‘Well,’ I replied, gathering my thoughts, ‘in a few minutes the shuttle will have entered the airlock and depressurisation will commence—’
‘Depressurisation? Why?’
‘For a frictionless drop. No air resistance—and we are kept from touching the sides by a powerful magnetic field. We then simply freefall the eight thousand miles to Sydney.’
‘So all cities have a DeepDrop to every other city, then?’
‘Only London and New York connecting to Sydney and Tokyo. If you wanted to get from Buenos Aires to Auckland you’d first take the Overmantle to Miami, then to New York, DeepDrop to Tokyo and finally another Overmantle to Auckland.’
‘How fast does it go?’ asked Snell, slightly nervously.
‘Peaks at fourteen thousand miles per hour,’ said my neighbour from behind his magazine, ‘give or take. We’ll fall with increasing velocity but decreasing acceleration until we reach the centre of the earth, at which point we will have attained our maximum velocity. Once past the centre our velocity will decrease until we reach Sydney, when our velocity will have decreased to zero.’
‘Is it safe?’
‘Of course!’ I assured him.
‘What if there’s another shuttle coming the other way?’
‘There can’t be,’ I assured him. ‘There’s only one shuttle per tube.’
‘What you say is true,’ said my boring neighbour. ‘The only thing we have to worry about is a failure of the magnetic containment system that keeps the ceramic tube and us from melting in the liquid core of the earth.’
‘Don’t listen to this, Snell.’
‘Is that likely?’ he asked.
‘Never happened before,’ replied the man sombrely. ‘But then if it had, they wouldn’t tell us about it, now, would they?’
Snell thought about this for a few moments.
‘Drop is D minus ten seconds,’ said the announcer.
The cabin went quiet and everyone tensed, subconsciously counting down. The drop, when it came, was a bit like going over a very large humpback bridge at great speed, but the initial unpleasantness—which was accompanied by grunts from the passengers—gave way to the strange and curiously enjoyable feeling of weightlessness. Many people do the drop for this reason only. I watched as my hair floated languidly in front of my face, and turned to Snell.
‘You okay?’
He nodded.
‘So I’m charged with a Fiction Infraction, yes?’
‘Fiction Infraction Class II,’ corrected Snell. ‘It’s not as though you did it on purpose. Even though we could argue convincingly that you improved the narrative of Jane Eyre, we still have to prosecute; after all, we can’t have people blundering around in Little Women trying to stop Beth from dying, can we?’
‘Can’t you?’
‘Of course not. Not that people don’t try. When you get before the magistrate, just deny everything and play dumb. I’m trying to get the case postponed on the grounds of strong reader approval.’
‘Will that work?’
‘It worked when Falstaff made his illegal jump to The Merry Wives of Windsor. We thought he’d be sent packing back to Henry IV Pt 2. But no, his move was approved—the judge was an opera fan, so maybe that had something to do with it. You haven’t had any operas written about you by Verde or Vaughan Williams, have you?’
‘No’
‘Pity.’
The feeling of weightlessness was odd but it didn’t last long, the increasing deceleration once more gently returning weight to us all. At 40 per cent normal gravity the cabin warning lights went out and we could move around if we wanted.
The technobore on my right started up again.
‘But the real beauty of the Gravitube is its simplicity. Since the force of gravity is the same irrespective of the declination of the tunnel, the trip to Tokyo will take exactly the same time as the trip to New York—and it would be the same again to Carlisle if it didn’t make more sense to use a conventional railway. Mind you,’ he went on, ‘if you could use the wave induction system to keep us accelerating all the way to the surface at the other end, the speed could be well in excess of the seven miles per second needed to achieve escape velocity.’
‘You’ll be telling me that we’ll fly to the moon next,’ I said.
‘We already have,’ returned my neighbour in a conspiratonal whisper. ‘Secret government experiments in space travel have already constructed a base on the far side of the moon where transmitters have been set up to control our thoughts and actions from repeater stations atop the Empire State Building using interstellar wireless communications from extraterrestrial life forms intent on world domination with the express agreement of the Goliath Corporation and a secret cabal of world leaders known as SPORK.’
‘And don’t tell me,’ I added, ‘Diatrymas are living in the New Forest.’
‘How did you know?’
I ignored him, and only thirty-eight minutes after leaving London we came in for a delicate dock in Sydney, the faintest click being heard as the magnetic locks held on to the shuttle to stop it falling back down again. After the safety light had been extinguished and the airlock pressurised we made our way to the exit, avoiding the technobore, who was trying to tell anyone who would listen that the Goliath Corporation were responsible for smallpox.
Snell, who genuinely seemed to enjoy the DeepDrop, walked with me until Passport Control, looked at his watch and announced:
‘Well, that’s me. Thanks for the chat. I’ve got to go and defend Tess for the umpteenth time. As Hardy originally wrote it she gets off. Listen, try and figure some extenuating circumstances as to your actions. If you can’t, then try and think up some stonking great lies. The bigger the better.’
‘That’s your best advice? Perjure myself?’
Snell coughed politely.
‘The astute lawyer has many strings to his bow, Miss Next. They’ve got Mrs Fairfax and Grace Poole to testify against you. It doesn’t look great, but no case is lost until it’s lost. They said I couldn’t get Henry V off the war crimes rap when he ordered the French POWs murdered, but I managed it—the same as Max DeWinter’s murder charge; no one figured he’d get off that in a million years. By the by, can you give this letter to that gorgeous Flakky girl? I’d be eternally grateful.’
He handed me a crumpled letter from his pocket and made to move off.
‘Wait!’ I said. ‘Where and when is the hearing?’
‘Didn’t I say? Sorry. The prosecution has chosen the examining magistrate from Kafka’s The Trial. Not my choice, believe me. Tomorrow at nine twenty-five. Do you speak German?’
‘No.’
‘Then we’ll make sure it’s an English translation—drop in at the end of Chapter Two; we’re on after Herr K. Remember what I said. So long!’
And before I could ask him how I might even begin to enter Kafka’s masterpiece of frustrating circuitous bureaucracy, he was gone.
I caught the Overmantle to Tokyo a half-hour later. It was almost deserted, and I hopped on board a Skyrail to Osaka and alighted in the business district at one in the morning, four hours after leaving Saknussum. I took a hotel room and sat up all night, staring out at the blinking lights and thinking about Landen.
15. Curiouser & Curiouser in Osaka
‘I first learned of my strange book-jumping skills as a little girl in the English school where my father taught in Osaka. I had been instructed to stand up and read to the class a passage from Winnie-the-Pooh. I began with Chapter 9: “It rained and it rained and it rained…” but then had to stop abruptly as I felt the Hundred Acre Wood move rapidly in all around me. I snapped the book shut and returned, damp and bewildered, to my classroom. Later on I visited the Hundred Acre Wood from the safety of my own bedroom and enjoyed wonderful adventures there. But I was always careful, even at that tender age, never to alter the visible storylines. Except, that is, to teach Christopher Robin how to read and write.’
O. NAKAJIMA. Adventures in the
Book Trade
Osaka was less flashy than Tokyo but no less industrious. In the morning I took breakfast at the hotel, bought a copy of the Far Eastern Toad and read the home news, but from a Far Eastern viewpoint—which made for a good take on the whole Russian thing. During breakfast I pondered just how I might find one woman in a city of a million. Apart from her surname and perfect English, there was little to go on. As a first step I asked the concierge to photocopy all the Nakajima entries from the telephone directory. I was dismayed to discover that Nakajima was quite a common name—there were 2,729 of them. I called one at random and a very pleasant Mrs Nakajima spoke to me for about ten minutes. I thanked her profusely and put the phone down, having not understood a single word. I sighed, ordered a large jug of coffee from room service, and began.
It was 351 non-book-jumper Nakajimas later, and in the doldrums of the depression that brings forth an abundance of negatives, that I started telling myself that what I was doing was useless—if Mrs Nakajima had retired to the distant back-story of Jane Eyre, was she really going to be anywhere near a telephone?
I stretched one of those groany-clicky stretches, drank the rest of my cold coffee and decided to go for a brief walk to loosen up. I was staring at the photocopied pages as I strolled along, trying to think of something to narrow the search, when a young man’s jacket caught my eye.
In the Far East many T-shirts and jackets have English writing on them—some of them making sense, but others just collections of words that must appear as fashionable to the Japanese youth as Kanji appears elegant to us. I had seen jackets with the strange legend ‘100% Chevrolet OK Fly-boy’ and later one with ‘Pratt & Whitney squadron movie’, so I should have been ready for anything. But this one was different. It was a smart leather jacket with the following message embroidered on the back. ‘Follow me, Next Girl!’
So I did. I followed the young man for two blocks before I noticed a second jacket much like the first. By the time I had crossed the canal I had seen another jacket with ‘SpecOps this way’ emblazoned on the back, then ‘Jane Eyre for ever!’ followed quickly by ‘Bad Boy Goliath’. But that wasn’t all—as if following some bizarre homing call, all the people wearing these jackets, hats and T-shirts seemed to be heading in the same direction. Thoughts of falling Hispano-Suizas and ambushed Skyrails suddenly filled my head, so I dug the entroposcope from my bag, shook it and noticed a slight separation between the rice and lentils. Entropy was decreasing. I rapidly turned and started walking in the opposite direction. I took three paces and stopped as a daring notion filled my head. Of course—why not make the entropic failure do the work for me? I followed the logos to a nearby market square where the rice and lentils in the entroposcope now formed into curved bands—coincidence had increased to the point where everyone I saw was wearing something with a relevant logo. ‘MycroTech developments’, ‘Charlotte Bronte’, ‘Toad News Network’, ‘Hispano-Suiza’, ‘Goliath’ or ‘Skyrail’ were all sewn or stuck to hats, jackets, umbrellas, shirts, bags. I looked around, desperately trying to find the coincidental epicentre. Then I saw him. In an inexplicably vacant gap within the busy market, an old man was seated in front of a small table. He was as brown as a nut and quite bald, and opposite him the other chair had just been vacated by a young woman. A piece of battered card leaning against his small valise declared, in eight languages, the fortune-teller’s trade and pledge. The English part of the sign read: ‘I have the answer you seek!’ and I was in no doubt that whatever he said would be so—and probably, yet very improbably in its undertaking, almost certainly result in my death. I took two paces towards the fortune-teller and shook the entroposcope again. The patterns were more defined but not the clean half-and-half separation I needed. The little man had seen me dither and beckoned me closer.
‘Please!’ he said. ‘Please come. Tell you everything!’
I paused and looked around for any sign of jeopardy. There was nothing. I was in a perfectly peaceful square in a prosperous area of a small provincial town in Japan. Whatever my anonymous foe had in store for me, it was something that I would least expect.
I stayed back, unsure of the wisdom of what I was doing. It was the appearance of a T-shirt that had nothing to do with me which clinched it. If I let this opportunity slide I would never find Mrs Nakajima this side of next month. I took out my ballpoint, clicked it open and marched purposefully towards the small man, who grinned wildly at me.
‘You come!’ he said in poor English. ‘You learn everything. Good buy, from me!’
But I didn’t stop. As I walked towards the fortune-teller I thrust my hand in my bag and pulled out a sheet of the Nakajima pages at random, then, just as I passed the little nut-brown man, I stabbed randomly on the page with my pen and broke into a run. I didn’t stop to look when I heard the lightning strike, nor the horrified gasps of onlookers. I didn’t stop until I was away from that place, back to plain polo shirts and ordinary designer labels and my entroposcope had returned to random clumping. I didn’t investigate what had happened; I didn’t need to. The fortune-teller was dead—and I would have been too if I had stopped to talk to him. I sat on a bench to get my breath back, felt nauseous again and almost threw up in a nearby trash can, much to the consternation of a little old lady who was sitting next to me. I recovered slightly and looked at the Nakajima that the fall of my ballpoint had decreed. If coincidences were running as high as I hoped, then this Nakajima had to be the one I sought. I asked the woman sitting on the bench next to me for directions. It seemed that a small amount of negative entropy still lingered—I was barely two minutes’ walk from my quarry.
The apartment block I was directed to was not in a very good state of repair. The plaster that was covering the cracks had cracks, and the grime on the peeling paint was itself starting to peel. Inside there was a small lobby where an elderly doorman was watching a dubbed version of 65 Walrus Street. He directed me to the fourth floor, where I found Mrs Nakajima’s apartment at the end of the corridor. The varnish on the door had lost its shine and the brass doorknob was tarnished, dusty and dull, no one had been in here for some time. I knocked despite this and, when silence was all that answered me, grasped the knob and turned it slowly. To my surprise it moved easily and the door creaked open I paused to look about me and, seeing no one, stepped inside.
Mrs Nakajima’s apartment was ordinary in the extreme. Three bedrooms, bathroom and kitchen. The walls and ceiling were plainly painted, the flooring a light-coloured wood. It seemed as though she had moved out a few months ago and taken almost everything with her. The only notable exception to this was a small table near the window of the living room, upon which I found four slim hide-bound volumes lying next to a brass reading lamp. I picked up the uppermost book. It had ‘Jurisfiction’ embossed on the cover, above a name I didn’t recognise. I tried to open the book but the covers were stuck fast. I tried the second book with no better luck, but paused for a moment when I saw the third book. I gently touched the slim volume and ran my fingertips across the thin layer of dust that had accumulated on the spine. The hair bristled on my neck and I shivered. But it wasn’t a fearful feeling. It was the light tingle of apprehension; this book, I knew, would open. The name on the cover was my own. I had been expected. I opened the book. On the title page was a handwritten note from Mrs Nakajima that was short and to the point:
For Thursday Next, in grateful anticipation of good work and fine times ahead with Jurisfiction. I jackanoried you into a book when you were nine but now you must do it for yourself—and you can, and you shall. I also suggest that you are quick, Mr Schitt-Hawse is walking along the corridor outside as you read this and he isn’t out collecting for ChronoGuard orphans. —Mrs Nakajima
I ran to the door and slid the bolt just as the door handle rattled. There was a pause and then a loud thump on the door.
‘Next!’ came Schitt-Hawse’s unmistakable voice. ‘I know you’re in there! Let me in and we can fetch Jack together!’
I had
been followed, obviously. It suddenly struck me that perhaps Goliath were more interested in how to get into books than in Jack Schitt himself. There was a billion-pound hole in the budget for their advanced weapons division and a Prose Portal, any Prose Portal, would be just the thing to fill it.
‘Go to hell!’ I shouted as I returned to my book. On the first page, under a large heading that read ‘READ ME FIRST!’, there was a description of a library somewhere. I needed no second bidding; the door flexed under a heavy blow and I saw the paint crack near the lock. If it was Chalk or Cheese they wouldn’t take long to gain entry.
I relaxed, took a deep breath, cleared my throat and read in a clear, strong and confident voice, expressive and expansive. I added pauses, inflections and raised the tone of my voice where the text required it. I read as I had never read before.
‘I was in a long, dark, wood-panelled corridor,’ I began, ‘lined with bookshelves that reached from the richly carpeted floor to the vaulted ceiling—’
The sound of thumping increased and as I spoke the door frame splintered near the hinges and collapsed inward as Chalk fell with a heavy thump on to the floor, closely followed by Cheese, who landed on top of him.
‘The carpet was elegantly patterned and the ceiling was decorated with rich mouldings that depicted scenes from the classics—’
‘Next!’ yelled Schitt-Hawse, putting his head round the door as Chalk and Cheese struggled to get up. ‘Coming to Osaka was not part of the deal! I told you to keep me informed. Nothing will happen to you—’
But something was happening. Something new, something other. My utter loathing of Goliath, the urge to get away, the knowledge that without entry to books I would never see Landen again—all of these things gave me the will to soften the barriers that had hardened since the day I first entered Jane Eyre in 1958.
‘High above me, spaced at regular intervals, were finely decorated circular apertures through which light gained entry—’
Lost in a Good Book tn-2 Page 15
