Their conversation faded as they disappeared into the kitchen.

  “Don’t forget the Battenberg,” my mother called after them.

  I opened my suitcase and took out a few rattly toys Mrs. Bradshaw had given me. Melanie had looked after Friday a lot, as she and Commander Bradshaw had no children of their own, what with Melanie’s being a mountain gorilla, so she had doted on Friday. It had its upsides: he always ate his greens and loved fruit, but I had my suspicions that they climbed on the furniture when I wasn’t about, and once I found Friday trying to peel a banana with his feet.

  “How’s life treating you?” I asked.

  “Better for seeing you. It’s quite lonely with Mycroft and Polly away at the Fourteenth Annual Mad Scientists’ Conference. If it wasn’t for Joffy and his partner Miles popping round every day, Bismarck and Emma, Mrs. Beatty next door, Eradications Anonymous, my auto-body work class and that frightful Mrs. Daniels, I’d be completely alone. Should Friday be in that cupboard?”

  I turned, jumped up and grabbed Friday by the straps of his dungarees and gently took the two crystal wineglasses from his inquisitive grasp. I showed him his toys and sat him down in the middle of the room. He stayed put for about three seconds before tottering off in the direction of DH-82, Mum’s bone-idle Thylacine, who was asleep on a nearby chair.

  DH-82 yelped as Friday tugged playfully at his whiskers. The Thylacine then got up, yawned and went to find his supper dish. Friday followed. And I followed Friday.

  “—in the ear?” said Joffy as I walked into the kitchen. “Does that work?”

  “Apparently,” replied the Prince. “We found him stone dead in the orchard.”

  I scooped up Friday, who was about to tuck in to DH-82’s food, and took him back to the living room.

  “Sorry,” I explained. “He’s into everything at the moment. Tell me about Swindon. Much changed?”

  “Not really. The Christmas lights have improved tremendously, there’s a Skyrail line straight through the Brunel Centre, and Swindon now has twenty-six different supermarkets.”

  “Can the residents eat that much?”

  “We’re giving it our best shot.”

  Joffy walked back in with Hamlet and placed a tray of tea things in front of us.

  “That small dodo of yours is a terror. Tried to peck me when I wasn’t looking.”

  “You probably startled him. How’s Dad?”

  Joffy, to whom this was a touchy subject, decided not to join us but play with Friday instead.

  “C’mon, young lad,” he said, “let’s get drunk and shoot some pool.”

  “Your father has been wanting to get hold of you for a while,” said my mother as soon as Joffy and Friday had gone. “As you probably guessed, he’s been having trouble with Nelson again. He often comes home simply reeking of cordite, and I’m really not keen on him hanging around with that Emma Hamilton woman.”

  My father was a sort of time-traveling knight errant. He used to be a member of SO-12, the agency charged with policing the time lines: the ChronoGuard. He resigned due to differences over the way the historical time line was managed and went rogue. The ChronoGuard decided that he was too dangerous and eradicated him by a well-timed knock at the door during the night of his conception; my aunt April was born instead.

  “So Nelson died at the Battle of Trafalgar?” I asked, recalling Dad’s previous problems in the time line.

  “Yes,” she replied, “but I’m not sure he was meant to. That’s why your father says he has to work so closely with Emma.”

  Emma, of course, was Lady Emma Hamilton, Nelson’s consort. It was she who had alerted my father to Nelson’s eradication. One moment she had been married to Lord Nelson for more than ten years, the next she was a bankrupt lush living in Calais. Must have been quite a shock. My mother leaned closer.

  “Between the two of us, I’m beginning to think Emma’s a bit of a tram—Emma! How nice of you to join us!”

  At the doorway was a tall, red-faced woman wearing a brocade dress that had seen better days. Despite the rigors of a lengthy and damaging acquaintance with the bottle, there were the remains of great beauty and charm about her. She must have been dazzling in her youth.

  “Hello, Lady Hamilton,” I said, getting up to shake her hand. “How’s the husband?”

  “Still dead.”

  “Mine, too.”

  “Bummer.”

  “Ah!” I exclaimed, wondering quite where Lady Hamilton had picked up the word, although on reflection she probably knew a few worse. “This is Hamlet.”

  “Emma Hamilton,” she cooed, casting an eye in the direction of the unquestionably handsome Dane and giving him her hand. “Lady.”

  “Hamlet,” he replied, kissing her proffered hand. “Prince.”

  Her eyelashes fluttered momentarily. “A Prince? Of anywhere I’d know?”

  “Denmark, as it happens.”

  “My . . . late boyfriend bombarded Copenhagen quite mercilessly in 1801. He said the Danes put up a good fight.”

  “We Danes like a tussle, Lady Hamilton,” replied the Prince with a great deal of charm, “although I’m not from Copenhagen myself. A little town up the coast—Elsinore. We have a castle there. Not very large. Barely sixty rooms and a garrison of under two hundred. A bit bleak in the winter.”

  “Haunted?”

  “One that I know of. What did your late boyfriend do when he wasn’t bombarding Danes?”

  “Oh, nothing much,” she said offhandedly. “Fighting the French and the Spanish, leaving body parts around Europe—it was quite de rigueur at the time.”

  There was a pause as they stared at one another. Emma started to fan herself.

  “Goodness!” she murmured. “All this talk of body parts has made me quite hot!”

  “Right!” said my mother, jumping to her feet. “That’s it! I’m not having this sort of smutty innuendo in my house!”

  Hamlet and Emma looked startled at her outburst, but I managed to pull her aside and whisper, “Mother! Don’t be so judgmental—after all, they’re both single. And Hamlet’s interest in Emma might take her interest off someone else.”

  “Someone . . . else?”

  You could almost hear the cogs going around in her head. After a long pause, she took a deep breath, turned back to them and smiled broadly.

  “My dears, why don’t you have a walk in the garden? There is a gentle cooling breeze and the niche d’amour in the rose garden is very attractive this time of year.”

  “A good time for a drink, perhaps?” asked Emma hopefully.

  “Perhaps,” replied my mother, who was obviously trying to keep Lady Hamilton away from the bottle.

  Emma didn’t reply. She just offered her arm to Hamlet, who took it graciously and was going to steer her out of the open doors to the patio when Emma stopped him with a murmur of “not the French windows” and took him out by way of the kitchen.

  “As I was saying,” said my mother as she sat down, “Emma’s a lovely girl. Cake?”

  “Please.”

  “Here,” she said, handing me the knife, “help yourself.”

  “Tell me,” I began as I cut the Battenberg carefully, “did Landen come back?”

  “That’s your eradicated husband, isn’t it?” she replied kindly. “No, I’m afraid he didn’t.” She smiled encouragingly. “You should come to one of my Eradications Anonymous evenings—we’re meeting tomorrow night.”

  In common with my mother, I had a husband whose reality had been scrubbed from the here and now. Unlike my mother, whose husband still returned every so often from the timestream, I had a husband, Landen, who existed only in my dreams and recollections. No one else had any memories or knowledge of him at all. Mum knew about Landen because I’d told her. To anyone else, Landen’s parents included, I was suffering some bizarre delusion. But Friday’s father was Landen, despite his nonexistence, in the same way that my brothers and I had been born, despite my father’s not existing. Time travel is like that. Full of unexplainable paradoxes.

  “I’ll get him back,” I mumbled.

  “Who?”

  “Landen.”

  Joffy reappeared from the garden with Friday, who, in common with most toddlers, didn’t see why adults couldn’t give airplane rides all day. I gave him a slice of Battenberg, which he dropped in his eagerness to devour. The usually torpid DH-82 opened an eye, darted in, ate the cake and was asleep again in under three seconds.

  “Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet!” Friday cried indignantly.

  “Yes, it was impressive, wasn’t it?” I agreed. “Bet you never saw Pickwick move that fast—even for a marshmallow.”

  “Nostrud laboris nisi et commodo consequat,” replied Friday with great indignation. “Excepteur sint cupidatat non proident!”

  “Serves you right,” I told him. “Here, have a cucumber sandwich.”

  “What did my grandson say?” asked my mother, staring at Friday, who was trying to eat the sandwich all in one go and making a nauseating spectacle of himself.

  “Oh, that’s just him jabbering away in Lorem Ipsum. He speaks nothing else.”

  “Lorem—what?”

  “Lorem Ipsum. It’s dummy text used by the printing and typesetting industry to demonstrate layout. I don’t know where he picked it up. Comes from living inside books, I should imagine.”

  “I see,” said my mother, not seeing at all.

  “How are the cousins?” I asked.

  “Wilbur and Orville both run Mycrotech these days,” answered Joffy as he passed me a cup of tea. “They made a few mistakes while Uncle Mycroft was away, but I think he’s got them on a short leash now.”

  Wilbur and Orville were were my aunt and uncle’s two sons. Despite having two of the most brilliant parents around, they were almost solid mahogany from the neck up.

  “Pass the sugar, would you? A few mistakes?”

  “Quite a lot, actually. Remember Mycroft’s memory-erasure machine?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Well, they opened a chain of High Street erasure centers called Mem-U-Gon. You could go in and have unpleasant memories removed.”

  “Lucrative, I should imagine.”

  “Extremely lucrative—right up to the moment they made their first mistake. Which was, considering those two, not an if but a when.”

  “Dare I ask what happened?”

  “I think that it was the equivalent of setting a vacuum cleaner to ‘blow’ by accident. A certain Mrs. Worthing went into the Swindon branch of Mem-U-Gon to remove every single recollection of her failed first marriage.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “Well, she was accidentally uploaded with the unwanted memories of seventy-two one-night stands, numerous drunken arguments, fifteen wasted lives and almost a thousand episodes of Name That Fruit! She was going to sue but settled instead for the name and address of one of the men whose exploits is now lodged in her memory. As far as I know, they married.”

  “I like a story with a happy ending,” put in my mother.

  “In any event,” continued Joffy, “Mycroft forbade them from using it again and gave them the Chameleocar to market. It should be in the showrooms quite soon—if Goliath hasn’t pinched the idea first.”

  “Ah!” I muttered, taking another bite of cake. “And how is my least favorite multinational?”

  Joffy rolled his eyes. “Up to no good as usual. They’re attempting to switch to a faith-based corporate-management system.”

  “Becoming a . . . religion?”

  “Announced only last month on the suggestion of their own corporate precog, Sister Bettina of Stroud. They aim to switch the corporate hierarchy to a multideity plan with their own gods, demigods, priests, places of worship and official prayer book. In the new Goliath, employees will not be paid with anything as un-spiritual as money, but faith—in the form of coupons that can be exchanged for goods and services at any Goliath-owned store. Anyone holding Goliath shares will have these exchanged on favorable terms with these ‘foupons’ and everyone gets to worship the Goliath upper echelons.”

  “And what do the ‘devotees’ get in return?”

  “Well, a warm sense of belonging, protection from the world’s evils and a reward in the afterlife—oh, and I think there’s a T-shirt in it somewhere, too.”

  “That sounds very Goliath-like.”

  “Doesn’t it just?” Joffy smiled. “Worshipping in the hallowed halls of consumerland. The more you spend, the closer to their ‘god’ you become.”

  “Hideous!” I exclaimed. “Is there any good news?”

  “Of course! The Swindon Mallets are going to beat the Reading Whackers to win the SuperHoop this year.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding!”

  “Not at all. Swindon winning the 1988 SuperHoop is the subject of the incomplete Seventh Revealment of St. Zvlkx. It goes like this: ‘There will be a home win on the playing fields of Swindonne in nineteen hundred and eighty eight, and in consequence of . . .’ The rest is missing, but it’s pretty unequivocal.”

  St. Zvlkx was Swindon’s very own saint, and no child educated here could fail to know about him, including me. His Revealments had been the subject of much conjecture over the years, for good reason—they were uncannily accurate. Even so, I was skeptical—especially if it meant the Swindon Mallets’ winning the SuperHoop. The city’s team, despite a surprise appearance at the SuperHoop finals a few years back and the undeniable talents of team captain Roger Kapok, was probably the worst side in the country.

  “That’s a bit of a long shot, isn’t it? I mean, St. Zvlkx vanished in, what—1292?”

  But Joffy and my mother didn’t think it very funny.

  “Yes,” said Joffy, “but we can ask him to confirm it.”

  “You can? How?”

  “According to his Revealment the Sixth, he’s due for spontaneous resurrection at ten past nine the day after tomorrow.”

  “But that’s remarkable!”

  “Remarkable but not unprecedented,” replied Joffy. “Thirteenth-century seers have been popping up all over the place. Eighteen in the last six months. Zvlkx will be of interest to the faithful and us at the Brotherhood, but the TV networks probably won’t cover it. The ratings of Brother Velobius’ second coming last week didn’t even come close to beating Bonzo the Wonder Hound reruns on the other channel.”

  I thought about this for a moment in silence.

  “That’s enough about Swindon,” said my mother, who had a nose for gossip—especially mine. “What’s been happening to you?”

  “How long have you got? What I’ve been getting up to would fill several books.”

  “Then . . . let’s start with why you’re back.”

  So I explained about the pressures of being the head of Jurisfiction, and just how annoying books could be sometimes, and Friday, and Landen, and Yorrick Kaine’s fictional roots. On hearing this, Joffy jumped.

  “Kaine is . . . fictional?”

  I nodded. “Why the interest? Last time I was here, he was a washed-up ex-member of the Whig Party.”

  “He’s not now. Which book is he from?”

  I shrugged. “I wish I knew. Why? What’s going on?”

  Joffy and Mum exchanged nervous glances. When my mother gets interested in politics, it means things are really bad.

  “Something is rotten in the state of England,” murmured my mother.

  “And that something is the English Chancellor Yorrick Kaine,” added Joffy, “but don’t take our word for it. He’s appearing on ToadNewsNetwork’s Evade the Question Time here in Swindon at eight tonight. We’ll go and see him for ourselves.”

  I told them more about Jurisfiction, and Joffy, in return, cheerfully reported that attendance at the Global Standard Deity church was up since he had accepted sponsorship from the Toast Marketing Board, a company that seemed to have doubled in size and influence since I was here last. They had spread their net beyond hot bread and now included jams, croissants and pastries in their portfolio of holdings. My mother, not to be outdone, told me she’d received a little bit of sponsorship money herself from Mr. Rudyard’s Cakes, although she privately admitted that the Battenberg she served up was actually her own. She then told me in great detail about her aged friends’ medical operations, which I can’t say I was overjoyed to hear about, and as she drew breath in between Mrs. Stripling’s appendectomy and Mr. Walsh’s “plumbing” problems, a tall and imposing figure walked into the room. He was dressed in a fine morning coat of eighteenth-century vintage, wore an impressive mustache that would have put Commander Bradshaw’s to shame and had an imperiousness and sense of purpose that reminded me of Emperor Zhark. “Thursday,” announced my mother in a breathless tone, “this is the Prussian Chancellor, Herr Otto Bismarck—your father and I are trying to sort out the Schleswig-Holstein question of 1863-64; he’s gone to fetch Bismarck’s opposite number from Denmark so they can talk. Otto—I mean, Herr Bismarck, this is my daughter, Thursday.”

  Bismarck clicked his heels and kissed my hand in an icily polite manner.

  “Fraulein Next, the pleasure is all mine,” he intoned in a heavy German accent.

  My mother’s curious and usually long-dead houseguests should have surprised me, but they didn’t. Not anymore. Not since Alexander the Great turned up when I was nine. Nice enough fellow—but shocking table manners.

  “So, how are you enjoying 1988, Herr Bismarck?”

  “I am especially taken with the concept of dry cleaning,” replied the Prussian, “and I see big things ahead for the gasoline engine.” He turned back to my mother: “But I am most eager to speak to the Danish prime minister. Where might he be?”

  “I think we’re having a teensy-weensy bit of trouble locating him,” replied my mother, waving the cake knife. “Would you care for a slice of Battenberg instead?”

  “Ah!” replied Bismarck, his demeanor softening. He stepped delicately over DH-82 to sit next to my mother. “The finest Battenberg I have ever tasted!”

  “Oh, Herr B,” said my flustered mother. “You do flatter me so!”

  She made shooing motions at us out of vision of Bismarck and, obedient children that we were, we withdrew from the living room.