Lost in a Good Book

I hugged him tightly.

‘I’ll miss you. And your mother, of course, and Escher, 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 flesh was 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 into 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, anywhere else in the universe. In a word, photosynthesis. An oxidising 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 happen. Take my chronograph; I’m not going to need it any more.’

I unstrapped the heavy watch from his good wrist as the smell of 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.

‘It was Aornis, wasn’t it?’

I nodded.

‘Worst of the lot—not counting Phlegethon. You know what we used to say about her? Evil rich, cash poor. She has her Achilles’ heel, same as the rest of the family. 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 snivelling 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 down 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 travelled 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 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 Top Shop. 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 whether 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 and never 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.

34. The Well of Lost Plots

‘Character Exchange Programme: If a character from one book looks suspiciously like another from the same author, chances are they are. There is a certain degree of economy that runs through the book world and personages from one book are often asked to stand in for others. Sometimes a single character may play another in the same book, which lends a comedic tone to the proceedings if they have to talk to themselves. Margot Metroland once told me that playing the same person over and over and over again was as tiresome as “an actress condemned to the same part in a provincial repertory theatre for eternity with no holiday”. After a spate of illegal PageRunning (q.v.) by bored and disgruntled bookpeople, the Character Exchange Programme was set up to allow a change of scenery. In any year there are close to ten thousand exchanges, few of which result in any major plot or dialogue infringements. The reader rarely suspects anything at all.’

UA OF W CAT. The Jurisfiction Guide to the Great Library (glossary)

I slept over at Joffy’s place. I say slept but that wasn’t entirely accurate. I just stared at the elegantly moulded ceiling and thought of Landen. At dawn I crept quietly out of the vicarage, borrowed Joffy’s Brough Superior motorcycle and rode into Swindon as the sun crept over the horizon. The bright rays of a new day usually filled me with hope but that morning I could think only of unfinished business and an uncertain future. I rode through the empty streets, past Coate and up the Marlborough road towards my mother’s house. She had to know about Dad however painful the news might be, and I hoped she would take solace, as I did, in his final selfless act. I would go to the station and hand myself into Flanker afterwards. There was a good chance that SO-5 would believe my account of what happened with Aornis but I suspected that convincing SO-1 of Lavoisier’s chronuption might take a lot more. Goliath and the two Schitts were a worry but I was sure I would be able to think of something to keep them off my back. Still, the world hadn’t ended yesterday which was a big plus—and Flanker couldn’t exactly charge me with ‘failing to save the planet his way’, no matter how much he might want to.

As I approached the junction outside Mum’s house I noticed a suspiciously Goliath-looking car parked across the street, so I rode on and did a wide circuit, abandoning the motorcycle two blocks away and treading noiselessly down the back alleys. I skirted around another large dark-blue Goliath motor-car, climbed over the fence into Mum’s garden and crept past the vegetable patch to the kitchen door. It was locked so I pushed open the large dodo-flap and crawled inside. I was just about to switch on the lights when I felt the cold barrel of a gun pressed against my cheek—I started and almost cried out.