Oddjobs 2: This Time It's Personnel Page 13

  Plaits thought for a second and then understood. Vivian was there. Professor Omar too. There was a line of symbols, unreadable from this distance and angle, along the floor: a barrier that only some could cross. Originals.

  “Balls,” she said with feeling. “I’m a bloody copy.”

  It was a gut punch of a discovery. It had been almost acceptable, funny even, when there had been a half dozen of them and none of them had known which of them was real. But, to discover that you were a fake, less than a day old, as significant and as durable as a person’s shadow… Well, that was just a steaming pile of shite.

  And Omar had painted a magic line that would erase her the moment she tried to escape. Bastards, the lot of them.

  “So, that’s it,” she said grimly to herself.

  Plaits took herself away a distance, far from the view of the real-world gits, found a reasonably inoffensive pillar to slump against and sulkily considered her lot.

  A strong part of her argued that she wasn’t meant to exist, that, despite the thirty years’ worth of baggage in her head, she had barely existed any time at all and that she should simply run at Omar’s death barrier and have done with it. She stood up, her decision made. She then discovered she still had half of a bacon bap in her pocket. So, she ate that first. And even though it was cold, it was delicious.

  “Bhul,” she swore.

  Copy or not, bacon was better than death. She wanted to live.

  “Options.”

  Taking the glass daggers with her, Plaits set off into the maze of aisles and mashed-up worlds, to seek inspiration and make choices. Walking gave her thinking space and, within the hour, she had four basic choices. She could kill herself by stepping into the barrier. She could stay here and hide, try to forage some sort of secret existence in the Vault. She could try to draw the attention of the consular mission staff and throw herself on their mercy (whether they would attempt to free her, destroy her or keep her in there as their pet Morag was debatable). Her fourth option was to free herself, find a way out of these pocket dimensions and back into the real world without crossing Omar’s kill barrier.

  This fourth option naturally appealed. It offered a return to her old life (albeit one that already had another Morag in it) and it would be done on her own terms. Of course, she had no idea how it could be accomplished.

  She explored the copy universes as well as one might without any map or point of reference. There was the possibility that some had expanded sufficiently to include other areas of the Library building or the wider city. She’d be ecstatic if any of them had reached as far as the coffee shop in the ground floor concourse. She could murder a donut or a Belgian bun.

  When that exploration proved fruitless, she considered other ways out. She levered up floor tiles and then climbed on a table and pulled down ceiling tiles, hoping against hope to find a way through ceiling or floor into notional levels above or below. Solid concrete and a lack of tools to cut through it put paid to that idea.

  In her wandering, she eventually found the remains of the Berry Mound vase. Here, where universes had been vomited out one after the other, the edges between realities were still pressed so closely together that looking in any direction was like staring into a smashed mirror. Nonetheless, with the vase destroyed, there had been a certain amount of natural settling and the epicentre, containing shards of pottery and the shelves of OOPArts where the vase had been stored, was at least a definable space in which she could stand without danger of falling into other worlds.

  A practical, physical escape appeared impossible. Calling on the powers of the Venislarn might be her last recourse. She looked at the shelves and, thoughtfully, picked up the pabash kaj doll.

  Nina produced a roll of semi-transparent plastic with a small ta-da.

  “What’s this?” said Paula.

  “Stick-on glass frosting,” said Nina. “You can help put it up. No more looking at people outside the window.”

  “What’s happening to my window?” asked Barbara.

  “Nothing, Barbara. It’s dinner time now,” said Nina. “Come on, what are you having?”

  The old lady waddled over to the printer.

  “Faces.”

  “Pick mine,” said Eunice. “Go on. Pick mine.”

  “Have they changed the menu, dear?” asked Barbara.

  “Hospital cuts again, I’m afraid,” said Nina, pushing buttons. “It’s a choice of fried Marco, roasted Paula, Angie au gratin, fricasseed Nina or … Eunice tartare.”

  In the printer tray, extruded from minced and then reconstituted meats, a face began to form.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Eunice.

  “Eye of the beholder, man,” said Marco, less than convinced, and began to unroll the frosting.

  Vivian took Morag to the office on the seventh floor and insisted on presenting her with a cup of tea. She ignored Morag’s argument that she was fine and, if anything, was in need of something stronger than tea. (Morag mentioned a “nasty” bottle of Merlot that she had at home that would apparently “do the trick”.) She certainly did not permit Morag to make her own cup of tea; Morag’s abilities in that area were entirely deficient. And, because Vivian was a civilised human being and knew some form of thanks was in order, she invited Professor Omar and his assistant, Maurice, to join them.

  Four cups of tea. They sat in a meeting room and drank, for the most part, in silence. Vivian chose to ignore the critical eye Maurice gave to the colour of the tea as she poured and the disapproving twist of his lips as he drank. The man was incorrect in his opinions but she had no need to point that out to him.

  “Of course,” observed Professor Omar, “now that you have untold spare universes in your basement, you will also have additional – dare I say redundant – copies of numerous artefacts.”

  “Your payment,” said Vivian, “is an invitation to interview on Thursday. Nothing more.”

  “I wasn’t suggesting otherwise,” said Omar suavely.

  “I worried what might happen if the effect reached the Bloody Big Book,” said Morag. “A book that contains literally everything and an effect that makes perfect copies. I thought it might be like the unstoppable wotsit meeting the immovable thingy.”

  “Eloquent as always,” said Omar.

  “I don’t think it would have caused a world-ending event,” said Vivian.

  “No,” Omar agreed. “The infinite obeys the same rules as the finite – more simply sometimes. Infinity times two is still infinity. Likewise, infinity halved. I have thought that one could rip out any number of pages from the Wittgenstein Volume and it would not change its total contents one iota.”

  “Do not get any ideas, Professor,” said Vivian.

  “Heaven forfend. Although I would give an arm and a leg to spend an afternoon with that book. Not my arm and leg but definitely whatever limbs I might lay my hands on.”

  “It is certainly an enlightening read,” said Vivian. “I have encouraged Miss Murray to read it although she claims to not have the time.”

  “It doesn’t look like a light read,” said Morag.

  “A poor excuse,” said Omar and then paused to remove a fleck of tea leaf from his lips.

  Maurice said nothing but the little man’s eyes glittered.

  “The dangers of using loose tea,” said Vivian unapologetically. “Something always slips through the sieve.”

  “Indeed, my dear,” said Omar. “So few take the effort to use loose leaf these days.”

  Maurice coughed lightly.

  “Yes,” acknowledged Omar with an affectionate smile. “Maurice is one of those few. He’s a dab hand at reading the leaves too. He could read the lottery numbers in your lapsang souchong.”

  Maurice made demure noises.

  “No, not at all,” said Omar. “In tea, truth.”

  Plaits sat cross-legged on the floor and twisted the Rubik’s Cube of Prein. The glittering symbols shifted as she turned the sides. She considered herself a fair student of th
e language of aklo and was ninety percent confident of what would happen if she rearranged it into the correct config–

  A pinpoint of wan blue light appeared in the air before her and rapidly expanded into first a disc and then a lightning-bounded tunnel.

  Eighty percent confident.

  There was a screeching howl like the badly-oiled gears between worlds crunching against each other and then, out of the vortex of sickly light, stepped an otherworldly horror.

  “Rhon-ada-ho, et glad muise!” it – he – gloated in wet-throated triumph.

  “Wow,” said Plaits, stepping back to take it all in. “Just wow.”

  “Gue-am-bhun, muise!”

  “No,” said Plait. “I mean, ‘wow, what the hell have you got going on here with your look?’ You’ve got the crab claws and the gazillion legs and –”

  “Pad veri-klu svet Prein!”

  “Oh, I know you’re part of the entourage of Prein, but then you’ve also got the chains and the blades embedded in your flesh and the whole ‘oops, I’m sorry, you’ve caught me halfway through an autopsy’ thing and –”

  “Cud vadu ib fenq muise!” he roared, waving a tattooed tentacle-leg-frond at her.

  “I may be just a bloody mortal but at least I don’t look like a rebellious teen trying too hard to get a reaction. Seriously, who needs that many penises? What’s your name?”

  “Se’ad u Qulsteyvan weh Pelk-chromlid.”

  “Qulsteyvan the… Deconstructor?”

  “It translates as ‘destroyer’, morsel,” the creature gargled.

  “Destroyer? Really? Okay. So, Qulsteyvan. Steven. Steve.”

  “– weh Pelk-chromlid.”

  “Right. Steve the Destroyer. You’re probably wondering why I’ve summoned you.”

  “You are an explorer in the realms of pleasure and pain. You have reached the limit of human experience and have now come to us. We have so much to teach you.”

  “No,” said Plaits. “Not that.”

  “It’s too late to change your mind, sweetling.”

  “I’m not into all that S and M jazz. I had me a boyfriend once who wanted me to bite his boabie during foreplay. Not my thing. I hear his next girlfriend accidentally put him in hospital. No, I’m sorry, Steve, I’m only interested in your big glowing dimension corridor,” she said, pointing at the tunnel of light.

  “I will take you to realms beyond imagining,” he burbled grandiosely.

  “I just need to get to Bourneville,” she said. “Or a train station. And you’re not taking me anywhere.”

  “I am an angel-demon of the desecrated ranks, gobbet. How dare you defy me!”

  “How?” said Plaits. “With that.” She pointed at the tcho-tcho Loigor circle he was standing in, had landed in. She’d had to paint it in blood, drawn from her fingertip, not because blood was part of the ritual but because there had been no other materials to hand.

  The Venislarn monster tried to crane its insectoid eyes round and down to see what she was pointing at. If it had elected to have more eyes and fewer extraneous genitalia it might have spotted the trap sooner.

  Plaits held up the little pabash kaj doll.

  “You can’t!” spat Steve.

  “I can.”

  “You wouldn’t dare!”

  “Oh, I do.”

  “I am of the entourage of Prein!”

  “Funny thing that,” said Plaits. “I’ve met you guys before. One of the August Handmaidens of Prein surprised me one time and I put a shotgun in her mouth. Her sister, Shardak’aan Syu, swore she would have vengeance against me. And bits of her still decorate my living room. You guys, you’re all mouth and no troosers. Hrorzza!”

  In a fraction of a second, the Venislarn had folded in on itself and was gone and, in her hand, the cloth dolly became a little heavier. Steve the Destroyer’s tunnel of light remained.

  “I will destroy you, fleshling!” cried the doll in a babyish high pitch. It tried to savage her with its sackcloth hands. It tried to bite her with a mouth that was stitched-on thread. It even headbutted her – bless! – gently tapping her fingers with its little wooden eyes.

  “So, cute,” said Plaits and gave him an affectionate squeeze. “Now, help me redirect this tunnel to somewhere I want to go.”

  Rod and Kathy assisted the restricted ward caretaker in screwing plywood panels over the small windows to either side of Barbara’s door and then in sliding into place and fixing the wood-constructed ‘airlock’ that insured no one could see out of the room as people were entering or leaving. A more durable and secure doorway would have to be built eventually but this would suffice for now.

  “You see, this is what I mean,” said Rod, as they held the frame in place and waited for the caretaker to screw it in. “I could get a little prosthetic screwdriver.”

  “Tiredness has made you speak gibberish,” said Kathy.

  “For my little finger: an electric screwdriver with interchangeable heads.”

  “And that’s what you think you need? A screwdriver.”

  “Or some other battery powered device. Whatever the situation calls for.”

  Kathy gave him a look, one that featured much wiggling of her perfect eyebrows.

  Once the caretaker had it all screwed down, Nina was the first to use the airlock.

  “And back to the real world,” she said, audibly relieved.

  “The others not coming out yet?” asked Rod.

  “Don’t think they’re ready to put their faith in my brilliant plan.”

  “It was a brilliant plan,” Kathy agreed.

  “Pictures of us on the wall. Nothing but us on the telly. Nothing but our hands and our faces to eat. I’ve told them all that they can spend as much time as they like in there. Well, no one else is going to be doing Barbara’s meals and cleaning. I think Paula is already eyeing up a corner for her desk.”

  “Aye, you done good, kiddo.”

  “Enough to deserve a drink from a grateful colleague?” Nina asked.

  “Another night,” he said. “Tonight, I just need to sleep.”

  “Tomorrow night it is, then.”

  Rod looked to Kathy, a question on his face.

  “Hey, the more the merrier,” said Kathy. “I’m just going to get my coat,” she said and went off to find it.

  When Rod looked back at Nina, there was a curious look on her face. He’d had enough of women giving him meaningful looks today.

  “What?” he said. “Kathy got a text. She’s got a place at interview on Thursday. I said we should go get a pint tomorrow to celebrate.”

  “Oh, okay,” said Nina archly. “So, it’s not cos you fancy the doctor with all the curves?”

  “I don’t know what you –”

  “You know it’s all corsets and underwiring under there. When you take it all off, she’ll be like that tub of gloopy goo that Vivian uses to clean her keyboard. You’ll see the edges of her seeping across –”

  “I’m not going to take it all –” Rod lowered his voice, realising how loud he was speaking. “I’m not going to take it all off.”

  “Have you forgotten how it’s done? I could send you a link to some videos to remind you.”

  “Nina,” he said in his sternest voice (which only made Nina smile), “it’s just a drink.”

  “Okay. I understand. Cos I thought you had a thing for someone else anyway.”

  “Who?”

  Nina put her hands on her hips and, in something that might have been an attempt at a Scottish accent, said, “Och aye, Rod. Come away wi’ me to my highland glen and we’ll drink Irn-Bru and eat deep fried Mars bars.”

  “Shrek?”

  Nina smacked him in the chest. “That was clearly an uncanny impression of Morag.”

  “That was meant to be Morag?”

  “Meant to be? It was. You put us side by side and I did that, you wouldn’t be able to tell which of us was which.”

  From Bourneville train station, through the leafy suburbs and to her flat in a
subdivided house on Franklin Road, the real, the one and the only Morag walked on autopilot. She had her key in the door before she came to and realised where she was.

  Richard, her downstairs neighbour, stood in the hallway waiting for her. He often waited for her to return from work. It wasn’t a creepy thing; it was more that he was like a dog (a dog with a big bushy beard and a penchant for ugly checked shirts) that couldn’t rest until everyone was back home.

  “You’re late today,” he said.

  “Long day,” she said.

  “What’s that on you?” he said and pointed to two smeared bloody fingerprints on her blouse.

  “Um. Red sauce,” she said.

  “Red sauce, of course,” he said. “I cooked pizza. You like pizza.”

  “I do,” she said. “Can it keep? I’m –” She gestured to the stairs. “I’m going to get changed and have a little lie down first.”

  “Are you unwell?”

  “I’m fine. I just don’t feel myself today.”

  She climbed the stairs slowly. One of the vicious cats that belonged to Mrs Atraxas on the top floor lay on the middle landing, giving her an evil look.

  “Just try it, cuddles,” she said warningly and stepped over it to get to her door.

  Inside, she immediately kicked off her shoes and threw her jacket aside. In the bedroom, she put her dead phone onto charge and then went to get a shower. The phone was ringing as she came back in, towelling her hair dry. The caller ID was a blast from the past. She didn’t hesitate in answering.

  “Cameron Barnes!” she said.

  “Morag Murray!” he replied, with mimicked and only slightly sarcastic enthusiasm. “Someone’s teglau glad I called.”

  And she was. His Morningside accent was an instant anchor to a past, not too distant, before she had screwed things up royally in Edinburgh and been sent to Birmingham as penance.

  “I was just... I was just talking about you today,” she said.

  “Oh, yes? Who to?”

  “Myself,” said Morag. “It’s a long story.”