The Woman Who Died a Lot

by Jasper Fforde

  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.”

  17.

  Tuesday: The Sisterhood

  The first tiltrotor was designed in the early twenties as a novel method of using a ducted fan as a propulsion and lifting mechanism. It took thirty years for a powerful enough engine to be introduced, and even then the craft was not a serious proposition until the introduction of a light and powerful nuclear reactor. Of the craft’s benefits, vertical takeoff and ease of use is their two best, and reactor leaks and the ability to drop out of the sky unannounced their two least.

  Jane’s Aviation Digest

  The small craft had landed on the front lawn, and Landen was chatting to Finisterre about how the technology had progressed since tiltrotors were used in the Crimea as spotter aircraft, a role in which they had been less than successful. The joke at the time had been “How do you get to own a tiltrotor?” and the answer was “Buy an acre of land in the Crimea and wait.”

  “We’d better be going if we’re to make our appointment,” said Finisterre as I arrived. “The Sisterhood can’t abide impunctuality. Will you be coming?”

  He was talking to Landen, but I already knew that Landen wouldn’t ever get into one again. Although his initial leg injury had been caused by to a land mine, it was the evac on a medical tiltrotor that had necessitated the partial amputation—the craft had crashed due to a gearbox failure sixteen miles short of the military hospital in Sevastopol, and those jeep-ridden sixteen miles, said Landen, were the most excruciating he had ever known. Still, that was almost thirty years ago, and tiltrotor technology had grown by leaps and bounds since then—especially after Mycroft became involved, which explained why they are no longer used militarily. I kissed Landen, we exchanged passwords again, and I climbed aboard the small craft as Finisterre spooled up the reactor, and few minutes later we had left Aldbourne behind us, passed overhead Marlborough and were skimming low across the Downs.

  “How’s your day going?” asked Finisterre.

  “Interesting so far,” I replied, and he smiled knowingly. “Wouldn’t want you to get bored.”

  “No indeed,” I replied.

  We swept past the single induction rail of the Southern Bullet Route and dropped down into the Vale of Pewsey. We flew on in silence for a few minutes until Finisterre called air-traffic control for transit permission into the Salisbury Danger Area and orbited twice around Urchfont while we waited for clearance. I had trained on Salisbury Plain myself on tracked vehicles before being dispatched to the Crimea aged only eighteen. We had been briefed never to stray near the Sisterhood’s hundredacre enclave, and it was hard to claim you didn’t know if you did— the convent’s tower soared two hundred feet above the plains, and the main Venerating Chamber was the size of an airship hangar.

  “We’re in,” said Finisterre, and we headed off toward the convent, which even now dominated the landscape, though we were still five miles away. We circled the tower once before coming into a neat landing near the entrance, and while Finisterre conducted the power-down checks, I stepped clumsily out and looked around.

  I had never been here before; few had. The Salisbury Plain order of the Blessed Ladies of the Lobster was the hub from where all other orders received instructions and to where all funds were sent. The Lobsterhood had been the nation’s most populous religious order, with over a hundred convents across the land, and although the Global Standard Deity’s unifying action had subsumed many of those within the order, a few had held out, Salisbury among them. But all that defiance had come to nought the day that He had revealed Himself and confirmed that yes, the game was up, there was only One, and all the silly lobster stuff was indeed transparent nonsense, and cower in the presence of Him. The fact that it was a He after all caused a lot of problems with the feminists. But it might have been worse— He could have turned out to have been French, too.

  “My name is Sister Megan,” said the greeter nun who had stepped ahead to receive us, “and you are fourteen seconds late. We cannot abide unpunctuality here in the Lobsterhood.”

  “We had to orbit for clearance into the zone,” I explained. “My name is Thursday Next.”

  Sister Megan gave a sharp cry and covered her mouth with her hand. I had to get used to this. Joffy’s efforts with the GSD had not always been welcomed
, and indeed, before the Lord’s Revealment, over a billion people had wanted him shredded as a heretic.

  “Causing trouble already?” asked Finisterre as the greeter nun ran back inside the lobster-shaped double doors.

  “I think it’s the connection with my brother. There were many religious orders who found it difficult to accept that they had been idolizing clearly demonstrable falsehoods for hundreds of years.”

  “Like the notion of the all-redeeming, ever-knowing and oftnipping ‘Big Lobster’?”

  “One of the more sensible ones,” I replied. “You’d better do the talking from now on, and refer to me by my married name.”

  But it didn’t come to that. No sooner had we taken two steps toward the convent than another nun had come running out of the doors firing a small pistol and screaming at the top of her voice that I was a ‘procreating girl dog,’ but not using those precise words. I was used to being called that, of course, but rarely by a nun. She had loosed off two shots by the time she’d been adroitly rugger-tackled to the ground by two other nuns, and Finisterre and I, caught out by the sudden violence, had not had time to move a muscle and had simply stood there as one of the shots passed between us at head level with a zip and the second passed cleanly through my shoulder bag, penetrating not just my purse and notebook but also a picture of Landen.

  Finisterre and I stared at each other as an unseemly fight developed in front of us, our assailant being finally subdued by two additional nuns, both of whom I suspected might actually be men. The gun was wrested from her hands, and she was sat upon while she struggled, howled and screamed the sorts of obscenities that would embarrass a docker.

  “I’m sorry about that,” said one of the other nuns, who had a cut lip and a wimple now dented and askew, “but we all joined the order for different reasons, and . . . well, some of us have a lot of repressed anger.”

  “Against me?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid so. Daisy always swore to kill you the next time you met—that was why she has closeted herself here. To protect herself and you from her rage.”

  “Should we take this up with the mother superior?”

  “Daisy is the mother superior. We’ll have to wait until she calms down. By the way, we all think Joffy is remarkable even if he is a man.”

  “No one’s perfect.”

  “Right. And we thank him for pointing out the error of our veneration. We all felt a bit silly to begin with, but when our mistake was plainly spelled out, we were more than happy to change four centuries of loyal tradition.”

  “Perhaps I should leave?” I said. “And let Finisterre speak to Mother Daisy on his own?”

  “No, no, no,” replied the nun, “she’ll be fine. She just has to compose herself. Forgiveness, companionship, self-control and not reading in the toilet are but four of the ninety-seven simple rules we live our lives by.”

  Mother Daisy was indeed calming down, and after another five minutes the others thought it safe to stop sitting on her and she got to her feet, covered in grass clippings and a bit bruised. She smoothed her habit, took a deep breath and approached us both.

  “Welcome to the Sisterhood of the Lobsterhood Salisbury Plain Chapter,” she said in a sedate and measured manner. “My Name is Mother Daisy. I do apologize for the attempted murder. It is not how we usually welcome distinguished guests. Can you find it in your heart to forgive me?”

  “Of course,” I said, suddenly realizing who she was and why she’d tried to kill me, “think no more of it. May I present Head of Antiquities James Finisterre of the Swindon All-You-Can-Eatat-Fatso’s Drink Not Included Library?”

  She shook his hand. “Welcome, Mr. Finisterre. Your expertise and reputation precede you. Just one question: Why did you have to . . . bring that lying man-stealer with you?!?”

  She had screamed the last line and in an instant had her hands around my throat. We toppled over backward, and I felt myself fall unconscious, but in an instant I was gasping for air as the two nuns who looked suspiciously male had dragged her from me.

  “Shit,” I said, sitting up.

  “Are you okay?” asked Finisterre.

  “Annoyed,” I said, giving him my hand so he could heave me to my feet.

  “Yes, I should imagine being attacked by a nun might be annoying.”

  “It’s not that,” I said, coughing and rubbing my throat. “It’s just that even six months ago I would have been fast and aggressive enough to have her on her back before she’d even grabbed me. And earlier?”

  “Yes?”

  I tapped the center of my forehead. “I’d have planted one right here before she got to fire the second shot.”

  “I’m very glad you didn’t,” said Finisterre with a shudder. “It might have put a damper on getting access to their library.”

  “She could have killed us both.”

  “Life is short, art is long, Thursday. You and I are passing through history; the contents of this library is history.” He thought for a moment. “You came to a convent tooled up?”

  “I’m always tooled up.”

  “I’m so sorry about that,” said Mother Daisy, who seemed once again to have recovered her composure. “My only companion from the outside world during nineteen years of isolation has been my personal hatred of Thursday Next. It’s kind of like the old me suddenly taking over, and I promised myself that this was how I would act if I ever saw you.”

  “I have the same thing, but with Tom Stoppard,” I said.

  “You’d kill Tom Stoppard?”

  “Not at all. I promised myself many years ago that I would throw myself at his feet and scream ‘I’m not worthy!’ if I ever met him, so now if we’re ever at the same party or something, I have to be at pains to avoid him. It would be undignified, you see—for him and for me.”

  “I can see that,” said Mother Daisy, “and since I demonstrably can’t control myself, I have allocated Sister Henrietta as your bodyguard.”

  One of the more masculine nuns bobbed politely and took up station beside me.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Don’t mention it,” replied Sister Henrietta in a deep voice.

  “I’m impressed that the Sisterhood has embraced inclusivity regarding its adherents,” I said as we walked toward the main doors.

  “What do you mean?” asked Mother Daisy.

  “That you now count men among the Sisterhood.”

  She stopped and looked around suspiciously. “You think there might be men present in our sanctuary?”

  “Oh,” I said, suddenly realizing that it might be a secret, “just idle talk from Swindon, I suspect.”

  “Hmm. Worth looking into. Sister Henrietta, would you conduct a gender check tomorrow? Nothing intrusive. Just find out if there is anyone who doesn’t know the name of Jennifer Grey’s character in Dirty Dancing.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Sister Henrietta, staring daggers in my direction as soon as Mother Daisy looked away.

  “And what news of Swindon?” asked Mother Daisy. “We have no radio, no TV, and only The Toad on Sunday once a month.”

  “There’s a new roundabout in the Old Town, Acme Carpets is having another sale, SpecOps is to be reformed—oh, and part of the city is to be wiped from the earth by a cleansing fire on Friday.”

  “An Acme Carpets sale?”

  “Forty percent off everything, I heard—with free installation, but you have to pay for the underlay.”

  “Worth a look. And a smiting, you say? What level?”

  We were now at the reception desk in the lobby. She indicated the visitors’ book for me to sign. I noted that the last visitor had been admitted in 1974.

  “A Level III,” I said, “to punish Joffy for his impertinence, we think. That is,” I added, “unless my daughter Tuesday can perfect her anti-smite device.”

  Mother Daisy reached behind the counter and picked up a length of lead pipe that happened to be there. She made a swipe in my direction.

  “A daughter
that should have been mine, you scarlet Jezebel!!”

  I was quicker this time and took a step back. Sister Henrietta was on the ball, too, and had Daisy around the waist and grappled to the floor in less than a second.

  “The Sisterhood likes to scrap, don’t they?” said Finisterre as the pair of them wrestled on the ground, with Mother Daisy howling and scratching and biting while Sister Henrietta attempted to calm her down. She did calm, eventually, and once more apologized for her conduct and asked for my forgiveness.

  This I gave, although less readily, as one can take just so much of nun violence. We moved into the main part of the convent, a large room that served as living space and refectory. To either side of the chamber were smaller cells for the sisters to live in. All about us was the lobster motif that the order lived beneath, a constant reminder of the mildly deluded notion that the world would one day be unified under a single lobster of astonishing intellect, and all ills, sorrow, hunger and thermidor would be banished forever. Although this might seem peculiar— even when compared to other, equally wild religions—my father had often traveled into the distant future and learned that there was indeed a time when the earth was dominated by the arthropods. Two hundred million years away, he said. But any notion that the Sisterhood might be planning for this was doubtful— there would be only six species of mammal on the earth at that time, and none of them with a higher intellect than a confused hedgehog.

  “How is he?” asked Daisy through half-gritted teeth.

  “He’s . . . very well,” I said warily, making sure there was a reasonable distance between us. Sister Henrietta had guessed that this was over a man and had placed herself in a position where it would be most easy to intervene.

  “A bestselling writer by now, I expect?”