sort out the Uc problem by morning. We gave them money for a cab, and they trotted off excitedly, Tuesday hanging on to Gavin’s hand and telling him how he would eventually meet her sister, Jenny.

  “She’s really funny, you’ll like her.”

  “Is she an . . . elder sister? The sort that takes a bath quite often and who never locks the door?”

  “Not at all,” she said, giving him a thump. “She’s my younger sister.”

  “Blast.”

  “If he carries on as he is,” said Landen under his breath, “I may have to kill him myself.”

  “Don’t even think about it. The world needs Gavin—or his intellect anyhow—and Tuesday seems to be fond of him in an unfathomable sort of way. Besides, if they can figure out how to make the shield work, Joffy in the cathedral and the felons up at Wroughton don’t get fried, Swindon gets to keep the hundred million pounds from Smite Solutions, and the library gets some funding. Best of all, I don’t have to transport a righteous man around all tomorrow morning. You know how tiresome those can be.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “Children first.”

  We stood there in silence for a while, contemplating the unusual turn of events and the mixed feelings they engendered. We were glad that Tuesday had a boyfriend, just disappointed it had to be Gavin.

  “What now?” asked Landen.

  “I need to get back to the office. Duffy and Spoons will be organizing a garage sale to try to fund the library service.”

  Landen said he would drop me there on his way home. I could use my official car to get home, or call a taxi.

  “We can drop into Image Ink on the way,” he added.

  “Okay—but let’s not forget this time.”

  34.

  Thursday: Evening

  John de Hepburn’s Eleanor of Aquitaine tell-all of 1209, Bonkeing Kinges for Pleasure and Profite, was the first true celebrity bio. Despite receiving rave reviews and a massive two-figure advance for a sequel, the book did not find favor with King John, Eleanor’s son, and de Hepburn was found dead the following winter, having apparently “Atempted to swim, with dire foolishness, the river Cherwell while disporting himself chained to an anvile.”

  James Finisterre, Genres in Classical Literature

  I spent the rest of the day at the library, trying to change the large quantity of salable equipment that Duffy and Spoons had earmarked into cash. The difficulty was not in finding a buyer— there was a lot of good stuff there—but persuading the banks to agree to a line of credit ahead of the sales. They wouldn’t be working tomorrow, because the financial center was to be evacuated as a precaution due to the upcoming smiting, so it was imperative that this was sorted before the end of the day. If it wasn’t, by the time the banks reopened on Monday morning, the Wessex All-You-Can-Eat-at-Fatso’s Drink Not Included Library Service would be bankrupt and closed, the rubber stamps would have fallen silent, and all chance of retrieving overdue books would be gone forever.

  I’d called home several times to see how Friday was getting on at the timepark. Millon had gone with him to keep us advised of progress, but other than a call on a landline to say that Friday had donned a gravity suit and gone in, there was no news. If he had to go “deep slow” at the timepark to find the Manchild, he might not be out for hours.

  Twice during the afternoon, I had my hand on the red phone and the emergency hotline to Nancy at the World League of Librarians, but each time Duffy laid his hand on mine, telling me this was not
anywhere near a serious enough emergency, leaving me wondering just what was. But he was right. By the time early evening had rolled around, I had negotiated a half-million-pound overdraft. We now had two whole days in which to figure out our financial problems.

  I dropped down to the subbasement as soon as I was done to see how Finisterre and Phoebe Smalls were doing with the palimpsests.

  “We’re working through the pages of Brothels of Dorset on Sixpence a Day one leaf at a time,” replied James, whose eyes were looking tired from comparing hundreds of pictures, “and we’ve managed to source where the manuscripts he reused might have come from—mostly mass-copied cookbooks and celebrity bios.”

  Phoebe held up a scan of one of the palimpsests, the old writing running under the new.

  “This was originally a page from the thirteenth-century bestseller Parsnipe Cooking with Olive of Jamestown, which was the first cookbook to have a production run of over two figures.”

  James held up another example of lost and recovered writing.

  “And this was originally from an edition of John de Hepburn’s scurrilous Eleanor of Aquitaine tell-all, Bonkeing Kinges for Pleasure and Profite.”

  “Yes, yes,” I said, “all very fascinating, “but anything unusual?”

  “There’s only this,” said Phoebe, holding up a picture of a grubby page with the palimpsest highlighted behind it. “It’s not from the Venerable Keith’s Evadum, nor, as we suspected, an early treatise called Dry rot & other cankers of the joiste by Howard de Winforton. In fact, we can’t find out what it is.”

  “But what does it look like?” I asked.

  She thought for a moment. “It bears something of a similarity to the style and spelling idiosyncrasies of the Venerable Bede but strays far from his usual subject matter. Bede generally wrote boring ecclesiastical histories and translated biblical tracts, but this looks more like . . . comedy.”