Fang shrugged. ‘Not much option, really,’ he replied. ‘At least while we’re safe in here, there’s not a lot they can do to us.’
‘True.’
‘ALL RIGHT THAT DOES IT TIME’S UP EUGENE, START THE GENERATOR.’
Fang didn’t particularly like the sound of that; so he crawled to the window and cautiously peered out. In the distance he could see two pigs setting up a huge, diabolical-looking machine, something that looked like a giant mutant vacuum cleaner. ‘Jeez,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘What in hell’s name is that?’
‘Let me see,’ Julian said, and he crawled over and had a look. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘That’s bad.’
‘Really? What is it?’
‘It’s a heavy-duty compressor,’ Julian replied nervously. ‘Used to generate an exceptionably powerful jet of compressed air. If I know Desmond, he’s proposing to huff and puff and blow our house down.’
‘But he can’t!’ Fang exclaimed. ‘That’s my…’ He remembered who he was talking to and broke off.
‘Your what?’
‘Oh, nothing.’
‘Didn’t sound like nothing to me. And how the hell did you know my name?’
Julian stared at Fang with a curious expression on his face, but before he could say anything further, the compressor started to rumble, making further conversation impossible. Fang took one last look, then dived for cover.
‘Anyway,’ he growled to himself, ‘it’ll never work.’
Wrong again.
Chapter 12
‘You can run,’ Snow White rasped, slashing at random at the bushes with her sword, ‘but you can’t hide.’
Souris, the former-blind-mouse-turned-mainframe-turned-fairytale-princess, knew better. Perfectly possible to do both, simultaneously even, so long as you did the running part in dense cover, such as a forest. No mere theory, this; she’d been doing it for seven hours, while Snow White followed her chopping the heads off saplings and skewering dead trees. Odd, then, that Snow White should still be trying to convince her of the truth of a hypothesis they both knew to be false. Maybe it was a human thing, this apparent ability to believe propositions one knows to be fallacious. It’d explain a lot, including the popularity of soap opera and the fact that humans still vote in elections.
‘Sooner or later,’ Snow White went on, ‘I’m going to find you, mouse, so why not make it easy on yourself and come out where I can see you? I’m not going to hurt you, I promise.’
Not necessarily a lie; the sword in Snow White’s hands looked so sharp that she probably wouldn’t feel a thing.
Thinking back, the farmer’s wife’s eight-inch Sabatier hadn’t hurt very much, or at least not at the time. There are worse things, however, than mere pain.
Souris tucked herself under an elderberry bush, painfully aware that she was a whole lot bigger than she was used to and that her concealment instincts hadn’t yet recalibrated themselves enough to guarantee her security, and consulted her database. Help, she said.
Running Help, please wait.
Time is a purely relative thing. Measured by one set of criteria, the Mirrors system had a response time that made light look like a twelve-year-old with an impending maths test getting out of bed in the morning. From another viewpoint, such as that of a defenceless ex-rodent barely an arm’s length away from three feet of razor-sharp high carbon steel, it moved like an hourly-paid Amstrad. Souris had just enough time to mutter comeoncomeoncomeoncomeon under her breath before the answer came through.
Are you sure? she asked. The database confirmed. She stood up.
‘Over here,’ she said.
Snow White yelped with relief and swung round, the blade raised above her head. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Now, here’s the deal. You do exactly what I tell you and you might just live to see the dawn. Well?’
Souris shook her head. ‘I don’t think so,’ she replied. ‘You see, if you kill me, bang goes the network. Not just your access to it, the whole thing. So you aren’t going to kill me. And if I know you aren’t going to kill me, why on Earth should I do what you say? Besides,’ she added, as Snow White tried to work through the equations in her head, ‘I wouldn’t let you kill me even if you could. I’m the operating system, remember. In this domain, I can do anything.’
By way of a demonstration, she snapped her fingers and at once the sword flew out of Snow White’s hands and vanished.
‘And before you ask,’ Souris added, ‘the wicked queen is the fairest of them all. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do. Okay?’
Snow White took a few steps backwards, until a tree got in the way and made her stop. ‘All right,’ she grunted. ‘But you need me. You may have the data, but you haven’t got the savvy. You’re not gladewise like I am. Without me, you wouldn’t last five minutes.’
Souris felt like pointing out that without her she’d already lasted over seven hours, and that was with a crazed swords-woman hot on her heels. This, though, was no time to score cheap debating points. ‘Please explain,’ she said.
‘You need to know the plot,’ Snow White wheedled. ‘Like who to watch out for and who you can trust, what’s the best way of going about things. Human nature. That kind of stuff. Come on, we can work together. Be a team. It’ll be so much better for both of us that way.’
‘Really? Why?’
Snow White fished about in the depths of the handbag of her resourcefulness, among the credit card slips, solo ancient peppermints and bits of chewed-up tissue. ‘It’s too complicated to explain,’ she said. ‘Like, if you could understand, you wouldn’t need me.’
Souris’ face twitched rapidly as she subconsciously tried to waggle whiskers that were no longer there. ‘What you’re saying is,’ she said, ‘trust you implicitly and take your word for it. Yes?’
‘That’s the idea,’ Snow White replied. ‘And as the absolute clincher, I’ll give you my word.’
‘Fair enough,’ Souris said. She gave her new colleague a friendly smile, then looked round to see exactly where she was. It was at this point, or to be precise a second and a half later, just after clobbering the back of her head with a large branch, that Snow White gave her the word she’d promised earlier. It was ‘Sucker!’, and Snow White put a good deal of feeling into it.
Interestingly, the sharp blow to the back of Souris’ head had roughly the same effect as the well-aimed kick applied by a skilled electronics engineer to a recalcitrant piece of high-tech gear. A connection closed, or a relay pulled in, or something happened, and the Mirrors network inside the ex-mouse’s skull began quietly running a couple of programs.
One was a simple search; and a nanosecond later, Mirrors came up with the following result:
CASTLES: (p2/2)… From which it can plainly be seen that all castles are in fact the same castle, and the only thing stopping people who have business in castles from meeting each other and spilling over into each others’ stories is CastleManagerTM For Mirrors, a complex sorting-and-stacking utility that allows an almost infinite number of stories to take place in one castle simultaneously by virtue of a series of spatio-temporal shifts. In plain language, CastleManagerTM ensures that for as long as Story A is taking place in the main hall, the narrative requirements of Story B will confine it to the dungeons, while Story C stays in the kitchens and Story D deals with events in the gatehouse.
The few niggling little bugs found in early versions of CastleManagerTM have all been corrected, and the utility now operates with the absolute reliability for which all Mirrors products are justly famous. In previous versions, however, it was theoretically possible for the so-called ‘Chinese walls’ separating different stories to be ruptured by a number of otherwise routine and unimportant systems malfunctions, leading to situations where, for example, two heroines or two assistant villains could be present in the same part of the castle at the same time. This occasionally had the unfortunate effect of triggering the CHARACTERMERGE.EXE program. CHARACTERMERGE speaks for itself. EXE stands for EXECUTE, an unfortunately ambivalent command in the context of a royal residence well supplied with armed guards.