After Tuesday had gone off to fetch a photograph album, I turned to Landen. “ She’s the secret plans, isn’t she?”
He looked at me but said nothing, which I took to mean she was. Tuesday’s intellect would be the driving force behind the government’s Anti-Smite Strategic Defense Shield.
“I guess we’re just about to find out if you’re the Goliath Thursday,” said Landen. “If you are, you’ll be contacting them straightaway.”
I wouldn’t, of course. “How long do you think before they figure it out?”
“I don’t know,” replied Landen, scraping the carrots he’d been chopping into a saucepan, “but know this: I’ll die to protect my daughter.”
“Me, too.”
Landen smiled. “Are you sure you’re not her?”
“I’m sure.”
Tuesday came back with the photograph album, and I joined her as she leafed through the family holidays of which I had no knowledge. I stared at the Thursday in the pictures and tried to figure her out. She never looked totally relaxed—not as much as Landen and the kids anyway, but clearly loved them all, even if she seemed to be glancing around her as though on the lookout for anyone wishing to do them or her harm. There were very few pictures in which she was smiling. She took life seriously, but her family kept her anchored, and probably as sane as she could ever hope to be. Tuesday reached for my hand and held it tightly without really thinking, and as we chatted, it crossed my mind that I could become Thursday, if the real one never showed up. I could go Blue Fairy, and all this would be mine. For a fleeting moment, it seemed like a good, worthy and attainable idea, but reality quickly returned. I was fooling myself. The longer I listened to Tuesday, the more I realized just how much she needed her mother. Not any mother, but her mother. I would never be anything more than a pale reflection.
“Landen,” I said when Tuesday had gone off to watch Bonzo the Wonder Hound, Series Twelve, “I shouldn’t have come.”
“Nonsense.”
“No, really. It was a huge mistake. I can’t be her, no matter how much I want to.”
“You sell yourself short—I’m more convinced by the minute. The way you sat with Tuesday.”
“Yes?”
“That’s how Thursday used to do it. Proud, loving—but not understanding a single word she said.”
“Land, I’m not her. I’ve got no idea what’s going on, I didn’t recognize Adrian Dorset, I didn’t know that you’d lost a leg and, and, and . . . I can’t see Jenny. I should just go and hide in a large cupboard somewhere until I’m whisked back into Fiction.”
He stared at me for a moment. “I never said her name was Jenny.”
“ Damn.”
He took a step closer and held my hand. “You saw her?”
I nodded. “Jenny mentioned Thursday saying ‘Lyell was boring.’ Does that make any sense to you?”
“Thursday didn’t discuss her BookWorld work with me. She pretended it was a secret, and I pretended I didn’t know about it. Same as the SpecOps work. But I don’t know anyone called Lyell, and she hated boring people. Except me.”
“You’re not boring.”
“I am, but I’m okay with it. I’m the anchor. The shoulder.”
“And you’re all right with the support role?”
He laughed. “Of course! It’s my function. Besides, I love her. More than anything on the planet—with the possible exception of Tuesday and Friday. And I’m actually quite fond of Jenny, too, even though she doesn’t exist.”
“You’re a good man.”
He smiled. “No, I’m an average man . . . with a truly extraordinary wife.”
I rubbed my temples with the frustration of it. I so wanted to be her and have all this—Landen, the kids. There was a dull throb in my head, and I felt hot and prickly. It was a lot easier being fictional—always assuming that I was, of course.
“That’s another reason I should leave,” I said in a harsher tone than I might have wished. “This morning I knew who I was and what I was doing. Now? I’ve got no idea.”
And I started to sob.
“Hey, hey,” he said, resting a hand on mine, “don’t cry. There’s four hours to go before you vanish or not, and I’m not sure I can wait that long. I’m pretty confident you’re her. You called me ‘Land,’ you saw Jenny, you’re a bit odd, you love the kids. But there’s one simple way I’ll be able to tell.”
“And what’s that?”
“Kiss me.”
I felt myself shiver with anticipation, and my heart—my real heart, that is, not the descriptive one—suddenly thumped faster. I placed my hand on his cheek, which was warm to the touch, and leaned forward. I felt his breath on my face, and our lips were just about to touch when suddenly I once more felt the hot needles and Klein-Blue Wagnerian treacle, and I was back in the arrivals lounge at JurisTech. As Plum had promised, there was a glass of water and some cookies waiting for me. I picked up the water glass and threw it at the wall.
27.
Back Early
Plot 9 (Human Drama) revolved around a protagonist returning to a dying parent to seek reconciliation for past strife and then finding new meaning to his or her life. If you lived anywhere but HumDram, “go do a Plot 9” was considered a serious insult, the Outlander equivalent of being told to “go screw yourself.”
I found Professor Plum working on his Large Metaphor Collider. As soon as he saw me, he pressed a couple of buttons on his mobilefootnoterphone, uttered a few words and smiled at me.
“Oh!” he said in some surprise. “You’re back.”
“What happened? I wasn’t meant to come back for another four hours!”
“Transfictional travel isn’t an exact science,” he replied with a shrug. “Sometimes you’ll pop back early for no adequately explained reason.”
“Can you send me out there again? I was right in the middle of something important.”
“If Bradshaw allows it, I’ll be more than happy to.”
“Please?”
“There are safety issues,” he explained. “The more you stay out there, the less time you can spend there. Bradshaw used to travel across quite often, but these days he can barely stay out for ten minutes before popping back.”
I thought about the excitement I’d felt just as I was about to kiss Landen and the potential chain of events that might have occurred from there on in.
“I really need to get back, Professor. Lives . . . um, depend on it.”
“Whose lives?”
Commander Bradshaw had appeared in the laboratory. But he didn’t walk in, he had bookjumped in. I hadn’t seen that for a while; it was considered very common and was actively discouraged. The Ungenred Zone and Racy Novel, to name but two, even had antijump sieves set up on their borders—large sails of a fine mesh that snagged the punctuation in one’s description and brought one down to earth with a thump.
“I’m very busy,” he said, glancing at his watch. “Walk with me.”
So I walked with Bradshaw out of the labs, past the frog-footman, who followed at a discrete distance and up the stairs.
“So,” said Bradshaw, “how did you get on?”
“Not very well. Lots happened, but I’ve got no way of knowing which of the facts were significant and which weren’t.”
“The RealWorld is like that. It’s possible that nothing was significant or that everything was. It scares the bejesus out of me, I can tell you—and I don’t scare easily. Anything on Thursday’s whereabouts?”
I told him about the locked room at Acme.
“Hmm,” he said, “ definitely in here somewhere. I’ll ask Professor Plum to attempt another Textual Sieve triangulation.” He thought for a moment. “How were Landen and the kids?”
“As good as might be expected. Permission to speak honestly, sir?”