The Woman Who Died a Lot

16. Tuesday: Tuesday

Tuesday was already back home when we got there at a little after one-thirty. She and the Wingco were in the far paddock with a quarter-size mockup of the anti-smote field generator. The Wingco was readying the high-speed camera, and standing around were assorted observers and representatives of various interested parties. Landen and I exchanged new passwords, and while he made a sandwich, I took the golf buggy down to see how things were going. The far paddock was the place usually reserved for Tuesday’s tests, partly because it was a good distance from the house but mostly because there was a useful screen of mature leylandii to absorb blast damage.

“I thought I told you to go to school this morning,” I said, making sure we were out earshot of the small crowd.

“Mum, like, duh, I did go to school. I went into math class and proved that there actually is a highest number, and then I helped Derek in the chemistry lab to make a new type of quick-setting PVC substitute from potato starch and an enzyme readily grown on onions. During the break I figured that Janice Lovegrove was up the duff and probably by Scooter Davis, that Debbie Trubshaw is now putting it about in a big way, and that Sian Johnson’s new hairstyle was pinched from page nine of the Swindon edition of Vogue.”

“Anything regarding Gavin Watkins?” I asked, considering that Friday was destined to murder him on Friday and had yet to have a motive.

“He didn’t offer me any money to see my boobs again.”

“That’s good.”

“No, he said he’d give me five pounds for sex.”

“He did what!?!” I yelled, outraged. “You said no, right? I’m going to report him to the headmaster.”

“ Mu-u-um! Of course I said no. Please don’t do that,” she implored. “I’m already a geek and a teacher’s pet and a brainiac and a smart aleck. I don’t want to be a snitch as well. Besides, I punched him in the eye.”

“You did?”

“Yes. Quite hard. I may even have detached his retina. I left school after that and got back in time to do a test of the defense shield for this bunch of suits.”

“Well, okay,” I said, looking over her shoulder to where they were all milling about. “Who are they anyway?”

“The guys in the raincoats are from the Ministry of Theistic Defense, and the two in tweeds are from Tobin & Scott, the anti-smite tower build contractors. The guy in the lab coat is from Health & Safety, and the three on the left are from the Swindon City Council.”

I noted that one of the women in the last group was Bunty Fairweather. I needed to talk to her about alternative plans for Swindon if the shield didn’t work, but this, I noted, was probably not the time.

“Leave you to it, then.”

But I didn’t leave completely. To watch the test, I stopped the golf cart above the long steps, where the landscaped water cascade tumbled into the lake, one of the many garden features within the eighty-eight-acre estate.

“Every journey begins with the first step,” came a deep voice tinged with wisdom and august pronouncements.

“Hello, Millon,” I said, greeting our ornamental hermit with a friendly nod. “How’s the hermitage?”

“Drafty,” he said simply, “but the discomfort of one man is mere sand upon the beach to the iniquities undertaken by the few to many.”

“You won’t want central heating put in, then?”

“Comfort is the measles of modern man,” he said in a halfhearted manner, “and only through cheerless discomfort will the mind be clear and unfettered.”

I smiled. My ex-stalker and biographer Millon de Floss had recently volunteered to be our ornamental hermit, part of the Commonsense Party’s Inverse Consequences directive. If we were going to have someone living on the estate who was to wander around aimlessly spouting quasi-philosophical nonsense, we far preferred it to be someone we knew.

“When’s the hermit exam?” I asked.

“Next week,” he said nervously. “How am I sounding?”

“I’ll be honest—not great.”

“Really?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Damn! I was hoping six months of silent contemplation would suddenly imbue me with sagelike intelligence, but all I seem to be able to manage is a strange fungal growth on my shins caused by the damp and lukewarm aphorisms that would scarcely do good favor to the back of a matchbox.”

“I don’t really get the whole intellect-through-isolation thing,” I said. “I’m not sure anyone can claim to understand the human condition until he’s talked two people out of a fight, smoothed over a best friend’s marital breakup or dealt effectively with a teenager’s huffy silence.”

“I’d include an appreciation of Tex Avery cartoons in that list,” added Millon sadly, “along with Gaudí, David Lean’s later movies and a minimum of one evening with Emo Philips. But the hermit elders are traditionalists. The City&Guilds Higher Hermiting Certificate is based mostly around Horace, the Old Testament, Descartes and Marx.”

“Groucho or Karl?”

“Harpo. I think it reflects the ‘silent’ aspect.”

“Ah. Couldn’t you just smear yourself with mud and excrement and mumble Latin to yourself in a corner?”

“What, now?”

“No, no—during the exam.”

Millon shook his head. “Everyone tries that old chestnut. Instant disqualification.” He nodded toward the far paddock. “What’s Tuesday up to?”

“Another Anti-Smite Shield test.”

“Will this one work?”

“Hope springs eternal.”

We watched as the observers were shepherded into the concrete viewing bunker while Tuesday made some trifling adjustments to the defense shield. It was identical to the full-size versions dotted around the country—a large copper-domed head like a mushroom atop a lattice tower. Above the test rig was the smite simulator, a single electrode twenty feet higher than the copper dome, suspended from three towers. This was charged to several trillion volts and would discharge on cue in an attempt to simulate the sort of high-power groundburst that was the Almighty’s favored attempt at cleansing.

As we watched, Tuesday walked to the concrete bunker herself, and a few moments later the domed copper hat of the shield began to rotate slowly. It moved faster and faster until small crackles of electricity started to fire off around the edges and a bluish field began to form in a soft, undulating canopy that reached beyond the tower and to the ground, like a large umbrella.

“Fingers in ears,” I said, and a second or two later a blue flash of lightning descended from the simulator, followed a millisecond later by a loud crack. For a moment I thought the shield had held, but then the spinning copper dome disintegrated into thousands of fragments, some of which were thrown hundreds of feet in the air. Millon and I ducked behind the golf buggy as the worthless shrapnel fell to the ground around us.

“She’ll be disappointed,” I said.

“Always expect a kick in the teeth,” said Millon, “so that when you get a slap in the chops, it seems like a triumph.”

“Listen,” I said, “what do you know about a Goliath employee named Jacob Krantz?”

Before his days as a hermit, Millon de Floss had been editor of Conspiracy Theorist magazine, a position that necessitated he keep a somewhat lower profile these days, as some of his wackier “exclusives” had turned out to be far truer than expected— much to the displeasure of Goliath, who was implicated in almost every conspiracy you cared to invent.

“Krantz?” said Millon. “Doesn’t ring a bell. Does he have a Laddernumber?”

“It’s 673.”

“Wow.”

“Wow indeed. He might be working in the Synthetic Human Division.”

“According to Goliath, there is no Synthetic Human Division. Let me make a few calls.”

He disappeared back into his hermitage, and I watched as the observers trailed out of the bunker to stare sadly at the remains of the defense shield. They had all been driven away by the time I got down there, and I found Tuesday in the bunker, trying to make sense of the vast amount of telemetry generated by the test.

“I’m sorry, Sweetpea,” I said. “It must be a huge disappointment.”

She turned to glower at me. “If you hadn’t sent me to school this morning to prove I was a real teenager, then I might have made this bloody thing work.”

“Really?”

“No, not really. This is me being angry and you being gullible and sensitive when reacting negatively to my wild accusations.”

Tuesday could be very direct when angry—but also quite honest.

“I can think of three things at once, so school isn’t usually a problem,” she said as she calmed. “I’ve just got to fine-tune the algorithm to better predict the Madeupion Field. Do it right and we have over twenty gigawatts of free energy and a vexed deity. Get it wrong and we’ve got seven tons of the most expensive scrap on record.”

“Will you be able to get it finished by Friday?” I asked. “I’m not keen to see Swindon’s downtown disappear in a flash of blue wrath.”

“I’ll figure it out, Mum,” she said with a sigh. “You should have seen their faces. That mockup cost them sixty million to build, and it’s the tenth I’ve destroyed.”

“So you’re sure you’re okay?” I asked as a distinctive thupthup-thup sound heralded the arrival of a tiltrotor aircraft.

“I’ll be fine,” said Tuesday as the small craft appeared above the tree line and folded its rotor panels to landing configuration.

“That’ll be my ride.”

“Where are you going?”

“The Sisterhood is opening their library for scrutiny.”

“Oooh,” said Tuesday, “if you see a copy of Archimedes’ fifth issue of Practical Mechanical Theorems, the one where he outlines how to build a tumble dryer, I’d love a copy.”