First Among Sequels (Thursday Next 5)

“Have you seen anything of my father?” I asked. I hadn’t seen him for over a year, not since the last potential life-extinguishing Armageddon anyway.

“I see him flash past from time to time,” replied Friday, “but he’s a bit of an enigma. Sometimes we’re told to hunt him down, and the next moment we’re working under him. Sometimes he’s even leading the hunt for himself. Listen, I’m ChronoGuard and even I can’t figure it out. Ah! We’re here.”

I looked up and frowned. We didn’t seem to be “here” anywhere in particular—we were outside T.J. Maxx, the discount clothes store.

18.

Aornis Hades

They called it being “in the loop,” but the official name was Closed Loop Temporal Field Containment. It was used only for criminals where there was little hope of rehabilitation, or even contrition. It was run by the ChronoGuard and was frighteningly simple. They popped the convict in an eight-minute repetitive time loop for five, ten, twenty years. The prisoner’s body aged but never needed sustenance. It was cruel and unnatural—yet cheap and required no bars, guards or food.

W e walked into the Swindon T. J. Maxx, threaded our way through the busy morning bargain hunters and found the manager, a well-dressed woman with an agreeable manner who had been in my class at school but whose name I had forgotten—we always gave polite nods to each other, but nothing more than that. Friday showed her his ID. She smiled and led us to a keypad mounted on the wall. The manager punched in a long series of numbers, and then Friday punched an even longer series of numbers. There was a shift in the light to a greeny blue, the manager and all the customers stopped dead in their tracks as time ground to a halt, and a faint buzz replaced the happy murmur of shoppers.

Friday looked at the manila folder he was carrying and then around the store. The illumination was similar to the cool glow you get from underwater lights in a swimming pool, with reflections that danced on the ceiling. Within the bluey greenness of the store’s interior, I could see spheres of warm light, and within these there seemed to be some life. We walked past several of these spheres, and I noted that while most of the people inside were dark and indistinct, at least one was more vivid than the rest and looking very much alive—the prisoner.

“She should be at Checkout Six,” said Friday, leading the way past a ten-foot-wide translucent yellow sphere that was centered on the chair outside the changing rooms. “That’s Reginald Danforth,” murmured Friday. “He assassinated Mahatma Winston Smith al Wazeed during his historic speech to the citizens of the World State in 3419. Looped for seven hundred and ninety-eight years in an eight-minute sliver of time where he’s waiting for his girlfriend, Trudi, to try on a camisole.”

“Does he know he’s looped?”

“Of course.”

I looked at Danforth, who was staring at the floor and clenching and unclenching his fists in frustration.

“How long’s he been in?”

“Thirty-four years. If he tells us who his co-conspirator was, we’ll enlarge his loop from eight minutes to fifteen.”

“Do you loop people just in stores?”

“We used to use dentists’ waiting rooms, bus stops and cinemas during Merchant-Ivory films, as these tended to be natural occurrences of slow time, but there were too many prisoners, so we had to design our own. Temporal-J, Maximum Security—why, what did you think T.J. Maxx was?”

“A place to buy designer-label clothing at reasonable prices?”

He laughed. “The very idea! Next you’ll be telling me that IKEA just sells furniture you have to build yourself.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Of course not. Here she is.”

We had approached the checkout, where a sphere of warm light about eighteen feet wide encompassed most of the till and a line of bored-looking shoppers. Right at the back of the queue was a familiar face: Aornis Hades, younger sister of Acheron. She was a Mnemonomorph—someone with the ability to control memories. I’d defeated her good and proper, twice in the real world and once in my head. She was slim, dark and attractive and dressed in the very latest fashion—but only from when she was looped seven years ago. Mind you, because of the vague meanderings of the fashion industry, she’d been in and out of high style twenty-seven times since then and was currently in—although she’d never know it. To a looped individual, time remains the same.

“You know she can control coincidences?”

“Not anymore,” replied Friday, with a grimness that I found disconcerting in one so young.

“Who are they?” I asked, pointing at the other women in the line for the checkout.

“They’re not prisoners—just real shoppers doing real shopping at the time of her enloopment; Miss Hades is stuck in an eight-minute zone waiting to pay for goods, but she never does. If it’s true what they say about her love of shopping, this punishment is particularly apt.”

“Do I have anything to bargain with?”

Friday looked at the file. “You can stretch her loop by twenty minutes.”

“How do I get to talk to her?”

“Just step inside the sphere of influence.”

I took a deep breath and walked into the globe of yellow light. All of a sudden, normality returned with a jerk. I was back in what seemed like real life. It was raining outside, which was what must have been happening when she was looped. Aornis, well used to the monotonous round of limited dialogue during her eight-minute existence, noticed me immediately.