“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You want to murder my son and replace him with yourself? I only met you ten minutes ago.”
“I’m your son, Mum. Every memory, good or bad is as much a part of me as it is the Friday at home. You want me to prove it? Who else knows about the BookWorld? One of your best friends is Melanie Bradshaw, who’s a gorilla. It’s true she let me climb all over the furniture and swing from the light fixtures. I can speak Courier Bold and Lorem Ipsum and even unpeel a banana with my feet—want me to show you?”
“No,” I said. “I accept that you’re my son. But you can’t kill the other Friday—he’s done nothing wrong. I won’t let you.”
“Mum! Which Friday would you rather have? The feckless, lazy ass or me?”
“You don’t understand what it is to be a mother, Friday. The answer’s no. I’ll take the Friday I’m dealt.”
“I thought you might say that,” he said in a harsher manner. “I’ll report back to Scintilla, but if the ChronoGuard feels there’s no alternative, we might decide to go ahead anyway—with or without your permission.”
“I think we’ve spoken enough,” I said, keeping my anger at bay. “Do one thing for me: Tell me how long you think I have until they might take that action.”
He shrugged. “Forty-eight hours?”
“Promise?”
“I promise,” said Friday. “By the way, have you told Dad about all your Jurisfiction work? You said you were going to.”
“I will—soon, I promise. Good-bye, darling.”
And I kissed him again and walked away, boiling with inner rage. Fighting with the ChronoGuard was like fighting city hall. You couldn’t win. Every way I looked at it, Friday’s days were numbered. But, paradoxically, they weren
’t—the Friday I had just spoken to was the one I was meant to have and the one I’d met in the future, the one who made sure he escaped Landen’s eradication and the one who whipped up the timephoon in the Dark Ages to cover up St. Zvlkx’s illegal time fraud. I rubbed my head. Time travel was like that—full of impossible paradoxes that defied explanation and made theoretical physicists’ brains turn to something resembling guacamole. But at least I still had two days to figure out a way to save the lazy good-for-nothing loafer that was my son. Before then, though, I needed to find out just how Goliath had managed to send a probe into fiction.
19.
The Goliath Corporation
The Isle of Man had been an independent corporate state within England since it was appropriated for the greater fiscal good in 1963. It had hospitals and schools, a university, its own fusion reactor and also, leading from Douglas to Kennedy Graviport in New York, the world’s only privately run Gravitube. The Isle of Man was home to almost two hundred thousand people who did nothing but support, or support the support, of the one enterprise that dominated the small island: the Goliath Corporation.
I hopped on the Skyrail at the Brunel Shopping Centre and went the three stops to Swindon’s Clary-LaMarr Travelport, where I caught the bullet train to Saknussemm International. From there I jumped on the next Overmantle Gravitube with seconds to spare and was at James Tarbuck Graviport in Liverpool in a journey time of just over an hour. The country’s hyperefficient public transport network was the Commonsense Party’s greatest achievement so far. Very few people used cars for journeys over ten miles these days. The system had its detractors, of course—the car-parking consortiums were naturally appalled, as was the motorway service industry, which had taken the extraordinary step of producing decent food in order to win back customers.
I made good use of the time by calling Landen and telling him all about the alternative Friday’s offer: to replace our idle and mostly bedridden headbanger of a son with a well-groomed, upright and responsible member of society, and Landen had agreed with me—that we’d keep the smelly one we had, thank you very much. Once I’d tubed to Tarbuck, I took the high-speed Ekrano-plane all the way to the distinctly unimaginatively titled Goliathopolis on what had once been the Isle of Man. Despite losing nearly everything during the dramatic St. Zvlkx adventure back in 1988, the vast multinational had staged an impressive comeback—mostly, it was said, by hiding its net worth and filing for bankruptcy on a subsidiary company that conveniently emerged from the distant past to take a lot of the flak. Timefoolery was suggested, but despite an investigation by the ChronoGuard’s Fiscal Chronuption Unit, which looked very closely at such matters, no wrongdoing had been found—or could be proved. After that it didn’t take long for the corporation to reestablish itself, and Goliathopolis was once again the Hong Kong of the Western Hemisphere, a forest of glassy towers striding up the hillside toward Snaefell.
Even before we left the dock at Tarbuck International, I had the idea that I was being watched. As the Goliath ground-effect transport jetted across the Irish Sea, several of the Goliath employees on the craft looked at me cautiously, and when I sat down in the coffee shop, the people near me moved away. It was kind of flattering, really, but since I had trounced the corporation in the very biggest way possible at least once, they clearly regarded me as something of a threat. How big a threat was revealed to me when we docked at Goliathopolis forty minutes later. There was a welcoming committee already waiting for me. But I don’t mean “welcoming committee” in the ironic sense of large men with no necks and blackjacks—they had laid out the red carpet, bedecked the jetty with bunting and put on a baton-twirling demonstration by the Goliathopolis Majorettes. More important, the entire upper echelons of Goliath management had turned out to greet me, which included the president, John Henry Goliath V, and a dozen or so of his executive officers, all of whom had a look of earnest apprehension etched upon their pasty faces. As someone who’d cost the company dearly over the past two decades, I was clearly feared—and possibly even revered.
“Welcome back to Goliathopolis,” said John Henry politely, shaking my hand warmly. “I hope that your stay is a happy one and that what ever brings you here can be a matter of mutual concern. I hardly need to stress the respect in which we hold you and would hate that you might find reason to act upon us without first entertaining the possibility of a misunderstanding.”
He was a large man. It looked as though someone had handed his parents a blueprint of a baby and told them to scale it up by a factor of one and a quarter.
“This is a joke, right?”
“On the contrary, Ms. Next. Based on past experiences, we have decided that complete and utter disclosure is the only policy worth pursuing as far as your good self is concerned.”
“You’ll excuse me if I remain unconvinced by your perceived honesty.”
“It’s not honesty, Ms. Next. You personally cost us over a hundred billion pounds in lost revenue, so we regard our openness as a sound business strategy—albeit of an abstract nature. Because of this, there is no door closed to you, no document unreadable, no member to whom you may not speak. I hope I am candid?”
“Very,” I replied, put off my guard by the corporation’s attitude. “I have a matter I’d like to discuss with you.”
“Naturally,” replied John Henry. “The majorettes would like to perform, if that’s all right with you?”
“Of course.”
So we watched the majorettes march up and down for twenty minutes to music of the Goliath Brass Band, and when it was over, I was driven in John Henry’s Bentley toward the Goliath head office, a mighty 110-story building right at the heart of Goliathopolis.
“Your son and family are well?” asked John Henry, who aside from a few more gray hairs didn’t seem to have aged a great deal since we last met. He fixed me with his piercing green eyes and poured on the natural charm he’d been blessed with.