The Woman Who Died a Lot

“Oh—right. Well, I need someone to cover my back.” “Is it illegal?”

“Quite possibly.”

“Might I have to kill someone?”

“I’m hoping not,” I said, “but can’t guarantee it.”

There was a pause, and I could sense her reticence. The last time I’d asked her for help, we had—technically speaking at least—sexually assaulted a Goliath Top One Hundred at gunpoint, a consequence of which Judith Trask had been murdered.

“It will involve causing a serious amount of grief for Goliath,” I said, “not to mention humiliation and a potential hundred million-pound loss.”

“Ah!” said Phoebe in a happier tone. “I’m in.”

I told her where to position herself, but after that there was little to do except wait, so once I’d checked that Gavin and Tuesday were working on U_c— they were, I was relieved to find—I made myself a coffee out of habit, then realized I couldn’t drink it, so I smelled it instead. I was amused, in an abstract kind of way, to discover that I could not tell only which country the coffee came from but also the probable region and year of cultivation. I then tuned the wireless to Toad-AM and listened to Lydia Startright’s live broadcast from just outside the Smite Zone. Little seemed to have changed— Lupton Cornball of Goliath came on air to reiterate the lie that the murderers were all willing adherents to their own destruction—and after that I listened to a spokesperson for the GSD, who confirmed that Joffy would indeed be in the cathedral at the Time of Smite and that a last-minute reprieve of the smiting had been turned down due to issues regarding infallibility.

I paced around the kitchen for the next hour and a half, interrupted variously by either Millon, who was still cramming for his hermiting certificate and who wanted testing on logical positivism, or the Wingco, who despite Tuesday’s expectations had been receiving sporadic images all morning from the Dark Reading Matter through Daphne the dodo’s buffer, which was still transmitting sporadically.

I told him I had a moment, so he showed Landen and me the images that had been sent back. The pictures were again fuzzy and indistinct and difficult to interpret. I could see what I thought were mountains and streams and clouds and a unicorn or two, then explosions and large tracked vehicles.

“Do those look like battle tanks to you?” said Landen.

“I’ve been watching glimpses of conflict all morning,” replied the Wingco. “Things don’t look good in there.”

“Can we get another dodo inside to see some more?”

“Interesting point. I spoke to the Swindon Dodo Fanciers Club, who tell me that pre-V2 dodos have almost four times the sensory bit rate and a larger buffer. If we could get a Version Two or lower in there, we might get some better images—and sound.”

“You wouldn’t get a Version Two in any condition these days for less than half a million,” I replied, a comment that reflected the greatly increasing value of early home-builds.

“It was just an idea,” replied the Wingco, “but a sound one. I would even volunteer to take it myself.”

“How would you enter the DRM?” I asked.

He gave a few instances of how it might be done, and I froze as a sudden thought struck me. Jack Schitt’s inexplicable behavior of late—in having an assistant destroy the pages with the lost works of Homer written beneath the later, crappier works— might not be so inexplicable after all, and it might just explain why the pro-literature Krantz was so willing to help us by supplying Day Players on a regular basis.

“By the Gods,” I murmured. “I think I know what Jack Schitt and Goliath are up to.”

The Wingco and Landen looked at me.

“Krantz worked for decades on the Book Project at Goliath, and it was his love of literature and the written word that set him on his self-destructive course.”

“I hope you’re not going to do one of those bullshit ‘I’ll tell you more when I know for sure’ deals,” said Landen. “That could be a serious annoyance.”

“Not at all,” I replied. “As the Wingco will tell you, travel to the Dark Reading Matter is a one-way journey. You can never get back. Unless you have one of these.” I pointed to myself.

“A left breast?” said Landen.

“No, clot, a Day Player. What I’m walking around in here might have been designed to be a twenty-four-hour disposable office worker or soldier, but it’s also the perfect way of getting into the Dark Reading Matter.”

I paused for a moment, waiting for this to filter in.

“Nope,” said Landen, “not getting this at all.”

“Okay, let’s start with his apparent escape from the Lobsterhood. He didn’t fast descend to escape and he didn’t BASE jump. He read his way into the lost work on the palimpsest. He then had his confederate destroy the pages. It was the only copy, so, once destroyed, the now-deleted work entered the Dark Reading Matter, with Jack in it.”

They stood and stared at me in silence.

“Jack could read himself into a book?” said Landen. “I thought that was something only you could do?”