The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [669]
“What do you mean?”
“That your Friday is removed and I take his place.”
“Define ‘removed.’”
Friday scratched his head.
“We’ve run several timestream models, and it looks good. I’m precisely the same age as him, and I’m what he would be like if he hadn’t gone down the bone-idle route. If ‘replacement’ isn’t a good word for you, why not think of it as just rectifying a small error in the Standard History Eventline.”
“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
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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 En gland 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 ser vice industry, which had