Something Rotten

Swindon’s mysterious seabird asphalt-smotherer has struck again, this time a stormy petrel found in an alleyway off Commercial Road. The unnamed bird was discovered yesterday covered in a thick glutinous coating that forensic scientists later confirmed as crude oil. This is the seventh such attack in less than a week and the Swindon police are beginning to take notice. “This has been the seventh attack in less than a week,” declared a Swindon policeman this morning, “and we are beginning to take notice.” The inexplicable seabird tarrer has so far not been seen, but an expert from the NSPB told the police yesterday that the suspect would probably have a displacement of 280,000 tons, be covered in rust and be floundering on a nearby rock. Despite numerous searches by police in the area, a suspect of this description has not yet been found.

Article in the Swindon Daily Eyestrain, July 18, 1988

It was the following morning. I was sitting at the kitchen table staring at my ring finger and the complete absence of a wedding band. Mum walked in wrapped in a dressing gown and with her hair in curlers, fed DH-82, let Alan out of the broom cupboard, where we had to keep him these days, and pushed the delinquent dodo outside with a mop. He made an angry plinking noise, then attacked the bootscraper.

“What’s wrong, sweetheart?”

“It’s Landen.”

“Who?”

“My husband. He was reactualized last night, but only for about two hours.”

“My poor darling! That must be very awkward.”

“Awkward. Extremely. I climbed naked into bed with Mr. and Mrs. Parke-Laine.”

My mother went ashen and dropped a saucer. “Did they recognize you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Thank the GSD for that!” she gasped, greatly relieved. Being embarrassed in public was something she cared to avoid more than anything else, and having a daughter climbing into bed with patrons of the Swindon Toast League was probably the biggest faux pas she could think of.

“Good morning, pet,” said Mycroft, shuffling into the kitchen and sitting down at the breakfast table. He was my extraordinarily brilliant inventor uncle and apparently had just returned from the 1988 Mad Scientists’ Conference, or MadCon-88, as it was known.

“Uncle,” I said, probably with less enthusiasm than I should, “how good to see you again!”

“And you, my dear,” he said kindly. “Back for good?”

“I’m not sure,” I replied, thinking about Landen. “Aunt Polly well?”

“The very best of health. We’ve been to MadCon—I was given a Lifetime Achievement Award for something, but for the life of me I can’t think what, or why.”

It was a typically Mycroft statement. Despite his undoubted brilliance, he never thought he was doing anything particularly clever or useful—he just liked to tinker with ideas. It was his Prose Portal invention that got me inside books in the first place. He had set up home in the Sherlock Holmes canon to escape Goliath but had remained stuck there until I rescued him about a year ago.

“Did Goliath ever bother you again?” I asked. “After you came back, I mean?”

“They tried,” he replied softly, “but they didn’t get anything from me.”

“You wouldn’t tell them anything?”

“No. It was better than that. I couldn’t. You see, I can’t remember a single thing about any of the inventions they wanted me to talk about.”

“How is that possible?”

“Well,” replied Mycroft, taking a sip of tea, “I’m not sure, but, logically speaking, I must have invented a memory-erasure device or something and used it selectively on myself and Polly—what we call the Big Blank. It’s the only possible explanation.”

“So you can’t remember how the Prose Portal actually works?”

“The what?”

“The Prose Portal. A device for entering fiction.”

“They were asking me about something like that, now you mention it. It’s very intriguing to try to redevelop it, but Polly says I shouldn’t. My lab is full of devices, the purpose of which I haven’t the foggiest notion about. An Ovinator, for example—it’s clearly something to do with eggs—but what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, perhaps it’s all for the best. These days I only work for peaceful means. Intellect is worthless if it isn’t for the betterment of us all.”

“I’ll agree with you on that one. What work were you presenting to MadCon-88?”

“Theoretical Nextian Mathematics, mostly,” replied Mycroft, warming to the subject dearest to his heart—his work. “I told you all about Nextian Geometry, didn’t I?”

I nodded.

“Well, Nextian Number Theory is very closely related to that, and in its simplest form allows me to work backwards to discover the original sum from which the product is derived.”

“Eh?”

“Well, say you have the numbers 12 and 16. You multiply them together and get 192, yes? Well, in conventional maths, if you were given the number 192, you would not know how that number was arrived at. It might just as easily have been 3 times 64 or 6 times 32 or even 194 minus 2. But you couldn’t tell just from looking at the number alone, now, could you?”

“I suppose not.”

“You suppose wrong,” said Mycroft with a smile. “Nextian Number Theory works in an inverse fashion from ordinary maths—it allows you to discover the precise question from a stated answer.”

“And the practical applications of this?”

“Hundreds.” He pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and passed it over. I unfolded it and found a simple equation written upon it: 2^216,091 minus 1, or 2 raised to the power of 216,091, minus 1.

“It looks like a big number.”

“It’s a medium-size number,” he corrected.

“And?”

“Well, if I were to give you a short story of ten thousand words, instructed you to give a value for each letter and punctuation mark and then wrote them down, you’d get a number with sixty-five thousand or so digits. All you need to do then is to find a simpler way of expressing it. Using a branch of Nextian Maths that I call FactorZip, we can reduce any size number to a short, notated style.”

I looked at the equation in my hand again. “So this is . . . ?”

“A FactorZipped Sleepy Hollow. I’m working on reducing all the books ever written to an equation less than fifty digits long. Makes you think, eh? Instead of buying a newspaper every day, you’d simply jot down today’s equation and pop it in your Nexpanding Calculator to read it.”

“Ingenious!” I breathed.

“It’s still early days, but I hope one day to be able to predict a cause simply by looking at the event. And after that, trying to construct unknown questions from known answers.”

“Such as?”

“Well, the answer ‘Good Lord no, quite the reverse.’ I’ve always wanted to know the question to that.”

“Right,” I replied, still trying to figure out how you’d know by looking at the number nine that it had got there by being three squared or the square root of eighty-one.

“Isn’t it just?” he said with a smile, thanking my mother for the bacon and eggs she had just put down in front of him.

Lady Hamilton’s departure at eight-thirty was really sad only for Hamlet. He went into a glowering mood and made up a long soliloquy about his heart that was aching fit to break and how cruel a fate life’s hand had dealt him. He said that Emma was his one true love and her departure made his life bereft; a life that had little meaning and would be better ended—and so on and so forth until eventually Emma had to interrupt him and thank him but she really must go or else she’d be late for something she couldn’t specify. So he then screamed abuse at her for five minutes, told her she was a whore and marched out, muttering something about being a chameleon. With him gone we could all get on with our good-byes.

“Good-bye, Thursday,” said Emma, holding my hand. “You’ve always been very kind to me. I hope you get your husband back. Would you permit me to afford you a small observation that I think might be of help?”

“Of course.”

“Don’t let Smudger dominate the forward hoop positions. He works best in defense, especially if backed up by Biffo—and play offensively if you want to win.”

“Thank you,” I said slowly, “you’re very kind.”

I gave her a hug, and my mother did, too—a tad awkwardly, as she had never fully divested herself of the suspicion that Emma had been carrying on with Dad. Then, a moment later, Emma vanished—which must be what it was like when Father arrives and stops the clock for other people.

“Well,” said my mother, wiping her hands on her apron, “that’s her gone. I’m glad she got her husband back.”

“Yes,” I agreed somewhat diffidently, and walked off to find Hamlet. He was outside, sitting on the bench in the rose garden, deep in thought.

“You okay?” I asked, sitting down next to him.

“Tell me truthfully, Miss Next. Do I dither?”

“Well—not really.”

“Truthfully now!”

“Perhaps . . . a bit.”

Hamlet gave a groan and buried his face in his hands.

“Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I! A slave to this play with contradictions so legion that scholars write volumes attempting to explain me. One moment I love Ophelia, the next I treat her cruelly. I am by turns a petulant adolescent and a mature man, a melancholy loner and a wit telling actors their trade. I cannot decide whether I’m a philosopher or a moping teenager, a poet or a murderer, a procrastinator or a man of action. I might be truly mad or sane pretending to be mad or even mad pretending to be sane. By all accounts my father was a war-hungry monster—was Claudius’s act of assassination so bad after all? Did I really see a ghost of my father or was it Fortinbras in disguise, trying to sow discord within Denmark? How long did I spend in England? How old am I? I’ve watched sixteen different film adaptations of Hamlet and two plays, read three comic books and listened to a wireless adaptation. Everything from Olivier to Gibson to Barrymore to William Shatner in Conscience of the King.”

“And?”

“Every single one of them is different.”

He looked around in quiet desperation for his skull, found it, and then stared at it meditatively for a few moments before continuing. “Do you have any idea the pressure I’m under being the world’s leading dramatic enigma?”

“It must be intolerable.”

“It is. I’d feel worse if anyone else had figured me out—but they haven’t. Do you know how many books there are about me?”

“Hundreds?”

“Thousands. And the slanders they write! The Oedipal thing is by far the most insulting. The good-night kiss with Mum has got longer and longer. That Freud fellow will have a bloody nose if ever I meet him. My play is a complete and utter mess—four acts of talking and one of action. Why does anyone trouble to watch it?”

His shoulders sagged and he appeared to sob quietly to himself. I rested a hand on his shoulder.

“It is your complexity and philosophical soul-searching that we pay money to see—you are the quintessential tragic figure, questioning everything, dissecting all life’s shames and betrayals. If all we wanted was action, we’d watch nothing but Chuck Norris movies. It is your journey to resolving your demons that makes the play the prevaricating tour de force that it is.”

“All four and a half hours of it?”

“Yes,” I said, wary of his feelings, “all four and a half hours of it.”

He shook his head sadly.

“I wish I could agree with you but I need more answers, Horatio.”

“Thursday.”

“Yes, her, too. More answers and a new facet to my character. Less talk, more action. So I have secured the services . . . of a conflict-resolution consultant.”

This didn’t sound good at all.

“Conflict resolution? Are you sure that’s wise?”

“It might help me resolve matters with my uncle—and that twit Laertes.”

I thought for a moment. An all-action Hamlet might not be such a good idea, but since he had no play to return to, it at least gave me a few days’ breathing space. I decided not to intervene for the time being.

“When are you talking to him?”

He shrugged. “Tomorrow. Or perhaps the day after. Conflict-resolution advisers are pretty busy, you know.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. True to form, Hamlet was still dithering. But he had brightened up, having come to a decision of sorts, and continued in a more cheery tone. “But that’s enough about me. How goes it with you?”

I gave him a brief outline, beginning with Landen’s reeradication and ending with the importance of finding five good players to help Swindon win the SuperHoop.

“Hmm,” he replied as soon as I had finished. “I’ve got a plan for you. Want to hear it?”

“As long as it’s not about where Biffo should play.”

He shook his head, looked around carefully and then lowered his voice. “Pretend to be mad and talk a lot. Then—and this is the important bit—do nothing at all until you absolutely have to and then make sure everyone dies.”

“Thanks,” I said at length, “I’ll remember that.”

“Plink!” said Alan, who had been padding grumpily around the garden.

“I think that bird is looking for trouble,” observed Hamlet.

Alan, who clearly didn’t like Hamlet’s attitude, decided to attack and made a lunge at Hamlet’s shoe. It was a bad move. The Prince of Denmark leapt up, drew his sword and, before I could stop him, made a wild slash in Alan’s direction. He was a skilled swordsman and did no more damage than to pluck the feathers off the top of Alan’s head. The little dodo, who now had a bald patch, opened his eyes wide and looked around him with a mixture of horror and awe at the small feathers that were floating to the ground.

“Any more from you, my fine feathered friend,” announced Hamlet, replacing his sword, “and you’ll be in the curry!”

Pickwick, who had been watching from a safe corner near the compost heap, boldly strode out and stood defiantly between Alan and Hamlet. I’d never seen her acting brave before, but I suppose Alan was her son, even if he was a hooligan. Alan, either terrified or incensed, stood completely motionless, beak open.

“Telephone for you,” my mother called out. I walked into the house and picked up the receiver. It was Aubrey Jambe. He wanted me to speak to my old coach Alf Widdershaine to get him out of retirement and also to know if I had found any new players yet.

“I’m working on it,” I said, rummaging through the Yellow Pages under “Sports Agents.” “I’ll call you back. Don’t lose hope, Aubrey.”

He harrumphed and rang off. I called Wilson Lonsdale & Partners, England’s top sports agents, and was delighted to hear there were any number of world-class croquet players available; sadly, the interest evaporated when I mentioned which team I represented.

“Swindon?” said one of Lonsdale’s associates. “I’ve just remembered—we don’t have anyone on our books at all.”

“I thought you said you had?”

“It must have been a clerical error. Good day.”

The phone went dead. I called several others and received a similar response from all of them. Goliath and Kaine were obviously covering all their bases.

Following that, I called Alf Widdershaine and, after a long chat, managed to persuade him to go down to the stadium and do what he could. I called Jambe back to tell him the good news about Alf, although I thought it prudent to hide the lack of new players from him for the time being.

I thought about Landen’s existence problem for a moment and then found the number of Julie Aseizer, the woman at Eradications Anonymous who had got her husband back. I called her and explained the situation.

“Oh, yes!” she said helpfully. “My Ralph flickered on and off like a faulty lightbulb until his uneradication held!”

I thanked her and put the phone down, then checked my finger for a wedding ring. It still wasn’t there.

I glanced into the garden and saw Hamlet walking on the lawn, deep in thought—with Alan following him at a safe distance. As I watched, Hamlet turned to him and glared. The small dodo went all sheepish and laid his head on the ground in supplication. Clearly Hamlet wasn’t just a fictional Prince of Denmark but also something of an alpha dodo.

I smiled to myself and wandered into the living room where I found Friday building a castle out of bricks with Pickwick helping. Of course, “helping” in this context meant “watching.” I glanced at the clock. Time for work. Just when I could do with some relaxing brick-building therapy. Mum agreed to look after Friday and I gave him a kiss good-bye.

“If those are rude Old English words, St. Zvlkx is in a lot of trouble—and so are you, my little fellow. Mum, sure you’re okay?”

“Of course. We’ll take him to the zoo.”

“Good. No, wait—we?”

“Bismarck and I.”

“Mum!?”

“What? Is there any reason a more or less widowed woman can’t have a bit of male company from time to time?”

“Well,” I stammered, feeling unnaturally shocked for some reason. “I suppose no reason at all.”

“Good. Be off with you. After we’ve gone to the zoo we might drop in at the tea rooms. And then the theater.”

She had started to go all dreamy so I left, shocked not only that Mother might be even considering some sort of a fling with Bismarck, but that Joffy might have been right.