42.
Explanations
State Funeral Attracts World’s
Leaders
Millions of heartbroken citizens of England and
the most important world leaders arrived in Wigan yesterday to pay
tribute to President George Formby, who died two weeks ago. The
funeral cortege was driven on a circuitous route of the Midlands,
the streets lined with mourners, eager to bid a final good-bye to
England’s President of the past thirty-nine years. At the memorial
service in Wigan Cathedral, the new Chancellor, Mr. Redmond van de
Poste, spoke warmly of the great man’s contribution to world peace.
After the Lancashire Male Voice Choir sang “With My Little Stick of
Blackpool Rock,” accompanied by two hundred ukuleles, the
Chancellor invited the Queen of Denmark to sing with him a duet of
“Your Way Is My Way,” something that “might well serve to patch the
rift between our respective nations.”
Article in The Toad, August 4, 1988
It was touch and go for a moment,” said
Landen, who was sitting by my hospital bed holding my hand. “There
was a moment when we really didn’t think you’d make it.”
I gave a wan smile. I had regained consciousness
only the day before, and every movement felt like daggers in my
head. I looked around. Joffy and Miles and Hamlet were there, too.
“Hi, guys.”
They smiled and welcomed me back.
“How long?” I asked in a whisper.
“Two weeks,” said Landen. “We really thought . . .
thought—”
I gently squeezed his hand and looked around.
Land divined my thoughts perfectly. “He’s with his
grandmother.”
I raised a hand to touch the side of my head but
could feel only a heavy bandage. Landen took my hand and returned
it to the sheet.
“What . . . ?”
“You were astonishingly lucky,” he said in a
soothing tone. “The doctors say you’ll make a full recovery. The
caliber was quite small, and it entered your skull obliquely; by
the time it had gone through, most of the energy was gone.” He
tapped the side of his head. “It lodged between your brain and the
inside of the skull. Gave us quite a fright, though.”
“Cindy died, didn’t she?”
Joffy answered. “Looked to be improving, but then
septicemia set in.”
“They really loved one another, you know, despite
their differences.”
“She was a hit woman, Thursday, a trained assassin.
I don’t think she regarded death as anything more than an
occupational hazard.”
I nodded. He was right.
Landen leaned forwards and kissed my nose.
“Who shot me, Land?”
“Does the name ‘Norman Johnson’ mean anything to
you?”
“Yes,” I said. “The Minotaur. You were right. He’d
been trying to slapstick me to death all week—steamroller, banana
skin, piano—I was a fool not to see it. Mind you, a gun’s hardly
slapstick, is it?”
Landen smiled.
“It had a large BANG sign that came out of the
barrel, as well as the bullet. The police are still trying to make
sense of it.”
I sighed. The Minotaur was long gone but I’d still
have to be careful. I turned to Landen. There was still something I
needed to know.
“Did we win?”
“Of course. You pegged a foot closer than
O’Fathens. Your shot has been voted Sporting Moment of the
Century—in Swindon, at any rate.”
“So we aren’t at war with Wales?”
Landen shook his head and smiled. “Kaine’s
finished, my darling—and Goliath has abandoned all attempts to
become a religion. St. Zvlkx does indeed work in mysterious
ways.”
“Are you going to tell me?” I said with a wan
smile. “Or do I have to beat it out of you with a stick?”
Joffy unfolded the picture of St. Zvlkx and Cindy’s
fatal pianoing on Commercial Road, the one from the Swindon
Evening Globe that Gran had given me.
“We found this in your back pocket,” said
Miles,
“And it got us to thinking,” continued Joffy,
“exactly where Zvlkx was heading that morning and why he had
the ticket for the Gravitube in his bedroom. He was cutting his
losses and running. I don’t think even Zvlkx—or whoever he
was—believed that Swindon could possibly win the SuperHoop. Dad had
always said that time wasn’t immutable.”
“I don’t get it.”
Miles leaned forward and showed me the picture
again. “He died trying to get to Tudor Turf Accounting.”
“So? Oldest betting shop in Swindon.”
“No—in the world. We made a few calls. It
had been trading continually since 1264.”
I looked at Joffy quizzically. “What are you
saying?”
“That the Book of Revealments was nothing of the
kind—it’s a thirteenth-century betting slip!”
“A what?”
He pulled Zvlkx’s Revealments from his pocket and
opened it to the front page. There was a countersigned receipt for
a farthing that we had thought was a bookbinder’s tax or something.
The small arithmetical sum next to each revealment was actually the
odds against that particular event’s coming true, each one
countersigned by the same signature as on the front page. Joffy
flicked through the slim volume.
“The Spanish Armada revealment had been given the
odds of 600-1, Wellington’s victory at Waterloo 420-1.” He flicked
to the final page. “The outcome of the croquet match was set at
124,000-1. The odds were generous because Zvlkx was betting on
things centuries before they happened—indeed, centuries before
croquet was even thought of. No wonder the person who had
underwritten the bet felt confident to offer such odds.”
“Well,” I said, “don’t hold your breath. A hundred
twenty-four thousand farthings only adds up to . . . up to . .
.”
“One hundred and thirty quid,” put in Miles.
“Right. One hundred and thirty quid. Nelson’s
victory would net Zvlkx only—what? Nine bob?”
I still didn’t quite get it.
“Thursday—it’s a totalizer. Each bet or
event that comes true is multiplied by the winnings of the previous
event—and any prophecy that didn’t come true would have negated the
whole deal.”
“So . . . how much are the revealments
worth?”
Joffy looked at Miles, who looked at Landen, who
grinned and looked at Joffy.
“One hundred and twenty-eight billion
pounds.”
“But Tudor Turf wouldn’t have that sort of
cash!”
“Of course not,” replied Miles, “but the parent
company that underwrites Tudor Turf would be legally bound to meet
all bets drawn up. And Tudor Turf is owned by Wessex Cashcow, which
is itself owned by Tails You Lose, the wholly owned gaming division
of Consolidated Glee, which is owned by—”
“The Goliath Corporation,” I breathed.
“Right.”
There was a stunned silence. I wanted to jump out
of bed and laugh and scream and run around, but that, I knew, would
have to be postponed until I was in better health. For now I just
smiled.
“So how much of Goliath does the Idolatry Friends
of St. Zvlkx actually own?”
“Well,” continued Joffy, “it doesn’t
actually own any of it. If you recall, we sold all his
wisdom to the Toast Marketing Board. They now own
fifty-eight percent of Goliath. We told them what we wanted, and
they wholeheartedly agreed. Goliath has dropped its plans to become
a religion and decided to support another political party other
than the Whigs. There was something in the deal about a new
cathedral to be built, too. We won, Thursday—we won!”
Kaine’s fall, I discovered, had been rapid and
humiliating. Once he was without Goliath’s backing and minus his
Ovinator, parliament suddenly started wondering why they had been
following him so blindly, and those who had supported him turned
against him with the same enthusiasm. In less than a week he
realized just what it was to be human. All the vanity and plotting
and conniving that worked so well for him when fictional didn’t
seem to have the same power at all when spoken with a real tongue,
and he was removed from office within three days of the SuperHoop.
Ernst Stricknene, questioned at length over calls made to Cindy
Stoker from his office, decided to save as much of his skin as he
could and talked at great length about his former boss. Kaine now
had to face the biggest array of indictments ever heaped upon a
public figure in the history of England. So many, in fact, that it
was easier to list the offenses he wasn’t indicted for—which
were: “working as an unlicensed nanny” and “using a car horn in a
built-up area during the hours of darkness.” If found guilty on all
charges, he was facing more than nine hundred years in
prison.
“I almost feel sorry for him,” said Joffy, who was
a lot more forgiving than I. “Poor Yorrick.”
“Yes,” replied Hamlet sarcastically, “alas.”