I rubbed my temples.
'So,' continued the CEO in a soft rumble, 'I'd like to offer an olive branch to you right now and uneradicate your husband.'
'In return,' added Schitt-Hawse, speaking for the first time, 'we would like for you to accept our full, frank and unreserved apology and sign our Standard Forgiveness Release Form.'
I looked at them both in turn, then at the contract they had placed in front of me, then at Friday, who had put his fingers in his mouth and was looking up at me with an inquisitive air. I had to get my husband back, and Friday his father. There didn't seem any good reason not to sign.
'I want your word you'll get him back.'
'You have it,' replied the CEO.
I took the offered pen and signed the form at the bottom.
'Excellent!' muttered the CEO. 'We'll reactualise your husband as soon as possible. Good day, Miss Next, it was a very great pleasure to meet you.'
'And you,' I replied, smiling and shaking both their hands. 'I must say I'm very pleased with what I've heard here today. You can count on my support when you become a religion.'
They gave me some leaflets on how to join New Goliath, which I eagerly accepted. I was shown out a few minutes later, the shuttle to Tarbuck Graviport having been held on my account. By the time I had reached Tarbuck the mane grin had subsided from my face; by the time I had arrived at Saknussum I was confused; on the drive back to Swindon I was suspicious that something wasn't quite right; by the time I had reached Mum's home I was furious. I had been duped by Goliath — again.
16
'How was your day?' asked Mum, handing me a large cup of tea. Friday had been tuckered out by the long day and had fallen asleep into his cheesy bean dips. I had bathed him and put him to bed before having something to eat myself. Hamlet and Emma were out at the movies or something, Bismarck was listening to Wagner on his Walkman, so Mum and I had a moment to ourselves.
'Not good,' I replied slowly. 'I can't dissuade an assassin from trying to kill me, Hamlet isn't safe here but I can't send him back and if I don't get Swindon to win the Superhoop then the world will end. Goliath somehow duped me into forgiving them, I have my own stalker and also have to figure out how to get the banned books I should be hunting for out of the country. And Landen's still not back.'
'Really?' she said, not having listened to me at all. 'I think I've got a plan for dealing with that annoying offspring of Pickwick's.'
'Lethal injection?'
'Not funny. No, my friend Mrs Beatty knows a dodo whisperer who can work wonders with unruly dodos.'
'You're kidding me, right?'
'Not at all.'
'I'll try anything, I suppose. I can't understand why he's so difficult — Pickers is a real sweetheart.'
We fell silent for a moment.
'Mum?' I said at last.
'Yes?'
'What do you think of Herr Bismarck?'
'Otto? Well, most people remember him for his "blood and iron" rhetoric, unification arguments and the wars — but few give him credit for devising the first social security system in Europe.'
'No, I mean . . . that is to say . . . you wouldn't—'
But at that moment we heard some oaths and a slammed door. After a few thumps and bumps Hamlet burst into the living room with Emma in tow. He stopped, composed himself, rubbed his forehead, looked heavenward, sighed deeply and then said:
'O! that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!'[1]
'Is everything all right?' I asked.
'Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon 'gainst self-slaughter!'[2]
'I'll make a cup of tea,' said my mother, who had an instinct for these sorts of things. 'Would you like a slice of Battenberg, Mr Hamlet?'
'O God! O God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable — yes, please — Seem to me all the uses of this world!'[3]
She nodded and moved off.
'What's up?' I asked Emma as Hamlet strutted around the living room, beating his head in frustration and grief.
'Well, we went to see Hamlet at the Alhambra.'
'Crumbs!' I muttered. 'It — er — didn't go down too well, I take it?'
'Well,' reflected Emma, as Hamlet continued his histrionics around the living room, 'the play was okay apart from Hamlet shouting out a couple of times that Polonius wasn't meant to be funny and Laertes wasn't remotely handsome. The management weren't particularly put out — there were at least twelve "Hamlets" in the audience and they all had something to say about it.'
'Fie on't! O fie!' continued Hamlet, ''tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature possess it merely—!'[4]
'No,' continued Emma, 'it was when we and the twelve other Hamlets went to have a quiet drink with the play's company afterwards that things turned sour. Piarno Keyes — who was playing Hamlet — took umbrage at Hamlet's criticisms of his performance; Hamlet said his portrayal was far too indecisive. Mr Keyes said Hamlet was mistaken, that Hamlet was a man racked by uncertainty. Then Hamlet said he was Hamlet so should know a thing or two about it; one of the other "Hamlets" disagreed and said he was Hamlet and thought Mr Keyes was excellent. Several of the "Hamlets" agreed and it might have ended there but Hamlet said that if Mr Keyes insisted on playing Hamlet he should look at how Mel Gibson did it and improve his performance in the light of that.'
'Oh dear.'
'Yes,' said Emma, 'oh dear. Mr Keyes flew right off the handle. "Mel Gibson?" he roared. "Mel ****ing Gibson? That's all I ever ****ing hear these days!" and he then tried to punch Hamlet on the nose. Hamlet was too quick, of course, and had his bodkin at Keyes' throat before you could blink, so one of the other "Hamlets" suggested a Hamlet contest. The rules were simple: they all had to perform the "To be or not to be" soliloquy and the drinkers in the tavern gave them points out often.'
'And—?'
'Hamlet came last.'
'Last? How could he come last?'
'Well, he insisted on playing the soliloquy less like an existential question about life and death and the possibility of an afterlife, and more as if it were about a post-apocalyptic dystopia where crossbow-wielding punks on motorbikes try to kill people for their gasoline.'
I looked across at Hamlet, who had quietened down a bit and was looking through my mother's video collection for Olivier's Hamlet to see whether it was better than Gibson's.
'No wonder he's hacked off.'
'Here we go!' said my mother, returning with a large tray of tea things. 'There's nothing like a nice cup of tea when things look bad!'
'Humph,' grunted Hamlet, staring at his feet. 'I don't suppose you've got any of that cake, have you?'
'Especially for you!' My mother smiled, producing the Battenberg with a flourish. She was right, too. After a few cups and a slice of cake, Hamlet was almost human again.
I left Emma and Hamlet arguing with my mother over whether they should watch Olivier's Hamlet or Great Croquet Sporting Moments on the television and went to sort some washing in the kitchen. I stood there trying to figure out just what sort of brain-scrubbing technique Goliath had used on me to get me to sign their forgiveness release. Oddly, I was still getting pro-Goliath flashbacks. In absent moments I felt they weren't so bad, then had to consciously remind myself that they were. On the plus side there was a possibility that Landen might be reactuallsed, but I didn't know when it would happen, or how.
I was just getting round to wondering whether a cold soak might remove ketchup stains better than a hot wash when there was a light crackling sound in the air like crumpled cellophane. It grew louder and green tendrils of electricity started to envelop the Kenwood mixer, then grew stronger until a greenish glow like St Elmo's fire was dancing around the microwave. There was a bright light and a rumble of thunder as three figures started to materialise into the kitchen. Two of them were dressed in body armour and holding ridiculously large blaster-type weapons; the other figure was tall and dressed in jet-black high-collared robes which hung to the floor on one side and buttoned tightly up to his throat on the other. He had a pale complexion, high cheekbones and a small and very precise goatee. He stood with his arms crossed and was staring at me with one eyebrow raised imperiously. This was truly a tyrant among tyrants, a cruel galactic leader who had murdered billions in his never-ending and inadequately explained quest for total galactic domination. This . . . was Emperor Zhark.
17
'Do you have to do that?' I asked.
'Do what?' replied the emperor.
'Make such a pointlessly dramatic entrance. And what are those two goons doing here?'
'Who said that?' said a muffled voice from inside the opaque helmet of one of his minders. 'I can't see a sodding thing in here.'
'Who's a goon?' said the other.
Zhark laughed, ignoring them both. 'It's a contractual thing. I've got a new agent who knows how to properly handle a character of my quality. I have to be given a minimum of eighty words' description at least once in any featured book, and at least twice in a book a chapter has to end with my appearance.'
'Do you get book title billing?'
'We gave that one away in exchange for chapter heading status. If this were a novel you'd have to start a new chapter as soon as I appeared.'
'Well, it's a good thing it's not,' I replied. 'If my mother was here she'd probably have had a heart attack.'
'Oh!' replied the emperor, looking around. 'Do you live with your mother too?'
'What's up? Problems at Jurisdiction?'
'Take five, lads,' said Zhark to the two guards, who felt around the kitchen until they found chairs and sat down. 'Mrs Tiggy-Winkle sent me,' he breathed. 'She's busy at the Beatrix Potter Characters AGM but wanted to give you an update on what's happening at Jurisfiction.'
'Who's that, darling?' called my mother from the living room.
'It's a homicidal maniac intent on galactic domination,' I called back.
'That's nice, dear.'
I turned back to Zhark.
'So, what's the news?'
'Max de Winter from Rebecca,' said Zhark thoughtfully. 'The Book World Justice Department has rearrested him.'
'I thought Snell got him off the murder charge?'
'He did. The department are still gunning for him, though. They've arrested him for — get this — insurance fraud. Remember the boat he sank with his wife in it?'
I nodded.
'Well, apparently he claimed the insurance on the boat, so they think they might be able to get him on that.'
It was not an untypical turn of events in the BookWorld. Our mandate from the Council of Genres was to keep fictional narrative as stable as possible. As long as it was how the author intended, murderers walked free and tyrants stayed in power — that was what we did. Minor infringements that weren't obvious to the reading public we tended to overlook. However, in a master stroke of inspired bureaucracy, the Council of Genres also empowered a Justice Department to look into individual transgressions. The conviction of David Copperfield for murdering his first wife was their biggest cause célèbre — before my time, I hasten to add — and
Jurisfiction, unable to save him, could do little except tram another character to take Copperfield's place. They had tried to get Max de Winter before but we had always managed to outmanoeuvre them. Insurance fraud. I could scarcely believe it.
'Have you alerted the Gryphon?'
'He's working on Fagin's umpteenth appeal.'
'Get him on it. We can't leave this to amateurs. What about Hamlet? Can I send him back?'
'Not . . . as such,' replied Zhark hesitantly.
'He's becoming something of a nuisance,' I admitted, 'and Danes are liable to be arrested. I can't keep him amused watching Mel Gibson's films for ever.'
'I'd like Mel Gibson to play me,' said Zhark thoughtfully.
'I don't think Gibson does bad guys,' I told him. 'You'd probably be played by Geoffrey Rush or someone.'
'That wouldn't be so bad. Is that cake going begging?'
'Help yourself.'
Zhark cut a large slice of Battenberg, took a bite and continued:
'Okay, here's the deal: we managed to get the Polonius family to attend arbitration over their unauthorised rewriting of Hamlet.'
'How did you achieve that?'
'Promised Ophelia her own book. All back to normal — no problem.'
'So . . . I can send Hamlet back?'
'Not quite yet,' replied Zhark, trying to hide his unease by pretending to find a small piece of fluff on his cape. 'You see, Ophelia has now got her knickers in a twist about one of Hamlet's infidelities — someone she thinks is called Henna Appleton. Have you heard anything about this?'
'No. Nothing. Nothing at all. Not a thing. Don't even know anyone called Henna Appleton Why?'
'I was hoping you could tell me. Well, she went completely nuts and threatened to drown herself in the first act rather than the fourth. We think we've got her straightened out. But while we were doing this there was a hostile takeover.'
I cursed aloud and Zhark jumped. Nothing was ever straightforward in the BookWorld. Book mergers, where one book joined another to increase the collective narrative advantage of their own mundane plotlines, were thankfully rare but not unheard of. The most famous merger in Shakespeare was the conjoinment of the two plays Daughters of Lear and Sons of Gloucester into King Lear. Other potential mergers such as Much Ado about Verona and A Midsummer Night's Shrew were denied at the planning stage and hadn't taken place. It could take months to extricate the plots, if indeed it was possible at all. King Lear resisted unravelling so strongly we just let it stand.
'So what merged with Hamlet?'
'Well, it's now called The Merry Wives of Elsinore, and features Gertrude being chased around the castle by Falstaff while being outwitted by Mistress Page, Ford and Ophelia. Laertes is the king of the fames and Hamlet is relegated to a sixteen-line sub-plot where he is convinced Dr Caius and Fenton have conspired to kill his father for seven hundred pounds.'
I groaned.
'What's it like?'
'It takes a long time to get funny and when it does everyone dies.'
'Okay,' I conceded, 'I'll try and keep Hamlet amused. How long do you need to unravel the play?'
Zhark winced and sucked in air through his teeth in the way heating engineers do when quoting on a new boiler.
'Well, that's the problem, Thursday. I'm not sure that we can do it all. If this had happened anywhere but the original we could have just deleted it. You know the trouble we had with King Lear? Well, I don't see that we're going to have any better luck with Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.'
I sat down and put my head in my hands. No Hamlet. The loss was almost too vast to comprehend.
'How long have we got before Hamlet starts to change?' I asked without looking up.
'About five days, six at the outside,' replied Zhark quietly. 'After that the breakdown will accelerate. In two weeks' time the play as we know it will have ceased to exist.'
'There must be something we can do.'
'We've tried pretty much everything. We're stuffed — unless you've got a spare William Shakespeare up your sleeve.'
I sat up.
'What?'
'We're stuffed?'
'After that.'
'A spare William Shakespeare up your sleeve?'
'Yes. How will that help?'
'Well,' said Zhark thoughtfully, 'since no original manuscripts of either Hamlet or Wives exist, a freshly penned script by the author would thus become the original manuscript — and we can use those to reboot the storycode engines from scratch. It's quite simple, really.'
I smiled but Zhark looked at me with bewilderment.
'Thursday, Shakespeare died in 1616!'
I stood up and patted him on the arm.
'You get back to the office and make sure things don't get any worse. Leave the Shakespeare up to me. Now, has anyone figured out which book Yorrick Kaine is from?'
'We've got all available resources working on it,' replied Zhark, still a bit confused, 'but there are a lot of novels to go through. Can you give us any pointers?'
'Well, he's not very multi-dimensional so I shouldn't go looking into anything too literary. I'd start at Political Thrillers and work your way towards Spy.'
Zhark made a note.
'Good. Any other problems?'
'Yes,' replied the emperor, 'Simpkin is being a bit of a pest in The Tailor of Gloucester. Apparently the tailor let all his mice escape and now Simpkin won't let him have the cherry-coloured twist. If the mayor's coat isn't ready for Christmas there'll be hell to pay.'
'Get the mice to make the waistcoat. They're not doing anything.'
He sighed. 'Okay, I'll give it a whirl.' He looked at his watch. 'Well, better be off. I've got to annihilate the planet Thraal at four and I'm already late. Do you think I should use my trusty Zharkian Death Ray and fry them alive in a millisecond or nudge an asteroid into their orbit, thus unleashing at least six chapters of drama as they try to find an ingenious solution to defeat me?'
'The asteroid sounds a good bet.'
'I thought so too. Well, see you later.'
I waved goodbye as he and his two guards were beamed out of my world and back into theirs, which was certainly the best place for them. We had quite enough tyrants in the real world as it was.
I was just wondering what The Merry Wives of Elsinore might be like when there was another buzzing noise and the kitchen was filled with light once more. There, imperious stare, high collar, etc., etc., was Emperor Zhark.
18
'Forget something?' I asked.
'Yes. What was that cake of your mother's?'
'It's called Battenberg.'
He got a pen and made a note on his cuff.
'Right. Well, that's it, then.'
'Good.'
'Right.'
'Is there something else?'
'Yes.'
'And—?'
'It's . . . it's . . .'
'What?'
Emperor Zhark bit his lip, looked around nervously and drew closer. Although I had had good reason for reprimanding him in the past — and had even suspended his Jurisfiction badge for 'gross incompetence' on two occasions — I actually liked him a great deal. Within the amnesty of his own books he was a sadistic monster who murdered millions with staggering ruthlessness, but out here he had his own fair share of worries, demons and peculiar habits — many of which seemed to have stemmed from the strict upbringing undertaken by his mother, the Empress Zharkeena.
'Well,' he said, unsure of quite how to put it, 'you know the sixth in the Emperor Zhark series is being written as we speak?'
'Zhark: End of Empire? Yes, I'd heard that. What's the problem?'
'I've just read the advanced plotline and it seems that I'm going to be vanquished by the Galactic Freedom Alliance.'
'I'm sorry, Emperor, I'm not sure I see your point — are you concerned about losing your empire?'
He moved closer.
'If the story calls for it, I guess not. But it's what happens to me at the end that I have a few problems with. I don't mind being cast adrift in space on the imperial yacht or left marooned on an empty planet, but my writer has planned . . . a public execution.'
He stared at me, shocked by the enormity of it all.
'If that's what he has planned—'
'Thursday, you don't understand. I'm going to be killed off — written out! I'm not sure I can take that kind of rejection.'
'Emperor,' I said, 'if a character has run its course, then it's run its course. What do you want me to do? Go and talk the author out of it?'
'Would you?' replied Zhark, opening his eyes wide. 'Would you really do that?'
'No. You can't have characters trying to tell their authors what to write in their books. Besides, within your books you are truly evil, and need to be punished.'
Zhark pulled himself up to his full height.
'I see,' he said at length. 'Well, I might decide to take drastic action if you don't at least attempt to persuade Mr Paige. And besides, I'm not really evil, I'm just written that way.'
'If I hear any more of this nonsense,' I replied, beginning to get annoyed, 'I will have you placed under book arrest and charged with incitement to mutiny for what you've just told me.'
'Oh, crumbs,' he said, suddenly deflated, 'you can can't you?'
'I can. I won't because I can't be bothered. But if I hear anything more about this I will take steps — do you understand?'
'Yes,' replied Zhark meekly, and without another word he vanished.
19
Sunday was meant to be a day off but it didn't really seem like it. I played golf with Braxton in the morning and outside work he was as amiable a gent as I could possibly hope to meet. He delighted in showing me the rudiments of golf and once or twice I hit the ball quite well — when it made the thwack noise and flew away as straight as a die I suddenly realised what all the fuss was about. It wasn't all fun and games, though — Braxton had been leaned on by Flanker, who, I assume, had been leaned on by somebody else higher up. In between putting practice and attempting to get my ball out of a bunker, Braxton confided that he couldn't hold off Flanker for ever with his empty promise of a report into my alleged Welsh cheese activities, and if I knew what was good for me I would have to at least try to look for banned books with SO-14. I promised I would and then joined him for a drink at the nineteenth hole, where we were regaled with stories by a large man with a red nose who was, apparently, the Oldest Member.
I was awoken on Monday morning by a burbling noise from Friday. He was standing up in his cot and trying to grasp the curtain, which was out of his reach. He said that now that I was awake I could do a lot worse than take him downstairs where he could play whilst I made some breakfast. Well, he didn't use those precise words, of course — he said something more along the lines of 'Reprehenderit in voluptate velit id est mollit', but I knew what he meant.
I couldn't think of any good reason not to, so I pulled on my dressing gown and took the little fellow downstairs, pondering on quite who, if anyone, was going to look after him today. Given that I had nearly got into a fight with Jack Schitt, I wasn't sure he should witness all that his mum got up to.
My mother was already up.
'Good morning, Mother,' I said, cheerfully, 'and how are you today?'
I'm afraid not during the morning,' she said, divining my unasked question instantly, 'but I can probably manage from teatime onwards.'
'I'd appreciate it,' I replied, looking at The Mole as I put on the porridge. Kaine had issued an ultimatum to the Danish: either the government in Denmark ended all its efforts to destabilise England and undermine our economy, or England would have no choice but to recall its ambassador. The Danish had replied that they didn't know what Kaine was talking about and demanded that the trade ban on Danish goods be lifted. Kaine responded angrily, made all sorts of counter-claims, imposed a 200 per cent tariff on Danish bacon imports and closed all avenues of communication.
'Duis aute irure dolor est!' yelled Friday.
'Keep your hair on,' I replied, 'it's coming.'
'Plink!' said Alan angrily, gesturing towards his supper dish indignantly.
'Wait your turn,' I told him.
'Plink, PLINK! he replied, taking a step closer and opening his beak in a menacing manner.
'Try and bite me,' I told him, 'and you'll be finding a new owner from the front window of Pete & Dave's!'
Alan figured out that this was a threat and closed his beak. Pete & Dave's was the local re-engineered pet store, and I was serious. He'd already tried to bite my mother and even the local dogs were giving the house a wide berth.
At that moment Joffy opened the back door and walked in. But he wasn't alone. He was with something that I can only describe as an untidy bag of thin bones covered in dirty skin and a rough blanket.
'Ah!' said Joffy. 'Mum and Sis. Just the ticket. This is St Zvlkx. Your Grace, this is my mother, Mrs Next, and my sister, Thursday.'
St Zvlkx looked at me suspiciously from behind a heavy curtain of oily black hair.
'Welcome to Swindon, Mr Zvlkx,' said my mother, curtsying politely. 'Would you like some breakfast?'
'He only speaks Old Enlish,' put in Joffy. 'Here, let me translate.'
'Oi, Pig-face — are you going to eat, or what?'
'Ahh!' said the monk, and sat down at the table. Friday stared at him a little dubiously, then started to jabber Lorem Ipsum at him while the monk stared at him dubiously.
'How's it all going?' I asked.
'Pretty good,' replied Joffy, pouring some coffee for himself and St Zvlkx. 'He's shooting a commercial this morning for the Toast Marketing Board and will be on The Adrian Lush Show at four. He's also guest speaker at the Swindon Dermatologists Convention at the Finis; apparently some of his skin complaints are unknown to science. I thought I'd bring him round to see you — he's full of wisdom, you know.'
'It's barely eight in the morning!' said Mum.
'St Zvlkx rises with the dawn as a penance,'Joffy explained. 'He spent all of Sunday pushing a peanut around the Brunei Centre with his nose.'
'I spent it playing golf with Braxton Hicks.'
'How did you do?'
'Okay, I think. My croquet-playing skills stopped me making a complete arse of myself. Did you know that Braxton had six kids?'
'Well, how about some wisdom, then?' said my mother brightly. 'I'm very big on thirteenth-century sagacity.'
'Okay,' said Joffy. 'Oi! Make yourself useful and give us some wisdom, you old fart.'
'Poke it up your arse.'
'What did he say?'
'Er — he said he would meditate upon it.'
'Well,' said my mother, who was nothing if not hospitable and could just about make breakfast without consulting the recipe book, 'since you are our guest, Mr Zvlkx, what would you like for breakfast?'
St Zvlkx stared at her.
'Eat,' repeated my mother, making biting gestures. This seemed to do the trick.
'Your mother has firm breasts for a middle-aged woman, orb-like and defying gravity. I should like to play with them, as a baker plays with dough.'
'What did he say?'
'He says he'd be very grateful for bacon and eggs,' replied Joffy quickly, turning to St Zvlkx and saying: 'Any more crap out of you, sunshine, and I'll lock you in the cellar tomorrow night as well.'
'What did you say to him?'
'I thanked him for his attendance in your home.'
'Ah.'
Mum put the big frying pan on the cooker and broke some eggs into it, followed by large rashers of bacon. Pretty soon the smell of bacon pervaded the house, something that attracted not only a sleepwalking DH82 but also Hamlet and Lady Hamilton, who had given up pretending they weren't sleeping together.
'Hubba, hubba,' said St Zvlkx as soon as Emma entered, 'who's the bunny with the scrummy hooters?'
'He wishes you — um — both good morrow,' said Joffy, visibly shaken. 'St Zvlkx, this is Lady Hamilton anb Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.'
'If you're giving one of those puppies,' continued St Zvlkx, staring at Emma's cleavage, 'I'll have the one with the brown nose.'
'Good morning,' said Hamlet without smiling. 'Any more bad language in front of the good Lady Hamilton and I'll take you outside and with a bare bodkin your quietus make.'
'What did the prince say?' asked St Zvlkx.
'Yes,' said Joffy, 'what did he say?'
'It's Courier Bold,' I told him, 'the traditional language of the BookWorld. He said that he would be failing in his duty as a gentleman if he allowed Zvlkx to show any disrespect to Lady Hamilton.'
'What did your sister say?' asked St Zvlkx. 'She said that if you insult Hamlet's bird again your nose will be two foot wide across your face.'
'Oh.'
'Well,' said my mother, 'this is turning out to be a very pleasant morning!'
'In that case,' said Joffy, sensing the time was just right, 'could St Zvlkx stay here until midday? I've got to give a sermon to the Sisters of Eternal Punctuality at ten and if I'm late they throw their prayer books at me.'
'No can do, o son my son,' said my mother, flipping the bacon. 'Why not take St Zvlkx with you? I'm sure the nuns will be impressed by his piety.'
'Did someone mention nuns?' asked St Zvlkx, looking around eagerly.
'How you got to be a saint I have no idea,' chided Joffy. 'Another peep out of you and I'll personally kick your bulgar arse all the way back to the thirteenth century.'
St Zvlkx shrugged, wolfed down his bacon and eggs with his hands and then burped loudly. Friday did the same and collapsed into a fit of giggles.
They all left soon after. Joffy wouldn't look after Friday and Zvlkx certainly couldn't, so there was nothing for it. As soon as Mum had found her hat, coat and keys and gone out, I rushed upstairs, dressed, then read myself into Bradshaw Defies the Kaiser to ask Melanie whether she would look after Friday until teatime. Mum had said she would be out the whole day, and since Hamlet already knew that Melanie was a gorilla and neither Emma nor Bismarck could exactly complain since they were long-dead historical figures themselves, I thought it a safe bet. It was against regulations, but with Hamlet and the world facing an uncertain future, I was past caring.
Melanie happily agreed, and once she had changed into a yellow polka-dot dress I brought her out of the BookWorld to my mother's front room, which she thought very smart, especially the festoon curtains. She was pulling the cord to watch the curtains rise and fall when Emma walked in.
'Lady Hamilton,' I announced, 'this is Melanie Bradshaw.'
Mel put out a large hand and Emma shook it nervously, as though expecting Melanie to bite her or something.
'H-how do you do?' she stammered. 'I've never been introduced to a monkey before.'
'Ape,' corrected Melanie helpfully. 'Monkeys generally have tails, are truly arboreal and belong to the families Hylobatidae, cebidae and Cercopithecidae. You and I and all the Great Apes are Pongidae. I'm a gorilla. Well, strictly speaking I'm a mountain gorilla — Gorilla gorilla beringei — which live on the slopes of the Virunga volcanoes — we used to call it British East Africa but I'm not sure what it is now. Have you ever been there?'
'No.'
'Charming place. That's where Trafford — my husband — and I met. He was with his gun bearers hacking his way through the undergrowth during the backstory to Bradshaw Hunts Big Game (Collins, 1878, 4/6d, illustrated) and he slipped from the path and fell twenty feet into the ravine below where I was taking a bath.'
She picked Friday up in her massive arms and he chortled with delight.
'Well, I was most dreadfully embarrassed. I mean, I was sitting there in the running water without a stitch on, but — and I'll always remember this — Trafford politely apologised and turned his back so I could nip into the bushes and get dressed. I came out to ask him if he might want directions back to civilisation — Africa was quite unexplored then, you know — and we got to chatting. Well, one thing led to another and before I knew it he had asked me out to dinner. We've been together ever since. Does that sound silly to you?'
Emma thought about how her relationship with Admiral Lord Nelson was lampooned mercilessly in the press.
'No, I think that sounds really quite romantic.'
'Right,' I said, clapping my hands, 'I'll be back at three. Don't go out and if anyone calls, get Hamlet or Emma to answer the door. Okay?'
'Certainly,' replied Melanie, 'don't go out, don't answer the door. Simple.'
'And no swinging on the curtains or lamp fixtures — they won't stand it.'
'Are you saying I'm a bit large?'
'Not at all,' I replied hastily, 'things are just different in the real world. There is lots of fruit in the bowl and fresh bananas in the refrigerator. Okay?'
'No problemo. Have a nice day.'
I drove into town and, avoiding several newspapermen who were still eager to interview me, entered the SpecOps building, which I noted had been freshly repainted since my last visit. It looked a bit more cheery in mauve, but not much.
'Agent Next?' said a young and extremely keen SO-14 agent in a well-starched black outfit, complete with Kevlar vest, combat boots and highly visible weaponry.
'Yes?'
He saluted.
'My name is Major Drabb, SO-14. I understand you have been assigned to us to track down more of this pernicious Danish literature.'
He was so keen to fulfil his duties I felt chilled. To his credit he would be as enthusiastic helping flood victims; he was just following orders unquestioningly. Worse acts than destroying Danish literature had been perpetrated by men like this. Luckily, I was prepared.
'Good to see you, Major. I had a tip-off that this address might hold a few copies of the banned books.'
I passed him a scrap of paper and he read it eagerly.
'The Albert Schweitzer Memorial Library? We'll be on to it right away.'
And he saluted smartly once again, turned on his heel and was gone.
I made my way up to the LiteraTecs' office and found Bowden in the process of packing Karen Blixen's various collections of stories into a cardboard box.
'Hi!' he said, tying up the box with string. 'How are things with you?'
'Pretty good. I'm back at work.'
Bowden smiled, put down the scissors and string and shook my hand.
'That's very good news indeed! Heard the latest? Daphne Farquitt has been added to the list of banned Danish writers.'
'But . . . Farquitt isn't Danish!'
'Her father's name was Farquittsen, so it's Danish enough for Kaine and his idiots.'
It was an interesting development. Farquitt's books were pretty dreadful but burning was still a step too far. Just.
'Have you found a way to get all these banned books out of England?' asked Bowden, running some tape across a box of Out of Africas. 'With Farquitt's books and all the rest of the stuff that's coming in, I think we'll need closer to ten trucks.'
'It's certainly on my mind,' I replied, having not done anything about it at all.
'Excellent! We'd like to take a convoy through as soon as you give the word. Now, what do you want me to brief you on first? The latest Capulet versus Montague drive-by shooting or which authors are next up for a random dope test?'
'Neither,' I replied. 'Tell me everything you know about cloned Shakespeares.'
'We've had to put that on "low priority". It's intriguing, to be sure, but ultimately pointless from a law-and-order point of view — anyone involved in their sequencing will be too dead or too old to go for trial.'
'It's more of a BookWorld thing,' I responded, 'but important, I promise.'
'Well, in that case,' began Bowden, who knew me too well to think I'd waste his time or my own, 'we have three Shakespeares on the slab at the moment, all aged between fifty and sixty — put those Hans Christian Andersen books in that box, would you? If they were cloned it was way back in the poorly regulated days of the thirties, when there was all sorts of nonsense going on, when people thought they could engineer Olympic runners with four legs, swimmers with real fins, that sort of thing. I've had a brief trawl through the records. The first confirmed WillClone surfaced in 1952 with the accidental shooting of a Mr Shakstpear in Tenbury Wells. Then there's the unexplained death of a Mr Shaxzpar in 1958, Mr Shagxtspar in 1962 and a Mr Shogtspore in 1969. There are others, too—'
'Any theories as to why?'
'I think,' said Bowden slowly, 'that perhaps someone was trying to synthesise the great man so they could have him write some more great plays. Illegal and morally reprehensible, of course, but potentially of huge benefit to Shakespearean scholars everywhere. The lack of any young Shakespeares turning up makes me think this was an experiment long since abandoned.'
There was a pause as I mulled this over. Genetic cloning of entire humans was strictly forbidden — no commercial bioengineering company would dare try it, and yet no one but a large bioengineering company would have the facilities to undertake it. But if these Shakespeare clones had survived, chances were there were more. And with the real one long dead, his re-engineered other self was the only way we could unravel The Merry Wives of Elsinore.
'Doesn't this come under the jurisdiction of SO-13?' I said at last.
'Officially, yes,' conceded Bowden, 'but SO-13 is as underfunded as we are and Agent Stiggins is far too busy dealing with mammoth migrations and chimeras to have anything to do with cloned Elizabethan playwrights.'
Stiggins was the Neanderthal head of the cloning police. Legally re-engineered by Goliath, he was the ideal person to run SO-13.
'Have you spoken to him?' I asked.
'He's a Neanderthal,' he replied, 'they don't talk at all unless it's absolutely necessary. I've tried a couple of times but he just stares at me in a funny way and eats live beetles from a paper bag — yuk.'
'He'll talk to me,' I said. He would, too. I still owed him a favour for when he got me out of a jam with Flanker. 'Let's see if he's about.'
I picked up the phone, consulted the internal directory and dialled a number.
I watched as Bowden boxed up more banned books. If he was caught he'd be finished. The irony of a LiteraTec being jailed for protecting Farquitt's Canon of Love — I liked him all the more for it. No one in the Literary Detectives would knowingly harm a book. We'd all resign before torching a single copy of anything.
'Right,' I said, replacing the receiver, 'his office said there was a chimera alert in the Brunei Centre — we should be able to find him there.'
'Whereabouts in the centre?'
'If it's a chimera alert, we just follow the screams.'
20
'So,' continued the CEO in a soft rumble, 'I'd like to offer an olive branch to you right now and uneradicate your husband.'
'In return,' added Schitt-Hawse, speaking for the first time, 'we would like for you to accept our full, frank and unreserved apology and sign our Standard Forgiveness Release Form.'
I looked at them both in turn, then at the contract they had placed in front of me, then at Friday, who had put his fingers in his mouth and was looking up at me with an inquisitive air. I had to get my husband back, and Friday his father. There didn't seem any good reason not to sign.
'I want your word you'll get him back.'
'You have it,' replied the CEO.
I took the offered pen and signed the form at the bottom.
'Excellent!' muttered the CEO. 'We'll reactualise your husband as soon as possible. Good day, Miss Next, it was a very great pleasure to meet you.'
'And you,' I replied, smiling and shaking both their hands. 'I must say I'm very pleased with what I've heard here today. You can count on my support when you become a religion.'
They gave me some leaflets on how to join New Goliath, which I eagerly accepted. I was shown out a few minutes later, the shuttle to Tarbuck Graviport having been held on my account. By the time I had reached Tarbuck the mane grin had subsided from my face; by the time I had arrived at Saknussum I was confused; on the drive back to Swindon I was suspicious that something wasn't quite right; by the time I had reached Mum's home I was furious. I had been duped by Goliath — again.
16
That Evening
TOAST MAY BE INJURIOUS TO HEALTH
That was the shock statement put out by a joint Kaine/Goliath research project undertaken last Tuesday morning. 'In our research we have found that in certain circumstances eating toast may make the consumer writhe around in unspeakable agony, foaming at the mouth before death mercifully overcomes them.' The scientists went on to report that although these findings were by no means complete, more work needed to be done before toast had a clean bill of health. The Toast Marketing Board reacted angrily and pointed out that the 'at risk' slice of toast in the experiment had been spread with the deadly poison strychnine and these 'scientific' trials were just another attempt to besmirch the board's good name and that of their sponsee, opposition leader Redmond van de Poste.
Article in The Mole, 16 July 1988
'How was your day?' asked Mum, handing me a large cup of tea. Friday had been tuckered out by the long day and had fallen asleep into his cheesy bean dips. I had bathed him and put him to bed before having something to eat myself. Hamlet and Emma were out at the movies or something, Bismarck was listening to Wagner on his Walkman, so Mum and I had a moment to ourselves.
'Not good,' I replied slowly. 'I can't dissuade an assassin from trying to kill me, Hamlet isn't safe here but I can't send him back and if I don't get Swindon to win the Superhoop then the world will end. Goliath somehow duped me into forgiving them, I have my own stalker and also have to figure out how to get the banned books I should be hunting for out of the country. And Landen's still not back.'
'Really?' she said, not having listened to me at all. 'I think I've got a plan for dealing with that annoying offspring of Pickwick's.'
'Lethal injection?'
'Not funny. No, my friend Mrs Beatty knows a dodo whisperer who can work wonders with unruly dodos.'
'You're kidding me, right?'
'Not at all.'
'I'll try anything, I suppose. I can't understand why he's so difficult — Pickers is a real sweetheart.'
We fell silent for a moment.
'Mum?' I said at last.
'Yes?'
'What do you think of Herr Bismarck?'
'Otto? Well, most people remember him for his "blood and iron" rhetoric, unification arguments and the wars — but few give him credit for devising the first social security system in Europe.'
'No, I mean . . . that is to say . . . you wouldn't—'
But at that moment we heard some oaths and a slammed door. After a few thumps and bumps Hamlet burst into the living room with Emma in tow. He stopped, composed himself, rubbed his forehead, looked heavenward, sighed deeply and then said:
'O! that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!'[1]
'Is everything all right?' I asked.
'Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon 'gainst self-slaughter!'[2]
'I'll make a cup of tea,' said my mother, who had an instinct for these sorts of things. 'Would you like a slice of Battenberg, Mr Hamlet?'
'O God! O God! How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable — yes, please — Seem to me all the uses of this world!'[3]
She nodded and moved off.
'What's up?' I asked Emma as Hamlet strutted around the living room, beating his head in frustration and grief.
'Well, we went to see Hamlet at the Alhambra.'
'Crumbs!' I muttered. 'It — er — didn't go down too well, I take it?'
'Well,' reflected Emma, as Hamlet continued his histrionics around the living room, 'the play was okay apart from Hamlet shouting out a couple of times that Polonius wasn't meant to be funny and Laertes wasn't remotely handsome. The management weren't particularly put out — there were at least twelve "Hamlets" in the audience and they all had something to say about it.'
'Fie on't! O fie!' continued Hamlet, ''tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature possess it merely—!'[4]
'No,' continued Emma, 'it was when we and the twelve other Hamlets went to have a quiet drink with the play's company afterwards that things turned sour. Piarno Keyes — who was playing Hamlet — took umbrage at Hamlet's criticisms of his performance; Hamlet said his portrayal was far too indecisive. Mr Keyes said Hamlet was mistaken, that Hamlet was a man racked by uncertainty. Then Hamlet said he was Hamlet so should know a thing or two about it; one of the other "Hamlets" disagreed and said he was Hamlet and thought Mr Keyes was excellent. Several of the "Hamlets" agreed and it might have ended there but Hamlet said that if Mr Keyes insisted on playing Hamlet he should look at how Mel Gibson did it and improve his performance in the light of that.'
'Oh dear.'
'Yes,' said Emma, 'oh dear. Mr Keyes flew right off the handle. "Mel Gibson?" he roared. "Mel ****ing Gibson? That's all I ever ****ing hear these days!" and he then tried to punch Hamlet on the nose. Hamlet was too quick, of course, and had his bodkin at Keyes' throat before you could blink, so one of the other "Hamlets" suggested a Hamlet contest. The rules were simple: they all had to perform the "To be or not to be" soliloquy and the drinkers in the tavern gave them points out often.'
'And—?'
'Hamlet came last.'
'Last? How could he come last?'
'Well, he insisted on playing the soliloquy less like an existential question about life and death and the possibility of an afterlife, and more as if it were about a post-apocalyptic dystopia where crossbow-wielding punks on motorbikes try to kill people for their gasoline.'
I looked across at Hamlet, who had quietened down a bit and was looking through my mother's video collection for Olivier's Hamlet to see whether it was better than Gibson's.
'No wonder he's hacked off.'
'Here we go!' said my mother, returning with a large tray of tea things. 'There's nothing like a nice cup of tea when things look bad!'
'Humph,' grunted Hamlet, staring at his feet. 'I don't suppose you've got any of that cake, have you?'
'Especially for you!' My mother smiled, producing the Battenberg with a flourish. She was right, too. After a few cups and a slice of cake, Hamlet was almost human again.
I left Emma and Hamlet arguing with my mother over whether they should watch Olivier's Hamlet or Great Croquet Sporting Moments on the television and went to sort some washing in the kitchen. I stood there trying to figure out just what sort of brain-scrubbing technique Goliath had used on me to get me to sign their forgiveness release. Oddly, I was still getting pro-Goliath flashbacks. In absent moments I felt they weren't so bad, then had to consciously remind myself that they were. On the plus side there was a possibility that Landen might be reactuallsed, but I didn't know when it would happen, or how.
I was just getting round to wondering whether a cold soak might remove ketchup stains better than a hot wash when there was a light crackling sound in the air like crumpled cellophane. It grew louder and green tendrils of electricity started to envelop the Kenwood mixer, then grew stronger until a greenish glow like St Elmo's fire was dancing around the microwave. There was a bright light and a rumble of thunder as three figures started to materialise into the kitchen. Two of them were dressed in body armour and holding ridiculously large blaster-type weapons; the other figure was tall and dressed in jet-black high-collared robes which hung to the floor on one side and buttoned tightly up to his throat on the other. He had a pale complexion, high cheekbones and a small and very precise goatee. He stood with his arms crossed and was staring at me with one eyebrow raised imperiously. This was truly a tyrant among tyrants, a cruel galactic leader who had murdered billions in his never-ending and inadequately explained quest for total galactic domination. This . . . was Emperor Zhark.
17
Emperor Zhark
'The eight "Emperor Zhark" novels were written in the seventies by Handley Paige, an author whose previous works included Spacestation Z—5 and Revenge of the Thraals. With Zhark he hit upon a pastiche of everything a bad SF novel should ever be: weird worlds, tentacled aliens, space travel and square-jawed fighter aces doing battle with a pantomime emperor who lived for no other reason than to cause evil and disharmony in the galaxy. His usual nemesis in the books was Colonel Brandt of the Space Corps, assisted by his alien partner Ashley. There have been two Zhark films starring Buck Stallion, Zhark the Destroyer and Bad Day at Big Rock, neither of which was any good.'
MILLON DE FLOSS — The Books of H. Paige
'Do you have to do that?' I asked.
'Do what?' replied the emperor.
'Make such a pointlessly dramatic entrance. And what are those two goons doing here?'
'Who said that?' said a muffled voice from inside the opaque helmet of one of his minders. 'I can't see a sodding thing in here.'
'Who's a goon?' said the other.
Zhark laughed, ignoring them both. 'It's a contractual thing. I've got a new agent who knows how to properly handle a character of my quality. I have to be given a minimum of eighty words' description at least once in any featured book, and at least twice in a book a chapter has to end with my appearance.'
'Do you get book title billing?'
'We gave that one away in exchange for chapter heading status. If this were a novel you'd have to start a new chapter as soon as I appeared.'
'Well, it's a good thing it's not,' I replied. 'If my mother was here she'd probably have had a heart attack.'
'Oh!' replied the emperor, looking around. 'Do you live with your mother too?'
'What's up? Problems at Jurisdiction?'
'Take five, lads,' said Zhark to the two guards, who felt around the kitchen until they found chairs and sat down. 'Mrs Tiggy-Winkle sent me,' he breathed. 'She's busy at the Beatrix Potter Characters AGM but wanted to give you an update on what's happening at Jurisfiction.'
'Who's that, darling?' called my mother from the living room.
'It's a homicidal maniac intent on galactic domination,' I called back.
'That's nice, dear.'
I turned back to Zhark.
'So, what's the news?'
'Max de Winter from Rebecca,' said Zhark thoughtfully. 'The Book World Justice Department has rearrested him.'
'I thought Snell got him off the murder charge?'
'He did. The department are still gunning for him, though. They've arrested him for — get this — insurance fraud. Remember the boat he sank with his wife in it?'
I nodded.
'Well, apparently he claimed the insurance on the boat, so they think they might be able to get him on that.'
It was not an untypical turn of events in the BookWorld. Our mandate from the Council of Genres was to keep fictional narrative as stable as possible. As long as it was how the author intended, murderers walked free and tyrants stayed in power — that was what we did. Minor infringements that weren't obvious to the reading public we tended to overlook. However, in a master stroke of inspired bureaucracy, the Council of Genres also empowered a Justice Department to look into individual transgressions. The conviction of David Copperfield for murdering his first wife was their biggest cause célèbre — before my time, I hasten to add — and
Jurisfiction, unable to save him, could do little except tram another character to take Copperfield's place. They had tried to get Max de Winter before but we had always managed to outmanoeuvre them. Insurance fraud. I could scarcely believe it.
'Have you alerted the Gryphon?'
'He's working on Fagin's umpteenth appeal.'
'Get him on it. We can't leave this to amateurs. What about Hamlet? Can I send him back?'
'Not . . . as such,' replied Zhark hesitantly.
'He's becoming something of a nuisance,' I admitted, 'and Danes are liable to be arrested. I can't keep him amused watching Mel Gibson's films for ever.'
'I'd like Mel Gibson to play me,' said Zhark thoughtfully.
'I don't think Gibson does bad guys,' I told him. 'You'd probably be played by Geoffrey Rush or someone.'
'That wouldn't be so bad. Is that cake going begging?'
'Help yourself.'
Zhark cut a large slice of Battenberg, took a bite and continued:
'Okay, here's the deal: we managed to get the Polonius family to attend arbitration over their unauthorised rewriting of Hamlet.'
'How did you achieve that?'
'Promised Ophelia her own book. All back to normal — no problem.'
'So . . . I can send Hamlet back?'
'Not quite yet,' replied Zhark, trying to hide his unease by pretending to find a small piece of fluff on his cape. 'You see, Ophelia has now got her knickers in a twist about one of Hamlet's infidelities — someone she thinks is called Henna Appleton. Have you heard anything about this?'
'No. Nothing. Nothing at all. Not a thing. Don't even know anyone called Henna Appleton Why?'
'I was hoping you could tell me. Well, she went completely nuts and threatened to drown herself in the first act rather than the fourth. We think we've got her straightened out. But while we were doing this there was a hostile takeover.'
I cursed aloud and Zhark jumped. Nothing was ever straightforward in the BookWorld. Book mergers, where one book joined another to increase the collective narrative advantage of their own mundane plotlines, were thankfully rare but not unheard of. The most famous merger in Shakespeare was the conjoinment of the two plays Daughters of Lear and Sons of Gloucester into King Lear. Other potential mergers such as Much Ado about Verona and A Midsummer Night's Shrew were denied at the planning stage and hadn't taken place. It could take months to extricate the plots, if indeed it was possible at all. King Lear resisted unravelling so strongly we just let it stand.
'So what merged with Hamlet?'
'Well, it's now called The Merry Wives of Elsinore, and features Gertrude being chased around the castle by Falstaff while being outwitted by Mistress Page, Ford and Ophelia. Laertes is the king of the fames and Hamlet is relegated to a sixteen-line sub-plot where he is convinced Dr Caius and Fenton have conspired to kill his father for seven hundred pounds.'
I groaned.
'What's it like?'
'It takes a long time to get funny and when it does everyone dies.'
'Okay,' I conceded, 'I'll try and keep Hamlet amused. How long do you need to unravel the play?'
Zhark winced and sucked in air through his teeth in the way heating engineers do when quoting on a new boiler.
'Well, that's the problem, Thursday. I'm not sure that we can do it all. If this had happened anywhere but the original we could have just deleted it. You know the trouble we had with King Lear? Well, I don't see that we're going to have any better luck with Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.'
I sat down and put my head in my hands. No Hamlet. The loss was almost too vast to comprehend.
'How long have we got before Hamlet starts to change?' I asked without looking up.
'About five days, six at the outside,' replied Zhark quietly. 'After that the breakdown will accelerate. In two weeks' time the play as we know it will have ceased to exist.'
'There must be something we can do.'
'We've tried pretty much everything. We're stuffed — unless you've got a spare William Shakespeare up your sleeve.'
I sat up.
'What?'
'We're stuffed?'
'After that.'
'A spare William Shakespeare up your sleeve?'
'Yes. How will that help?'
'Well,' said Zhark thoughtfully, 'since no original manuscripts of either Hamlet or Wives exist, a freshly penned script by the author would thus become the original manuscript — and we can use those to reboot the storycode engines from scratch. It's quite simple, really.'
I smiled but Zhark looked at me with bewilderment.
'Thursday, Shakespeare died in 1616!'
I stood up and patted him on the arm.
'You get back to the office and make sure things don't get any worse. Leave the Shakespeare up to me. Now, has anyone figured out which book Yorrick Kaine is from?'
'We've got all available resources working on it,' replied Zhark, still a bit confused, 'but there are a lot of novels to go through. Can you give us any pointers?'
'Well, he's not very multi-dimensional so I shouldn't go looking into anything too literary. I'd start at Political Thrillers and work your way towards Spy.'
Zhark made a note.
'Good. Any other problems?'
'Yes,' replied the emperor, 'Simpkin is being a bit of a pest in The Tailor of Gloucester. Apparently the tailor let all his mice escape and now Simpkin won't let him have the cherry-coloured twist. If the mayor's coat isn't ready for Christmas there'll be hell to pay.'
'Get the mice to make the waistcoat. They're not doing anything.'
He sighed. 'Okay, I'll give it a whirl.' He looked at his watch. 'Well, better be off. I've got to annihilate the planet Thraal at four and I'm already late. Do you think I should use my trusty Zharkian Death Ray and fry them alive in a millisecond or nudge an asteroid into their orbit, thus unleashing at least six chapters of drama as they try to find an ingenious solution to defeat me?'
'The asteroid sounds a good bet.'
'I thought so too. Well, see you later.'
I waved goodbye as he and his two guards were beamed out of my world and back into theirs, which was certainly the best place for them. We had quite enough tyrants in the real world as it was.
I was just wondering what The Merry Wives of Elsinore might be like when there was another buzzing noise and the kitchen was filled with light once more. There, imperious stare, high collar, etc., etc., was Emperor Zhark.
18
Emperor Zhark Again
PRESIDENT GEORGE FORMBY OPENS MOTORCYCLE FACTORY
The President opened the new Brough-Vincent-Norton motorcycle factory yesterday in Liverpool, bringing much-welcomed jobs to the area. The highly modernised factory, which aims to produce up to A thousand quality touring and racing machines every week, was described by the President as 'cracking stuff!' The President, a long-time advocate of motorcycling, rode one of the company's new Vincent 'Super Shadow' racers around the test track, reportedly hitting over 120 mph, much to his retinue's obvious concern for the octogenarian Presidents health. Our George then gave a cheerful rendering of 'Riding in the TT Races', reminding his. audience of the time he won the Manx Tourist Trophy on a prototype Rainbow motorcycle.
Article in The Toad, 9 July 1988
'Forget something?' I asked.
'Yes. What was that cake of your mother's?'
'It's called Battenberg.'
He got a pen and made a note on his cuff.
'Right. Well, that's it, then.'
'Good.'
'Right.'
'Is there something else?'
'Yes.'
'And—?'
'It's . . . it's . . .'
'What?'
Emperor Zhark bit his lip, looked around nervously and drew closer. Although I had had good reason for reprimanding him in the past — and had even suspended his Jurisfiction badge for 'gross incompetence' on two occasions — I actually liked him a great deal. Within the amnesty of his own books he was a sadistic monster who murdered millions with staggering ruthlessness, but out here he had his own fair share of worries, demons and peculiar habits — many of which seemed to have stemmed from the strict upbringing undertaken by his mother, the Empress Zharkeena.
'Well,' he said, unsure of quite how to put it, 'you know the sixth in the Emperor Zhark series is being written as we speak?'
'Zhark: End of Empire? Yes, I'd heard that. What's the problem?'
'I've just read the advanced plotline and it seems that I'm going to be vanquished by the Galactic Freedom Alliance.'
'I'm sorry, Emperor, I'm not sure I see your point — are you concerned about losing your empire?'
He moved closer.
'If the story calls for it, I guess not. But it's what happens to me at the end that I have a few problems with. I don't mind being cast adrift in space on the imperial yacht or left marooned on an empty planet, but my writer has planned . . . a public execution.'
He stared at me, shocked by the enormity of it all.
'If that's what he has planned—'
'Thursday, you don't understand. I'm going to be killed off — written out! I'm not sure I can take that kind of rejection.'
'Emperor,' I said, 'if a character has run its course, then it's run its course. What do you want me to do? Go and talk the author out of it?'
'Would you?' replied Zhark, opening his eyes wide. 'Would you really do that?'
'No. You can't have characters trying to tell their authors what to write in their books. Besides, within your books you are truly evil, and need to be punished.'
Zhark pulled himself up to his full height.
'I see,' he said at length. 'Well, I might decide to take drastic action if you don't at least attempt to persuade Mr Paige. And besides, I'm not really evil, I'm just written that way.'
'If I hear any more of this nonsense,' I replied, beginning to get annoyed, 'I will have you placed under book arrest and charged with incitement to mutiny for what you've just told me.'
'Oh, crumbs,' he said, suddenly deflated, 'you can can't you?'
'I can. I won't because I can't be bothered. But if I hear anything more about this I will take steps — do you understand?'
'Yes,' replied Zhark meekly, and without another word he vanished.
19
Cloned Will Hunting
OPPOSITION LEADER MILDLY CRITICISES KAINE
Opposition leader Mr Redmond van de Poste lightly attacked Yorrick Kaine's government yesterday over its possible failure to adequately address the nation's economic woes. Mr van de Poste suggested that the Danish were 'no more guilty of attacking this country than the Swedes' and then went on to question Kaine's independence given his close sponsorship ties with the Goliath Corporation. In reply. Chancellor Kaine thanked ran de Poste for alerting him to the Swedes, who were 'doubtless up to something', and pointed out that Mr van de Poste himself was sponsored by the Toast Marketing Board.
Article in the Gadfly, 17 July 1988
Sunday was meant to be a day off but it didn't really seem like it. I played golf with Braxton in the morning and outside work he was as amiable a gent as I could possibly hope to meet. He delighted in showing me the rudiments of golf and once or twice I hit the ball quite well — when it made the thwack noise and flew away as straight as a die I suddenly realised what all the fuss was about. It wasn't all fun and games, though — Braxton had been leaned on by Flanker, who, I assume, had been leaned on by somebody else higher up. In between putting practice and attempting to get my ball out of a bunker, Braxton confided that he couldn't hold off Flanker for ever with his empty promise of a report into my alleged Welsh cheese activities, and if I knew what was good for me I would have to at least try to look for banned books with SO-14. I promised I would and then joined him for a drink at the nineteenth hole, where we were regaled with stories by a large man with a red nose who was, apparently, the Oldest Member.
I was awoken on Monday morning by a burbling noise from Friday. He was standing up in his cot and trying to grasp the curtain, which was out of his reach. He said that now that I was awake I could do a lot worse than take him downstairs where he could play whilst I made some breakfast. Well, he didn't use those precise words, of course — he said something more along the lines of 'Reprehenderit in voluptate velit id est mollit', but I knew what he meant.
I couldn't think of any good reason not to, so I pulled on my dressing gown and took the little fellow downstairs, pondering on quite who, if anyone, was going to look after him today. Given that I had nearly got into a fight with Jack Schitt, I wasn't sure he should witness all that his mum got up to.
My mother was already up.
'Good morning, Mother,' I said, cheerfully, 'and how are you today?'
I'm afraid not during the morning,' she said, divining my unasked question instantly, 'but I can probably manage from teatime onwards.'
'I'd appreciate it,' I replied, looking at The Mole as I put on the porridge. Kaine had issued an ultimatum to the Danish: either the government in Denmark ended all its efforts to destabilise England and undermine our economy, or England would have no choice but to recall its ambassador. The Danish had replied that they didn't know what Kaine was talking about and demanded that the trade ban on Danish goods be lifted. Kaine responded angrily, made all sorts of counter-claims, imposed a 200 per cent tariff on Danish bacon imports and closed all avenues of communication.
'Duis aute irure dolor est!' yelled Friday.
'Keep your hair on,' I replied, 'it's coming.'
'Plink!' said Alan angrily, gesturing towards his supper dish indignantly.
'Wait your turn,' I told him.
'Plink, PLINK! he replied, taking a step closer and opening his beak in a menacing manner.
'Try and bite me,' I told him, 'and you'll be finding a new owner from the front window of Pete & Dave's!'
Alan figured out that this was a threat and closed his beak. Pete & Dave's was the local re-engineered pet store, and I was serious. He'd already tried to bite my mother and even the local dogs were giving the house a wide berth.
At that moment Joffy opened the back door and walked in. But he wasn't alone. He was with something that I can only describe as an untidy bag of thin bones covered in dirty skin and a rough blanket.
'Ah!' said Joffy. 'Mum and Sis. Just the ticket. This is St Zvlkx. Your Grace, this is my mother, Mrs Next, and my sister, Thursday.'
St Zvlkx looked at me suspiciously from behind a heavy curtain of oily black hair.
'Welcome to Swindon, Mr Zvlkx,' said my mother, curtsying politely. 'Would you like some breakfast?'
'He only speaks Old Enlish,' put in Joffy. 'Here, let me translate.'
'Oi, Pig-face — are you going to eat, or what?'
'Ahh!' said the monk, and sat down at the table. Friday stared at him a little dubiously, then started to jabber Lorem Ipsum at him while the monk stared at him dubiously.
'How's it all going?' I asked.
'Pretty good,' replied Joffy, pouring some coffee for himself and St Zvlkx. 'He's shooting a commercial this morning for the Toast Marketing Board and will be on The Adrian Lush Show at four. He's also guest speaker at the Swindon Dermatologists Convention at the Finis; apparently some of his skin complaints are unknown to science. I thought I'd bring him round to see you — he's full of wisdom, you know.'
'It's barely eight in the morning!' said Mum.
'St Zvlkx rises with the dawn as a penance,'Joffy explained. 'He spent all of Sunday pushing a peanut around the Brunei Centre with his nose.'
'I spent it playing golf with Braxton Hicks.'
'How did you do?'
'Okay, I think. My croquet-playing skills stopped me making a complete arse of myself. Did you know that Braxton had six kids?'
'Well, how about some wisdom, then?' said my mother brightly. 'I'm very big on thirteenth-century sagacity.'
'Okay,' said Joffy. 'Oi! Make yourself useful and give us some wisdom, you old fart.'
'Poke it up your arse.'
'What did he say?'
'Er — he said he would meditate upon it.'
'Well,' said my mother, who was nothing if not hospitable and could just about make breakfast without consulting the recipe book, 'since you are our guest, Mr Zvlkx, what would you like for breakfast?'
St Zvlkx stared at her.
'Eat,' repeated my mother, making biting gestures. This seemed to do the trick.
'Your mother has firm breasts for a middle-aged woman, orb-like and defying gravity. I should like to play with them, as a baker plays with dough.'
'What did he say?'
'He says he'd be very grateful for bacon and eggs,' replied Joffy quickly, turning to St Zvlkx and saying: 'Any more crap out of you, sunshine, and I'll lock you in the cellar tomorrow night as well.'
'What did you say to him?'
'I thanked him for his attendance in your home.'
'Ah.'
Mum put the big frying pan on the cooker and broke some eggs into it, followed by large rashers of bacon. Pretty soon the smell of bacon pervaded the house, something that attracted not only a sleepwalking DH82 but also Hamlet and Lady Hamilton, who had given up pretending they weren't sleeping together.
'Hubba, hubba,' said St Zvlkx as soon as Emma entered, 'who's the bunny with the scrummy hooters?'
'He wishes you — um — both good morrow,' said Joffy, visibly shaken. 'St Zvlkx, this is Lady Hamilton anb Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.'
'If you're giving one of those puppies,' continued St Zvlkx, staring at Emma's cleavage, 'I'll have the one with the brown nose.'
'Good morning,' said Hamlet without smiling. 'Any more bad language in front of the good Lady Hamilton and I'll take you outside and with a bare bodkin your quietus make.'
'What did the prince say?' asked St Zvlkx.
'Yes,' said Joffy, 'what did he say?'
'It's Courier Bold,' I told him, 'the traditional language of the BookWorld. He said that he would be failing in his duty as a gentleman if he allowed Zvlkx to show any disrespect to Lady Hamilton.'
'What did your sister say?' asked St Zvlkx. 'She said that if you insult Hamlet's bird again your nose will be two foot wide across your face.'
'Oh.'
'Well,' said my mother, 'this is turning out to be a very pleasant morning!'
'In that case,' said Joffy, sensing the time was just right, 'could St Zvlkx stay here until midday? I've got to give a sermon to the Sisters of Eternal Punctuality at ten and if I'm late they throw their prayer books at me.'
'No can do, o son my son,' said my mother, flipping the bacon. 'Why not take St Zvlkx with you? I'm sure the nuns will be impressed by his piety.'
'Did someone mention nuns?' asked St Zvlkx, looking around eagerly.
'How you got to be a saint I have no idea,' chided Joffy. 'Another peep out of you and I'll personally kick your bulgar arse all the way back to the thirteenth century.'
St Zvlkx shrugged, wolfed down his bacon and eggs with his hands and then burped loudly. Friday did the same and collapsed into a fit of giggles.
They all left soon after. Joffy wouldn't look after Friday and Zvlkx certainly couldn't, so there was nothing for it. As soon as Mum had found her hat, coat and keys and gone out, I rushed upstairs, dressed, then read myself into Bradshaw Defies the Kaiser to ask Melanie whether she would look after Friday until teatime. Mum had said she would be out the whole day, and since Hamlet already knew that Melanie was a gorilla and neither Emma nor Bismarck could exactly complain since they were long-dead historical figures themselves, I thought it a safe bet. It was against regulations, but with Hamlet and the world facing an uncertain future, I was past caring.
Melanie happily agreed, and once she had changed into a yellow polka-dot dress I brought her out of the BookWorld to my mother's front room, which she thought very smart, especially the festoon curtains. She was pulling the cord to watch the curtains rise and fall when Emma walked in.
'Lady Hamilton,' I announced, 'this is Melanie Bradshaw.'
Mel put out a large hand and Emma shook it nervously, as though expecting Melanie to bite her or something.
'H-how do you do?' she stammered. 'I've never been introduced to a monkey before.'
'Ape,' corrected Melanie helpfully. 'Monkeys generally have tails, are truly arboreal and belong to the families Hylobatidae, cebidae and Cercopithecidae. You and I and all the Great Apes are Pongidae. I'm a gorilla. Well, strictly speaking I'm a mountain gorilla — Gorilla gorilla beringei — which live on the slopes of the Virunga volcanoes — we used to call it British East Africa but I'm not sure what it is now. Have you ever been there?'
'No.'
'Charming place. That's where Trafford — my husband — and I met. He was with his gun bearers hacking his way through the undergrowth during the backstory to Bradshaw Hunts Big Game (Collins, 1878, 4/6d, illustrated) and he slipped from the path and fell twenty feet into the ravine below where I was taking a bath.'
She picked Friday up in her massive arms and he chortled with delight.
'Well, I was most dreadfully embarrassed. I mean, I was sitting there in the running water without a stitch on, but — and I'll always remember this — Trafford politely apologised and turned his back so I could nip into the bushes and get dressed. I came out to ask him if he might want directions back to civilisation — Africa was quite unexplored then, you know — and we got to chatting. Well, one thing led to another and before I knew it he had asked me out to dinner. We've been together ever since. Does that sound silly to you?'
Emma thought about how her relationship with Admiral Lord Nelson was lampooned mercilessly in the press.
'No, I think that sounds really quite romantic.'
'Right,' I said, clapping my hands, 'I'll be back at three. Don't go out and if anyone calls, get Hamlet or Emma to answer the door. Okay?'
'Certainly,' replied Melanie, 'don't go out, don't answer the door. Simple.'
'And no swinging on the curtains or lamp fixtures — they won't stand it.'
'Are you saying I'm a bit large?'
'Not at all,' I replied hastily, 'things are just different in the real world. There is lots of fruit in the bowl and fresh bananas in the refrigerator. Okay?'
'No problemo. Have a nice day.'
I drove into town and, avoiding several newspapermen who were still eager to interview me, entered the SpecOps building, which I noted had been freshly repainted since my last visit. It looked a bit more cheery in mauve, but not much.
'Agent Next?' said a young and extremely keen SO-14 agent in a well-starched black outfit, complete with Kevlar vest, combat boots and highly visible weaponry.
'Yes?'
He saluted.
'My name is Major Drabb, SO-14. I understand you have been assigned to us to track down more of this pernicious Danish literature.'
He was so keen to fulfil his duties I felt chilled. To his credit he would be as enthusiastic helping flood victims; he was just following orders unquestioningly. Worse acts than destroying Danish literature had been perpetrated by men like this. Luckily, I was prepared.
'Good to see you, Major. I had a tip-off that this address might hold a few copies of the banned books.'
I passed him a scrap of paper and he read it eagerly.
'The Albert Schweitzer Memorial Library? We'll be on to it right away.'
And he saluted smartly once again, turned on his heel and was gone.
I made my way up to the LiteraTecs' office and found Bowden in the process of packing Karen Blixen's various collections of stories into a cardboard box.
'Hi!' he said, tying up the box with string. 'How are things with you?'
'Pretty good. I'm back at work.'
Bowden smiled, put down the scissors and string and shook my hand.
'That's very good news indeed! Heard the latest? Daphne Farquitt has been added to the list of banned Danish writers.'
'But . . . Farquitt isn't Danish!'
'Her father's name was Farquittsen, so it's Danish enough for Kaine and his idiots.'
It was an interesting development. Farquitt's books were pretty dreadful but burning was still a step too far. Just.
'Have you found a way to get all these banned books out of England?' asked Bowden, running some tape across a box of Out of Africas. 'With Farquitt's books and all the rest of the stuff that's coming in, I think we'll need closer to ten trucks.'
'It's certainly on my mind,' I replied, having not done anything about it at all.
'Excellent! We'd like to take a convoy through as soon as you give the word. Now, what do you want me to brief you on first? The latest Capulet versus Montague drive-by shooting or which authors are next up for a random dope test?'
'Neither,' I replied. 'Tell me everything you know about cloned Shakespeares.'
'We've had to put that on "low priority". It's intriguing, to be sure, but ultimately pointless from a law-and-order point of view — anyone involved in their sequencing will be too dead or too old to go for trial.'
'It's more of a BookWorld thing,' I responded, 'but important, I promise.'
'Well, in that case,' began Bowden, who knew me too well to think I'd waste his time or my own, 'we have three Shakespeares on the slab at the moment, all aged between fifty and sixty — put those Hans Christian Andersen books in that box, would you? If they were cloned it was way back in the poorly regulated days of the thirties, when there was all sorts of nonsense going on, when people thought they could engineer Olympic runners with four legs, swimmers with real fins, that sort of thing. I've had a brief trawl through the records. The first confirmed WillClone surfaced in 1952 with the accidental shooting of a Mr Shakstpear in Tenbury Wells. Then there's the unexplained death of a Mr Shaxzpar in 1958, Mr Shagxtspar in 1962 and a Mr Shogtspore in 1969. There are others, too—'
'Any theories as to why?'
'I think,' said Bowden slowly, 'that perhaps someone was trying to synthesise the great man so they could have him write some more great plays. Illegal and morally reprehensible, of course, but potentially of huge benefit to Shakespearean scholars everywhere. The lack of any young Shakespeares turning up makes me think this was an experiment long since abandoned.'
There was a pause as I mulled this over. Genetic cloning of entire humans was strictly forbidden — no commercial bioengineering company would dare try it, and yet no one but a large bioengineering company would have the facilities to undertake it. But if these Shakespeare clones had survived, chances were there were more. And with the real one long dead, his re-engineered other self was the only way we could unravel The Merry Wives of Elsinore.
'Doesn't this come under the jurisdiction of SO-13?' I said at last.
'Officially, yes,' conceded Bowden, 'but SO-13 is as underfunded as we are and Agent Stiggins is far too busy dealing with mammoth migrations and chimeras to have anything to do with cloned Elizabethan playwrights.'
Stiggins was the Neanderthal head of the cloning police. Legally re-engineered by Goliath, he was the ideal person to run SO-13.
'Have you spoken to him?' I asked.
'He's a Neanderthal,' he replied, 'they don't talk at all unless it's absolutely necessary. I've tried a couple of times but he just stares at me in a funny way and eats live beetles from a paper bag — yuk.'
'He'll talk to me,' I said. He would, too. I still owed him a favour for when he got me out of a jam with Flanker. 'Let's see if he's about.'
I picked up the phone, consulted the internal directory and dialled a number.
I watched as Bowden boxed up more banned books. If he was caught he'd be finished. The irony of a LiteraTec being jailed for protecting Farquitt's Canon of Love — I liked him all the more for it. No one in the Literary Detectives would knowingly harm a book. We'd all resign before torching a single copy of anything.
'Right,' I said, replacing the receiver, 'his office said there was a chimera alert in the Brunei Centre — we should be able to find him there.'
'Whereabouts in the centre?'
'If it's a chimera alert, we just follow the screams.'
20
Chimeras and Neanderthals
'The Neanderthal experiment was conceived in order to create the euphemistically entitled "medical test vessels", living creatures that were as close as possible to humans without actually being human within the context of the law. The experiment was an unparalleled success — and failure. The Neanderthal was everything that could be hoped for. A close cousin but not human, physiologically almost identical — and legally with less rights than a dormouse. But sadly for Goliath, even the hardiest of medical technicians balked at experiments conducted upon intelligent and speaking entities, so the first batch of Neanderthals were trained instead as "expendable combat units", a project that was shelved as soon as the lack of aggressive instincts in the Neanderthals was noted. They were subsequently released into the community as cheap labour and became a celebrated tax write-off. It was Homo sapiens at his least sapient.'