Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Sausages

by Tom Holt

  “Don’t suppose you can help us,” one of them said, “but we’re a couple of knights and we’ve been asleep for a very long time. You wouldn’t happen to be able to get rust spots out of chain mail, would you?”

  “There you are,” said Kevin Briggs angrily. “I want a word with you.”

  Don winced. He had it coming, he supposed. It was all very well Mr Gogerty saying it hadn’t been his fault, just bad timing and coincidence, but he hadn’t really believed a word of it. He was, of course, delighted and overjoyed that the chickens had all become human again about five minutes after Mr Huos went into the box. No harm done and All’s well that ends well weren’t, however, cutting it as far as he was concerned. He hadn’t killed anybody after all, but he easily could have.

  “Look,” he said appeasingly, but Kevin Briggs didn’t give him a chance. “I’ve had just about enough of you,” he said, as Don wilted under his glare, “making that bloody awful racket at all hours of the day and night. It’s making the walls shake. I can’t even hear myself practise the bloody guitar. So if I hear so much as a squeak out of you from now on I’m going straight to Environmental Health, and they’ll soon wipe the grin off your—”

  At which point Don took a good swing and punched him on the nose. The sixth note, he thought. Perfect.

  They hitched a lift with a couple of field marshals, who dropped them off at Tewkesbury station. Polly and Don bought tickets to London. Mr Gogerty phoned for a hire car. They parted without any fuss. Polly mumbled, “Well, thanks for everything,” and Don wrote out a cheque. He’d decided he couldn’t be bothered to collect his prize for guessing which came first. As the train pulled out he was already humming under his breath (seven perfect notes for Radio Tyneside), while Polly opened the magazine she’d bought at the station bookstall.

  Mr Gogerty’s car took him to a private airstrip.

  “Oh shit,” said the pilot. “You again.”

  “Yes,” Mr Gogerty said. “You remember how to get there?”

  It wasn’t something the pilot was ever likely to forget. They flew there in grim silence. Mr Gogerty made a show of checking his messages and doing some routine paperwork, but just for once he couldn’t concentrate. He wasn’t looking forward to what was going to come next.

  “Stan.” The old man stepped back to let him in. He stepped out of the blinding glare of the naked sun, and the old man shut the door behind him. Was there a slight edge to the cheery how-nice-to-see-you smile, or was it just his imagination?

  “Always pleased to see you, Stan,” the old man said, “but twice in one week…” He frowned. “There’s nothing wrong, is there, son?”

  Mr Gogerty sat down. He tried not to look at the photo of his mother on the mantelpiece. “That’s what I was about to ask you,” he said. “Listen.”

  He told the whole story. He kept it to the bare minimum without leaving out anything important. He was good at that sort of thing. As he spoke he tried to read the old man’s face, but all he saw there was interest, wonder, concern, all perfectly registered. The old man would have done well in silent movies.

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” he said.

  The old man looked at him for what seemed like a very long time. Then he chuckled, a sound that came welling up from deep inside him, like something long-contained breaking free. “What kind of thing’s that to say to an old friend, Stan?” he said. “You got a touch of the sun or something?”

  “It was you,” Mr Gogerty said. “You tried to cheat the competition.”

  “No way, Stan.”

  But Mr Gogerty’s face was grim. “You burned down the Carpenter Library,” he said, “just to stop me finding out.”

  And then the old man’s face crumpled, like a paper bag blown up and then burst. “I’d lose my job, Stan,” he said, “if they ever found out. You ain’t going to tell on me, are you?”

  “I don’t know,” Mr Gogerty said.

  “You can’t.” The old man was pleading with him, and he wasn’t sure he was proof against that. “It’d break your mother’s heart.”

  “You shouldn’t have burned down the Carpenter, Uncle Theo,” Mr Gogerty said. “That was wrong.”

  The old man nodded slowly. “How’d you figure it out?”

  Mr Gogerty shrugged. “You knew all about it,” he said. “You told me, everything I know, when I was a kid. You’ll have forgotten…”

  “I remember,” the old man said. “It was on the beach. You were nine years old.”

  There seemed to be something wrong with Mr Gogerty’s throat. “You’re the only man in the profession who could’ve rigged up that hub,” he said. “It was a beautiful piece of work.”

  The old man nodded – no false modesty. “I was a lot younger then,” he said. “Still had good eyesight. Couldn’t do it now, I don’t suppose.” He sighed. “The box was the tricky part,” he said. “You know how many connections there were in that box? One thousand, six hundred and forty-three. All done by hand,” he added with a spark of pride. “Just an eyeglass and a soldering iron was all I had to work with; couldn’t afford fancy tools, not then.” He shook his head. “So,” he said, “that boy you told me about, he solved it.”

  Mr Gogerty nodded. “He gave the right answer.”

  “And the prize?” There was a pale glow in the old man’s eyes. “He got the prize?”

  “No.” Mr Gogerty looked away. “He says he can’t be bothered to collect it. He’s had enough of, well, our stuff. Just wants to forget it ever happened.”

  “So the prize is still—” The old man stopped short. There was a hungry look in his eyes Mr Gogerty found disturbing. “Well,” he said, “you could say I’ve got as good a right to it as anybody.”

  Mr Gogerty frowned. “Uncle Theo,” he said, “do you know what the prize is?”

  “Actual figures? No, can’t say as I do. But it’s got to be pretty damn good – enough to pay off all my debts and see me right in my old age. And there’d be something left over for your mother when I’m gone, and you as well, Stan. You know I always—”

  “Five hundred pounds sterling,” Mr Gogerty said.

  The old man’s mouth opened, but for a while no sound came out. Then he said, “What?”

  “Five hundred pounds,” Mr Gogerty repeated.

  “Shit.”

  “And before you ask,” Mr Gogerty went on, “there’s no compound interest or anything like that. Cash money. I’ve got the address to write to, if you want it.”

  Slowly the old man slumped forward, his face sliding between his cupped hands. It was more than Mr Gogerty could bear. “What we could do,” he heard himself say, “is take it back in time and invest it in real estate – Manhattan island or something like that – and then—”

  “Wouldn’t work,” the old man snapped. “You know that. Didn’t you ever listen to anything I told you?”

  “Sorry,” Mr Gogerty grumbled, and suddenly he wanted to leave. “Anyway,” he said, “I won’t tell anybody about the library. I won’t say a word about anything, I promise. I’d better be going now. I’ve got an appointment…”

  He didn’t bother to finish the lie. He wasn’t sure if the old man even registered that he was still there. He stood up, trying to make as little noise as possible. “I’ll see myself out,” he said. “And I’ll give your love to…”

  The old man wasn’t listening. As Mr Gogerty stepped from the cloud into the helicopter a thought struck him, something the old man had said. Something left over for his mother, and hers the only picture on the shelf. Just a friend of the family, she’d always told him. Well, he thought.

  He asked the pilot to take a detour and swoop low over the Malverns. Norton St Edgar looked very small: one street, a church, a pub that never seemed to be open. The stretch Mercs had long since gone, but the lanes were clogged with wandering pedestrians – people who’d woken up out of the strangest dream to find themselves standing in a field surrounded by their furniture, and a whole lot of women lawyers, confused,
angry and at a total loss as to who they should sue for what. Mr Gogerty smiled faintly and told the pilot to fly him back to London.

  Far below, the old saddleback sow lifted her head, saw the helicopter, figured out what it was more or less from first principles, worked out how she’d go about making one if only she had opposable thumbs, and ate a turnip.

  extras

  meet the author

  TOM HOLT was born in London, England, in 1961. At Oxford he studied bar billiards, ancient Greek agriculture, and the care and feeding of small, temperamental Japanese motorcycle engines; interests that led him, perhaps inevitably, to qualify as a solicitor and emigrate to Somerset, where he specialized in death and taxes for seven years before going straight in 1995. Now a full-time writer, he lives in Chard with his wife, one daughter, and the unmistakable scent of blood wafting in on the breeze from the local meat-packing plant. Find out more about the author at http://www.tom-holt.com/.

  introducing

  If you enjoyed

  LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF SAUSAGES,

  look out for

  BLONDE BOMBSHELL

  by Tom Holt

  The year is 2017. Lucy Pavlov is the CEO of PavSoft Industries, home of a revolutionary operating system that every computer in the world runs on. Her personal wealth is immeasurable, her intelligence is unfathomable, and she’s been voted World’s Most Beautiful Woman for three years running. To put it simply – she has it all.

  But not everything is quite right in Lucy’s life. For starters, she has no memories prior to 2015. She also keeps having run-ins with a unicorn. And to make matters even worse, a bomb is hurtling through interstellar space, headed straight for Lucy – and the planet known as Earth.

  * * *

  Interstellar Space

  In spite of the director’s misgivings, the bomb launched on time. As it bypassed Orion, blasting through the heart of the Lion’s Mane nebula at 106 times the speed of light, it composed a violin sonata.

  It felt guilty about that. Violin sonatas, after all, were what it had been built to eradicate. But, it argued to itself, it was above all a smart bomb, a very smart bomb indeed. Warhead (powerful enough to reduce any known planet to gravel), engines, guidance system, targeting and defensive arrays only took up a tenth of the volume of its asteroid-sized casing. The rest was pure intellect, the finest synthetic intelligence the Ostar had ever produced.

  Know your enemy, it reasoned. Learn to think like them. An alien race capable of building a weapon as subtle, insidious and devastating as a violin sonata mustn’t be underestimated. After all, it now seemed certain that the aliens had somehow managed to knock out the Mark One, the bomb’s immediate predecessor; they must have done, or they wouldn’t still be there. An astounding accomplishment for a planet whose dominant species were primates (Yetch, the bomb muttered to itself ) who could think of no better name for their homeworld than Soil, or Dirt, or some such.

  The bomb swerved to avoid a comet, and added a coda and a set of variations. The tune was catchy. It hummed a few bars, though of course in the impenetrable silence of space it couldn’t hear them.

  The bomb had never known the Mark One, which had been built, programmed and launched long before its successor had been envisaged. Indeed, it was to the Mark One’s failure that this bomb, the Mark Two, owed its existence. Clearly the Mark One had been flawed, or simply not good enough, because it had failed. Failure was inexcusable. Even so, as the stars dopplered past in thin filaments of light, it couldn’t help wondering what the Mark One had been like; whether, under other circumstances, they’d have got on together, whether they’d have been friends.

  (It felt the slight gravitational tug of a hitherto unrecorded comet passing by a thousand light-years away. It made the necessary calculations and adjusted its course.)

  On balance, Mark Two was inclined to doubt it. They were both, after all, bombs. When you’ve been built for a purpose, and that purpose is the elimination of an entire planet, the circumstances of your origin tend to colour your worldview. A certain degree of pessimism is inevitable. What does it ultimately matter? you can’t help thinking. The beauty of a sunset, the mind-stopping clarity of a cat singing at dawn, the flash of light on a flawless titanium-alloy panel, the sinuous modulations of a violin sonata; with a supercharged artificial intelligence, you can’t help but appreciate all these, but deep down you know they’re irrelevant, because a day will come when the mission has been accomplished, the target has been reduced to dust floating on the stellar winds, and you with it. The sun, the cat, the panel, quite possibly the violin sonata will all still be there, back on the planet where your frames were first joined, but you won’t be.

  To which the programmers had instructed the Mark Two to react: Oh well, never mind, omelettes and eggs and all that. It didn’t – couldn’t – occur to the Mark Two that its programmers may have been wrong, but it also couldn’t help detecting a certain frailty about the logic.

  Know your enemy, it reminded itself. It was worth repeating, because it constituted the First Law of Sentient Ordnance: Thou shalt not blow up the wrong planet. On that point the programmers had been insistent to the point of fussiness. Accordingly, they’d fed into Mark Two’s cavernous brain every last scrap of data they had about Dirt and its people, their history, biology, philosophy, culture, art, literature and, of course, music. It wasn’t much, a mere 1010,000,000 scantobytes, but it was enough to get the job done; enough, also, to intrigue the Mark Two as it trudged across the endless parsecs towards its target. Above all, it posed the question that even the programmers had been unable to answer. Why?

  Nobody knew. There were theories, of course. The favourite, endorsed by the War Department and the Governing Pack, was that the Dirt-people launched their music into space with a view to neutralising other races as a preliminary to invasion and the formation of a galactic empire. If that was the intention, it was working, at least on the Ostar. From the day when the first Dirt broadcasts, drifting aimlessly through space, had reached the Ostar homeworld, bringing with them the lethally insidious melodies of Dirt music, intellectual life on the planet had practically ground to a halt. After an alarmingly short time, the Ostar could barely think at all. With the fiendishly catchy Dirt melodies looping endlessly round and round in their heads, even the wisest academicians were mentally paralysed. The weapons researchers who’d designed the Mark One had had to have the auditory centres of their brains artificially paralysed before they could settle down to work, and even then it hadn’t been uncommon to find one of them slumped at his console, his jowls noiselessly shaping dum, de dum, de dumpty dumpty dum; at which point the kindest thing was to have him taken away and shot. As for the rest of their once mighty civilisation, it had more or less seized up.

  Hostile intent certainly seemed to be the only logical explanation. But there were inconsistencies. For example: how could a race descended from tree-rats who hadn’t even mastered faster-than-light yet possibly believe they’d be capable of conquering worlds it’d take them tens of thousands of years to reach in their pathetic fire-driven tin-can spaceships? Did they even know there were other inhabited worlds out there? If the inane babble of their public telecasts was to be believed, a large majority of the Dirters sincerely believed they were alone in the universe. A blind, the War Department argued; a fatuous attempt to lure us into a false sense of security. But that hypothesis did suggest an alternative explanation: that the Dirters, unaware that they had neighbours in the cosmos, were mindlessly polluting space with their toxic aural garbage. They didn’t know the harm they were doing; or, worse still, they knew and they didn’t care.

  To which the War Department replied, “If, as is not admitted, this hypothesis is true, all the more reason to blow Dirt into its constituent atoms.” With which line of argument it was hard to find fault. On one thing the Ostar were completely agreed: the Dirters had to be stopped, and quickly.

  The bomb skirted a red dwarf, slowing down ever so slightly
and flipping through ninety degrees to bask in its rich, sensuous heat. There were times when it almost wished it wasn’t a bomb. Sure, every sentient machine on Ostar knew that explosive ordnance was the highest calling to which an artificial intelligence could aspire. Bombs were the élite, the elect, the chosen few; you didn’t get to be a bomb unless you were something really special. That side of it, Mark Two had no quarrel with. It knew it was extraordinary, outstanding, and that fitting it to an industrial matter resequencer or a washing machine would have been a crime against technology. It was the getting-blown-up part that bothered it, with a small afterthought-grade reservation about taking a whole planet with it when it went. The programmers, needless to say, had an answer to that. Only with the very finest sentient machines, they said, were they prepared to share their species’ greatest gift, the defining quality of canine life: mortality. It was the finite nature of Ostar existence that motivated them, gave them goals and objectives, spurred them on to achieve, discover and create. A dishwasher, by contrast, would chunter quietly on for ever, one day pretty much like the last and the next, never knowing the scintillating urgency that came with a limited lifespan. Count yourself lucky, was the moral.

  Yes, Mark Two thought. Well.

  Something infinitesimally small brushed its forward sensory array. Mark Two decoded it in a fraction of a nanosecond, and felt a deep chill crawling through its circuits. A ray of light from Dirt’s sun. That could only mean one thing.

  Mark Two engaged its optical-data-acquisition unit and followed the light’s trajectory, compensating for entropic drift, the magnetic fields of all known objects in the relevant vicinity, time distortion and the effects of its own hyperspatial shroud. At the end of the line, sure enough, was a small, pale star with a gaggle of unremarkable planets bobbing along in its wake. The third planet out from the star was blue, with green splodges.