“Do I have anything to bargain with?”
Friday looked at the file. “You can stretch her loop by twenty minutes.”
“How do I get to talk to her?”
“Just step inside the sphere of influence.”
I took a deep breath and walked into the globe of yellow light. All of a sudden, normality returned with a jerk. I was back in what seemed like real life. It was raining outside, which was what must have been happening when she was looped. Aornis, well used to the monotonous round of limited dialogue during her eight-minute existence, noticed me immediately.
“Well, well,” she murmured sarcastically, “is it visitors’ day already?”
“Hello, Aornis,” I said with a smile. “Remember me?”
“Very funny. What do you want, Next?”
I offered her a small vanity case with some cosmetics in it that I had picked off a shelf earlier. She didn’t take it.
“Information,” I said.
“Is there a deal in the offing?”
“I can give you another ten minutes. It’s not much, but it’s something.”
She looked at me, then all around her. She knew that people were outside the sphere looking in, but not how many and who. She had the power to wipe memories but not read minds. If she could, she’d know how much I hated her. Mind you, she probably knew that already.
“Next, please!” said the checkout girl, and Aornis put two dresses and a pair of shoes on the counter.
“How’s the family, Thursday-Landen and Friday and the girls?”
“Information, Aornis.”
She took a deep breath as the loop jumped back to the beginning of her eight minutes and she was once more at the rear of the line. She clenched her fists so tightly her knuckles went white. She’d been doing this for ten years without respite. The only thing worse than a loop was a loop in which one suffered a painful trauma, such as a broken leg. But even the most sadistic judges could never find it in themselves to order that.
Aornis calmed herself, looked up at me and said, “Give me twenty minutes and I’ll tell you what you want to know.”
“I want to know about Felix8.”
“That’s not a name I’ve heard for a while,” replied Aornis evenly. “What’s your interest in that empty husk?”
“He was hanging around my house with a loaded gun yesterday,” I told her, “and I can only assume he was wanting to do me harm.”
Aornis looked mildly perturbed. “You saw him?”
“With my own eyes.”
“Then I don’t understand. After Acheron’s untimely end, Felix8 seemed rather at a loss. He came around to the house and was making a nuisance of himself, very like an abandoned dog.”
“So what happened?”
“Cocytus put him down.”
“I’m assuming you don’t mean in the sense of ‘to humiliate.’”
“You think correct.”
“And when was this?”
“In 1986.”
“Did you witness the murder? Or see the body?” I stared at her carefully, trying to determine if she was telling the truth.
“No. He just said he had. You could have asked him yourself, but you killed him, didn’t you?”
“He was evil. He brought it upon himself.”
“I wasn’t being serious,” replied Aornis. “It’s what passes for humor in the Hades family.”
“This doesn’t really help me,” I murmured.
“That’s nothing to do with me,” replied Aornis. “You wanted intel, and I gave it to you.”
“If I find out you’ve lied,” I said, getting ready to leave, “I’ll be back to take away the twenty minutes I gave you.”
“If you’ve seen Felix8, how could you think otherwise?” pointed out Aornis with impeccable logic.
“Stranger things have happened.”
I stepped out of the loop cell and was back in the bluey greenness of T.J. Maxx among the time-frozen customers, with Friday at my side.
“Think she’s telling the truth?” he asked.
“If she is, it makes no sense at all, which is a point in her favor. If she’d told me what I wanted to hear, I’d have been more suspicious. Did she say anything else to me she might have made me forget?”
Aornis, with her power of memory distortion and erasure, was wholly untrustworthy-she could tell you everything, only to make you forget it a few seconds later. At her trial the judge and jury were merely actors-the real judge and jury watched it all on CCTV. To this day the actors in the courtroom still have no idea why that “frightfully pleasant girl” was in the dock at all. Friday ran over what he had witnessed her saying, and we managed to find an exchange that she’d erased from my recollection: that she was going to bust out of T.J. Maxx with the help of someone “on the outside.”
“Any idea who that might be?” I asked. “And why did she shield it from me?”
“No idea-and it’s probably just her being manipulative; my guess is the recollection will be on time release-it’ll pop into your head in a few hours.”
I nodded. She’d done something similar to me before.
“But I wouldn’t worry,” added Friday. “Temporal Enloopment has a hundred percent past-present-future escape-free record; she’d have to bend the Standard History Eventline to get out.”
I left Aornis to her never-ending wait at the checkout, and Friday powered down the visitors’ interface. The manager popped back into life as time started up again.
“Did you get all you need?” she asked pleasantly.
“I hope so,” I replied, and followed Friday from the store. “Thanks,” I said, giving him a motherly hug and a kiss.
“Mum,” he said in a serious tone.
“What?”
“There’s something I need to suggest to you, and you’re going to have to think really carefully before you reply.”
“What is it?”
“It’s Friday. The other Friday. We’ve got two and a half days to the End of Time. Does it seriously look like he’s going to join the ChronoGuard?”
“It’s possible.”
“Mum-truthfully?”
“No.”
“We’re running out of options fast. My director-general older self is still absent at the End of Time, so I had a word with Bendix, and he suggested we try…replacement.”
“What do you mean?”
“That your Friday is removed and I take his place.”
“Define ‘removed.’”
Friday scratched his head.
“We’ve run several timestream models, and it looks good. I’m precisely the same age as him, and I’m what he would be like if he hadn’t gone down the bone-idle route. If ‘replacement’ isn’t a good word for you, why not think of it as just rectifying a small error in the Standard History Eventline.”
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You want to murder my son and replace him with yourself? I only met you ten minutes ago.”
“I’m your son, Mum. Every memory, good or bad is as much a part of me as it is the Friday at home. You want me to prove it? Who else knows about the BookWorld? One of your best friends is Melanie Bradshaw, who’s a gorilla. It’s true she let me climb all over the furniture and swing from the light fixtures. I can speak Courier Boldand Lorem Ipsum and even unpeel a banana with my feet-want me to show you?”
“No,” I said. “I accept that you’re my son. But you can’t kill the other Friday-he’s done nothing wrong. I won’t let you.”
“Mum! Which Friday would you rather have? The feckless, lazy ass or me?”
“You don’t understand what it is to be a mother, Friday. The answer’s no. I’ll take the Friday I’m dealt.”
“I thought you might say that,” he said in a harsher manner. “I’ll report back to Scintilla, but if the ChronoGuard feels there’s no alternative, we might decide to go ahead anyway-with or without your permission.”