Something Rotten

by Jasper Fforde

'How you got to be a saint I have no idea,' chided Joffy. 'Another peep out of you and I'll personally kick your bulgar arse all the way back to the thirteenth century.'

  St Zvlkx shrugged, wolfed down his bacon and eggs with his hands and then burped loudly. Friday did the same and collapsed into a fit of giggles.

  They all left soon after. Joffy wouldn't look after Friday and Zvlkx certainly couldn't, so there was nothing for it. As soon as Mum had found her hat, coat and keys and gone out, I rushed upstairs, dressed, then read myself into Bradshaw Defies the Kaiser to ask Melanie whether she would look after Friday until teatime. Mum had said she would be out the whole day, and since Hamlet already knew that Melanie was a gorilla and neither Emma nor Bismarck could exactly complain since they were long-dead historical figures themselves, I thought it a safe bet. It was against regulations, but with Hamlet and the world facing an uncertain future, I was past caring.

  Melanie happily agreed, and once she had changed into a yellow polka-dot dress I brought her out of the BookWorld to my mother's front room, which she thought very smart, especially the festoon curtains. She was pulling the cord to watch the curtains rise and fall when Emma walked in.

  'Lady Hamilton,' I announced, 'this is Melanie Bradshaw.'

  Mel put out a large hand and Emma shook it nervously, as though expecting Melanie to bite her or something.

  'H-how do you do?' she stammered. 'I've never been introduced to a monkey before.'

  'Ape,' corrected Melanie helpfully. 'Monkeys generally have tails, are truly arboreal and belong to the families Hylobatidae, cebidae and Cercopithecidae. You and I and all the Great Apes are Pongidae. I'm a gorilla. Well, strictly speaking I'm a mountain gorilla – Gorilla gorilla beringei – which live on the slopes of the Virunga volcanoes – we used to call it British East Africa but I'm not sure what it is now. Have you ever been there?'

  'No.'

  'Charming place. That's where Trafford – my husband – and I met. He was with his gun bearers hacking his way through the undergrowth during the backstory to Bradshaw Hunts Big Game (Collins, 1878, 4/6d, illustrated) and he slipped from the path and fell twenty feet into the ravine below where I was taking a bath.'

  She picked Friday up in her massive arms and he chortled with delight.

  'Well, I was most dreadfully embarrassed. I mean, I was sitting there in the running water without a stitch on, but – and I'll always remember this – Trafford politely apologised and turned his back so I could nip into the bushes and get dressed. I came out to ask him if he might want directions back to civilisation – Africa was quite unexplored then, you know – and we got to chatting. Well, one thing led to another and before I knew it he had asked me out to dinner. We've been together ever since. Does that sound silly to you?'

  Emma thought about how her relationship with Admiral Lord Nelson was lampooned mercilessly in the press.

  'No, I think that sounds really quite romantic.'

  'Right,' I said, clapping my hands, 'I'll be back at three. Don't go out and if anyone calls, get Hamlet or Emma to answer the door. Okay?'

  'Certainly,' replied Melanie, 'don't go out, don't answer the door. Simple.'

  'And no swinging on the curtains or lamp fixtures – they won't stand it.'

  'Are you saying I'm a bit large?'

  'Not at all,' I replied hastily, 'things are just different in the real world. There is lots of fruit in the bowl and fresh bananas in the refrigerator. Okay?'

  'No problemo. Have a nice day.'

  I drove into town and, avoiding several newspapermen who were still eager to interview me, entered the SpecOps building, which I noted had been freshly repainted since my last visit. It looked a bit more cheery in mauve, but not much.

  'Agent Next?' said a young and extremely keen SO-14 agent in a well-starched black outfit, complete with Kevlar vest, combat boots and highly visible weaponry.

  'Yes?'

  He saluted.

  'My name is Major Drabb, SO-14. I understand you have been assigned to us to track down more of this pernicious Danish literature.'

  He was so keen to fulfil his duties I felt chilled. To his credit he would be as enthusiastic helping flood victims; he was just following orders unquestioningly. Worse acts than destroying Danish literature had been perpetrated by men like this. Luckily, I was prepared.

  'Good to see you, Major. I had a tip-off that this address might hold a few copies of the banned books.'

  I passed him a scrap of paper and he read it eagerly.

  'The Albert Schweitzer Memorial Library? We'll be on to it right away.'

  And he saluted smartly once again, turned on his heel and was gone.

  I made my way up to the LiteraTecs' office and found Bowden in the process of packing Karen Blixen's various collections of stories into a cardboard box.

  'Hi!' he said, tying up the box with string. 'How are things with you?'

  'Pretty good. I'm back at work.'

  Bowden smiled, put down the scissors and string and shook my hand.

  'That's very good news indeed! Heard the latest? Daphne Farquitt has been added to the list of banned Danish writers.'

  'But . . . Farquitt isn't Danish!'

  'Her father's name was Farquittsen, so it's Danish enough for Kaine and his idiots.'

  It was an interesting development. Farquitt's books were pretty dreadful but burning was still a step too far. Just.

  'Have you found a way to get all these banned books out of England?' asked Bowden, running some tape across a box of Out of Africas. 'With Farquitt's books and all the rest of the stuff that's coming in, I think we'll need closer to ten trucks.'

  'It's certainly on my mind,' I replied, having not done anything about it at all.

  'Excellent! We'd like to take a convoy through as soon as you give the word. Now, what do you want me to brief you on first? The latest Capulet versus Montague drive-by shooting or which authors are next up for a random dope test?'

  'Neither,' I replied. 'Tell me everything you know about cloned Shakespeares.'

  'We've had to put that on "low priority". It's intriguing, to be sure, but ultimately pointless from a law-and-order point of view – anyone involved in their sequencing will be too dead or too old to go for trial.'

  'It's more of a BookWorld thing,' I responded, 'but important, I promise.'

  'Well, in that case,' began Bowden, who knew me too well to think I'd waste his time or my own, 'we have three Shakespeares on the slab at the moment, all aged between fifty and sixty – put those Hans Christian Andersen books in that box, would you? If they were cloned it was way back in the poorly regulated days of the thirties, when there was all sorts of nonsense going on, when people thought they could engineer Olympic runners with four legs, swimmers with real fins, that sort of thing. I've had a brief trawl through the records. The first confirmed WillClone surfaced in 1952 with the accidental shooting of a Mr Shakstpear in Tenbury Wells. Then there's the unexplained death of a Mr Shaxzpar in 1958, Mr Shagxtspar in 1962 and a Mr Shogtspore in 1969. There are others, too—'

  'Any theories as to why?'

  'I think,' said Bowden slowly, 'that perhaps someone was trying to synthesise the great man so they could have him write some more great plays. Illegal and morally reprehensible, of course, but potentially of huge benefit to Shakespearean scholars everywhere. The lack of any young Shakespeares turning up makes me think this was an experiment long since abandoned.'

  There was a pause as I mulled this over. Genetic cloning of entire humans was strictly forbidden – no commercial bioengineering company would dare try it, and yet no one but a large bioengineering company would have the facilities to undertake it. But if these Shakespeare clones had survived, chances were there were more. And with the real one long dead, his re-engineered other self was the only way we could unravel The Merry Wives of Elsinore.

  'Doesn't this come under the jurisdiction of SO-13?' I said at last.

  'Officially, yes,' conceded Bowden, 'but SO-13 is as u
nderfunded as we are and Agent Stiggins is far too busy dealing with mammoth migrations and chimeras to have anything to do with cloned Elizabethan playwrights.'

  Stiggins was the Neanderthal head of the cloning police. Legally re-engineered by Goliath, he was the ideal person to run SO-13.

  'Have you spoken to him?' I asked.

  'He's a Neanderthal,' he replied, 'they don't talk at all unless it's absolutely necessary. I've tried a couple of times but he just stares at me in a funny way and eats live beetles from a paper bag – yuk.'

  'He'll talk to me,' I said. He would, too. I still owed him a favour for when he got me out of a jam with Flanker. 'Let's see if he's about.'

  I picked up the phone, consulted the internal directory and dialled a number.

  I watched as Bowden boxed up more banned books. If he was caught he'd be finished. The irony of a LiteraTec being jailed for protecting Farquitt's Canon of Love — I liked him all the more for it. No one in the Literary Detectives would knowingly harm a book. We'd all resign before torching a single copy of anything.

  'Right,' I said, replacing the receiver, 'his office said there was a chimera alert in the Brunei Centre – we should be able to find him there.'

  'Whereabouts in the centre?'

  'If it's a chimera alert, we just follow the screams.'

  20

  Chimeras and Neanderthals

  'The Neanderthal experiment was conceived in order to create the euphemistically entitled "medical test vessels", living creatures that were as close as possible to humans without actually being human within the context of the law. The experiment was an unparalleled success – and failure. The Neanderthal was everything that could be hoped for. A close cousin but not human, physiologically almost identical – and legally with less rights than a dormouse. But sadly for Goliath, even the hardiest of medical technicians balked at experiments conducted upon intelligent and speaking entities, so the first batch of Neanderthals were trained instead as "expendable combat units", a project that was shelved as soon as the lack of aggressive instincts in the Neanderthals was noted. They were subsequently released into the community as cheap labour and became a celebrated tax write-off. It was Homo sapiens at his least sapient.'

  GERHARD VON SQUID – Neanderthals – Back after a Short Absence

  The Brunei Centre was packed, as usual. Busy shoppers moved from chain store to chain store, trying to find bargains in places whose identical goods were price fixed by head office several months in advance. It didn't stop them trying, though.

  'So why the interest in Xeroxed bards?' asked Bowden as we crossed the canal.

  'We've got a crisis in the BookWorld.'

  I outlined what was happening within the play previously known as Hamlet and he opened his eyes wide.

  'Whoa!' he said after a pause. 'And I thought our work was unusual!'

  We didn't have to wait long to find Mr Stiggins. Within a few moments there was a blood-curdling cry of terror from a startled shopper. A second scream followed, and all of a sudden there was a mad rush of people moving away from the junction of Canal Walk and Bridge Street. We moved against the flow, stepping over discarded shopping and the odd shoe. The cause of the panic was soon evident. Rifling through a rubbish bin for a tasty snack was a bizarre hybrid of a creature – in SO-13 slang, a chimera. The genetic revolution that gave us unlimited replacement organs and the power to create dodos and other extinctees from home cloning kits had a downside: perverse pastiches of animals who were not borne on the shoulders of evolution, but by hobby gene splicers who didn't know any better than to try to play God in the comfort of their own potting sheds.

  As the crowds rapidly departed. Bowden and I stared at the strange creature that lurched and slavered as it rooted through the waste bin. It was about the size of a goat and had the rear legs of one. but not much else. The tail and the forelegs were lizard, the head almost feline. It had several tentacles, and it sucked noisily on a chip-soaked newspaper, the saliva from its toothless mouth dribbling copiously on to the pavement. In general, hybrid birds were the most common product of illegal gene splicing, as birds were closely enough related to come out pretty well no matter how ham-fisted the amateur splicer. You could even create a passable dogfoxwolf or a domestic catleopard with no greater knowledge than a biology GCSE. No. it was the cross-class abominations which led to the total ban on home cloning, the lizard/mammal switcheroos that really pushed the limits on what was socially acceptable. It didn't stop the sport; just pushed it underground.

  The creature rummaged with its one good arm in the bin, found the remains of a SmileyBurger, stared at it with its five eyes, then pushed it into its mouth. It then flopped to the ground and moved, half shuffling and half sllthering, to the next bin, all the while hissing like a cat and slapping its tentacles together.

  'Oh my God,' said Bowden, 'it's got a human arm!'

  And so it had. It was when there were bits of recognisable human

  in them that chimeras were most repellent – a failed attempt to replace a deceased loved one, or a hobby gene splicer trying to make themselves a son.

  'Repulsive?' said a voice close at hand. 'The creature, or the creator?' I turned to find myself looking at a squat, beetle-browed Neanderthal in a pale suit and with a Homburg hat perched high on his domed head. I had met him several times before. This was Bartholomew Stiggins, head of SO-13 here in Wessex.

  'Both,' I replied.

  Stiggins nodded almost imperceptibly as a blue SO-13 Land Rover pulled up with a squeal of brakes. A uniformed officer jumped out and started to try to push us back. Stiggins said:

  'We are together.'

  The Neanderthal took a few steps forward and we joined him at the creature, which was close enough to touch.

  'Reptile, goat, cat, human,' murmured the Neanderthal, crouching down and staring intently at the creature as it ran a thin pink-forked tongue across a crisp packet.

  'The eyes look insectoid,' observed the SO-13 agent, dart gun in the crook of his arm.

  'Too big. More like the eyes we found on the chimera up at the bandstand. You remember, the one that looked like a giant hamster?'

  'Same splicer?'

  The Neanderthal shrugged.

  'Same eyes. You know how they like to trade.'

  'We'll take a sample and compare. Might lead us to them. That looks like a human arm, doesn't it?'

  The creature's arm was red and mottled and no bigger than a child's. To grasp anything the fingers grabbed and twisted randomly until it found something and then it clung on tight.

  'Gives it an age,' said Stiiggins, 'perhaps five years.'

  'Do you want to take it alive, sir?' asked the SO-13 agent, breeching the barrel of his gun and pausing. The Neanderthal shook his head.

  'No. Send him home.'

  The agent inserted a dart and snapped the breech shut. He took careful aim and fired into the creature. The chimera didn't flinch – a fully functioning nervous system is a complicated piece of design and well beyond the capabilities of even the most gifted of amateur splicers – but it stopped trying to chew the bark off a tree and twitched several times before lying down and breathing more slowly. The Neanderthal moved closer and held the creature's grubby hand as its life ebbed away.

  'Sometimes,' said the Neanderthal softly, 'sometimes, the innocent must suffer.'

  'DENNIS!' came a panicked voice from the gathering crowd, which had fallen silent as the creature's breathing grew slower. 'Dennis, Daddy's worried! Where are you?'

  The whole sad, sorry scene had just got a lot worse. A man in a beard and sleeveless white shirt had run into the empty circle around the rapidly dying creature and stared at us with a look of numb horror on his face.

  'Dennis?'

  He dropped to his knees next to his creation, which was now breathing in short gasps. The man opened his mouth and emitted such a wail of heartbroken grief that it made me feel quite odd inside. Such an outpouring cannot be feigned; it comes from the soul, one's
very being.

  'You didn't have to kill him,' he wailed, wrapping his arms around the dying beast, 'you didn't have to kill him . . . !'

  The uniformed agent moved to pull Dennis's creator away but the Neanderthal stopped him.

  'No,' he said gravely, 'leave him for a moment.'

  The agent shrugged and walked to the Land Rover to fetch a bodybag.

  'Every time we do this it's like killing one of our own,' said Stiggins softly. 'Where have you been, Miss Next? In prison?'

  'Why does everyone think I've been in prison?'

  'Because you were heading towards death or prison when we last met – and you are not dead.'

  Dennis's maker was rocking backwards and forwards, bemoaning the loss of his creation.

  The agent returned with a bodybag and a female colleague, who gently prised the man from the creature and told his unhearing ears his rights.

  'Only one signature on a piece of paper keeps Neanderthals from being destroyed, the same as him,' said Stiggins, indicating the creature. 'We can be added to the list of banned creatures and designated a chimera without even an Act of Parliament.'

  We turned from the scene as the other two agents laid out the bodybag and then rolled the corpse of the chimera on to it.

  'You remember Bowden Cable?' 1 asked. 'My partner at the LiteraTecs.'

  'Of course,' replied Stiggins, 'we met at your reception.'

  'How have you been?' asked Bowden.

  Stiggins stared back at him. It was a pointless human pleasantry that Neanderthals never troubled themselves with.

  'We have been fine,' replied Stig, forcing the standard answer from his lips. Bowden didn't know it but he was only rubbing Stiggins's nose deeper in sapien-dominated society.

  'He means nothing by it,' I said matter-of-factly, which is how Neanderthals like all their speech. 'We need your help, Stig.'

  'Then we will be happy to give it, Miss Next.'

  'Mean nothing by what?' asked Bowden as we walked across to a bench.

  'Tell you later.'

  Stig sat down and watched as another SO-13 Land Rover turned up, followed by two police cars to disperse the now curious crowd. He pulled out a carefully wrapped package of grease-proof paper and unfolded it to reveal his lunch – two windfall apples, a small bag of live bugs and a chunk of raw meat.