JOHN WILLIAMS,

  The Extraordinary Career of George Formby

  IT WAS AFTER two or three days of plain Litera Tec work and a dull weekend without Landen that I found myself lying awake and staring at the ceiling, listened to the clink-clink of milk bottles and the click-click of Pickwick’s feet on the linoleum as she meandered around the kitchen. Sleep patterns never came out quite right in reengineered species; no one knew why. There had been no major coincidences over the past few days, although on the night of Joffy’s exhibition the two SpecOps-5 agents who had been assigned to watch Slorter and Lamme died in their car as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning. It seemed their car had a faulty exhaust. Lamme and Slorter had been following me around very indiscreetly for the past two days. I just let them get on with it; they weren’t bothering me—or my unseen assailant. If they had, they’d as likely as not be dead.

  But there was more than just SO-5 to worry about. In three days the world would be reduced to a sticky mass of sugar and proteins—or so my father said. I had seen the pink and gooey world for myself, too, but then I had also seen myself shot at Cricklade Skyrail station, so the future wasn’t exactly immutable—thank goodness. There had been no advance on the forensic report; the pink slime matched to no known chemical compound. Coincidentally, next Thursday was also the day of the general election, and Yorrick Kaine looked set to make some serious political gain thanks to his “generous” sharing of Cardenio. Mind you, he was still taking no chances—the first public unveiling of the text was not until the day after the election. The thing was, if the pink gunge got a hold, Yorrick Kaine could have the shortest career as a prime minister ever. Indeed, next Thursday could be the last Thursday for all of us.

  I closed my eyes and thought of Landen. He was there as I best remembered him: seated in his study with his back to me, oblivious to everything, writing. The sunlight streamed in through the window and the familiar clacketty-clack of his old Underwood typewriter sounded like a fond melody to my ears. He stopped occasionally to look at what he had written, make a correction with the pencil clenched between his teeth, or just pause for pause’s sake. I leaned on the doorframe for a while and smiled to myself. He mumbled a line he had written, chuckled to himself and typed faster for a moment, hitting the carriage return with a flourish. He typed quite animatedly in this fashion for about five minutes until he stopped, took out the pencil and slowly turned to face me.

  “Hey, Thursday.”

  “Hey, Landen. I didn’t want to disturb you; shall I—?”

  “No, no,” he said hurriedly, “this can wait. I’m just pleased to see you. How’s it going out there?”

  “Boring,” I told him despondently. “After Jurisfiction, SpecOps work seems as dull as ditchwater. Flanker at SO-1 is still on my back, I can feel Goliath breathing down my neck, and this Lavoisier character is using me to get to Dad.”

  “Can I do anything to help?”

  So I sat on his lap and he massaged the back of my neck. It was heaven.

  “How’s Junior?”

  “Junior is smaller than a broadbean—little more to the left—but making himself known. The Lucozade keeps the nausea at bay most of the time; I must have drunk a swimming pool of it by now.”

  There was a pause.

  “Is it mine?” he asked.

  I held him tightly but said nothing. He understood and patted my shoulder.

  “Let’s talk about something else. How are you getting along at Jurisfiction?”

  “Well,” I said, blowing my nose loudly, “I’m not a natural at this bookjumping lark. I want you back, Land, but I’m only going to get one shot at ‘The Raven,’ and I need to get it right. I’ve not heard from Havisham for nearly three days—I don’t know when the next assignment will be.”

  Landen shook his head slowly.

  “Sweetness, I don’t want you to go into ‘The Raven.’ ”

  I looked up at him.

  “You heard me. Leave Jack Schitt where he is. How many people would have died for him to make a packet out of that plasma rifle scam? One thousand? Ten thousand? Listen, your memory may grow fuzzy, but I’ll still be here, the good times—”

  “But I don’t want just the good times, Land. I want all the times. The shitty ones, the arguments, that annoying habit you had of always trying to make the next filling station and running out of petrol. Picking your nose, farting in bed. But more than that, I want the times that haven’t happened yet—the future. Our future! I am getting Schitt out, Land—make no mistake about that.”

  “Let’s talk about something else again,” said Landen. “Listen— I’m a bit worried about someone trying to kill you with coincidences.”

  “I can look after myself.”

  He looked at me solemnly.

  “I don’t doubt it for one moment. But I’m only alive in your memories—and some mewling and puking ones of my mum’s I suppose—and without you I’m nothing at all, ever—so if whoever is juggling with entropy gets lucky next time, you and I are both for the high jump—but at least you get a memorial and a SpecOps regulation headstone.”

  “I see your point, however muddled you might make it. Did you see how I manipulated coincidences in the last entropic lapse to find Mrs. Nakajima? Clever, eh?”

  “Inspired. Now, can you think of any linking factor—except the intended victim—that connects the three attacks?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. I’ve thought it through a thousand times. Nothing.”

  Landen thought for a moment, tapped a finger on his temple and smiled.

  “Don’t be so sure. I’ve been having a little peek myself, and, well, I want to show you something.”

  And there we were, on the platform of the Skyrail station at South Cerney. But it wasn’t a moving memory, like the other ones I had enjoyed with Landen, it was frozen like a stilled video image—and like a stilled video image, it wasn’t very good; all blurry and a bit jumpy.

  “Okay, what now?” I asked as we walked along the platform.

  “Have a look at everyone. See if there is anyone you recognize.”

  I stepped onto the shuttle and walked round the players in the fiasco, who were frozen like statues. The faces that were most distinct were the neanderthal driver-operator, the well-heeled woman, the woman with Pixie Frou-Frou and the woman with the crossword. The rest were vague shapes, generic female human forms and little else—no mnemonic tags to make them unique. I pointed them out.

  “Good,” said Landen, “but what about her?”

  And there she was, the young woman sitting on the bench in the station, doing her face in a makeup mirror. We walked closer and I looked intently at the nondescript face that loomed dimly out of my memory.

  “I only glimpsed her for a moment, Land. Slightly built, mid-twenties, red shoes. So what?”

  “She was here when you arrived, she’s on the southbound platform, all trains go to all stops—yet she didn’t get the Skyrail. Suspicious?”

  “Not really.”

  “No,” said Landen, sounding crestfallen, “not exactly a smoking gun, is it? Unless,” he smiled, “unless you look at this.”

  The Skyrail station folded back to be replaced by the area near the Uffington white horse on the day of the picnic. I looked up nervously. The large Hispano-Suiza automobile was hanging motionless in the air not fifty feet up.

  “Anything spring to mind?” asked Landen.

  I looked around carefully. It was another bizarre frozen vignette. Everyone and everything was there—Major Fairwelle, Sue Long, my old croquet captain, the mammoths, the gingham tablecloth, even the bootleg cheese. I looked at Landen.

  “Nothing, Land.”

  “Are you sure? Look again.”

  I sighed and scanned their faces. Sue Long, an old school friend whose boyfriend set his own trousers on fire for a bet; Sarah Nara, who lost her ear at Bilohirsk on a training accident and ended up marrying General Spottiswode; croquet pro Alf Widdershaine, who taught me how to “peg out” all the way from the forty-yard line. Even the previously unknown Bonnie Voige was there, and—

  “Who’s this?” I asked, pointing at a shimmering memory in front of me.

  “It’s the woman who called herself Violet De’ath,” answered Landen. “Does she seem familiar?”

  I looked at her blank features. I hadn’t given her a second thought at the time, but something about her was familiar.

  “Sort of,” I responded. “Have I seen her somewhere before?”

  “You tell me, Thursday,” Landen said, shrugging. “It’s your memory. But if you want a clue, look at her shoes.”

  And there they were. Bright red shoes that just might have been the same ones on the girl at the Skyrail platform.

  “There’s more than one pair of red shoes in Wessex, Land.”

  “You’re right,” he observed. “I did say it was a long shot.”

  I had an idea, and before Landen could say another word we were in the square at Osaka with all the Nextian-logoed Japanese, the fortune-teller frozen in mid-beckon, the crowd around us an untidy splash of visual noise that is the way crowds appear to the mind’s eye, the logos I remembered jutting out in sharp contrast to the unremembered faces. I peered through the crowd as I anxiously searched for anything that might resemble a young European woman.

  “See anything?” asked Landen, hands on hips and surveying the strange scene.

  “No,” I replied. “Wait a minute, let’s come in a bit earlier.”

  I took myself back a minute and there she was, getting up from the fortune-teller’s chair the moment I first saw him. I walked closer and looked at the vague shape. I squinted at her feet. There, in the haziest corner of my mind, was the memory I was looking for. The shoes were definitely red.

  “It’s her, isn’t it?” asked Landen.

  “Yes,” I murmured, staring at the wraithlike figure in front of me. “But it doesn’t help; none of these memories are strong enough for a positive ID.”

  “Perhaps not on their own,” observed Landen. “But since I’ve been in here I’ve figured out a few things about how your memory works. Try and superimpose the images.”

  I thought of the woman on the platform, placed her across the vague form in the market and then added the specter who had called herself De’ath. The three images shimmered for a bit before they locked together. It wasn’t great. I needed more. I pulled from my memory the half-shredded picture that Lamme and Slorter had shown me. It fitted perfectly, and Landen and I stared at the result.

  “What do you think?” asked Landen. “Twenty-five?”

  “Possibly a little older,” I muttered, looking closer at the amalgam of my attacker, trying to fix it in my memory. She had plain features, a small amount of makeup and blond hair cut in an asymmetric bob. She didn’t look like a killer. I ran through all the information I had—which didn’t take long. The failed SpecOps-5 investigations allowed me a few clues: the recurring name of Hades, the initials A.H., the fact that she did resolve on pictures. Clearly it wasn’t Acheron in disguise, but perhaps—

  “Oh, shit.”

  “What?”

  “It’s Hades.”

  “It can’t be. You killed him.”

  “I killed Acheron. He had a brother named Styx—why couldn’t he have a sister?”

  We exchanged nervous looks and stared at the mnemonograph in front of us. Some of her features did seem to resemble Acheron now that I stared at her. Like Hades, she was tall and her lips were thin. That alone would not have been enough; after all, many people are tall with thin lips, and few, if any, are evil geniuses. But her eyes were unmistakable—they had a sort of brooding darkness to them.

  “No wonder she’s pissed off with you,” murmured Landen. “You killed her brother.”

  “Thanks for that, Landen,” I replied. “Always know how to relax a girl.”

  “Sorry. So we know the H in A.H. is Hades—what about the A?”

  “The Acheron was a tributary of the river Styx,” I said quietly. “As was the Phlegethon, Cocytus, Lethe—and Aornis.”

  I’d never felt so depressed at having identified a suspect before. But something was niggling at me. There was something here that I couldn’t see, like listening to a TV from another room. You hear dramatic music but you have no idea what’s going on.

  “Cheer up,” smiled Landen, rubbing my shoulder, “she’s ballsed it up three times already—it might never happen!”

  “There’s something else, Landen.”

  “What?”

  “Something I’ve forgotten. Something I never remembered. Something about—I don’t know.”

  “It’s no good asking me,” replied Landen. “I may seem real to you, but I’m not—I’m only here as your memory of me. I can’t know any more than you do.”

  Aornis had vanished and Landen was starting to fade.

  “You’ve got to go now,” he said in a hollow-sounding voice. “Remember what I said about Jack Schitt.”

  “Don’t go!” I yelled. “I want to stay here for a bit. It’s not much fun out here at the moment, I think it’s Miles’s baby, Aornis wants to kill me and Goliath and Flanker—”

  But it was too late. I’d woken up. I was still in bed, undressed, bedclothes rumpled. The clock told me it was a few minutes past nine. I stared at the ceiling in a forlorn mood, wondering how I could really have got myself into such a mess, and then wondering if there was anything I could have done to prevent it. I decided, on the face of it, probably not. This, to my fuddled way of thinking, I took to be a positive sign, so I slipped on a T-shirt and shuffled into the kitchen, filled the kettle and put some dried apricots in Pickwick’s bowl after trying and failing once again to get her to stand on one leg.

  I shook the entroposcope just in case—was thankful to find everything normal—and was just checking the fridge for some fresh milk when the doorbell rang. I trotted out to the hall, picked up my automatic from the table and asked: “Who is it?”

  “Open the door, Doofus.”

  I put the gun away and opened the door. Joffy smiled at me as he entered and raised his eyebrows at my disheveled state.

  “Half day today?”

  “I don’t feel like working now that Landen’s gone.”

  “Who?”

  “Never mind. Coffee?”

  We walked into the kitchen. Joffy patted Pickwick on the head, and I emptied the old grounds out of the coffee jug. He sat down at the table.

  “Seen Dad recently?”

  “Last week. He was fine. How much did you make on the art sale?”

  “Over £2,000 in commission. I thought of using the cash to repair the church roof but then figured, what the hell—I’ll just blow it on drink, curry and prostitutes.”

  I laughed.

  “Sure you will, Joff.”

  I rinsed some mugs and stared out of the window.

  “What can I do for you, Joff?”

  “I came round to pick up Miles’s things.”

  I stopped what I was doing and turned to face him.

  “Say that again.”

  “I said I’d come—”

  “I know what you said, but, but—how do you know Miles?”

  Joffy laughed, saw I was serious, frowned at me and then remarked: “He said you didn’t recognize him that night at Vole Towers. Is everything okay?”

  I shrugged. “Not really, Joff—but tell me: How do you know him?”

  “We’re going out, Thurs—surely you can’t have forgotten?”

  “You and Miles?”

  “Sure! Why not?”

  This was very good news indeed.

  “Then his clothes are in my apartment because—”

  “—we borrow it every now and then.”

  I tried to grasp the facts.

  “You borrow my apartment because it’s . . . secret—?”

  “Right. You know how old-fashioned SpecOps are when it comes to their staff fraternizing with clerics.”

  I laughed out loud and wiped away the tears that had sprung to my eyes.

  “Sis?” said Joffy, getting up. “What’s the matter?”

  I hugged him tightly.

  “Nothing’s the matter, Joff. Everything’s wonderful!—I’m not carrying his baby!”

  “Miles?” said Joff. “Wouldn’t know how. Wait a minute, sis—you’ve got a bun in the oven? Who’s the father?”

  I smiled through my tears.

  “It’s Landen’s,” I said with a renewed confidence. “By God it’s Landen’s!”

  And I jumped up and down overwhelmed by the sheer joy of the fact, and Joffy, who had nothing better to do, joined me in jumping up and down until Mrs. Scroggins in the apartment below banged on the ceiling with a broom handle.

  “Sister dearest,” said Joffy as soon as we had stopped, “who in St. Zvlkx’s name is Landen?”

  “Landen Parke-Laine,” I gabbled happily. “The ChronoGuard eradicated him, but something other happened and I still have his child, so it’s all meant to come out right, don’t you see? And I have to get him back because if Aornis does get to me then he’ll never exist ever ever ever—and neither will the baby and I can’t stand that idea and I’ve been farting around for too long so I’m going to go into ‘The Raven’ no matter what— because if I don’t I’m going to go nuts!”

  “I’m more than happy for you,” said Joffy slowly. “You’ve completely lost your tiny doofus-like mind, but I’m very happy for you, in spite of it.”