“Yes?” she asked in a lazy manner. “Can I help?”
I flashed Thursday’s badge. “Thursday Next,” I announced, “and this is my butler, Sprockett. Your name is . . . ?”
“Gatsby.”
This was unexpected.
“The Mediocre Gatsby?”
“No, the Loser Gatsby, the youngest of the three Gatsbys. I haven’t seen Great for a while. How did it turn out with crazy Daisy? She looked like trouble to me.”
“Not . . . terrific, as I recall.”
“Did they let Mia Farrow play her in the movie?”
“I’m not sure. Is Mediocre here?”
“I’ve not seen the miserable fart for three days,” she sniffed, picking her nose. “How did you know he was missing? I didn’t call you.”
“May we come in?”
“I guess,” said Loser Gatsby with a shrug, and we walked into the apartment. Sprawled in the front room were a half dozen men and women who looked as though life had not been kind to them. One of the women had been crying recently, and two of the men still were.
“This is our Siblings of More Famous BookWorld Personalities self-help group,” explained Loser. “That’s Sharon Eyre, the younger and wholly disreputable sister of Jane; Roger Yossarian, the draft dodger and coward; Brian Heep, who despite admonishments from his family continues to wash daily; Rupert Bond, still a virgin and can’t keep a secret; Tracy Capulet, who has slept her way round Verona twice; and Nancy Potter, who is . . . well, let’s just say she’s a term that is subject to several international trademark agreements.”
“She’s a Muggle?”
“Pretty much.”
They all nodded a greeting.
“We meet twice daily to try to iron out the feelings of low self-worth we experience, given our more famous family members. It’s quite hard, I assure you, being a nobody when an elder sister or brother is iconic for all time. Tracy Capulet was telling us what it was like living in Verona.”
“It’s ‘Juliet this, Juliet that’ all day long,” said Tracy petulantly. “Juliet’s on the balcony, Juliet’s shagging a Montague, Juliet’s pretending to be dead—blah, blah, blah. I tell you, I’m totally sick of it.”
Sprockett moved to the window and peered out. The Men in Plaid would be here soon.
“This is a matter of some urgency,” I said. “Does Mediocre have a room?”
Loser pointed to a door, and before she could explain that it was locked, Sprockett had wrenched it off its hinges.
The room was grubby and the floor scattered with discarded pizza containers and empty hyphen cans. The TV was still on and was tuned to a shopping channel, and his record collection contained Hooked on Classics and Footloose. Mediocre lived up to his name.
“What do you make of this?” asked Sprockett, who had come across a large model of the Forth Rail Bridge. It had large spans that in reality would have thrust boldly across the Forth Estuary, not just to connect two landmasses separated by a barrier that was also an arterial trade route but to demonstrate man’s technological prowess in the face of natural obstacles.
“It’s not a bridge,” I whispered, “it’s metaphor.”
We started opening boxes and found three more bridges, two rivers and a distant mountain range, swathed in mist with a road leading to unknown valleys beyond. Loser Gatsby was at the door, mouth open.
“Tell me,” I said, “where did your brother get all this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Truthfully?”
“I’m a loser,” she said. “If I’d known about this little lot, I would have sold it all, gone on a bender and had a dolphin tattooed on my left boob.”
Her logic was impeccable. I questioned her further, but she knew nothing.
“In two minutes the Men in Plaid will be coming through that door,” I told her. “Believe me, you don’t want to be here when they do.”
I didn’t need to say it twice, and she and the rest of the loser literary siblings made a hasty exit down the stairs.
“So,” said Sprockett, staring at all the metaphor, “stolen?”
“Not if Mediocre was as his name suggests,” I replied. “How much do you think this is all worth?”
“Twenty grand,” said Sprockett. “People will pay good money to get hold of raw metaphor. There’s enough here to keep a man comfortable for a long time.”
“Or even enroll at character college,” I said holding up a prospectus from St. Tabularasa’s. “Looks like Mediocre was trying to better himself and shed his epithet. A cabbie couldn’t earn this much in a decade of Octobers.” I added, “I reckon we’re looking at a bribe.”
“To do what?”
“I don’t know.”
I picked up Mediocre’s account book. It outlined all the trips he had done and which needed to be billed. The last day was not there, of course, but the previous day was.
“Well, well,” I said, “looks like Thursday went on a trip to Biography the day before she vanished. And that’s not all,” I added. “Every single fare Mediocre accepted was picked up from the same place—Sargasso Plaza, just outside the entrance to Fan Fiction. Coincidence?”
“We have company,” murmured Sprockett, who’d been standing at the window.
I joined him and noted that a 1949 Buick Roadmaster had pulled up outside the building. Two Men in Plaid got out and looked around.
“Time we weren’t here.”
We crossed to the other side of the room and exited though the French windows, which opened onto a veranda. From there we climbed down onto the roof of a garden shed, then let ourselves out into an alley beyond. We walked back around the house and watched as the Plaids went into the building.
“What now, ma’am?”
I handed him a set of keys I’d found in Mediocre’s room and nodded towards the brand-new taxi parked outside. “Can you drive one of those?”
“If it has wheels, I can drive it, ma’am. Are we heading for Biography?”
“We are.”
“And what will we do when we get there?”
“Find out if Lyell is as boring as Thursday said he was.”
30.
High Orbit
Sooner or later a resident of the BookWorld will start to question what is beyond the internal sphere that we call home. Stated simply, what would happen if one burrowed directly downwards? In pursuit of an answer, noted explorer Arne Saknussemm entered a disused metaphor mine to see if a way through could be found. As this edition went to press, he has not yet returned.
Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (3rd edition)
Sprockett reversed the cab out of the garage, engaged the Technobabble™ Swivelmatic vectored-ion plasma drive and powered vertically upwards from Parody Valley and Vanity. I was pressed back into my seat by the acceleration and the ascent angle, and I might have been frightened had my mind not been tumbling with what we’d discovered so far—or even with what we had still yet to find out. Within a few minutes, we were hanging in the heavens a couple of thousand feet from the surface, right at the cruising altitude of local books that were being moved around Fiction. Below us the islands that made up the Fiction Archipelago were laid out in precise detail.
“Would it be impertinent to point out that visiting another island in the BookWorld without transit papers is strictly forbidden?”
“What does Thursday Next care for transit papers?”
“I would politely point out that you’re not her, ma’am.”
“I might as well be. I have a shield and I look like her. Who can say I’m not?”
“Who indeed, ma’am?”
I looked behind us and out to sea. Biography was situated beyond Artistic Criticism, and it was unlikely that any books would be going that way at this lower level. I wound down the window, poked my head out and looked up. Several miles above us, I could see the high-level books crisscrossing the sky, their journey made less arduous by traveling at the precise altitude where the force of gravity from below cance
ls the force of gravity from above—the gravopause. At that height you could usually find someone going your way—so long as you could get up there. The Technobabble™ drive on the cab would get us to local traffic height, but after that we were on our own.
We had to wait a nail-biting two and three-quarters minutes, every second worrying that the Plaids would spot us.
“Buckle up, ma’am,” said Sprockett. “Looks like someone’s been discovered.”
As we watched, an entire section of Vanity Island seemed to fall away. A book had been accepted into the mainstream and was rising from the flanks of Mount Sleeper, trailing the debris of a ramshackle group of shameless Zadie Smith rip-offs that had been unwisely built on top of it.
The settings—mostly of a winter scene in London, it appeared—rotated slowly about its axis as it rose vertically to meet us, and just as it transitioned into forward flight, Sprockett stepped on the throttle and accelerated to meet the book, which loomed as large as eight cathedrals in the windscreen. As soon as we were close enough, Sprockett slewed the vehicle to a stop on the side of a dream sequence—a picnic the family had once spent on a grassy hill in spring, where a silver pond alive with bulrushes lay within the dappled glade of beech trees.
“Congratulations on the publication,” I said to a small boy who was playing with a tin train, and he waved shyly in return. We weren’t there for long. Piggybacking around the BookWorld was a dark art that needed calm nerves and good timing; within a few minutes, Sprockett lifted off again and made the short hop to a historical novel that was moving up to join the High Stream in order to make its way to History for fact-checking. They looked less friendly in this book, so Sprockett simply fired one of the vehicle’s two grapnels into the soft intratextual matrix to which the book’s settings were bolted, and we began the tow into the high orbit dangling on the end of a slender length of steel cable.
“Okay,” I said as we moved steadily upwards, the cab’s altimeter winding around like a top, “how’s this for a scenario? Thursday is investigating something that requires her to stay out of sight. She hides out in Vanity, somewhere near Sargasso Plaza. The Mediocre Gatsby always hangs out there, waiting for fares. He takes her to Biography and the following day picks her up to go to the Council of Genres. He piggybacks The Murders on the Hareng Rouge, which is heading—ISBN already scrubbed—towards the Ungenred Zone to be scrapped. Somewhere above Aviation the rhetorical device is activated. The book explodes into a zillion fragments within a fraction of a second, taking with it Thursday, Mediocre, and the TransGenre Taxi. It’s just another book coming to grief that would be swiftly investigated, and then as swiftly dismissed as an accident.”
“Barmouth Blaster?” asked Sprockett, offering me a cocktail.
“Thank you.”
“So we were right—it wasn’t an attack on the book at all,” murmured Sprockett, adding the ice and lemon to the cocktail shaker along with half a can of Red Bull, a Mucinex and two onions. “It was a hit on the taxi—with Thursday Next inside. Which means that Mediocre must have been bribed to take the particular book—”
“But knew nothing of the reason. He was tricked into attending his own execution, as well as Thursday’s.”
We sat in silence for some minutes as we were towed ever upwards, thinking about what we had just uncovered. In the RealWorld such a convoluted method of murder would be faintly ridiculous, but in the BookWorld all murders happened this way.
“Your Barmouth Blaster, ma’am.”
“Thank you.”
“Ma’am?”
“Yes?”
“Why was Ms. Next murdered?”
There were at least seventy-two people who had tried to kill her over the years, and narrowing it down was going to be tricky. I decided to head for the most obvious.
“Without Thursday the Racy Novel peace talks might well fail. Who would benefit most from a genre war in the north of the island?”
“Men in Plaid,” said Sprockett.
“Hardly likely,” I replied. “They’re probably mopping up for someone else—or simply want to find Thursday—or are just being wicked for the hell of it.”
“You misunderstand me, madam,” he said politely. “I mean Men in Plaid—behind us!”
I turned and looked out the cab’s rear window. Sprockett was right. Far below was not one Buick Roadmaster but three. They would also have Technobabble™ Scramjamcious Gravitational Flux Throb-O-Tron Torque Converter drive systems and, knowing the Men in Plaid, ones considerably more advanced than ours and twice as nonsensical.
“How far to the gravopause?” I asked.
“We’re almost there.”
Despite the gravopause’s usefulness for getting about, one had to be careful. If you had the misfortune to move above this altitude and had insufficient thrust to escape, you could be caught in the dead center of the sphere forever. There was a small moon in the gravitational dead spot made from accreted book traffic that had accidentally fallen in and been unable to escape. From the dizzying heights we had now reached, I could actually see the moon above us, no bigger than a pea.
Within a half minute more, we had reached the gravopause. Sprockett cast off the towline, and we drifted onwards, safely in orbit. All that was required now was to coast along until we were above Biography and then dip the cab into a downwards trajectory and let gravity take over.
“Ma’am, would you wind me up?” said Sprockett. “I can see fun and games ahead, and I wouldn’t want to risk spring depletion at an inopportune moment.”
I leaned forward and wound him until his indicator was just below the red line. I felt his bronze outer casing flex with the increased tension.
“The Men in Plaid are gaining,” I said, looking behind us.
The three Roadmasters were in V formation about a half mile away and had just reached the gravopause. At the rate they were going, they would be upon us in under five minutes.
“I’m going to head for that cluster of book traffic,” announced Sprockett, opening the throttle and accelerating towards a loose gaggle of several hundred books that all appeared to be heading in the same direction. As we drew closer, I could see that they were mostly nonfiction and of considerable size. It was the renegade Oversize Books section, on their way to their new home.
They grew dramatically in size as we approached, and as we passed between John Deere Tractors and Clarice Cliff Tableware, they towered over us like skyscrapers.
“Hold tight,” said Sprockett, and he pulled the cab hard over and darted behind Lighthouses of Maine.
“They’re still behind us!” I barked, peering out the rear windshield as the Monhegan Island Light Station flashed past on our left-hand side, foghorn blaring. “Or at least one is.”
“They only attack one at a time,” replied Sprockett, his eyebrow flicking past “Indignant” to “Peeved,” “and in that respect they’re very like baddies in seventies martial-arts movies. Hold tight.”
Sprockett skimmed past Best of National Geographic so close I could taste the hot dust of the Serengeti, then pulled up sharply in front of Chronicle of Britain. I felt myself pressed hard into my seat. My vision grew gray, then faded out entirely. My arms and head felt intolerably heavy, and a second later I was unconscious as Sprockett—his body designed to tolerate up to 17.6 Gs—pulled the cab into an almost vertical climb. I came around again as soon as he reached the top of the book, and he immediately plunged the cab into a near-vertical dive.
“Still behind us?”
They were. I could see the emotionless features of the Plaids as they edged closer. Sprockett corkscrewed around Knitting Toy Animals for Pleasure and Profit as the passenger in the Roadmaster leaned out the window and fired a shot, which flew wide to blow a ragged hole in Knitting Toy Animals as we sped on, and a blue knitted giraffe named Natalie began a long, slow fall to the Text Sea, sixteen miles below.
“These Men in Plaid are made of stern stuff,” said Sprockett, his eyebrow pointer clicking from “Pe
eved” to “Puzzled” to “Indignant,” then almost to “Severely Peeved” before settling on “Peeved” again. “Hold tight.”
The Oversized Books were now moving in a more random fashion as they tried to avoid us, and Sprockett dived to get more speed, then pulled up and headed towards where What Do People Do All Day? and ABC with Dewin the Dog were about to collide, cover to cover. There was barely a ten-foot gap on either side as we flew between them, and the gap narrowed as we moved on. I barely had a chance to wave a cheery hello to a worried-looking Lowly Worm as the covers closed together a split second before we shot out the other side. The Roadmaster was less fortunate, and there was a tremendous detonation as the car was crushed between the two books, the worried shouts of Scarry’s folk mixing with Dewin the Dog’s furious barking.
. . . the passenger in the Roadmaster fired a shot, which flew wide to blow a ragged hole in Knitting Toy Animals, and a blue knitted giraffe named Natalie began a long, slow fall to the Text Sea, sixteen miles below.
“Do you see the others, ma’am?” asked Sprockett as he swerved hard to miss the Greatest Oversize Book of All Time but the abrupt sideways movement caused a ventral compressor stall on the Technobabble™ drive, and we went spiraling downwards out of control until Sprockett achieved an emergency relight.
“On the left!” I yelled as the second Roadmaster swept past, a shot from an eraserhead removing half the rear bumper and a fender. Sprockett jinked hard, spiraled up for a second, then shot past Cooking for Fusspots and Helmut Newton Nudes.
“Rewind me again, ma’am, if you please,” said Sprockett, hauling sideways on the wheel to avoid the Times Atlas. The exertions on his frame had depleted his spring at a furious rate—I’d have to remain conscious, if only to rewind him.
“Watch out!”
It was too late. We had taken a hard left at The Titanic Revisited and were met by a group of Oversize Books that had bunched together tightly for self-protection. There was no time to avoid them and all we could see was a saber jet fragmenting in front of us as we loomed ever closer to Lichtenstein Prints. But just when I thought we were dead for sure, Sprocket pulled the wheel hard over and we entered The Works of Thomas Gainsborough through a small thermal-exhaust port near the preface.
One of Our Thursdays Is Missing Page 24
