Something rotten (34 page)

“I hope he’s up to it. What do you make of this?”

He handed me the solid, and I turned the grapefruit-size object over in my hands. Some of the faces were odd-sided and some even-sided—and some, strangely enough, appeared to be
both,
and my eyes had trouble making sense of it.

“Very . . . pretty,” I replied. “What does it do?”

“Do?” Mycroft smiled. “Put it on the worktop, and you’ll see what it do!”

I placed it on the surface, but the oddly shaped solid, unstable on the face I had placed it upon, tipped onto another. Then, after a moment’s pause, it wobbled again and fell onto a third. It carried on in this jerky fashion across the worktop until it fell against a screwdriver, where it stopped.

“I call it a Nextahedron,” announced Mycroft, picking up the solid and placing it on the floor, where it continued its random perambulations, watched by Pickwick, who thought it might be chasing her and ran away to hide. “Most irregular solids are only unstable on one or two faces. The Nextahedron is unstable on
all
its faces—it will continue to fall and tip until a solid object impedes its progress.”

“Fascinating!” I murmured, always surprised by the ingenuity of Mycroft’s inventions. “But what’s the point?”

“Well,” explained Mycroft, warming to the subject, “you know those inertial-generator things that self-wind a wristwatch?”

“Yes?”

“If we have a larger one of those inside a Nextahedron weighing six hundred tons, I calculate we could generate as much as a hundred watts of power.”

“But . . . but that’s only enough for a lightbulb!”

“Considering the input is nil, I think it’s a remarkable achievement,” replied Mycroft somewhat sniffily. “To generate significant quantities of power, we’d have to carve something of considerable mass—Mars, say—into a huge Nextahedron with a flat plate falling around the exterior, held firm by gravity. The power could be transmitted to Earth using Tesla beams and . . .”

His voice trailed off as he started to sketch ideas and equations in a small notebook. I watched the Nextahedron fall and rock and jiggle across the floor until it fell against a roll of wire.

“On a more serious note,” confided Polly, putting down her tea, “you could help us identify some of the devices in the workshop. Since both Mycroft and I have taken the Big Blank, you might be able to help.”

“I’ll try,” I said, looking around the room at the bizarre devices. “That one over there guesses how many pips there are in an unopened orange, the one with the horn is an Olfactrograph for measuring smells, and the small box thing there can change gold into lead.”

“What’s the point in that?”

“I’m not entirely sure.”

Polly made notes against her inventory, and I spent the next ten minutes trying to name as many of Mycroft’s inventions as I could. It wasn’t easy. He didn’t tell me everything.

“I’m not sure what this one is either,” I said, pointing at a small machine about the size of a telephone directory lying on a workbench.

“Oddly enough,” replied Polly, “this is one we do have a name for. It’s an Ovinator.”

“How do you know if you can’t remember?”

“Because,” said Mycroft, who had finished his notes and now rejoined us, “it has ‘Ovinator’ engraved on the case just there. We think it’s either a device for making eggs without the need of a chicken or for making chickens without the need of an egg. Or something else entirely. Here, I’ll switch it on.”

Mycroft flicked a switch and a small red light came on.

“Is that it?”

“Yes,” replied Polly, staring at the small and very unexciting metallic box thoughtfully.

“No sign of any eggs or chickens,” I observed.

“None at all,” sighed Mycroft. “It might just be a machine for making a red light come on. Drat my lost memory! Which reminds me: any idea which device actually
is
the memory eraser?”

We looked around the workshop at the odd and mostly anonymous contraptions. Any one of them might have been used to erase memories, but then any one of them might have been a device for coring apples, too.

We stood in silence for a moment.

“I still think you ought to have Smudger on defense,” said Polly, who was probably the biggest croquet fan in the house.

“You’re probably right,” I said, suddenly feeling that it would be easier just to go with the flow. “Uncle?”

“Polly knows best,” he replied. “I’m a bit tired. Who wants to watch
Name That Fruit!
on the telly?”

We all agreed that it would be a relaxing way to end the day, and I found myself watching the nauseating quiz show for the first time in my life. Halfway through, I realized just how bad it was and went to bed, temples aching.

30.

Neanderthal Nation

Neanderthals “of Use” at Politicians’ Training College

Neanderthals, the reengineered property of the Goliath Corporation, found unexpected employment at the Chipping Sodbury College for Politicians yesterday when four selected individuals were inducted as part of the Public Office Veracity Economics class. Neanderthals, whose high facial-acuity skills make them predisposed to noticing an untruth, are used by students to hone their lying skills—something that trainee politicians might find useful once in a position of office. “Man, those thals can spot everything!” declared Mr. Richard Dixon, a first-year student. “Nothing gets past them—even a mild embellishment or a tactical omission!” The lecturers at the college declared themselves wholly pleased with the neanderthals and privately admitted that “if the proletariat were even half as good at spotting lies, we’d really be in the soup!”

Article in
The Toad
(political section), July 4, 1988

T
he hunt for
At Long Last Lust
had been going on all morning, but with little success. Kaine had almost two years’ head start on us. Of the one hundred copies in the print run, sixty-two of them had changed hands within the past eighteen months. Initially they had been sold for modest sums of £1,000 or so, but there is nothing like a mystery buyer with deep pockets to push up the price, and the last copy sold was for £720,000 at Agatha’s Auction House—an unprecedented sum, even for a prewar Farquitt.

The likelihood of finding a copy of
Lust
was looking increasingly desperate. I called Farquitt’s agent, who said that the author’s entire library had been confiscated and the septuagenarian author questioned at length about pro-Danish political activism before being released. Even a visit to the Library of Farquitt in Didcot didn’t bear any fruit—both their original manuscript of
At Long Last Lust
and a signed copy had been seized by “government agents” nearly eighteen months before. The librarian met us in the sculpted marble hall and after telling us not to talk so loudly, reported that representative copies of all Farquitt’s works were packed and ready for removal “as soon as we wanted.” Bowden responded that we’d be heading towards the border just as soon as we finalized the details. He didn’t look at me as he said it, but I knew what he was thinking—I still needed to figure out a way to get us across the border.

We drove back to the LiteraTec office in silence, and as soon as we got in, I called Landen. My wedding ring, which had been appearing and disappearing all morning, had been solid for a good twenty minutes.

“Yo, Thursday!” he said enthusiastically. “What happened to you yesterday? We were talking, and you just went quiet.”

“Something came up.”

“Why don’t you come around for lunch? I’ve got fish fingers, beans and peas—with mashed banana and cream for pudding.”

“Have you been discussing the menu with Friday?”

“Whatever made you think that?”

“I’d love to, Land. But you’re still a bit existentially unstable at the moment, so I’d only end up embarrassing myself in front of your parents again—and I’ve got to go and meet someone to talk about Shakespeares.”

“Anyone I know?”

“Bartholomew Stiggins.”

“The neanderthal?”

“Yes.”

“Hope you like beetles. Call me when I exist next. I lo—”

The phone went dead. My wedding ring had gone again, too.

I listened to the dial tone for a moment, tapping the receiver thoughtfully on my forehead. “I love you too, Land,” I said softly.

“Your Welsh contact?” asked Bowden, walking up with a fax from the Karen Blixen Appreciation Society.

“Not exactly.”

“New players for the SuperHoop, then?”

“If only. Goliath and Kaine have frightened every player in the country except Penelope Hrah, who’ll play for food and doesn’t care what anyone says, thinks or does.”

“Didn’t she have a leg torn off during the Newport Strikers v. Dartmoor Wanderers semifinal a few years back?”

“I’m in no position to be choosy, Bowd. If I put her on back-hoop defense, she can just growl at anyone who comes close. Ready for lunch?”

The neanderthal population of Swindon numbered about three hundred, and they all lived in a small village to the west known as the Nation. Because of their tool-using prowess, they were just given six acres of land, water and sewage points and told to get on with it, as if they needed to be asked, which they didn’t.

The neanderthals were not humans nor descendants of ours, but cousins. They had evolved at the same time as us, then been forced into extinction when they failed to compete successfully with the more aggressive human. Brought back to life by Goliath BioEngineering in the late thirties and early forties, they were as much a part of modern life as dodos or mammoths. And since they had been sequenced by Goliath, each individual was actually owned by the corporation. A less-than-generous “buyback” scheme to enable one to purchase oneself hadn’t been well received.

We parked a little way down from the Nation and got out of the car.

“Can’t we just park inside?” asked Bowden.

“They don’t like cars,” I explained. “They don’t see the point in traveling any distance. According to neanderthal logic, anywhere that can’t be reached in a day’s walk isn’t worth visiting. Our neanderthal gardener used to walk the four miles to our house every Tuesday and then walk back again, resisting all offers of a lift. Walking was, he maintained, ‘the only decent way to travel—if you drive, you miss the conversations in the hedgerows.’ ”

“I can see his point,” replied Bowden, “but when I need to be somewhere in a hurry—”

“That’s the difference, Bowd. You’ve got to get off the human way of thinking. To neanderthals nothing is so urgent that it can’t be done another time—or not done at all. By the way, did you remember not to wash this morning?”

He nodded. Because scent is so important to neanderthal communications, the soapy cleanliness of humans reads more like some form of suspicious subterfuge. Speak to a neanderthal while wearing scent and he’ll instantly think you have something to hide.

We walked into the grassy entrance of the Nation and encountered a lone neanderthal sitting on a chair in the middle of the path. He was reading the large-print
Neanderthal News
. He folded up the paper and sniffed the air delicately before staring at us for a moment or two and then asking, “Whom do you wish to visit?”

“Next and Cable, lunch with Mr. Stiggins.”

The neanderthal stared at us for moment or two, then pointed us towards a house on the other side of a grassed open area that surrounded a totem representing I-don’t-know-what. There were five or six neanderthals playing a game of street croquet on the grass area, and I watched them intently for a while. They weren’t playing in teams, just passing the ball around and hooping where possible. They were excellent, too. I watched one player hoop from at least forty yards away off a roquet. It was a pity neanderthals were aggressively noncompetitive—I could have done with them on the team.

“Notice anything?” I asked as we walked across the grassed area, the croquet players moving past us in a blur of well-coordinated limbs.

“No children?”

“The youngest neanderthal is fifty-two,” I explained. “The males are infertile. It’s probably their biggest source of disagreement with their owners.”

“I’d be pissed off, too.”

We found Stiggins’s house, and I opened the door and walked straight in. I knew a bit about neanderthal customs, and you would never go into a neanderthal home unless you were expected—in which case you treated it as your own and walked in unannounced. The house was built entirely of scrap wood or recycled rubbish and was circular in shape, with a central hearth. It was comfortable and warm and cozy, but not the sort of basic cave I think Bowden expected. There was a TV and proper sofas, chairs and even a hi-fi. Standing next to the fire was Stiggins, and next to him was a slightly smaller neanderthal.

“Welcome!” said Stig. “This is Felicity—we are a partnership.”

His wife walked silently up to us and hugged us both in turn, taking an opportunity to smell us, first in the armpit and then in the hair. I saw Bowden flinch, and Stig gave a small, grunty cough that was a neanderthal laugh.

“Mr. Cable, you are uncomfortable,” observed Stig.

Bowden shrugged. He
was
uncomfortable, and he knew neanderthals well enough to know that you can’t lie to them.

“I am,” he replied. “I’ve never been in a neanderthal house before.”

“Is it any different to yours?”

“Very,” said Bowden, looking up at the construction of the roof beams, which had been made by gluing oddments of wood together and then planing them into shape.

“Not a single wood screw or bolt, Mr. Cable. Have you heard the noise wood makes when you turn a screw into it? Most uncharitable.”

“Is there anything you don’t make yourself?”

“Not really. You are insulting the raw material if you do not extract all possible use from it. Any cash we earn has to go to our buyback scheme. We may be able to afford our ownership papers by the time we are due to leave.”