Read Online Lost in a good book by Jasper Fforde - Free Book Online Page B

years ago when his “historical and moral” differences brought him into conflict with the ChronoGuard High Chamber. The down-side of this was that he didn’t really exist at all in any accepted terms of the definition; the ChronoGuard had interrupted his conception in 1917 by a well-timed knock on his parents’ front door. But despite all this Dad was still around and I and my brothers had been born. “Things,” Dad used to say, “are a whole lot weirder than we can know.”
    He thought for a moment and made a few notes on the back of an envelope with a pencil stub.
    “How are you, by the way?” he asked.
    “I think I was just accidentally shot dead by a SpecOps marksman.”
    He burst out laughing but suddenly stopped when he saw I was serious.
    “Goodness!” he said. “You do live an exciting life. But never fear. You can’t die until you’ve lived, and you’ve barely started that at all. What’s the news from home?”
    “A ChronoGuard officer turned up at my wedding bash wanting to know where you were.”
    “Lavoisier?”
    “Yes; do you know him?”
    “I should think so,” sighed my father. “We were partners for nearly seven centuries.”
    “He said you were very dangerous.”
    “No more dangerous than anyone else who dares speak the truth. How’s your mother?”
    “She’s fine, although you might try and clear up that misunderstanding about Emma Hamilton.”
    “Emma and I—I mean Lady Hamilton and I—are simply ‘good friends.’ There’s nothing to it, I swear.”
    “Tell her that.”
    “I try, but you know what a temper she has. I only have to mention I’ve been anywhere near the turn of the nineteenth century and she gets in a frightful strop.”
    I looked around.
    “Where are we?”
    “Summer of ’72,” he replied. “All well at work?”
    “We found a thirty-third play by Shakespeare.”
    “Thirty-three?” echoed my father. “That’s odd. When I took the entire works back to the actor Shakespeare to distribute there were only eighteen. ”
    “Perhaps the actor Shakespeare started writing them himself?” I suggested.
    “By thunder you could be right!” he exclaimed. “He looked a bright spark. Tell me, how many comedies are there now?”
    “Fifteen.”
    “But I only gave him three. They must have been so popular he started writing new ones himself!”
    “It would explain why all the comedies are pretty much the same,” I added. “Spells, identical twins, shipwrecks—”
    “—usurped Dukes, men dressed as women,” continued my father. “You could be right.”
    “Wait a moment—!” I began. But my father, sensing my disquiet over the many seemingly impossible paradoxes in his work in the timestream, silenced me with his hand.
    “One day you’ll understand and everything will be more different than you can, at present, possibly hope to imagine.”
    I must have looked blank, for he checked the road again, leaned against the back of the billboard and continued:
    “Remember, Thursday, that scientific thought, indeed, any mode of thought whether it be religious or philosophical or anything else, is just like the fashions that we wear—only much longer-lived. It’s a little like a boy band.”
    “Scientific thought a boy band? How do you figure that? ”
    “Well, every now and then a boy band comes along. We like it, buy the records, posters, parade them on TV, idolize them right up until—”
    “—the next boy band?” I suggested.
    “Precisely. Aristotle was a boy band. A very good one, but only number six or seven. He was the best boy band until Isaac Newton, but even Newton was transplanted by an even newer boy band. Same haircuts—but different moves.”
    “Einstein, right?”
    “Right. Do you see what I’m saying?”
    “That the way we think is nothing more than a passing fad?”
    “Exactly. Hard to visualize a new way of thinking? Try this. Go thirty or forty boy bands past Einstein. Where we would regard Einstein as someone who glimpsed a