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'I only wish I could say your brothers would be avenged,' I told him sadly,
'but in all honesty the men who did this are now dead themselves. I can only
offer yourself and any others who survived my protection.'
He took in every word carefully and seemed impressed by my candour. I looked
beyond the mass graves of the Shakespeares to several other mounds beyond. I
had thought they might have cloned two dozen or so, not hundreds.
'Are there any other Shakespeares here?' asked Bowden.
'Only myself  yet the night echoes with the cries of my cousins
,' replied Shgakespeafe. 'You will hear them anon.'
As if in answer there was a strange cry from the hills. We had heard something
like it when Stig dispatched the chimera back in Swindon.
'We are not safe, Clarence, we are not safe,' said Shgakespeafe, looking
around nervously. 'Follow me and give me audience, friends.'
He led us along the corridor and into a room that was full of desks set neatly
in rows, each with a typewriter upon it. Only one typewriter was anything like
still functioning; around it stood stacks and stacks of typewritten sheets of
paper  the product of Shgakespeafe's outpourings. He led us across and gave
us some of his work to read, looking on expectantly as our eyes scanned the
writing. It was, disappointingly, nothing special at all  merely scraps of
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existing plays cobbled together to give new meaning. I tried to imagine the
whole room full of Shakespeare clones clattering away at their typewriters,
their minds filled with the Bard's plays, and scientists moving among them
trying to find one, just one
, who had even one half the talent of the original.
Shgakespeafe beckoned us to the office next to the writing room, and there
showed us mounds and
mounds of paperwork, all packaged in brown paper with the name of the
Shakespeare clone who had written it printed on a label. As the production of
writing outstripped the ability to evaluate it, the people working here could
only file what had been written and then store it for some unknown employee in
the future to peruse. I looked again at the mound of paperwork. There must
have been twenty tons or more in the storeroom. There was a hole in the roof
and the rain had got in; much of this small mountain of prose was damp, mouldy
and unstable.
'It would take an age to sort through it for anything of potential
brilliance,' mused Bowden, who had arrived by my side. Perhaps, ultimately,
the experiment had succeeded. Perhaps there was an equal of
Shakespeare buried in the mass grave outside, his work somewhere deep within
the mountain of unintelligible prose facing us. It was unlikely we would ever
know, and if we did it would teach us nothing new - except that it could be
done and others might try. I hoped the mound of paperwork would just slowly
rot. In the pursuit of great art Goliath had perpetrated a crime that far
outstripped anything I had so far seen.
Millon took pictures, his flashgun illuminating the dim intenor of the
scriptorium. I shivered and decided I
needed to get away from the oppressiveness of the interior. Bowden and I
walked to the front of the building and sat among the rubble on the front
steps, just next to a fallen statue of Socrates that held a banner proclaiming
the value of the pursuit of knowledge.
'Do you think we'll have trouble persuading Shgakespeafe to come with us?' he
asked.
As if in answer, Shgakespeafe walked cautiously from the building. He earned a
battered suitcase and blinked in the harsh sunlight. Without waiting to be
asked he got in the back of the car and started to scribble in a notebook with
a pencil stub.
'Does that answer your question?'
The sun dropped below the hill in front of us and the air suddenly felt
colder. Every time there was a strange noise from the hills Shgakespeafe
jumped and looked around nervously, then continued to scribble. I was just
about to fetch Stig when he appeared from the building carrying three enormous
leather-bound volumes.
'Did you find what you needed?'
He passed me the first book, which I opened at random. It was, I discovered, a
Goliath biotech manual for building a Neanderthal. The page I had selected
gave a detailed description of the Neanderthal hand.
'A complete manual,' he said slowly. 'With it we can make children.'
I handed back the volume and he placed it with the others in the boot of the
car. There was another unearthly wail in the distance.
'A deadly groan,' muttered Shgakespeafe, sitting lower in his seat, 'like life
and death's departing!'
'We had better get going,' I said. 'There is something out there and I've a
feeling we should leave before it gets too inquisitive.'
'Chimera?' asked Bowden. 'To be honest we've seen the grand total of none from
the moment we came in here.'
'We do not see them because they do not wish to be seen,' observed Stig.
'There are chimera here.
Dangerous chimera.'
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'Thanks, Stig,' said Millon, dabbing his brow with a handkerchief, 'that's a
real help.'
'It is the truth, Mr de Floss.'
'Well, keep the truth to yourself in future.'
I shut the rear door as soon as Stig had wedged himself in next to
Shgakespeafe and climbed in the front passenger seat. Bowden drove off as
rapidly as the car would allow.
'Millon, is there any other route out that doesn't take us through that
heavily wooded area where we found the other cars?'
He consulted the map for a moment.
'No. Why?'
'Because it looked like a good place for an ambush.'
'This really gets better and better, doesn't it?'
'On the contrary,' replied Stig, who took all speech at face value, 'this is
not good at all. We find the prospect of being eaten by chimeras extremely
awkward.'
'Awkward?' echoed Millon. 'Being eaten is awkward
?'
'Indeed,' said Stig, 'the Neanderthal instruction manuals are far more
important than we.'
'That's your opinion,' retorted Millon. 'Right now there is nothing more
important than me.'
'How very human
,' replied Stig simply.
We sped up the road, drove back through the rock cutting and headed towards
the wood.
'By the pricking of my thumbs,' remarked Shgakespeafe in an ominous tone of
voice, 'something wicked this way comes!'
'There!' yelled Millon, pointing a quivering finger out of the window. I
caught a glimpse of a large beast before it vanished behind a fallen oak, then
another jumping from one tree to another. They weren't hiding themselves any
more. We could all see them as we drove down the wooded road, past the
abandoned cars. Lolloping beasts of a ragged shape flitted through the woods, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]