As far as I knew, no such plans were afoot. But you didn’t live in Conspiracy for long without imagining all sorts of nonsense. Not that Conspiracy always got it wrong. On the few occasions they were correct, a rapid transfer to Nonfiction was in order—which threw those who were left behind into something of a dilemma. Being in Fiction meant a wider readership, something that Nonfiction could never boast. Besides, a conspiracy theory that turned out to be real wasn’t a theory anymore, and the loss of wild uncorroborated speculation could be something of a downer.
“I’m working with JAID—the Jurisfiction Accident Investigation Department.”
“Ah!” he replied, suddenly realizing what I was here for. “The Lola incident. I believe that Commander Herring is already up there. Can I stress at this time that we will afford Jurisfiction’s representatives all possible help and assistance?”
It was all he could say, really. No one wanted to fall afoul of Jurisfiction or the Council of Genres. This was Fiction. There were skeletons in everyone’s closet.
“It came to earth nine hours ago,” he said as we walked past two faked moon landings, three UFO abductions and a grassy knoll. “It bounced on a pamphlet regarding the notion that Diatrymas are being bred by the Goliath Corporation to keep people out of the New Forest, then landed on a book outlining the somewhat dubious circumstances surrounding the death of Lola Vavoom.”
With Sprockett following at a discreet distance, we took a shortcut through a field of crop circles, passed a laboratory covertly designing infectious diseases for population control, moved aside as a white Fiat Uno drove after a black Mercedes, then entered the subgenre of Lola Vavoom Suspicious Death. Roswell pushed open the swinging doors of a concrete multistory car park that opened directly onto the tenth floor, and standing next to a large lump of tattered wreckage the size of a truck were two men. I didn’t recognize the more disheveled of the two, but the older, wiser and clearly the boss was someone I did recognize: Regional Commander Herring of the BookWorld Policing Agency.
He was very much a hands-on type of administrator. He had no staff, carried all his notes in his head and was one of the few people who still jumped from book to book rather than taking a taxi or public transport. He was a BGH-87 character type. Male, persnickety and highly efficient, but seemingly without humor. He was about fifty and was dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt with an infinite quantity of pens in his top pocket and a garish tie. He wore spectacles, but only for effect. He was high up in the chain of command at the Council of Genres and had access, it was said, to Senator Jobsworth himself. He was the most powerful man I knew.
“About time,” he said when I appeared. “Places to be, people to visit—wheels within wheels.”
“Wheels within wheels,” echoed the man next to him.
“This is Martin Lockheed,” explained Herring. “You’ll answer to him, as I am a busy man. After this meeting I do not expect us to meet again.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your Three Men in a Boat investigation didn’t really impress,” he began.
“Yes, I’m sorry about that.”
“Apologies don’t really cut it, Next, but I am a man loyal to friends, and the real Miss Next has always intimated in the past that you may show promise one day.”
“I’m very grateful to her . . . and you,” I managed to stammer.
“So I look upon you as an investment,” replied Herring, “and a long-standing favor to a valued colleague. Which is why we are here now. Do you understand?”
“I think so.”
“Good.”
“That’s good,” said Lockheed, as if I might not have heard what Herring said. The regional commander waved a hand at the wreckage.
“Easy one for you to cut your teeth on. It has all the signs of being another unprecedented event that despite all expectations has become repeatedly unrepeatable. Don’t let me down, will you? Wrap it up nice and neat and don’t get all showy or anything. Fiction has a 99.97 percent book-safety record, and the last thing we want is the residents of this fair island worried that the fabric of their world is prone to shredding itself at the drop of a participle, hmm?”
“I’ll do my very best to discover that it’s an unrepeatable accident,” I told him, “and with indecent haste.”
“Very good. Twenty-four hours should suffice, yes?”
“I’ll see what I can do, sir, and I’d like to thank you for the opportunity.”
“No need. Lockheed?”
“Yes, sir?”
Herring snapped his fingers impatiently, and the rather harassed Lockheed passed him a clipboard.
“These are the reported items of debris,” Herring said, handing the clipboard straight to me without looking at it. “Not good, having narrative falling from the skies, so let’s keep it simple, eh? Wheels within wheels, Thursday.”
“Wheels within wheels,” added Lockheed earnestly.
“Wheels within wheels, sir. Would you thank Miss Next for me when you see her?”
“When next I see her. She’s very busy.”
He then looked at Sprockett, who was standing off from the group, being unobtrusive. “Who’s that?”
“Sprockett,” I replied, “my butler.”
“I didn’t know you had a butler.”
“Everyone needs a butler, sir.”
“I have no argument with that. Duplex-3, is he?”
“Duplex-5, sir.”
“The Fives were prone to be troublesome without sufficient winding. I’ll let you get on. You can call Lockheed anytime you want for guidance. Any questions?”
I thought of asking him if he had seen the real Thursday Next recently but decided against it. The red-haired gentleman had spoken of “being able to trust no one but myself,” and besides, I didn’t want to look a fool if the man on the tram really was a murderous nutjob.
“No questions, sir.”
“Good luck, Miss Next.”
He gave me a half smile, shook my hand and vanished.
“I’ll be off, too,” said Lockheed, handing me a business card and a folder full of health-and-safety literature. “Commander Herring is a great and good man, and you are lucky to have been given this opportunity to converse. He doesn’t usually speak to people as low as you.”
“I’m honored.”
“And so you should be. I was his assistant for three years before he deigned to look me in the eye. One of my proudest moments. If you need me, the JAID offices are at Norland Park.”
And he walked off. Eager not to waste the opportunity I had just been given, I turned my attention to the wreckage.
The chunk of book had splintered off the main novel as it broke up. But this wasn’t pages or ink or anything; it was a small part of setting. Despite the ragged textual word strings that were draped across and the graphemes lying scattered on the floor nearby, the misshapen lump seemed to be a room from a house somewhere. It had landed on the asphalt covering of the car park and cracked the surface so badly that the textual matrix beneath the roadway was now visible. The battered section had landed upside down just behind Lola Vavoom’s Delahaye Roadster, which had prevented her from reversing too quickly from her parking place, breaking through the barriers and falling eighty feet to her death. It had always been a suspicious accident, but nothing untoward was ever found to suppose it wasn’t just that—an accident.
“Will this take long, dahling?” asked Lola, who was dressed in tight slacks and a cashmere sweater with a pink scarf tied around her hair. Her eyes were obscured by a pair of dark glasses, and she was casually sitting on the trunk of her car smoking a small Sobranie cigarette.
“As long as it must,” I said, “and I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”
“Do your best, dear,” she intoned patronizingly, “but if I’m not dead in mysterious circumstances by teatime, someone is going to have some serious explaining to do.”
I turned my attention to the wreckage. Spontaneous breakups were uncommon but not unheard o
f, and it was JAID’s job to try to find the cause so that other books wouldn’t suffer the same fate. Losing a cast of a thousand or more was not just a personal tragedy, but expensive. When a book-club edition of War and Peace had disintegrated without warning a few years ago as it passed over Human Drama, all those within the debris field were picking brass buttons and lengthy digressions out of their hair for a week. The JAID investigator assigned to the case painstakingly reconstructed the book, only to find that a batch of verbs had been packed incorrectly at the aft expansion joint and had overheated. Punctuation lock had no effect, and in a last desperate attempt to bring the book under control, the engineers initiated Emergency Volume Separation. A good idea, but undertaken too quickly. The smaller and lighter Epilogues could not alter course in time and collided with Volume Four, which in turn collided with Volume Three, and so forth. Of the twenty-six thousand characters lost in the disaster, only five survived. Verb quality control and emergency procedures were dramatically improved after this, and nothing like it had happened since.
“It seems to be a bed-sitting room of some variety,” murmured Sprockett as he peered inside the large lump of scrap. “Probably ten pounds a week—furnished, naturally.”
“Naturally.”
“Are we looking for anything in particular?”
“An International Standard Book Number,” I said, “an ISBN. We need to know what the book is and where it came from before we can start trying to figure out what went wrong. It’s sometimes harder than it seems. The wreckage is often badly mangled, widely scattered—and there are a lot of books out there.”
We stepped into the upside-down bed-sitting room, all its contents strewn around inside. It was well described, so it was either a popular book given depth and color by reader feedback, or pre-feedback altogether. The room hadn’t been painted for a while, the carpets were threadbare, and the furniture had seen better days. It might seem trivial, but it was these sorts of clues that allowed us to pinpoint which book it was from.
“Potboiler?” I suggested.
“It’s from HumDram if it is,” replied Sprockett as he picked up a torn Abbey Road album. “Post-1969, at any rate.”
We searched for half an hour amongst the debris but found no sign of an ISBN.
“This book could be any one of thousands,” said Sprockett.
“ Millions.”
With nothing more to see here, we stepped back outside the bed-sitting room, and I laid a map of the BookWorld on the hood of Lola’s car and marked where the section had been found. This done, I called in Pickford Removals, and within twenty minutes the bed-sitting room had been loaded onto the back of a flatbed for onward delivery to the double garage at the back of my house. This was ostensibly to allow the books in which they had landed to carry on unhindered. Not that a ton of tattered paragraph would necessarily be a problem. The entire cast of A Tale of Two Cities has steadfastly ignored a runaway pink gorilla that has evaded capture for eighty-seven years but, as far as we know, has not been spotted by readers once.
“I’m sorry to have troubled you,” I said to Lola, who stubbed out her cigarette and climbed into her car. She stomped on the accelerator, and the Delahaye shot across the car park, drove straight through the wooden barrier behind her and landed with a crunch on top of the Mairzy Doats sandwich bar ten stories below.
“Come on,” I said to Sprockett. “Work to be done.”
The debris field extended across four genres, and we spent the next three hours listening to residents who claimed that falling book junk had “completely ruined their entrance,” and on one rare occasion it actually had. There was a reasonable quantity of wreckage, but nothing quite as large as the bed-sitting room. We found a yellow-painted back axle, the remains of at least nine tigers, a few playing cards, some lengths of silk, a hat stand, sections of a box-girder bridge, nine apples, parts of a raccoon and a quantity of slate. There was a lot of unrecognizable scrap, too, much of it desyntaxed sentences that made no sense at all. We found only one piece of human remains—a thumb—except it might not have been a thumb at all but simply reformed graphemes.
“Graphemes?” asked Sprockett when I mentioned it.
“Everything in the BookWorld is constructed of them,” I explained. “Letters and punctuation—the building blocks of the textual world.”
“So why might that thumb not actually be a thumb?”
“Because once broken down below the ‘word’ unit, a grapheme might come from anywhere. The same s can serve equally well in a sword, a sausage, a ship, a sailor or even the sun. It doesn’t help that under extreme pressure and heat, graphemes often separate out and then fuse back together into something else entirely. At Jurisfiction basic training, we were shown how a ‘sheet of card,’ once heated up white-hot and then struck with a blacksmith’s hammer, could be made into ‘cod feathers’ and then back again.”
“Ah,” said Sprockett, “I see.”
“Because of this, anything under a few words long found at an accident site can be disregarded as evidence—it might once have been something else entirely.” Oddly enough, the process of graphusion and graphission, while occurring naturally in the Text Sea, was hard to do synthetically in the BookWorld but simplicity itself in the Outland. The long and short of it was that victims of extreme trauma in the BookWorld were rarely found. A sprinkling of graphemes was soon absorbed into the fabric of the book it fell upon and left no trace.
Once Sprockett and I had logged everything we’d found and dispatched it via Pickford’s to my double garage, I called Mrs. Malaprop to check that all was well. It was, generally speaking. Pickwick was suspicious that there really might be goblins around, and Carmine was spending her time rehearsing with the various members of the cast. Whitby Jett had called to say that now that Carmine was there, he would be taking me out to Bar Humbug for a drink and nibbles at nine—and no arguments.
I’d known him for nearly two years, and I think I’d just come to the end of a very long trail of excuses and reasons that I couldn’t go out on a date. I sighed. There was still one. Perhaps the only one I’d ever had. I told Mrs. Malaprop I would be home in half an hour, thought for a moment and then turned to Sprockett.
“Can I shut you down for a while?”
“Madam, that is a most improper suggestion.”
“I’m about to do something illegal, and since you are incapable of lying, I don’t want you in a position where you have to divide your loyalties between your duties as a butler and your duties to the truth.”
“Most thoughtful, ma’am. Conflicting loyalties do little but strip teeth off my cogs. Shall I shut down immediately?”
“Not yet.”
We hailed a cab at the corner of Heller and Vonnegut. The cabbie had issues with clockwork people—“all that infernal ticking”—but since Sprockett was, legally speaking, nothing more nor less than a carriage clock, he was consigned to the trunk.
“I don’t mind being treated as baggage,” he said agreeably.
“In fact, I prefer it. Promise you’ll restart me?”
“I promise.”
And after he had settled back against the spare tire, I pressed the emergency spring-release button located under his inspection cover. There was a loud whirring noise, and Sprockett went limp.
I shut the trunk, settled into the cab and closed the door.
“Where to?”
“Poetry.”
7.
The Lady of Shalott
Here in the BookWorld, the protagonists and antagonists, gatekeepers, shape-shifters, heroes, villains, bit parts, knaves, comedians and goblins were united in that they possessed a clearly defined motive for what they were doing: entertainment and enlightenment. As far as any of us could see, no such luxury existed in the unpredictable world of the readers. The Outland was extraordinarily well named.
Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (4th edition)
The taxi was the usual yellow-and-check variety and could either run on wheels i
n the conventional manner or fly using advanced Technobabble™ vectored gravitational inversion thrusters. This had been demanded by the Sci-Fi fraternity, who had been whingeing on about hover cars and jet packs for decades and needed appeasing before they went and did something stupid, like allow someone to make a movie based on the title of the book known as I, Robot.
The driver was an elderly woman with white hair who grumbled about how she had just given a fare to three Triffids and how they hadn’t bothered to tip and left soil in the foot wells and were horribly drunk on paraquat.
“Poetry?” she repeated. “No worries, pet. High Road or Low Road?”
She meant either up high, dodging amongst the planetoid-size books that were constantly moving across the sky, or down low on the ground, within the streets and byways. Taking the High Road was a skillful endeavor that meant either slipstreaming behind a particularly large book or latching onto a novel going in roughly the same direction and being carried to one’s destination in a series of piggyback rides. It was faster if things went well, but more dangerous and prone to delays.
“Low Road,” I said, since the traffic between Poetry and Fiction was limited and one could orbit for hours over the coast, waiting for a novel heading in the right direction.
“Jolly good,” she said, clicking the FARE ON BOARD sign. “Cash, credit, goats, chickens, salt, pebbles, ants or barter?”
“Barter. I’ll swap you two hours of my butler.”
“Can he mix cocktails?”
“He can do a Tahiti Tingle—with or without umbrella.”
“Deal.”
We took the Dickens Freeway through HumDram, avoided the afternoon jam at the Brontë-Austen interchange and took a shortcut through Shreve Plaza to rejoin the expressway at Picoult Junction, and from there to the Carnegie Underpass, part of the network of tunnels that connected the various islands that made up the observable BookWorld.
One of Our Thursdays Is Missing tn-6 Page 6
