The lights flickered back on as entropy returned to normal. Aornis’s boldly audacious plan for revenge had backfired badly. She had, perversely enough, actually given us all life. And after all that talk about irony. She’d probably be kicking herself all the way to TopShop. Dad was right. It is funny the way things turn out.

I sat through the Nolan Sisters concert that evening with an empty seat beside me, glancing at the door to see if he would arrive. I hardly even heard the music—I was thinking instead of a lonely foreshore on a planet devoid of any life, a person who had once been my father sloughing away to his component parts. Then I thought of the resultant proteins, now much replicated and evolved, working on the atmosphere. They released oxygen and combined hydrogen with carbon dioxide to form simple food molecules. Within a few hundred million years the atmosphere would be full of free oxygen; aerobic life could begin—and a couple of billion years after that, something slimy would start wriggling onto land. It was an inauspicious start, but now there was a sort of family pride attached to it. He wasn’t just my father but everyone’s father. As the Nolans performed “Goodbye Nothing to Say,” I sat in quiet introspection, regretting, as children always do upon the death of a parent, all the things we never said nor ever did. But my biggest regret was far more mundane: Since his identity and existence had been scrubbed by the ChronoGuard, I never knew, nor ever asked him—his name.

34.
The Well of Lost Plots

Character Exchange Program: If a character from one book looks suspiciously like another from the same author, more than likely, they are. There is a certain degree of economy that runs through the bookworld, and personages from one book are often asked to stand in for others. Sometimes a single character may play another in the same book, which lends a comedic tone to the proceedings if they have to talk to themselves. Margot Metroland once told me that playing the same person over and over and over again was as tiresome as “an actress condemned to the same part in a provincial repertory theater for eternity with no holiday.” After a spate of illegal PageRunning (q.v.) by bored and disgruntled bookpeople, the Character Exchange Program was set up to allow a change of scenery. In any year there are close to ten thousand exchanges, few of which result in any major plot or dialogue infringements. The reader rarely suspects anything at all.

UNITARY AUTHORITY OF WARRINGTON CAT,
The Jurisfiction Guide to the Great Library (glossary)