The Woman Who Died a Lot

28. Wednesday: The Manchild

They kept the gravity suits in the abandoned school, and we were measured precisely for size, as an ill-fitting suit could give you “old feet,” which was not recommended. After we were weighed, had our density checked and then our center of balance ascertained by being made to lie on a tilting bed, we were helped into the hardshell suits after first having to remove anything of greater than bone density from our pockets. I’d worn a gravity suit once before, but a long time ago. It was when Dad was still at the ChronoGuard, before the regrettable Sarah Wade stretching incident brought the SO-12 Bring a Child to Work Days to a rapid end.

The suits looked old and worn on the outside but almost brand new on the inside, which was at least some comfort. Friday pointed out that the suits had been built in 1992 and had long surpassed their four-thousand-year design limit, but I simply shrugged. The dilation level inside the facility was a life-frittering D=.31, and if we didn’t wear gravity suits, we’d be lucky to get out within ten months. Once the suits were sealed and tested for leaks, the helmets were latched in place and the power-supply and life-support units placed on our backs.

“Comfortable?” yelled the protester named George.

“Not at all!” I yelled back. “Bloody heavy, in fact—I can hardly move.”

“Totally normal. It’ll weigh less than nothing when they power up. Don’t forget that the Tachytalk™ intercom has a range of only forty-seven seconds, so don’t stray too far from each other. The batteries will give you an hour’s suit time at anything up to D=.5. Skirt any hot spots and you’ll get longer, but don’t venture inside the main engine room—we think it’s at D=.82 in there. You’ll need these.” He handed us each a marker pen and a whiteboard the size of a legal pad. “Okay?”

“Sort of.”

“Good. You’ll feel a slight thump when you flip the switch, but wait until we get to a safe distance, won’t you? Gravity Suits have an eight percent chance of explosive fragmentation on start-up.”

“Nice to know,” I murmured.

Friday and I exchanged glances and smiled nervously at each other.

“Ready?” I asked.

“Ready,” he replied, and I turned my backpack toward him so he could switch it on.

The thump was anything but slight—more like seven idiots hitting you repeatedly all over the body with three-day-old baguettes. I felt the suit creak and flex as the variable-mass substrate started to increase its unidirectional mass to offset any dilation gradient outside the suit. Inside the helmet were a few gauges that could viewed from within—one that listed battery power, a second that was marked “External Flux” and was broken, two that just blinked annoyingly and an analogue clock with two second hands—a normal one and a sweep that rotated the dial once a second. There was an identical clock mounted outside the suit, and as soon as we powered up, the clocks started to run out of sync. I gave a thumbs-up to the protesters and was delighted to find I could move a lot easier in the suit than I could outside it, which was something of a relief, as I wouldn’t need my stick.

We waved to our new friends and walked across the road to the chain-link fence. We pushed open the gates and climbed aboard an electric crew cart designed for gravity-suit use. The old car park was covered in dead leaves and other detritus, and as we trundled toward the administrative buildings almost a mile away, the asphalt became older as the dilation gradient became more apparent. The closer we approached the source of the leaking flux, the older the surroundings became. In the two years since the abandonment of the facility, mature trees had grown up through the paving slabs. But the oddness of it all was that from an outside observer the facility had actually aged just two years—it was only as we walked closer did the aging occur. As we moved in, the trees grew and the building decayed, until by the time we reached the front entrance, the paint was mottled and cracked, the woodwork had rotted away, and the internal steel within the concrete had begun to rust, spall and fracture, leaving large areas where the concrete had fallen from the wall. As we stepped off the electric buggy, it almost corroded to dust beneath us.

“The building was only abandoned two years ago,” murmured Friday, sounding a lot like Jane Horrocks, one of the unavoidable consequences of the Tachytalk™ communication system. “It looks as if five decades have passed.”

We walked cautiously past a sign marked WARNING: STEEP _T-_GRADIENT, and the sun suddenly moved faster across the sky.

“I don’t get it,” said Friday. “Are we in the future now?”

“Yes and no,” I replied, once more reinforcing the strange duality of time. “If you equalize your suit,” I explained, pointing to the big red button marked PURGE on his chest, “you’ll stay at the out-suit time. If you walk back up the temporal gradient, we’ll stay on in-suit time. Watch this.”

I stopped, turned around and took a few paces back in the direction we had come. There was a shuddering in the suit, and my skin prickled as I walked up the gradient. I turned back to Friday and asked if he was okay.

He said he was, but I could see that his mouth wasn’t moving when he spoke. I was talking to him as he was now but seeing him as he would be in about thirty seconds. Conversely, he was hearing what I said now but seeing me as I had been half a minute ago. As I watched, he drew a picture on his slate and then showed it to me. It was of an elephant.

“Want to see a neat trick?” I asked.

“Go on, then.”

“Draw something on your slate.”

“Okay.”

I waited a few seconds. “It’s an elephant,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, “that was weird. How did you know?”

I walked back to him, and as I drew closer, I could hear his speech once more creep back into sync with his mouth.

“It’s a simple demonstration of instantaneous communication across a dilation gradient. A lot of the ChronoGuard’s work was done using that very effect. I saw the picture of the elephant after you drew it but spoke to you before you had.”

We stepped inside the main admin block as the sun set, and the internal lights flickered on in the rapidly gathering dusk. Two years before, there had been a staff of over six thousand working here, and everything had been left as it was when the building was abandoned. In one room we saw a map of Stalingrad, and in another was a pile of ancient Egyptian artifacts. Everything was old, decayed, dusty and corroded.

We pushed open some swinging doors marked MAINTENANCE and entered a vast hangar full of large machine parts with overhead cranes. I’d seen something similar in a power station. The C-90 time engines had been a major engineering project.

“I know the time industry was shut down because it was deemed impossible,” said Friday as he looked around at the long abandoned building, “but it seems pretty credible from where I’m standing right now.”

“I don’t think anyone ever truly understood it,” I replied. “What’s all this furniture doing here?”

A large section of the maintenance hangar was filled with old furniture loaded onto pallets. We walked on and came across about two dozen motorcars, all vintage and all aging quickly. The paint was beginning to crackle, and light corrosion marks were appearing on the chrome. As we stood there, we saw a strange, misshapen figure stand momentarily in front of me, shaking and buzzing like one of those accelerated films of a plant growing. The next moment I felt a tug at my sleeve, and my whiteboard was suddenly propped on a reproduction Regency sideboard close by. It had writing on it:

What are you doing here?

I saw the odd-looking person flit past us, and one of the cars vanished, only to be replaced by another. I rubbed the board clean and wrote:

Can we talk about stuff?

In an instant the whiteboard had been wiped and replaced by another message:

I’ll be with you in twenty minutes.

And we saw the figure dash off again.

“He’s running about four times faster than we are,” said Friday, “so about five minutes.”

“How did you figure that?” I asked. “Comparing clocks or an extrapolation of the dilation gradient?”

“Neither,” he replied. “He just looks like the VCR at home running at the ‘4X’ fast-forward feature.”

“Very technical.”

But Friday was right. In a little over four minutes, the Manchild appeared again, but this time he had brought a chair and sat patiently still so we could get a good look at him. He was indeed a manchild—the left side of him was a boy of no more than ten, while the right side of him was a man approaching middle age. The two flowed into each other like hot wax, and his features were stretched sideways across his face, with one shoulder considerably lower than the other. To enable him to walk, his younger leg had an extension on the base of his shoe, which gave him a lilting gait.

“I was working here before we shut down the engines,” he explained in a voice that sounded like a speed-faulty tape player, “as part of SO-12’s legal team. I was down here to view the new C-90 engines when I tore my suit and suffered what’s termed a Progressive Negative Bilateral Aggregation. I was going to have a hard time explaining this, even with a new career history, so I decided to stay.”

“Will you be all right once the left side catches up?” asked Friday.

“You’re going to have to speak quicker,” he said. “I can’t understand you.”

So Friday repeated himself as fast as he could, and the Manchild gave an odd sideways smile and chuckled.

“No,” he said, touching the child side of his head with his older hand. “This side is getting younger. The left side of my mind is gradually reverting to that of a child.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

He shrugged. “Accidents happen. I’m just glad I didn’t have to undergo what happened to Sarah Wade—and besides, being able to laugh in an uninhibited manner about poo and wee is really very liberating.”

“You sound vaguely normal,” said Friday, again as fast as he could, “yet we’re running four times slower than you.”

“I’m speaking very slowly for your benefit,” he said with a faint smile. “I don’t get many visitors. What do you think of our little enterprise?” He made a jerky gesture in the direction of the hundreds of pieces of furniture.

“The craze for shabby chic,” he replied, “people like stuff that looks old, but they don’t have the time to wait, and ‘distressed’ stuff looks such shit, don’t you think? I have a business called Age-Fast that specializes in making things old. It’s the same with those sports cars. All those idiots who restored their cars to factory condition now realize that they’ve stolen the cars’ very soul—but down here I can put sixty years back on them in a little under a week. Nice patina, although I do have to keep them rotated to avoid overaging one side. We have more than a million of bottles of whiskey, too—twelve years in only three weeks. Vintage Château Latour in six months? No problem. Wine, whiskey, counterfeit Vermeers—we do the lot down here. I’ve seen the future, and it’s old.”

“So the core really is running close to D=.82?” I asked.

“Two minutes in there is almost four months,” he said, “and the gradient is getting steeper by the second. In thirty-seven years, it should be about ready to pop.” And he gave a soft, knowing chuckle.

“Who are you anyway?” he asked.

“Thursday Next,” I said, “and this is my son, Friday.”

“Ah,” he said, “you must have come about the Letters of Destiny.”

Friday and I exchanged looks, and he asked the Manchild what he knew about them. It was, it transpired, just one of several jobs he had been asked to do after he’d stayed on, but he didn’t know why. All he had was a timescale to stick to and instructions to pass them on if he became old, incapacitated or dead.

“There must be something you can tell us,” said Friday. “I’m going to kill someone for no reason on Friday morning, and I need to know why.”

The Manchild blinked his mismatched eyes at Friday and thought for a few seconds.

“I saw you drawing an elephant earlier,” he said. “Your mother was demonstrating a simple cause-and-effect reversal, yes?”

“Yes?”

“Okay, tell me this: Whose decision was it to make it an elephant? Thursday because she saw you draw it or you because you did draw it?”

We said nothing; there didn’t seem to be an answer.

“The truth is that you both did and neither of you did—which leaves only the drawn elephant, who seized an opportunity to exist through a chink in the tightly enmeshed cause-and-effect paradigm.”

“A drawn elephant has a desire to exist?”

“Certainly. All of everything came into existence simply because it wanted to be. The big bang wasn’t so much a big bang as a hasty dash toward an opportunity to trade nothingness for somethingness. The main contributory factor to the entire universe was a momentary effect in need of a cause. And in that split second, everything that wanted to have existence—which is everything—came racing through in one huge hot mass. They’ve been trying to sort themselves out ever since.”

“Kind of like a Harrods sale?” I suggested. “When the doors suddenly open?”

“Exactly like that. Only with six quintillion shoppers all trying to get to the knockdown perfume counter in a trillionth of a second—and through a garden hose.”

“I’m sure this is going somewhere,” said Friday, “but I’m not sure where.”

“It’s about cause and effect and how the two can be separated and even entangled. Often it can become tricky to see which cause leads to which effect—or even which effect leads to which cause. And in cases like that, you need to let go and do as your spirit guides you.”

“That’s pretty deep,” said Friday.

“I have a lot of time to think,” said the Manchild, “and a unique brain that can understand the complexity of the very simple. Uh-oh,” he sniggered, “fart. And it’ll be a stinky one.”

And after cracking one off in a childish manner, he giggled about it for several minutes.

“Right,” I said when he had recovered his composure, “so Friday will kill Gavin?”

“He will and he won’t. It’ll work out, you’ll see. You must have faith and remain true to the guiding principles within you. You didn’t get to be the director general of the ChronoGuard by luck. It was by your sense of justice, your selflessness—and being able to gauge cause simply by viewing the effect. Not one in a trillion can do that.”

“I don’t understand,” said Friday.

The Manchild rested his child’s hand on his visor. “You will, if only fleetingly. Sometimes we do our best work without even knowing it.”

“We’ve got to go,” I said, glancing at the battery indicator in my suit.

“I need to know more,” said Friday. “How does this have anything to do with averting HR-6984?”

“Everything. You’ll figure it out. Take a bottle of twelve-year whiskey with you and don’t worry too much about prison—the alternative is unthinkable. The other fourteen will thank you— or won’t, as it turns out. Oh, well,” he added, “time waits for no man, as they say.”

And he hobbled rapidly off. We watched him walk faster and faster as he moved past the cars and down the T-gradient toward where the main time engines were located, then vanished through some double doors.

We turned our backs and plodded painfully back toward the exit. I had badly underestimated the extra effort required to walk back up the dilation gradient, and even with Friday helping me it was slow going. We’d only gotten halfway across the car park when the power packs finally failed. We purged the suits and found ourselves five hours away. It took us only ten minutes to walk to the main gate and the demonstrators, but we lost another forty minutes in the process—it was now past ten o’clock at night. I was sweating buckets and had to be helped out of the suit, trying hard not to scream with the pain.

“How was the Manchild?” asked George.

“Good for another ten years—his time,” I said.

They all looked solemn.

“He said he wanted to be buried in the churchyard next to his mother,” said another of the villagers in a respectful tone. “I’d best book a funeral for the spring.”

I called Landen on the landline to tell him we were okay, which was just as well, as he was beginning to worry, and he reported that another St. Zvlkx book had been vandalized in a private collection in Guildford. There had been two Special Library Services guards on duty supplied by the Surrey Bentalls Center for All Your Shopping Needs Library Service, and they were now both in hospital—one on the critical list.

Friday and I recovered with tea and some specially baked scones, kindly prepared for us by the villagers, and we then headed back toward town.

“What did he mean,” said Friday after we had driven along in silence for ten minutes, “about ‘Sometimes we do our best work without even knowing it’?”

“I don’t know, Sweetpea,” I said, already drifting off into an exhausted drowse. “Why not sleep on it? I know I’m going to.”

I leaned my head against the door pillar, my leg feeling as though it were on fire. I tried to gather my thoughts over what had happened, but it was too much effort, and in an instant I was in deep, grateful slumber.