One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

by Jasper Fforde

  We drove past Political Thriller on the Ludlum Freeway and made our way towards the towering heights of the Great Library, and I guessed where we were headed. On the twenty-sixth floor would be the Council of Genres and Senator Jobsworth, the man from whom the Men in Plaid ultimately drew their authority. Like Bradshaw, he must have figured out a way in which a Thursday Next look-alike could be used.

  The security was even tighter here, and the Roadmaster slowed to negotiate the concrete roadblocks and high antibookjump mesh. We were waved through with only a cursory glance and drove across a narrow bridge and into the Ungenred Zone. This was an area of independent, narrative-free space where the governing body of the BookWorld could exist free from influence and bias. Or at least that was the theory. I’d been a few times to the Council of Genres, but only with the real Thursday. Ordinary citizens didn’t come here unless strictly on business. If we wanted to pretend we had influence, we could take any grievances to our genre representatives, and they would intercede on our behalf—or so the theory went.

  “Where are you taking me?” I asked.

  “Right to the very top.”

  “That high, huh?”

  Having the Great Library and the Ungenred Zone on Fiction Island was not without problems. Theoretically speaking, if it was located here, then it must be potentially readable by the RealWorld population, something about which the CofG was not happy. If it became common knowledge that there was a text-based realm on the other side of the printed page, hacking into the BookWorld would be a far bigger problem than it was already. The Outlander corporation known as Goliath had been attempting to find a way in for decades, but aside from their transfictional tour bus, quaintly named the Austen Rover and the occasional bookhacker, the independent existence of the BookWorld remained secret.

  Even so, council officials were taking no chances, and the entire Ungenred Zone was rendered invisible to potential bookhackers by the simple expedient of not being written about. At least not directly. The adventures in my own series hinted at a BookWorld but these were heavily fictionalized, since the ghostwriter had no collaboration from Thursday when writing them. There was only the vaguest reference to the Great Library, and nothing about Jurisfiction or the Council of Genres. Despite this, some of the more talented readers in the Outland had managed to hack into the zone by exploiting a hole in the defenses that allowed one to “read between the lines.” To counter this, the CofG had all the borders covered in soporific paint the shade of young lettuces, which worked like a charm. Every attempted incursion into the Ungenred Zone was met by drowsiness followed by an almost instantaneous torpor on the part of the potential hacker. It had exactly the same effect as the emergency Snooze Button, except that no kittens were ever hurt or injured.

  The Roadmaster drove up to the BookWorld’s main port, where the Metaphoric River joined the Text Sea by a series of locks, weirs, traps and sluices. The port was large, and several hundred scrawl trawlers rode gently in the swell, grammasites wheeling above the mast tops, hoping to dart down and snatch a dropped article. On the dockside was the day’s catch. Most scrawlers simply netted the words that basked upon the surface for a quick and easy sale to the wordsmiths, while others deep-trawled for binary clause systems, whereby a verb and a noun had clumped together in a symbiotic relationship to form a protosentence. But even these hardened scrawlers were in awe of those who hunted fully formed sentences. These weatherbeaten sea dogs would sail far across the Text Sea in search of an entire paragraph, a descriptive zinger or even an original comedy monologue—the elusive Moby-Shtick that legends speak of.

  Facing the docks and beyond the coils of ropes, nets, harpoons and infinitive splitters were several rows of single-story workshops where the words and letters were crocheted, knitted, sewed, glued, riveted or nailed together into sentences, depending on the softness of the prose to which they were destined. The completed sentences were either rough-sorted into bundles and sold direct to the Well of Lost Plots or woven into standard paragraphs on power looms, the nouns, verbs and adjectives left loose so the end users could make their own choices.

  The Buick pulled to a stop outside the main entrance of the Great Library, and we climbed out. The library was housed in a towering Gothic skyscraper that stood as a reminder of the BookWorld before it was remade. Back then the area below the Great Library had been simply unexplored jungle. All that was swept away in the nine minutes of the remaking. The BookWorld may be slow when it comes to changing fashions and storytelling conventions, but it can rebuild itself in a flash if required.

  I paused for a moment. It was impossible not to be impressed by the Great Library, and this in a world noted for its superlative structures, settings and depth. Just by way of example, the landscape inside Lord of the Rings was so stunning and so stupendous that it could be absorbed as a form of nourishment. The huge tourism opportunities within the trilogy had been long understood and exploited, and even though the battles were exciting and fun to watch, most people went only for the valleys, rivers, waterfalls, crags, trees and moss.

  I stepped into the lobby of the library and paid my respects to those names on the Boojumorial—a marble tablet that commemorated Jurisfiction agents from both the RealWorld and the BookWorld who had lost their lives in the protection of the written word. They may have been carbon- or text-based, but here they were equal; no preference was given to the real over the imaginary. My companions, however, due either to indifference or to long acquaintance with the “Honored Erased,” paid it no heed at all. We walked towards the circular void that ran through the building, and I looked up. Twenty-six floors above us, the glazed roof was just visible. Twenty-six floors of every book that had ever been written, and here logged faithfully in alphabetical order for mostly serial-continuity purposes. It wasn’t necessary to have the library anymore, but it paid to have a backup in case something went wrong. And something always did go wrong. Although infuriating, it was unavoidable. With all the drama at hand, it was inevitable that the BookWorld would spontaneously erupt into intrigue, which would then set off a chain reaction of unexpected consequence. If the BookWorld were itself a book, it would be self-writing.

  I glanced down. Below me were the twenty-six basements that made up the Well of Lost Plots—the place where all books are built. As I looked, I could see flashes of light as inspiration fired off in small bursts of energy. A really good idea could burn brightly for many months and give nearby books-in-progress much-needed warmth.

  We entered the elevator, and I felt myself grow increasingly apprehensive as the ancient lift slowly clanked its way to the top. The senator’s summons might have been related to Bradshaw’s recent request, to our chance meeting in Norland Park or to something else entirely—I had no idea. The lift doors opened, and the CofG spread out in front of us, a seething mass of offices, desks, meeting rooms and people scurrying back and forth in a ceaseless quest to keep the BookWorld running as efficiently as possible. The chamber was bigger in here than it appeared from the outside, but nothing was particularly linear or even logical within the BookWorld; the fabric of imagination is elastic, and that reflected itself within the Council of Genres.

  I passed the big viewing windows, where I had stood with the real Thursday when she was my mentor, and peered out at a BookWorld that appeared deceptively orderly. Because I was quite high and the island dished to fit snugly on the inside face of the sphere, I could clearly see every part of it, from the volcanoes in the far north all the way down to Vanity Island off the southern tip. I could even see my own series as a dark smudge in the distance.

  I was escorted away from the viewing windows and walked past the public gallery above the debating chamber. There was a session in progress, and although it was being conducted in Courier Bold, the antiquated yet universal language of the BookWorld, I could make out that it was a discussion about the possibility of Text Sea levels rising due to the advent of e-books. I’d heard about this issue. The argument went that because e-b
ooks were composed almost entirely of electrons and barely any ink and paper at all, the scrawl trawlers’ work would be cut by 90 percent overnight, and there was a possibility for inundation of the low-lying areas of the BookWorld—essentially Maritime and Disaster. This argument was countered by a delegate who maintained that e-books were the way of the future, and since the power of a book is undiminished irrespective of the carrier medium, no such panic was necessary. Still another delegate suggested that the advent of e-books might actually increase the demand for new material and thus cause a shortage of words—something for which the BookWorld must be prepared by the construction of more scrawl trawlers and the training of extra scrawlermen. All three were experts, and all three had conflicting views. I was reminded of Clarke’s Second Law of Egodynamics: “For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.”

  “Come on,” said one of the Plaids. “We’re not bleeding tour guides.”

  We walked down a corridor, past more security, then arrived at an opulent antechamber with expansive views across the BookWorld.

  “Miss Next?” said a friendly clerk holding a clipboard. “The senator will see you now.”

  18.

  Senator Jobsworth

  Dark Reading Matter: the hypothetical last resting place of books never published, ideas never penned and poems held only in the heart by poets who died without passing them on. Theoretical bibliologists have proved that the Background Story Radiation was appreciably more than the apparent quantity of STORY in the BookWorld. No one had any idea where it might be or how you could reach it. DRM’s existence remained theoretical, at best.

  Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (4th edition)

  The senator was sitting behind his desk as I was ushered into his office. Several men and women dressed in the uniform of almost every military conflict there was were in attendance, as well as a couple of high-ranking generals, Colonel Barksdale and Commander Herring, the chief of staff.

  “Would you excuse us?” said the senator, and everyone except Red Herring and Colonel Barksdale filed out, looking at me suspiciously as they did so. I stood in front of Jobsworth’s desk while he finished what he was doing. I didn’t know which book he had come from, but wagging tongues suggested he was an illegal immigrant from Quackery, a subgenre within Lies & Self-Delusion, just off the north coast. I don’t think anyone ever raised it with him, or if they did, no answer was forthcoming. It didn’t really much matter, since Jobsworth had been the overall leader of the Council of Genres for as long as it had been in existence, and his unassailable position as head of the council looked set to continue far into the future. He had the ear, apparently, of the Great Panjandrum himself, who could fix almost everything when he had a mind to.

  “They say she’s dead, you know,” said Jobsworth, striding to the large window in his office that looked out over the BookWorld, the islands of the various categories of books patches of verdant green against the dark slatey gray of the Text Sea. “Killed in the Outland, killed in the BookWorld—who knows? What do you think?”

  “I have no opinion on the matter, sir. I just play her in the series.”

  “You must have some idea.”

  I looked across at the chief of staff, who was gazing at me intently. “No.”

  Jobsworth stared at me for a long while, then grunted and looked outside his office again. Yet this time he wasn’t looking at the larger BookWorld, but rather at the island of Fiction below him. The Ungenred Zone was on the west coast about halfway up. Crime was just to the north, but the areas I knew best—Adventure, Fantasy and Sci-Fi—were situated in the southeast, out of sight. It was Herring who spoke next.

  “Ever been up-country?”

  “I’ve been to Crime.”

  “Farther. Towards Racy Novel.”

  “No.”

  “So there is a good chance they haven’t seen you up there? Or even know about you?”

  I suddenly had a very unpleasant feeling and turned back to Jobsworth. “What is it you want me to do, Senator?”

  “A small favor. I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t important. And if you do this for us, I’m sure it will be to your benefit if you reapply to join Jurisfiction.”

  I was right. If that was the carrot, I could be in for some serious stick.

  “It’s nothing too onerous,” added Colonel Barksdale, who had so many campaign medals on his chest that he was probably bulletproof. “It simply requires you to take Thursday’s place at the peace talks on Friday.”

  I was momentarily at a loss for words. I should have tried to extricate myself, but I had paused too long.

  “Splendid,” said Jobsworth, crossing to a scale model of the island that was built upon a large oak table. “Let me give you some background.”

  “Would you excuse me?” said Herring. “I have to revise the upcoming Linguistic Hygiene Bill if we’re to have any chance of rejecting it.”

  “Thank you, Red.”

  Herring wished me good day, thanked me for my selfless adherence to duty and walked from the room. Jobsworth beckoned me closer to the large model of the island, where the topography was perfectly realized in miniature, including the individual genres along with their borders, railway networks, major rivers and capital novels. He swept his hand in the direction of the Northern Genres.

  “You’ve heard about Speedy Muffler’s threats and the peace talks on Friday?”

  I said that I had.

  “Speedy Muffler claims to have developed a dirty bomb,” announced Jobsworth with a grimace, “a loosely bound collection of badly described scenes of a sexual nature. The detonation of such a bomb could cause untold damage, flinging wholly gratuitous sex scenes as far as Mrs. Dalloway.”

  “But has he really?” I asked, since the possession of the bomb was only conjecture, much like Comedy’s claim to be experimenting with a fifty-megaton-yield deep satire device.

  “Do you know,” said Jobsworth, “it doesn’t matter. Feminism and Dogma are taking the threat seriously and are massing armies on the border ready to take preemptive action ahead of the peace talks. And we can’t have that.”

  “Invasion?” I said. “What would Feminism and Dogma do with Racy Novel?”

  “They’ll simply push the rogue genre up north towards Porn and De Sade. Fanny Hill, The Story of O and The Adventures of Tom Jones will be annexed back into Classics, and the territory shared between them. Comedy will still insist upon the buffer zone of Bedroom Farce, and since Comedy is regarded with a certain sense of reluctant admiration by Romance and Dogma, they’ll not want to go any farther.”

  He took a deep breath.

  “But we can’t risk that kind of disruption. The genres might take months to rebuild to current strength, and the prose will suffer terribly. With the advent of e-books in the Outland, this is not a good time to have a cross-genre war. The battle between Sci-Fi and Horror all those years ago has still left its mark; their reputations as serious literature have still to recover completely—and the civil war inside Fantasy has left the reading public with an entirely unwarranted dismal view of the genre. I can’t have Romance and Female Crime marginalized in the same way—they’re 43.9 percent of our readership.”

  “I’m not sure what I can do,” I said. “I’m not much good at negotiating. I tend to want everyone to simply hug and make up.”

  “I’m not asking you to do anything, you little fool. We’re putting it about that you—the real Thursday—has irritable vowel syndrome and can’t speak, so Emperor Zhark will be doing the talking. You’ll just sit there and nod and look serious. Muffler might be a troublemaker, but even he will knuckle under if he thinks Thursday Next might be annoyed if he shouts too loudly. How about it?”

  He was asking too much. No, it was more than that—insane, even by Council of Genre standards. If Muffler found out I wasn’t her, things might get even worse, and I wasn’t going to have a cross-genre war on my conscience.

  “I may have to politely decline,” I said.

/>   He stared at me for a moment, then opened a manila folder on his desk.

  “Hmm,” he said, “looks like we have a lot of illegal narrative flexations in your series, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m playing Thursday as Thursday wants me to.”

  “We have only your word for that. There is also a possible charge of your understudy consorting with undesirables and, most seriously, your harboring an illegal alien from Vanity.”

  He meant Sprockett.

  “We call it Self-Publishing these days.”

  “Immaterial. We’ll be taking the Metaphoric River route up-country via paddle steamer. I’ll have a car pick you up Friday morning at 0700. Are we agreed?”

  I took a deep breath. “Yes, sir.”

  “Excellent!”

  He pressed a button on his desk.

  “Miss Next, you must also understand that in matters of BookWorld politics like this, it is essential you do not speak of this to anyone, especially that busybody Bradshaw. Jurisfiction has a twisted vision of the good work we do at the council, and I don’t want him to get the wrong idea. Do you understand?”

  If there was any lingering doubt that the CofG and Jurisfiction distrusted each other, it was dispelled. Neither wanted the other to know what it was asking me to do. The clerk came back in, and I was escorted from the building by the same two Men in Plaid who had brought me there.

  In a very short time, I was deposited back at my front door, and the Roadmaster pulled silently away. Sprockett was waiting for me in the hall, his single eyebrow pointer clicking alternately between “Quizzical” and “Uncomfortable.”

  But he knew what to do.

  “Can I interest ma’am in a Ludlow Scorcher?”

  I told him a cocktail would go down very well so long as he went easy on the parsley, and then I related what had just happened with Jobsworth. I decided not to mention the threats he’d made regarding Sprockett and Carmine, but I did mention that I would be going up-country on Friday—and also the dent and the streak of yellow paint on the Men in Plaid’s Buick Roadmaster.