Something rotten n-4

by Jasper Fforde

  'You're going to go into Area 21?'

  'No.' I replied, 'we both are. Tomorrow. Leaving here at seven in the morning, sharp. Can you find what I asked for?'

  He narrowed his eyes.

  'I can get you your information, Miss Next,' he said slowly and with a gleam in his eye, 'but it will cost. Let me be your official biographer.'

  I put out a hand and he shook it gratefully.

  'Deal.'

  I walked back inside to find Landen talking to a man dressed in slightly punky clothes, brightly coloured spectacle frames, bleached blond hair and an infinitesimally small goatee firmly planted just under his lower lip.

  'Darling,' he said, grasping the hand that I had just rested on his shoulder, 'this is my very good friend Handley Paige.'

  I shook his hand. He seemed pretty much the same as any other SF writers I had ever met. Slightly geeky but pleasant enough.

  'You write the Emperor Zhark books,' I observed.

  He winced slightly.

  'No one ever talks about the decent stuff I write,' he moaned, 'they just ask me for more and more Zhark stuff. I did it as a joke — a pastiche of bad science fiction, and blow me down if it isn't the most popular thing I've ever done.'

  I remembered what Emperor Zhark had told me.

  'You're going to kill him off, aren't you?'

  Handley started.

  'How did you know that?'

  'She works for SO-27,' explained Landen, 'they know everything.'

  'I thought you guys were more hooked on the classics?'

  'We deal with all genres,' I explained. 'For reasons that I can't reveal, I advise you to maroon Zhark on an uninhabited planet rather than submit him to the humiliation of a public execution.'

  Handley laughed.

  'You talk about him as if he were a real person!'

  'She takes her work very seriously, Handley,' said Landen without the glimmer of a smile. 'I'd advise you to consider very seriously anything she happens to say. Wheels within wheels, Handley.'

  But Handley was adamant.

  'I'm going to kill him off so utterly and completely that no one will ever ask me for another Zhark novel again. Thanks for lending me the book, Land. I'll see myself out.'

  'Is Handley in danger?' asked Landen as soon as he had gone.

  'Quite possibly. I'm not sure the Zharkian death ray works in the real world, and I'd hate for Handley to be the one who finds out.'

  'This is a BookWorld thing, isn't it? Let's just change the subject. What did your stalker want?'

  I smiled.

  'You know, Landen, things are beginning to look up. I must call Bowden.'

  I quickly dialled his number.

  'Bowd? It's Thursday. I've figured out how we're going to get across the border. Set everything up for tomorrow morning. We'll muster at Leigh Delamere at eight ... I can't tell you . . . Stig and Millon . . . see you there. 'Bye.'

  I called Stig and told him the same, then kissed Landen and asked him whether he'd mind feeding Friday on his own. He didn't, of course, and I dashed off to speak to Mycroft.

  I was back in time to help Landen scrub the food off Friday, read him a story and put him to bed. It wasn't late but we went to bed ourselves. Tonight there was no shyness or confusion and we undressed quickly. He pushed me back on to the bed and with his fingertips—

  'Wait!' I cried out.

  'What?'

  'I can't concentrate with all those people—!'

  Landen looked round the empty bedroom.

  'What people?'

  'Those people,' I repeated, waving a hand in the general direction of everywhere, 'the ones reading us.'

  Landen stared at me and raised an eyebrow. I felt stupid, relaxed and gave out a nervous giggle.

  'Sorry. I've been living inside fiction for too long; sometimes I get this weird feeling that you, me and everything else are just, well, characters in a book or something.'

  'Plainly, that is ridiculous.'

  'I know, I know. I'm sorry. Where were we?'

  'Just here.'

  32

  Area 21: The Elan

  FREEDOM OF |||||||| ACT

  A STEP CLOSER, ANNOUNCES MR ||||||||

  Open government came one step closer yesterday with the announcement that Mr |||||| would lend his weight to the Freedom of ||||||| Act. The act, which aims to bring once top-||||| information from ||||||||||||| into hands of the

  |||||||, was halted as a 'great leap forward' by Mr ||||||||||||, the Departmnt of |||||||||||||||'s senior ||||||||||||. The chief opponent to the draft bill, Mr |||||||||||, gave his assurance that 'as long as my name is |||||||||||| I won't allow this ||||||||||| to be passed'.

  Article in The |||||||||| newspaper, |||||||||||||||| July 19|||||

  'So, what's the plan?' asked Bowden as we drove towards the Welsh border town of Hay-on-Wye. It was about ten in the morning, and we were travelling in Bowden's Welsh-built Griffin Sportina with Millon de Floss and Stig in the back seat. Behind us was a convoy of ten lorries, all loaded with banned Danish books.

  'Well,' I said, 'ever thought it odd that Parliament just roll over and do anything that Kaine asks?'

  'I've given up even trying to understand Parliament,' said Bowden.

  'They're all snivelling toadies,' put in Millon.

  'If you even need a government,' added Stig, 'you are a life form flawed beyond redemption.'

  'I was confused, too,' I continued. 'A government wholly agreeable to the worst excesses of Kaine could mean only one thing: some form of short-range mind control wielded by unscrupulous power brokers."

  'Now that's my kind of theory!' exclaimed Millon excitedly.

  'I couldn't figure it out at first, but then when I was up at Goliathopolis I felt it myself. A sort of mind-numbing go-with-the-flow feeling when I just wanted to follow the path of least resistance, no matter how pointless, or wrong. I had seen its effect at the Evade the Question Time TV show, too — the front row were eating out of Kaine's hand, no matter what he said.'

  'So what's the connection?'

  'I felt it again in Mycroft's lab. It was only when Landen made a sarcastic comment that I twigged. The ovinator. We all thought the "ovine" part of it was to do with eggs, but it's not. It's to do with sheep. The ovinator transmits sub-alpha brain waves that inhibit free will and instil sheep-like tendencies into the minds of anyone close by. It can be tuned to the user so they are unaffected; it's possible that Goliath may have developed a long-range version called the Ovitron and an anti-serum. Mycroft thinks he probably invented it to transmit public health messages, but he can't remember. Goliath get hold of it, Stricknene gives it to Kaine -bingo. Parliament do everything Kaine asks. The only reason Formby is still anti-Yorrick is because he refuses to go anywhere near him.'

  There was silence in the car.

  'What can we do about it?'

  'Mycroft's working on an ovi-negator that should cancel it out, but we carry on with our plans as before. The Elan — and win the Superhoop.'

  'Even I'm finding this hard to believe,' murmured Millon, 'and that's a first for me.'

  'How does it get us out of England?' asked Bowden.

  I patted the briefcase that was sitting on my lap.

  'With the ovinator on our side, no one will want to oppose.us.'

  'I'm not sure that's morally acceptable,' said Bowden. 'I mean, doesn't that make us as bad as Kaine?'

  'I think we should stop and talk this through,' added Millon.

  'It's one thing making up stories about mind control experiments, but quite another actually using them.'

  I opened the briefcase and switched the ovinator on.

  'Who's with me to go to the Elan, guys?'

  'Well, all right, then,' conceded Bowden, 'I guess I'm with you on this.'

  'Millon?'

  'I'll do whatever Bowden does.'

  'It really does work, doesn't it?' observed Stig, giving a short snorty cough. I chuckled slightly myself, too.


  Getting through the English checkpoint at Clifford was even easier than I had imagined. I went ahead with the ovinator in the briefcase and stood for some time at the border station, chatting to the duty guard and giving him and the small garrison a good soaking for half an hour before Bowden drove up with the ten trucks behind him.

  'What are in those trucks?' asked the guard with a certain degree of torpidity in his voice.

  'You don't need to look in the trucks,' I told him.

  'We don't need to look in the trucks,' echoed the border guard.

  'We can go through unimpeded.'

  'You can go through unimpeded.'

  'You're going to be nicer to your girlfriend.'

  'I'm definitely going to be nicer to my girlfriend . . . Move along.'

  He waved us through and we drove across the demilitarised zone to the Welsh border guards, who called their colonel as soon as we explained that we had ten truckloads of Danish books that required safe-keeping. There was a long and convoluted phone call with someone from the Danish consulate, and after about an hour we and the trucks were escorted to a disused hangar at the Llandrindod Wells airfield park. The colonel in charge offered us free passage back to the border but I switched on the ovinator again and told him that he could take the truck drivers back but to let us go on our way, a plan that he quickly decided was probably the best option.

  Ten minutes later we were on the road north towards the Elan, Millon directing us all the way with a 1950s tourist map. By the time we were past Rhaydr the countryside became more rugged, the farms less and less frequent and the road more and more potholed until, as the sun reached its zenith and started its downward track, we arrived at a tall set of gates, strung liberally with rusty barbed wire. There was an old stone-built guardhouse with two very bored guards, who only needed a short burst from the ovinator to isolate the electrified fence, allowing us to pass. Bowden drove the car through and stopped at another internal fence twenty yards inside the first. This was not electrified and I pushed it open to let the car pass.

  The road was in worse repair on the Area 21 side of the gates. Tussocky grass was growing from the cracks in the concrete roadway, and on occasion trees that had fallen across the road impeded our progress.

  'Now can you tell me what we're doing here?' asked Millon, staring intently out of the window and taking frequent photographs.

  'Two reasons,' I said, looking at the map that Millon had obtained from his conspiracy buddies, 'first, because we think someone's been cloning Shakespeares and I need one as a matter of some urgency, and second, to find vital reproductive information for Stig.'

  'So it's true you can't have children?'

  Stig liked Millon because he asked such direct questions.

  'It is true,' he replied simply, loading up his dart gun with tranqs the size of Havana cigars.

  'Take a left here, Bowd.'

  He changed gear, pulled the wheel around and we drove on to a stretch of road with dark woodland on either side. We proceeded up a hill, took a left turn past an outcrop of rock, then stopped. There was a rusty car upside down on the road in front of us, blocking the way.

  'Stay in the car, keep it running,' I said to Bowden. 'Millon, stay put. Stig — with me.'

  Stig and I climbed out of the car and cautiously approached the upturned vehicle. It was a licence-built Studebaker, probably about ten years old. I peered in. Vandals never came here. The glass in the speedometer was unbroken, the rusty keys still in the ignition, the seat leather hanging in rotten strands. There was a sun-bleached briefcase lying on the ground and it was full of water-related technical stuff, all now mushy and faded by the wind and rain. Of the occupants there was no sign. I had thought Millon was overcooking it with all his 'chimeras running wild' stuff, but all of a sudden I felt nervous.

  'Miss Next!'

  It was Stig. He was about ten yards ahead of the car and was squatting down, rifle across his knees. I walked slowly up to him, looking anxiously into the deep woodland on either side of the road. It was quiet. Rather too quiet. The sound of my own footfalls felt deafening.

  'What's up?'

  He pointed to the ground. There was a human ulna lying on the road. Whoever was in this accident, one of them never left.

  'Hear that?' asked Stig.

  I listened.

  'No.'

  'Exactly. No noise at all. We think it advisable to leave.'

  We pivoted the car on its roof to give us room to pass and drove on, this time much more slowly, and in silence. There were three other cars on that stretch of road, two on their sides and one pushed into the verge. None of them showed the least sign of the occupants, and the woods to either side seemed somehow even more dark and deep and impenetrable as we drove past. I was glad when we reached the top of the hill, cleared the forest and drove down past a small dam and a lake before a rise in the road brought us within sight of the old Goliath bioengineering labs. I asked Bowden to stop. He pulled up silently and we all got out to observe the old factory through binoculars.

  It was in a glorious location, right on the edge of the reservoir. But compared to what we had been led to expect by Millon's hyper-active imagination and a tatty photograph taken in its heyday, it was something of a disappointment. The plant had once been a vast, sprawling complex, built in the art deco style then popular for factories in the thirties, but now it looked as though a hurried and not entirely successful effort had been made to demolish it a long time ago. Although much of the building had been destroyed or had collapsed, the east wing looked as though it had survived relatively unscathed. Even so, it didn't appear that anyone had been there for years, if not decades.

  'What was that?' said Millon.

  'What was what?'

  'A sort of yummy noise.'

  'Hopefully just the wind. Let's have a closer look at the plant.'

  We motored down the hill and parked in front of the building. The front facade was still imposing though half collapsed, and even retained much of the ceramic tile exterior and decoration. Clearly, Goliath had great things planned for this place. We picked our way among the rubble that lay strewn across the steps and approached the main doors. They had both been pushed off their hinges and one of them had large gouge marks, something that Millon was most interested in. I stepped inside. Broken furniture and fallen masonry lay everywhere in the oval lobby. The once fine suspended glass ceiling had long since collapsed, bringing natural light to an otherwise gloomy interior. The glass squeaked and cracked as we stepped across it.

  'Where are the main labs?' I asked, not wanting to be here a minute longer than I had to.

  Millon unfolded a blueprint.

  'Where do you get all this stuff?' asked Bowden incredulously.

  'I swapped it for a Cairngorm yeti's foot,' Millon replied, as though talking about bubble-gum cards. 'It's this way.'

  We walked through the building, among more fallen masonry and partially collapsed ceilings, towards the relatively undamaged east wing. The roof was more intact here and our torches flicked into offices and incubating rooms where row upon row of abandoned glass amnio jars were lined up against the wall. In many of them the liquefied remnants of a potential life form had pooled in the bottom. Goliath had left in a hurry.

  'What was this place?' I asked, my voice barely louder than a whisper.

  'This was,' muttered Millon, consulting his blueprint, 'the main sabre-tooth tiger manufacturing facility. The Neanderthal wing should be through there and the first on the left.'

  The door was locked and bolted but it was dry and rotten and it didn't take much to force it open. There were papers scattered everywhere, and a half-hearted attempt had been made to destroy them. We stopped in the doorway and let Stiggins walk in alone. The room was about a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide. It was similar to the tiger facility next door but the amnio jars were larger. The glass nutrient pipes were still in evidence and I shivered. To me, the room was undeniably creepy, but to Stig it was his fir
st home. He, along with many thousands of his fellow extinctees, had been grown here. I had sequenced Pickwick at home using nothing more complex than average kitchen utensils and cultivated her in a denucleated goose egg. Birds and reptiles were one thing; umbilical cultivation of mammals quite another. Stig trod carefully among the twisted pipes and broken glass to a far door and found the decanting room where the infant Neanderthals were taken out of their amnio jars and breathed for the first time. Beyond this was the nursery where the young had been brought up. We followed Stig through. He stood at the large window that overlooked the reservoir.

  'When we dream, it is of this,' he said quietly. Then, obviously feeling that he was wasting time, he strode back to the incubating room and started rummaging in filing cabinets and desk drawers. I told him we'd meet him outside and rejoined Millon, who was trying to make sense of his floor plan.

  After walking in silence through several more rooms with even more ranks of amnio jars, we arrived at a steel-gated secure area. The gate was open and we stepped through, entering what had once been the most secret area of the entire plant.

  A dozen or so paces farther on the corridor led into a large hall, and we knew we had found what we had been looking for. Built within the large room was a full-scale copy of the Globe Theatre. The stage and groundling area were strewn with torn-out pages of Shakespeare's plays, heavily annotated in black ink. In an adjacent room we found a dormitory that might have contained two hundred beds. All the bedding was upended in a corner, the bedsteads broken and lying askew.

  'How many do you think went through here?' asked Bowden in a whisper.

  'Hundreds and hundreds,' replied Millon, holding up a battered copy of The Two Gentlemen of Verona with the name 'Shaxpreke, W., 769' written on the inside front cover. He shook his head sadly.

  'What happened to them all?'

  'Dead,' said a voice, 'dead as a ducat!'

  33

  Shgakespeafe

  'ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE', CLAIMS PLAYWRIGHT

  That was the analogy of life offered by Mr William Shakespeare yesterday when his latest play opened at the Globe. Mr Shakespeare went on to further compare plays with the seven stages of life by declaring that 'All the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances, And one nun in his time plays many parts.' Mr Shakespeare's latest offering, a comedy entitled As You Like It, opened to mixed reviews with the Southwark Gazette declaring it 'a rollicking comedy of the highest order' while the Westminster Evening News described it as 'tawdry rubbish from the Warwickshire shithouse'. Mr Shakespeare declined to comment as he is already penning a follow-up.