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“What do you think Gavin Watkins will do to make Friday murder him, just supposing he does?” asked Landen.
“What could a sixteen-year-old do?” I replied.
We thought for a moment.
“Do we intervene?” said Landen.
“We can try,” I said, “but the eventline can be a tricksy beast. Push it too hard and it will push back—and almost guarantee that you complete the event you were trying to avoid.”
“It’s annoying,” said Landen.
“What is?”
“I thought we’d seen the back of all this time-travel nonsense.”
“Even when it’s not there,” I murmured, “it still is.”
“Like forgotten dreams,” said Landen.
9.
Monday: The Madeupion
Thursday’s father was a retired ChronoGuard operative whose nebulous state of semiexistence was finally resolved when the time engines at Kemble were disabled. As part of the downstream erasure of the fact that there had ever been a time industry, his career had been replaced with something immeasurably more mundane. He was, and now had always be
en, a plumber. Only one with no name, which made paying by check somewhat tiffy and word-of-mouth recommendations almost impossible. But despite his new past, he also kept the old one. Few of us are so lucky as to draw experience from two lives.
Millon de Floss, Thursday Next: A Biography
As it turned out, we were eight for dinner. Landen and myself, obviously, and Friday and Tuesday, equally obviously. My brother Joffy and his partner, Miles, also made it, as did my dad. Mum and Polly, more inseparable as the years went by, were going to listen to the live studio taping of Avoid the Question Time. The Wing Commander would always sit down to talk, but he never ate as he didn’t need to, being fictional. Jenny would have been there—for the starters at any rate—but still had the flu and so was confined to her room.
But Friday was right. My father did want to talk about matters ChronoGuard.
“Get your future in the post?” he asked, sitting down next to his grandson.
“Last week.”
“Any good?”
“It’ll be . . . challenging.”
My father had also worked in the time industry, but unlike Friday, who now no longer had the future he was going to have, my father no longer had the past to which he was entitled. ChronoGuard agents who were active during the shutdown were offered a replacement past career to replace their theoretically unsustainable ones, and most chose something in the arts, sciences or politics. My father, ever the maverick, had opted for a fifty-seven-year career in plumbing. The reason, he stated, was so his new memories would have him at home as much as possible, to better reminisce about his family. This worked well for him, but not for us—we retained only those memories of his first career as a time-traveling knight-errant. As far as we were concerned, he’d turned up the day after the time engines were shut down, full of fond memories of us that we couldn’t remember but he could— sort of like having an aged parent with a bad memory, only the other way round.
“Challenging is good,” said Dad. “I used to take your mother and her brothers on long hiking holidays in Scotland. Now, that was challenging. Do you remember that time when we got lost on Ben Nevis, Thursday, and had to be rescued by several men in beards, all of whom smelled of pipe tobacco and York Peppermint Patty?”
“No.”
“I saw a few posters up in town about the smiting,” said Landen. “The city council doesn’t seem to be taking it very seriously. Are we sure it’s still on?”
Joffy and Miles exchanged nervous glances.
“It’s on, all right,” replied Miles. “When He announced the smiting to a state-registered Meek Person in a lonely gas station in the small hours, He had the Meek write it down so he wouldn’t forget and then went and told another Meek just in case. After that He reiterated His plans in the pips of a cucumber and burned them into the side of Haytor on Dartmoor.”
“He’s kind of done with ambiguity, isn’t He?” I said.
“Pretty much,” said Joffy. “Since His Revealment He’s kind of ditched the idea of subtle signs or obscure clues. Burning His intentions into granite is a lot more direct, and it certainly makes people take notice, although the Dartmoor Parks Authority was none too pleased. But there it was: Swindon will be hit with a Grade-III Smite on Friday at midday.”
We all fell silent. It kind of sounded more ominous coming from Joffy, even if a Grade-III was not the worst. More to do with cleansing fire and none of the mass murder, lava and pillar-of-salt stuff.
