The Woman Who Died a Lot

And we set to squabbling after that, mostly about young people not being responsible, and that “being dead in under an hour” is no excuse for anything, and that Gavin should jolly well be more careful because he won’t be around after today, and then Tuesday said that she wanted something to remember him by and if that was a child with superior intellect and his nose— which was quite good, as it happened—then she jolly well would, and besides she was sixteen, and lots of people she knew got pregnant at sixteen, and didn’t we want her to have a normal life and be a normal person and do dumb teenage things so she was a real person and so on and so forth until Landen yelled:

“STOP!”

And we did.

“Have you seen the time?”

“Shit,” said Gavin, staring at the homemade atomic clock on Tuesday’s wall. “I’m not dead. How did that happen?”

He was right. It was 14 02 and twenty-six seconds. Destiny had not been fulfilled. We all looked at one another, confused.

“What happens now?” asked Gavin. “Shoot me dead and apologize to destiny for being late?”

“No,” replied Friday. “It hasn’t happened because it wasn’t meant to happen—and if we don’t fix this right now, it will never happen, and Gavin will murder those agents in the future, and Goliath will succeed in coercing HR-6984 into our path.”

It was Landen who broke the empty confused silence.

“I’ve an idea,” he said. “What if everything we know right now is entirely consistent with the eventline? Gavin is killed and Friday goes to prison and the ChronoGuard serial killer is still active thirty-seven years from now? That the Letters of Destiny will happen exactly as stated?”

“Great Scott,” said Friday, looking at us all with a shocked expression. “Gavin and I have been set up. I was being tricked into killing him: I kill Gavin, I go to prison, the ChronoGuard members are still murdered, and the whole plan carries on as normal. They relied on me to fulfill my destiny and to do it without question. The whole thing makes total sense. Even if I had killed Gavin, nothing would have changed—because that slimy piece of shit over there is the wrong Gavin!”

“There’s another Gavin Watkins?” asked Landen.

“Probably dozens. But there’s only one other who would have been ChronoGuard, and he’s the sixteenth man. All they had to do was swap over the Letters of Destiny.”

He held up a copy of Gavin’s summary.

“This isn’t you. You’re not going to die, and I’m not going to kill you.”

Gavin looked triumphant “I told you I’d never buy a Vauxhall.”

“Exactly. But killing you would have fulfilled my destiny. All that remained after that is for Goliath to train up the other Gavin Watkins. Brainwash him, pay him off, coerce him— whatever it takes—to murder all those ChronoGuard. My future self was leaving provision to save everyone, and the future Goliath was doing all they could to thwart me. And they almost succeeded.”

There was a pause.

“Okay,” I said, “just supposing all this does make sense, where is the other Gavin Watkins? And how can you kill him three minutes ago?”

“Given the timescale,” said Friday, “only one possible place.”

“Liddington,” I murmured.

“Right,” said Friday, “all that ‘Swindon Time Zone’ nonsense means that only Liddington is running on Swindon time—and that’s seven minutes behind Greenwich. I’ve got”— he looked at his watch—“three minutes and eight seconds to find him. And you know what? I will. It’s my destiny—and his. Tuesday? We need an address.”

He ran out the door, and I ran with him, and within a minute we were on the road back into town. Tuesday rang me with an address as we drove past the signs declaiming cartographic independence on the edge of the village, and I gave Friday the directions. A few moments later, we screeched to a halt before an ordinary-looking house. Friday jumped out, ran up the garden path and opened the front door with myself close behind. We found a young man of no more than eighteen, standing in the hallway reading his mail. There was a suitcase on the floor; it looked as though he had just returned from a trip.

“Gavin Watkins?” said Friday, glancing at his watch. I checked, too. There was one minute and twenty-six seconds to go.

“Yes?”

“My name’s Friday Next, and I’m going to kill you.”

“Ah,” said Liddington-Gavin, showing us his freshly opened Letter of Destiny, “I’ve just been reading about you. Why has that woman only got one arm?”

“It’s a long story,” I said.

Friday explained what he had to do and why he had to do it as the other Gavin Watkins listened quietly. Friday told him about the murders that Gavin would commit and that Friday was sacrificing his own freedom but saving the murdered ChronoGuard, 7 billion people and an agreeably pleasant yet somewhat taken-for-granted blue planet. When he had stopped, there was a pause. Gavin looked at Friday, then at the gun he was pointing at him, then at the clock.