The Woman Who Died a Lot (Thursday Next 7)

“You would have been ChronoGuard, wouldn’t you?”

She gazed up at me with large, intelligent eyes. The grammatical inference of my question showed I understood the complexities of the service.

“I would have had a successful career in the timestream,” she replied with a sad smile, “but the way things stand at the moment, I marry a guy named Biff I don’t much like, have two unremarkable kids and then get hit by a car in 2041, aged fifty-five.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, musing on the misguided wisdom that allowed ex–potential employees to have both their original and new lives summarized in a paragraph or two. It was dubbed the “Letter of Destiny” and was apparently part of the Union of Federated Timeworkers severance package. The unions were powerful but had achingly slow bureaucracy. Despite the time engines’ being shut down over two years ago, the Letters of Destiny were only just falling through people’s mailboxes. To many they came as a complete surprise and met with mixed feelings. Yes, it was good to know you might have been a hero at ChronoGuard, and yes, it was good to know that you make it to fifty-one without losing your mind or your hair, but no, perhaps you could do without knowing that your wife/husband is going to sleep with your best friend and enjoy it more, and no, it’s not healthy to know that you’re going to have an arm torn off by a gorilla in six hours and there’s nothing you can do about it.

“You would have known my son,” I said. “Friday Next.”

“Ooh,” she said, eyes opening a bit wider at the mention of his name, “I’d have left my husband for him. We’d have spent a sweaty weekend consummating our affair in his Late Pleistocene weekend retreat.”

This was news to me, and I wasn’t happy knowing that my son might once—in an alternative future—be sleeping with another man’s wife. There was the ethical question of second homes, too.

“I never knew he would’ve had a holiday home in the Late Pleistocene.”

“One interglacial back so with good weather, nothing too bitey and only twelve thousand years ago, so easy access for Friday afternoons—the time engines would have gotten really clogged as soon as work ended.”

“If you must have a second home, best have it someplace where it doesn’t inflate house prices,” I mused. “Have you met him in this timeline?”

“No. I only got my Letter of Destiny last week.”

“Are you okay about it?” I asked, as my son Friday had also been summarized recently and was being a bit more reticent as to how it turned out for him.

“I’m fine about it,” she said cheerily. “Before, I suspected I might not amount to anything, and now I know I won’t, so at least it takes away the wearisome burden of delusive hope.”

“Very . . . philosophical of you.”

She thought for a moment.

“Will you tell Friday that Shazza says, ‘It would have been seriously good’?”

My son and father would both have been in the ChronoGuard if the engines hadn’t been switched off, so the seemingly pointless discussions on the might-have-been were not exactly relevant but certainly of interest.

I told her I’d pass on her message, and she gave a half smile before returning to her nails and bag of M&M’s.

The door to Dr. Chumley’s office opened, and a short, heavyset man walked out. He had prominent brow ridges, dark eyes, and a broad nose. He wore a well-tailored suit woven from three different colors of baling twine, and his head was topped by a shock of unruly hair that had violently resisted all attempts to be combed. When he moved, he had the side-to-side gait of a sailor, and the smell of woodsmoke and hot mud moved with him. This was not at all unusual. He was a resequenced neanderthal named Stiggins and soon to be, I assumed, divisional head of SO-13, the department that policed all unextincted creatures. Not just the legal ones like mammoths, dodos, saber-toothed tigers and himself but also all the ones that were illegal— Diatrymas, to list an example never far from the news, and a host of chimeras—creatures that had sprung not from the random machinations of evolution but from garden-shed laboratories of meddling hobby geneticists who should have known better.

“Hello, Stig.”

He gave a snorty grunt of pleasure, and we hugged and smelled each other—once in the armpit, once in the hair, as was the neanderthal custom.

“ Co-op generic shampoo,” he said with a grimace, the ’thal version of a smile, “but stored in a Pantene container.”

“I like the shape of the bottle.”

“Us, too. Bacon and eggs for breakfast with arabica coffee, pushy-down, not bubble-bubble. Toast with jam. Raspberry. You travel Skyrail, sit next to someone too much Bodmin aftershave, and I smell much-much painkiller, Dizuperadol patches, two per cheek.” He took another deep breath. “But no oofy-oofy with husband. Not for weeks. Not like you. Problems?”

“I’m still a bit mashed,” I replied with a smile, well used to neanderthal ways, which were dazzlingly direct and unencumbered by the complex peculiarities of human etiquette, “but thanks for the concern.”

“Oofy-oofy very important.”

“I’ll second that,” I said with a sigh. “I’d like to but have no desire to. How are Felicity and the boys?”

“We are all well, thank you. Mrs. Stiggins is ripe at present, and the boys passed their flint-plus with distinction.”

“You must send them our congratulations.”

“We shall. And your own childer, Thursday?”