The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [665]
“Hi, Mum!”
“Hi, Sweetpea,” I said, deeply confused and also kind of relieved. This was the Friday I thought I was meant to have—clean-cut, well presented, confident and with an infectious smile that reminded me of Landen. And he probably bathed more than once a fortnight, too.
“How old are you?” I asked, placing a hand on his chin to make sure he was real, and not a phantasm or something, like Mycroft. He was real. Warm and still needing to shave only once a week.
“I’m sixteen, Mum, the same age as the lazy slob asleep at home. In a context that you’d understand, I’m a Potential Friday. I started with the Junior Time Scouts at thirteen and popped my first tube at fifteen—the youngest ever to do so. The Friday you know is the Friday Present. The older me that will hopefully be the director-general is the Friday Last, and because he’s indisposed due to a mild temporal ambiguity caused by the younger alternative me not joining the Time Scouts, Bendix reconstituted me from the echoes of the might-have-been. They asked me to see what I can do.”
“Nope,” I replied in some confusion, “didn’t understand a word.”
“It’s a split-timeline thing, Mum,” explained Friday, “in which two versions of the same person can exist at the same time.”
“So can’t you become the director-general at the other end of time?”
“Not that easy. The alternative timelines have to be in concurrence to go forward to a mutually compatible future.”
I understood—sort of.
“I guess this means you haven’t invented time travel yet?”
“Nope. Any idea why the other me is such a slouch?”
“I asked you to join the Time Scouts three years ago, but you couldn’t be bothered,” I murmured by way of explanation. “You were too busy playing on computer games and watching TV.”
“I don’t blame you or Dad. Something’s seriously out of joint, but I don’t know what. Friday Present seems to have the intelligence but not the pizzazz to want to do anything.”
“Except play the guitar in the Gobshites.”
“If you can call it playing,” said Friday with an unkind laugh.
“Don’t be so—” I checked myself. If this wasn’t self-criticism, I didn’t know what was.
All of a sudden, there was another Friday standing next to Potential Friday. He was identical, except he was carrying a manila folder. They looked at each other curiously. The newest Friday said “Sorry” in an embarrassed fashion and walked a little way down the corridor, where he pretended to be interested in the carved wood around the doorframe.
“This morning I only had one son,” I muttered despondently. “Now I’ve got three!”
Friday glanced at the second Friday over his shoulder, who was caught staring at us and quickly looked the other way. “You’ve only got one, Mum. Don’t worry about him.”
“So what’s gone wrong?” I asked. “Why is Friday Present so unlike Potential Friday?”
“It’s difficult to tell. This 2002 isn’t like the one in the Standard History Eventline. Everyone seems introspective and lacking in any sort of charisma. It’s as though a heavy sky is forcing lassitude on the population—in a word, a grayness seems to have spread across the land.”
“I know what you mean,” I said, shaking my head sadly. “We’ve seen a sixty percent drop in book readership; it seems no one can be bothered to invest their time in a good novel.”
“That would figure,” replied Friday thoughtfully. “It’s not supposed to be like this, I assure you—the best minds have it as the beginning of the Great Unraveling. If what we suspect is true and time travel isn’t invented in the next three and a half days, we might be heading toward a spontaneously accelerated inverse obliteration of all history.”
“Can you put that into a carpet metaphor I might understand?”
“If we can’t secure our existence right at the beginning, time will start to roll up like a carpet, taking history with it.”
“How fast?”
“It will begin slowly at 22:03 on Friday with the obliteration