by Tom Holt
‘Wouldn’t mind.’
‘Fine. So, what’s first?’
The cloning equipment was heavier than it looked, but with two of them on the job it only took a couple of hours. For some reason, the frogs kept well back as they carried things out to the van; they stood in rows, like kids at school assembly, and made soft rumbling noises. Eventually, there was nothing left in the workshop except one glowing tank.
‘So what do you want to do?’ John asked.
‘Don’t ask me,’ David replied. ‘It’s your tank.’
‘Yeah, but it’s your clone.’
David shook his head. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘He’ll be his own clone, when he wakes up. Poor bastard,’ he added with feeling. ‘Right. Before we go—’
‘Oh,’ John said. ‘You’re coming too, then?’
‘Well, you’ll need someone to help you unload, won’t you?’
‘It’d be a help,’ John admitted.
‘There you are, then. But first,’ David said, ‘I’d just like to use your phone. Quick call,’ he added.
‘Help yourself,’ John told him. ‘I’ll wait in the van.’
David dialled 999. ‘Police,’ he said. He rang off when they asked for his name.
‘All done?’ John asked him, as he slammed the van door shut.
‘All done,’ David replied. ‘You know, it’s a funny thing, but I’ve never been to Watford.’
John started the engine. ‘Haven’t missed much.’
‘Maybe not. But I’m sure it’s better than, say, British Columbia.’
‘That’s in Canada, isn’t it?’
David looked out of the side window. ‘I believe so,’ he replied. ‘Though I’ve heard different.’
‘I think it’s in Canada,’ John replied. ‘Dunno. I always liked the sound of Canada, myself. Pretty sure it’s got to be better than Watford. But then, all depends on what you want out of life, doesn’t it?’
As they waited at a T-junction, they saw a fleet of police cars with their sirens blazing, going in the direction they’d just come from. ‘Bloody hell,’ John said. ‘Just as well we got out of there when we did.’
‘Isn’t it?’
David fell asleep shortly after the Hillingdon roundabout. He was woken up by the sound of a door slamming. It was dark outside. He wound down his window. ‘Are we here?’ he asked.
‘Yup. You go round the back, I’m just opening the doors.’
Light flared up on the other side of the windscreen, revealing an empty building with whitewashed walls. David grunted and got out of the van. It took rather less time and effort to unload the gear than it had to cram it all in.
‘Good job,’ John said. ‘Right, I think we’ve earned a cup of tea.’
David nodded. ‘Thanks.’
“S all right. Got the kettle,’ John went on, ‘and tea bags, should be a tin of powdered milk somewhere. No sugar, though, must’ve left it behind, sorry.’
David lifted his head. ‘You’re sure about that?’ he asked. ‘Yeah. Might be some of them sweetener things in that small tea chest.’
‘You’re sure,’ David asked, ‘that there wasn’t another bag of sugar here when we arrived?’
‘Didn’t see one.’
‘Ah.’ David breathed a long sigh. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to cut down on sugar. It can be really bad for you, I’m told.’
‘Yeah, well, they say that about everything, don’t they?’
Honest John made the tea. It came out dark and strong and fairly horrible, with just a faint savour of cloning goo. It was the first cup of tea David had had in a very long time. He enjoyed it. ‘Want a biscuit?’ John asked.
‘Yes.’
John rootled about in one of the tea chests and produced an elderly packet of digestives. They were soft and chipped and crumbly. David ate them all.
‘Excuse me if this is a bad thing to ask,’ David said eventually, his mouth still full of mashed crumbs, ‘and please just say no if you like, but would there happen to be any jobs going around here?’
Honest John looked at him. ‘Around here?’
‘In Watford. In the cloning industry.’
John shrugged. ‘Could be,’ he said. ‘You think you know someone who’d be interested?’
‘Yes. Me.’
‘You?’ John scratched the back of his head. ‘But I thought you’d got a job,’ he said.
‘Not any more,’ David replied.
John nodded thoughtfully. ‘It’s a long way to come each morning, though, from where you live to here.’
‘I don’t live there any more,’ David replied. ‘In fact, I was wondering if you’d mind if I sort of camped out here for the night. If that’s no trouble, I mean.’
Suddenly, John laughed. ‘I think I know what’s going on,’ he said. ‘That bird I done for you; the snotty one, with the big—’
‘I know who you mean.’
John nodded again. ‘Your wife found out what you’ve been up to, and now she’s slung you out on your ear. Something like that, is it?’
‘Something like that,’ David replied.
‘Serves you right,’ John said, but not entirely uncharitably. ‘You ought to have thought about that before you started cloning birds all over the shop. Always ends in tears, that kind of caper. Still,’ he continued, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, ‘that’s none of my business, what you get up to. So what makes you think you’d be any good to me?’
David looked at him. ‘Oh, it’s just a feeling,’ he said. ‘I have an idea that you, or someone like you, could find me very useful under certain circumstances.’
John raised an eyebrow. ‘What line are you in, then?’
‘Computers.’ David looked away. To his surprise, he hadn’t seen anything in John’s face that shouldn’t have been there. Maybe, he wondered, maybe he’s called Honest John because he’s honest. Then he thought:
Nah, because they call New York new, but it’s been there for ages. It’s probably just a nickname, like Chalky or Ginger.
‘Never got the hang of them bloody things,’ John sighed. ‘Got to use ‘em, mind. Couldn’t do all the calculations by hand when you’re configuring, it’d take years. Hundreds of years, even.’
David nodded. ‘And that’d be a problem for you, would it?’
“Course it would. I mean, it’s not like I’m going to live for ever.’ John laughed. ‘Oh, I can see what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, why bother when I could just clone up half a dozen of myself and make them do the maths.’ He shook his head. ‘Wouldn’t work. At least, they wouldn’t work. More likely to start a fight with each other, or try and clone a whole army and take over the world. They’re like that, see, multiples, once they get together. That’s why it’s so important not to have two copies of the same original at the same time. If they ever run into each other, you’re in trouble.’
‘Ah,’ David said; and he thought of the two Philippa Levenses, both en route to Homeworld.
‘Oh yes,’ John said. ‘It’s like when you got an original and a clone and they get together. Real trouble. That’s why I try and only do dead people. Too risky else.’
This time, David thought of the other David, the one he’d left semi-alive, floating in green slime, for the police to arrest. ‘I can see the logic there,’ he said. ‘Tricky business you’re in, really.’
‘Not half.’ John sighed. “Course, my dad wanted me to be a fireman, same as him. Can’t go wrong being a fireman, he told me, people’ll always be setting fire to things. Had to know better, didn’t I?’
‘Children always do, don’t they?’
‘Don’t they just.’ Honest John frowned, his thoughts clearly elsewhere. ‘You do your best for them, try and stop ‘em making a fuck-up of their lives, and the more you try, the worse it gets. Playing God, see, trying to make people do what you want, not what they want. Never works out. Same with clones, of course.’
For some reason, David looked up sh
arply when he said that. There was something in the voice. Before he could follow up on the lead, however, John stood up and yawned. ‘Yeah, sure,’ he said, ‘you can come and work for me if you want to. Hours are terrible, money’s worse and it makes your hair smell. But if you know about computer stuff—’
‘Oh, I do. Believe me.’
John shrugged. ‘That’s all right, then. And if you want to doss down in here for the night, be my guest. Wouldn’t suit me, mind, but you’re welcome. You can make yourself useful while you’re here, keep the spiders out of the tanks, stuff like that.’
‘Thank you,’ David replied. ‘I’ll see about finding a place to stay tomorrow. In my lunch break,’ he added quickly.
‘Lunch break?’ John grinned. ‘You’ll be lucky. But you can use the phone if you want to ring round. I’ll stop the cost of the calls out of your money.’
‘Right;’ David said. ‘Thank you.’
“S all right,’ John yawned. ‘I’m off home. Don’t leave the lights on late, for crying out loud. I’m not made of money.’
He wandered out, shutting the door behind him, and left David wondering; sure, John wasn’t made out of money, else he’d be a sort of blue papier-mâché statue. But if he wasn’t made of money, it raised the question, what was he made of? The usual slug/snail/puppy-dog-tail gumbo that our flesh is heir to, or something greener, slimier and less vexingly random? Bottom line was, this one didn’t seem to know; that, or he was one hell of an actor. The resequencing faults, now: they seemed to banjax the memory, sealing off whole chunks, so maybe Honest John really didn’t know anything, and genuinely believed that David was there because he had a wife who objected to beautiful girls wearing nothing but green slime being smuggled into the matrimonial home. It was possible. It had to be, or else why did David instinctively trust him?
The fact remained that he did; and that was about as odd as you could get outside of a picket line in front of an integer factory. Quite possibly it was simply because he’d turned up at such a useful moment and helped David so much with his getaway — very helpful he’d been, extremely helpful, suspiciously helpful... And all this business about going to work in the clone factory; where the hell had all that come from? Stood to reason: if David had any sense, he’d be keeping a whole lot of distance between himself and anybody with a case of bad conjunctivitis, let alone a missing eye.
But here he was; here and, for the moment, by the looks of things, dry, fed and safe. Yeah, what about that? There was something wonderfully old-fashioned and wholesome about starting over sweeping floors and making tea and scrubbing out the tanks and all the stuff he’d just signed on to do; a new day dawning, a new door opening as the old one slammed, the perfect fresh start.
In the clone trade. In Watford. Well, perhaps not perfect.
David found a heap of sacks to lie down on, turned off the lights and closed his eyes.
‘Something you said yesterday,’ Honest John said, his eye fixed on the machine he was wiring up. ‘About how it’d be nice not to go to prison for the rest of your life. You in trouble or something?’
Up till that point, it had all been going rather well. Mostly they’d worked together in silence, John fiddling round the backs of grey steel boxes with a screwdriver, David locked in the archetypal light/darkness struggle with Windows 98.
‘Yes,’ David said, and waited.
‘Oh.’ Pause. ‘Anything to do with that clone? You know, the one I did for you?’
‘In a way,’ David replied. ‘No, I didn’t kill her or anything like that, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘Isn’t, actually. Can you pass me a seven-mill socket?’
‘What’s a seven-mill socket?’
John got up off his knees and walked over to the workbench. ‘One of these,’ he said.
‘Ah, right. Small cylindrical metal thing. I’ll remember that.’
Silence, apart from John ratcheting and David typing.
‘So what did you do?’ John asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘Ah.’ John sighed. ‘That’s all right, then. Only, if it was thieving or something — well, you know what I mean. There’s valuable stuff here.’
David half-turned in his swivel chair. ‘In 1981,’ he said, ‘either late July or early August, I can’t remember exactly, I stole a Mars bar from the Woolworth’s on Ealing Broadway. They never did get me for it, though I guess they stopped trying to track down the perp some time ago. Apart from that—’
‘Yes, all right, fair enough. Can’t blame me for asking. I mean, I only met you a couple of times.’
‘True. And you didn’t have to give me this job, I appreciate that.’ He tapped a few more keys. Please wait, the screen told him, while Windows compiles the appropriate wizard. He hummed a few topical bars from ‘The Wizard of Oz’, and turned away again. ‘Out of interest,’ he said, ‘why did you give me this job?’
‘Because I can’t do computers.’ He grunted, putting his weight behind his spanner. ‘Never did understand the poxy things, never will. Don’t even have them where—’
‘Where you come from,’ David said evenly. ‘Where was that again? Basildon?’
‘Weren’t any computers in Basildon when I was growing up there,’ John replied; and to his credit, he handled it very well, with just the right lack of concern. But not well enough. ‘Managed perfectly well without ‘em, too, with just a slide rule and a pencil. People nowadays though—’
They looked at each other, and a kind of understanding passed between them: specialised, though not particularly rare. It was a sensible compromise in bad circumstances — you know I know you’re lying, but it’s all right, I’ll pretend I don’t. You can see it any day of the week in the eyes of long and wearily married couples when they say, ‘I love you’.
But that was all right, David assured himself as he swivelled back to work, because I knew all this already. What matters is that, for reasons best known to himself, he rescued me. Which is good, surely?
‘I know what you’re going to say,’ he interrupted, with forced cheerfulness. ‘If the abacus was good enough for the Ancient Egyptians, it’s good enough for you, right?’
‘Never could get on with them things,’ John replied. ‘Like I said, give me a slide rule any day.’
‘Sure. What’s a slide rule?’
Apparently, wiring up and adjusting the machines was a much longer job than pulling them out, because it took the whole working day. ‘Half five,’ John called out at one stage. ‘Knocking-off time.
‘All right,’ David called back. He was genuinely intrigued by the Byzantine complexity of the snarl-up in John’s Internet software; it was as if the programs had come alive and been struck stupid at exactly the same moment, and in their panic had tried to dig their way out of the system, burrowing frantically clean through anything that had got in their way. ‘Just give me a few minutes, will you? I’ve almost got this thing fixed— Oh, scrod.’
‘I don’t pay overtime,’ John warned.
‘What? Oh, I see what you mean. Sorry, I’m so used to working for myself, I forgot that time has a value. Don’t worry about. it. If I can just get it sorted tonight, it means I won’t have to start from scratch first thing tomorrow.’
‘Please yourself,’ John said. ‘Here, you had anything to eat since this morning?’
At 8.20 a.m., John had swooshed open the shed’s sliding door and marched in with two styrofoam cups and a big, partly transparent brown paper bag containing two jumbo bacon rolls. David had eaten and drunk his share ravenously, anxious to get as much of it down his neck as he could before the other 4,999 disciples showed up. ‘It’s OK,’ he said, ‘I’m not hungry right now. Could do with a coffee, though, as and when you’re making one.’
‘Sure.’
John put down his spanner and pottered away. David tapped a few keys in a desultory manner, but the thread had escaped him and slithered away, like a slow-worm escaping into long grass. You need to
have a clear head and supple mental joints if you’re going to go crawling about in the maze of tunnels that honeycomb the mind of a computer; if your concentration’s impaired in any way, stay well clear, go and find something else to do. He sat back and closed his eyes to clear them of little flickering dots.
Well, David thought, here I am; and I’m sitting in front of a totally screwed-up computer, trying to figure out how it possibly got that way, which is, of course, my default setting. A little sliver of normality. Hooray. I can focus on that like mad, and that’ll help me keep my mind off the small matter of how I came to be here and what the hell is going on. Sure, I feel like I’m a small child who’s been given a comic to read while its parents hack at each other with big knives, but at least it implies that somebody’s thinking of me. That makes a pleasant change, and of course I’m pathetically grateful.
But... He wound back various things Honest John had said, the expression on his face while he’d been saying them. Unless Honest John was Olivier and Gielgud and Dustin Hoffman with a side salad of De Niro and a cocktail olive, when he’d said or implied that he didn’t know anything about interstellar lifts or murdered clones or duplicate Philippa Levenses, he’d been telling the truth — in which case, he wasn’t the Good Cop in this scenario, and his motivation was either much simpler or vastly more complex than David had assumed. Really, it had only been that one stray remark about there being no computers where he came from that had put a dent in his credibility; and there were plenty of good explanations for it that didn’t involve superbeings from alien worlds or centuries-old conspiracies to make a fool out of David Perkins. Maybe Honest John had grown up on a remote Scottish island or a coral reef in the South Pacific. Why he’d choose to lie about something like that wasn’t immediately obvious, but people do strange things for strange (but entirely terrestrial) reasons. Perhaps he really was on the level, after all.
(Fine. In which case, why are there two dozen men who look just like him running around out there trying to get me locked up or lure me onto spacecraft?)
After he’d thought through a couple of alternative explanations, debugged them for continuity errors and assessed them for viability, he reached one inescapable conclusion; namely, that there really are things in the universe even more bafflingly incomprehensible than a fucked-over Microsoft product. That being the case, he resolved to rest his brain by getting back to work. The rest and the confrontation with a far nastier problem had done him some good, and he was just starting to make some progress when Honest John came in with the coffee.