“Who?” said Sparks, disappointed to learn that he wasn’t the problem.
“Someone who isn’t an idiot,” said Jeff. “Someone who’s very close to working it all out. And someone who’s more dangerous because he’s going mad.”
“Are you sure it’s not me?” said Sparks, hopefully.
“Dear Lord,” said Jeff, rubbing his eyes. “Listen, I’ve got a migraine and I’m knackered. Also I don’t think your mind can take in too much information in one go, so we’re going to take you up to a luxury hotel room and lock you in. Then we’ll do the rest of the explaining.”
“Will there be…”
“Yes,” said Jeff. “There’ll be a movie channel in the hotel. And a mini bar. And room service.”
He turned to Duncan and sighed. “These people, they’re so predictable.”
Ha! thought Sparks, ‘will there be a phone?’ is what I meant. He felt he had achieved a small victory.
Good news about the mini bar and the movie channel, though, he added to himself.
Joseph Kaye went to the library. He was going to spend an hour looking on the library index system for subjects which could in no way be connected to cockroaches or bugs or even things with more than four legs.
He walked into the library, nodded at the head librarian, who instinctively ducked, as though Kaye’s forehead was firing brain-mulching rays at him, and went into the reference section. The reference section was in many ways the beating heart of the library. It was also in many other ways a really boring place. Built at a time when library architects were clearly despotic figures with an imperial bent, the room was a huge copy of some sort of Roman palace, all decked out in wood and marble, with a huge clock over the atlas section. As the clock was rather noisy, the hands had been removed, giving the room a literally timeless flavour. Time, Kaye decided, did not so much stand still in this room as lie on its back with its legs sticking up in the air.
Rows and rows of, inevitably, bookshelves surrounded the room; the cases were heavy and glass-covered and contained no book that was not leather-bound and embossed in gilt. Even books that had never been leather-bound and embossed in gilt, like The World Guide To Plumbing and World War I Made Simple, had been rebound so as not to stand out. Kaye hated this room. It was like a court run by books, juries of books lining the room, a public gallery of non-fiction behind him and in front of him a really attractive girl.
The really attractive girl didn’t fit into Kaye’s simile of a court made of books, largely because Kaye had never seen her in the library before. She was sitting down with an enormous book on the desk in front of her, flicking through its giant pages with some difficulty and frowning. Kaye was intrigued; he affected to saunter past and look over her shoulder. As he sauntered ineptly up to the girl – difficult in a library, where the atmosphere dampens sauntering like a bursting dam on a cotton swab – she must have heard him, because she closed the book and turned round, and looked shocked.
“Oh!” said Alison. “It’s you.”
Kaye stopped sauntering and stood, awkwardly and confused.
“Pardon?” he said.
“I… I’ve seen you before,” said Alison. “In the, in the... somewhere else.”
“In the somewhere else?” said Kaye. “What a nice expression. Is it Canadian?”
Immediately he said it, Kaye knew it wasn’t Canadian, and wished he hadn’t spoken.
“Yes, it is,” said Alison quickly. “No. No, it’s not. No, I saw you somewhere and didn’t want to say where, in case you were embarrassed.”
“Oh,” said Kaye, desperately trying not to say anything stupid again. “Where – no, you already said you didn’t want to say where.”
Something occurred to him.
“It was in the park, wasn’t it?” he said. “When I was…”
“Speaking,” said Alison.
“Being arrested,” said Kaye. “But it’s all right. I was in a mental hospital. But it’s fine. I was cured. I am cured.”
“I never thought you were mad,” Alison said, sliding her book under a newspaper.
“I did,” said Kaye. “I thought I was mad. Now I don’t mind either way.”
“I think people who don’t mind if they’re mad are generally not mad,” said Alison, and immediately looked surprised. She had never actually had an opinion on the subject before, but now suddenly she did.
Kaye was looking at her in a thoughtful way.
“Yes,” he said. “You may be right.”
Now Alison was looking at Kaye in a thoughtful way.
“Is there an unpleasant cafeteria attached to this place that we can go to?” she asked.
“Oh yes,” said Kaye. “I know just the one.”
The cafeteria was incredibly unpleasant, perhaps because it had something to do with the government. It was a windowless room on the third floor of the library building. No one was entirely sure why a room on the third floor should have no windows, unless it was to stop diners seeing people outside eating nice food, running pell-mell out of the building and grabbing the sandwiches out of their very mouths. Instead of windows, there was a mural on one side of a very big pie, painted by someone who had clearly never seen a pie before, and believed pies were cylindrical and had PIE carved on them to aid identification. This mural had cracked and peeled over the years, making the pie look as though it was made of flaky paint pastry, and sometimes bits of it would fall into the actual pies on the counter, where it made no difference to the taste. (“Probably improve it,” said diners, knowing that it didn’t).
The other wall was even worse. It was an enormous tropical fish tank. This might in another venue have been a thoughtful and elegant addition to the decor, but here, in this grim cafeteria, it wasn’t, basically. The tank, dimly lit in an already dimly lit room, was filled with miniature ruined castles and galleons, round which really miserable-looking fish swam like finny depressives. The effect was of some horrible marine graveyard prowled by unhappy giant fish, most of whom could actually see bigger, dead fish behind the cafeteria counter. Some of them had possibly made the connection between themselves and the dead fish, and imagined themselves in hell.
These were, at any rate, the chipper thoughts that normally kept a smile away from Joseph Kaye’s face as he queued for dead fish or pie with bits of paint in it. But today he found the fish tank attractive and even cute. The pie mural looked almost accurate, for a cylinder. And the staff, who normally looked as though they had been conscripted into a terrible army of filthy caterers who would live and die in the cafeteria, looked like a jolly bunch who loved their work.
They weren’t, of course. Nor was anything in the cafeteria remotely pleasant. However, Kaye felt otherwise, and the cause of this, he suddenly realised, was standing next to him, holding a tray and saying, “What’s wrong with that mural?”
Kaye was disconcerted. He had rarely felt attracted to someone before, and if he had, he had never been this strongly affected by their presence. He found everything Alison said incredibly interesting, he found her clothes deeply fascinating, and there was something about her wrists that was so astonishingly appealing that he was surprised the whole cafeteria wasn’t crowded round Alison shouting, “Hey! Look at these wrists! Someone bring a camera! No, wait – cancel that! Someone bring a sculptor! We’ve got to get these wrists immortalised!”
Kaye wanted to tell Alison all of these things, although he suspected she might be a bit alarmed by the wrist part. Instead, he smiled and said, “It’s meant to be a pie.”
Kaye and Alison sat down. They looked at their fish, then at the fish tank and looked at each other instead.
After some time, Alison said, “Tell me about yourself.” Then she looked embarrassed. “Sorry,” she said. “I know you’ve had a difficult time, what with being…”
“Put inside a mental hospital,” said Kaye, without rancour.
“Put inside a mental hospital,” agreed Alison. There was some silence.
“Sorry,�
�� she said.
“I know,” said Kaye, trying to sound jolly, and realising that sounding jolly meant sounding like Santa Claus, so he stopped, and sounded pleasant instead. “Why don’t you tell me about yourself?”
Alison leapt at this suggestion as though it recast the whole concept of originality.
“Well,” she said, enthusiastically. “My name is Alison, I live locally… I don’t have a job… my boyfriend was killed by a bus.”
She fell silent again, and looked at her fish.
“Oh dear,” she said. “What a cheerful conversation.”
But Joseph Kaye was looking extremely cheerful.
“Can you use a computer?” he said.
The job interview was an unusual one. It took place in a pub, 200 yards away from the library, and consisted entirely of the following searching interrogation.
“Would you like a drink?”
“Yes please. Can I have a gin and tonic?”
“The job’s yours.”
“What if I had asked for a different drink? Pernod and black?”
“The job would still be yours. Would you like to go to the pictures tomorrow night?”
“I don’t think anyone says ‘the pictures’ any more.”
“Sorry. I don’t get out much.”
“Then we’d better go to the pictures tomorrow.
THIRD INTERLUDE
Mark and Peter stood outside the darkened and closed-up room. Gary threw the great doors open and they filed in with the others.
“Do you have to do that, Gary?” said Mark.
“What?” said Gary. He blinked in the dark.
“Throw the doors open. Why can’t you just push them?”
“We always throw the doors open.”
“It’s not even as though they’re particularly big doors. If they were great huge iron things with, I don’t know, carvings on, fair enough. But they’re only – what? – about the size of office doors.”
“It’s a tradition,” said Peter.
“How is it a tradition?” said Mark. He pulled his white robe down where it was riding up. “We’ve only ever done this once before.”
“Well, we threw the doors open that time,” said the third person, who was called Peter.
“How do you know? Last time was over 400 years ago.”
“I read it.”
“No you f…”
A loud stomping interrupted Mark, as if made by an oak pole on a marble floor, which is what it was. All the lights in the room came on, illuminating about 100 very skinny men and two reasonably sized doors. (“Much betters doors.” “Ssh!”). The lights revealed that the person doing the stomping with the pole on the floor was, unusually in this gathering, uniquely even, neither skinny nor a man. It was a large woman. She was standing in the middle of the skinny men, a hefty magnet drawing in a lot of anorexic iron filings
“Welcome,” said the large woman, “to this extraordinary meeting of the Society.”
A drone of excitement filled the room at ear level. The large woman banged the pole on the floor again.
“For the second time only in 500 years, we have been compelled to meet,” she said. “For the second time in 500 years, all of the members of the Society who are not otherwise engaged are gathered here to discuss a new problem. A problem of such urgency that it could destroy our mission.”
“Do you mean,” said a voice, “do you mean the search for God’s Perfect World?”
“No, the search for a new kind of badger,” said a voice. A tall man appeared behind the others. The large woman stood back to let him in.
“Welcome, my friends,” said the man, who had an air of affable smugness, like a vicar who has done well on the Stock Exchange.
“Welcome, Alan,” said the others.
“I was being ironic when I mentioned the badger,” said Alan. “Our friend is quite right, if a bit slow. The quest for God’s Perfect World is indeed in peril. May I take the staff please, Mrs Reeves?”
The large woman gave Alan the pole, and he tapped it lightly on the floor. The lights went down and a screen appeared. Two speakers rose up from beneath the floor to bookend the screen.
“This must have cost a fortune,” said Peter.
“Shh!” said Gary.
The speakers began to play ominous music. The screen chattered with numbers and then the numbers resolved themselves into a gargantuan image of a human face. The face was Joseph Kaye’s.
“Gentlemen and Mrs Reeves,” said Alan. “We have a major problem. This man…”
He stopped.
“By the way,” he said. “Has anyone seen Jeff and Duncan lately?”
*
LATER IN HIS room, as workmen took the television away, Sparks went through what Jeff had told him. Some of it he even wrote down on hotel notepaper to make it clearer. After a while, he drew some stick men and a Venn diagram to see if that would help. It did, although later Sparks thought he might have regretted the Venn diagram as not having been strictly necessary.
Jeff’s points were, essentially, these:
1) The person who was about to cause all the trouble did not know that he or she was about to cause all the trouble. Despite this, they still had to be stopped. (“Like in that DVD,” said Sparks. “Shut up,” Jeff said.)
2) The trouble this person was about to cause concerned the Society.
3) The trouble concerning the Society affected more than one world.
At this point, Sparks had a good point to make.
“Why?” was his point.
“Because there is a Society on more than one world,” said Duncan. “And all these worlds are different, but on them the Society is the constant. We’ve been active for so long that the search for God’s Perfect World is taking place on a myriad…”
“Hang on,” said Sparks, feeling like an incredibly clever philosophy professor, and thus wishing he hadn’t prefaced his point with “hang on”. “You said there are an infinite amount of worlds.”
“Is,” said Jeff. “Is an infinite amount, yes.”
“Well, therefore then,” said Sparks, “there must be a load of worlds where there is no Society.”
“Yes, you bozo,” said Jeff, a tad warmly. “But we’re not concerned with saving the Society on worlds where there is no Society, are we? That would be stupid. We’re concerned with damage limitation. We want to save the Society to further its purpose.”
“But there must be worlds where the Society’s purpose isn’t what you want,” said Sparks.
It went quiet. Duncan pretended to be looking at chutney.
“What?” said Jeff. He sounded cold and hard, even for Jeff.
“If there is an infinite amount of worlds, then in some of them the Society must have deviated from its purpose,” said Sparks. “Because that’s what infinity does, right?”
He stopped. He wasn’t very comfortable with the infinite, and Jeff was giving him a deeply superior and cold and hard look.
“No,” said Jeff. “The Society exists outside these worlds as well as on them. Therefore…”
“But…” said Sparks.
“Therefore the Society will always have a common purpose,” said Jeff. “I mean,” he said, a horrible laugh gurgling out of him like mud in a toilet, “there isn’t, there isn’t a world where the Society is trying to find a nice golf course. So…”
“But,” Sparks said again.
“So to return to my main point,” said Jeff, adding some foamy spittle to the gurgling mud-toilet laugh, “If this person – this person that we’re supposed to be talking about – is causing trouble to the Society in this world, he’ll be doing it on other worlds, and…”
Jeff held up a hand to silence Sparks. “And as the Society also exists outside the worlds it exists on, then...”
He looked around and wiped his hand on the grass.
“Then we’ve all had it,” he said.
“So what’s it got to do with me?” said Sparks.
“Um,” sai
d Duncan. “You’re the only one who can save us.”
“I’m the only one who can save you?” said Sparks.
“Yes,” said Jeff. “How sad is that?”
The workmen left, then came back for the minibar and the telephone. Sparks crumpled up his diagrams and lay back on his pillow.
Joseph Kaye crumpled up his diagrams and lay back on his pillow. He had spent the last hour trying to draw the insect in his head, something he did every night. But now he found he was tired of drawing and wanted instead to think about recent events (and part of him was relieved not to have to obsess about bugs and beetles for once).
So Joseph Kaye lay back and thought about Alison.
Sparks lay back and thought about Alison. He found he hadn’t thought of her for a while, presumably, he presumed, because he was in life-threatening circumstances on an alien world (and he wondered in what way this world would be alien, maybe the cars were powered by dandruff or something unpleasant like that). He wondered if there was an Alison on this world (he made a mental note to look, as soon as he had got away from Jeff and Duncan, found a computer and got out through a portal, not really intending to participate in the skinny men’s plan, which sounded to him both complicated and dull).
Sparks stopped thinking about Alison and started thinking about Jeff and Duncan’s plan. They wanted him to stop someone doing something. This wasn’t surprising, as Jeff and Duncan were exactly the type of person who was always trying to stop someone doing something. What did engage Sparks’ interest was how he was meant to do the stopping, and who he was meant to stop.
He hoped it wasn’t someone he liked off the television.
Alison went to the supermarket for a late night bout of fruit shopping. As she stood in line, basket in hand, she thought about Joseph Kaye. Since Spark’s death in the bus crash, she had avoided thinking about men, partly because this was generally unproductive, and partly because she had been too sad. Now she found she was feeling a lot less sad, and was even looking forward to things. And, given that these things involved visiting a library and working for the civil service, this was quite a remarkable achievement.
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