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He thought about this for a few seconds, lowered his shoulders and went off to find Lola, who I could hear sobbing somewhere near the stern of the flying boat.
'Young love!' said a voice behind me. 'Eighteen years of emotions packed into a single week – it can't be easy, now, can it?'
'Gran!' I said, whirling round. 'When did you get back?'
'Just now,' she replied, removing her gingham hat and gloves and passing me some cash.
'What's this?'
'D-3 Generics are annoyingly literal but it can pay dividends – I asked the cabbie to drive backwards all the way here and by the end of the trip he owed me money. How are things?'
I sighed. 'Well, it's like having a couple of teenagers in the house.'
'Look upon it as training for having your own children,' said Gran, sitting down on a chair and sipping my coffee.
'Gran?'
'Yes?'
'How did you get here? I mean, you are here, aren't you? You're not just a memory, or something?'
'Oh, I'm real, all right.' She laughed. 'You just need a bit of looking after until we sort out Aornis.'
'Aornis?' I queried.
'Yes.' Gran sighed. 'Think carefully for a moment.'
I mulled the name in my mind, and, sure enough, Aornis came out of the murk like a ship in fog. But the fog was deep, and there were other things hidden within – I could feel it.
'Oh yes,' I murmured, 'her. What else was I meant to remember?'
'Landen.'
He came out of the fog, too. The man in the sketch. I sat down and put my head in my hands. I couldn't believe I'd forgotten him.
'I'd regard it a bit like measles,' said Gran, patting my back. 'We'll cure you of her, never fear.'
'But then I have to go and battle with her again, in the real world?'
'Mnemonomorphs are always easier to contain on the physical plane,' she observed. 'Once you have beaten her in your mind, the rest should be easy.'
I looked up at her.
'Tell me again about Landen.'
And she did, for the next hour – until it was time for me to stand in for Mary Jones again.
* * *
I drove into Reading in Mary's car, past red Minis, blue Morris Marinas and the ubiquitous Spongg Footcare trucks. I had visited the real Reading on many occasions in my life and although the Heights Reading was a fair impression, the town was lacking in detail. A lot of roads were missing, the library was a supermarket, the Caversham district was a lot more like Beverly Hills than I remember, and there was a very grotty downtown which was more like New York in the seventies. I think I could guess where the author got his inspiration; I suppose it was artistic licence – something to increase the drama.
I stopped in a traffic jam and drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. Our investigation of Perkins' death had not made much progress. Bradshaw had found the partially molten padlock and key in the remnants of the castle keep, but they didn't tell us any more. Havisham and I were not having much better luck ourselves: after three days of discreet investigation, only two pieces of information had come to light. First, that only eight members of Jurisfiction had access to The Sword of the Zenobians, and one of them was Vernham Deane. I mention this because he was posted as missing following an excursion into Ulysses to try to figure out what had happened to the stolen punctuation in the final chapter. No one had seen him since. Successive sweeps of Ulysses had failed to show that he had been there at all. In the absence of any more information, Havisham and I had started to discuss the possibility that Perkins might have removed the padlock himself – to clean out the cage or something, although this seemed doubtful. And what about my sabotaged Eject-O-Hat? Neither Havisham nor I had any more idea why I should be considered a threat; as Havisham delighted in pointing out, I was 'completely unimportant'.
But the big news that had emerged in the past few days was that the time of the UltraWord™ upgrade had been set. Text Grand Central had brought the date forward a fortnight to coincide with the 923rd Annual BookWorld Awards. During the ceremony Libris would inaugurate the new system before an audience of seven million invited characters. The Bellman told us he had been up to Text Grand Central and seen the new UltraWord™ engines for himself. Sparkling new, each engine could process about a thousand simultaneous readings of each book – the old V8.3 engines were lucky to top a hundred.
I wound down the window and looked out. Traffic jams in Reading weren't uncommon but they usually moved a little bit, and this one had been solid for twenty minutes. Exasperated, I got out of the car and went to have a look. Strangely, there appeared to have been an accident. I say strangely because all the drivers and pedestrians inside Caversham Heights were only Generic D-2 to D-9s and anything as dramatic as an accident was quite outside their brief. As I walked past the eight blue Morris Marinas in front of me, I noticed that each one had an identically damaged front wing and shattered windscreen. By the time I reached the head of the queue I could see that the incident involved one of the white Spongg Footcare trucks. But this truck was different from the others. Usually, they were unwashed Luton-bodied Fords with petrol streaks near the filler cap and a scratched roller shutter at the rear. This t
ruck had none of these – it was pure white, very boxy and without a streak of dirt on it anywhere. The wheels, I noticed, weren't strictly round, either – they were more like a fifty-sided polygon which gave an impression of a circle. I looked closer. The tyres had no surface detail or texture. They were just flat black, without depth. The driver was no more detailed than the truck; he – or she or it – was pink and cubist with simple features and a pale blue boiler suit. The truck had been turning left and had hit one of the blue Morris Marinas, damaging all of them identically. The driver, a grey-haired man wearing herringbone tweed, was trying to remonstrate with the cubist driver but without much luck. The truck driver turned to face him, tried to speak but then gave up and looked straight ahead, going through the motions of driving the truck even though he was stationary.
