We walked through the building, among more fallen masonry and partially collapsed ceilings, towards the relatively undamaged east wing. The roof was more intact here and our torches flicked into offices and incubating rooms where row upon row of abandoned glass amnio jars were lined up against the wall. In many of them the liquefied remnants of a potential life form had pooled in the bottom. Goliath had left in a hurry.
'What was this place?' I asked, my voice barely louder than a whisper.
'This was,' muttered Millon, consulting his blueprint, 'the main sabre-tooth tiger manufacturing facility. The Neanderthal wing should be through there and the first on the left.'
The door was locked and bolted but it was dry and rotten and it didn't take much to force it open. There were papers scattered everywhere, and a half-hearted attempt had been made to destroy them. We stopped in the doorway and let Stiggins walk in alone. The room was about a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide. It was similar to the tiger facility next door but the amnio jars were larger. The glass nutrient pipes were still in evidence and I shivered. To me, the room was undeniably creepy, but to Stig it was his first home. He, along with many thousands of his fellow extinctees, had been grown here. I had sequenced Pickwick at home using nothing more complex than average kitchen utensils and cultivated her in a denucleated goose egg. Birds and reptiles were one thing; umbilical cultivation of mammals quite another. Stig trod carefully among the twisted pipes and broken glass to a far door and found the decanting room where the infant Neanderthals were taken out of their amnio jars and breathed for the first time. Beyond this was the nursery where the young had been brought up. We followed Stig through. He stood at the large window that overlooked the reservoir.
'When we dream, it is of this,' he said quietly. Then, obviously feeling that he was wasting time, he strode back to the incubating room and started rummaging in filing cabinets and desk drawers. I told him we'd meet him outside and rejoined Millon, who was trying to make sense of his floor plan.
After walking in silence through several more rooms with even more ranks of amnio jars, we arrived at a steel-gated secure area. The gate was open and we stepped through, entering what had once been the most secret area of the entire plant.
A dozen or so paces farther on the corridor led into a large hall, and we knew we had found what we had been looking for. Built within the large room was a full-scale copy of the Globe Theatre. The stage and groundling area were strewn with torn-out pages of Shakespeare's plays, heavily annotated in black ink. In an adjacent room we found a dormitory that might have contained two hundred beds. All the bedding was upended in a corner, the bedsteads broken and lying askew.
'How many do you think went through here?' asked Bowden in a whisper.
'Hundreds and hundreds,' replied Millon, holding up a battered copy of The Two Gentlemen of Verona with the name 'Shaxpreke, W., 769' written on the inside front cover. He shook his head sadly.
'What happened to them all?'
'Dead,' said a voice, 'dead as a ducat!'
33
Shgakespeafe
'ALL THE WORLD'S A STAGE', CLAIMS PLAYWRIGHT
That was the analogy of life offered by Mr William Shakespeare yesterday when his latest play opened at the Globe. Mr Shakespeare went on to further compare plays with the seven stages of life by declaring that 'All the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances, And one nun in his time plays many parts.' Mr Shakespeare's latest offering, a comedy entitled As You Like It, opened to mixed reviews with the Southwark Gazette declaring it 'a rollicking comedy of the highest order' while the Westminster Evening News described it as 'tawdry rubbish from the Warwickshire shithouse'. Mr Shakespeare declined to comment as he is already penning a follow-up.
We turned to find a small man with wild, unkempt hair standing in the doorway. He was dressed in Elizabethan clothes that had seen far better days and his feet were bound with strips of cloth as makeshift shoes. He twitched nervously and one eye was closed — but beyond this the similarity to the Shakespeares Bowden had found was unmistakable. A survivor. I took a step closer. His face was lined and weathered and those teeth he still possessed were stained dark brown and worn. He must have been at least seventy but it didn't matter. The genius that had been Shakespeare had died in 1616 but genetically speaking he was with us right now.
'William Shakespeare?'
'I am a William, sir, and my name is Shgakespeafe,' he corrected.
'Mr Shgakespeafe,' I began again, unsure of how to explain exactly what I wanted, 'my name is Thursday Next and I have a Danish prince urgently in need of your help.'
He looked from me to Bowden to Millon and then back to me again. Then a smile broke across his weathered features.
'O, wonder!' he said at last. 'How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't!'
He stepped forward and shook our hands warmly; it didn't look as though he had seen anyone for a while.
'What happened to the others, Mr Shgakespeafe?'
He beckoned us to follow him and then was off like a gazelle. We had a hard job keeping up with him as he darted down the labyrinthine corridors, nimbly avoiding the rubbish and broken equipment. We caught up with him when he stopped at a broken window that overlooked what had once been a large exercise compound. In the middle were two grassy mounds. It didn't take a huge amount of imagination to guess what was underneath them.
'O heart, heavy heart, Why sigh'st thou without breaking?' murmured Shgakespeafe sorrowfully. 'After the slaughter of so many peers by falsehood and by treachery, when will our great regenitors be conquered?'
'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 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.