Thursday Next in First Among Sequels

by Jasper Fforde

  “How do you know this?”

  “I become director-general of the ChronoGuard when I’m thirty-six. In the final year before retirement, at seventy-eight, I’m inducted into the ChronoGuard Star Chamber—the ruling elite. It was there that I discovered something so devastating that if it became public knowledge would shut down the industry in an instant. And the time business is worth six hundred billion a year—minimum.”

  “Tell them what it is,” said Polly, who’d been standing at his side. “If anything happens to you, then at least one of us might be able to carry on.”

  Friday nodded and took a deep breath. “Has anyone noticed how short attention spans seem to have cast a certain lassitude across the nation?”

  “Do I ever,” I replied, rolling my eyes and thinking of the endlessly downward clicking of the Read-O-Meter. “No one’s reading books anymore. They seem to prefer the mind-numbing spectacle of easily digested trash TV and celebrity tittle-tattle.”

  “Exactly,” said Friday. “The long view has been eroded. We can’t see beyond six months, if that, and short-termism will spell our end. But the thing is, it needn’t be that way—there’s a reason for it. The time engines don’t just need vast quantities of power—they need to run on time. Not punctuality, but time itself. Even a temporal leap of a few minutes will use up an infinitesimally small amount of the abstract concept. Not the hard clock time but the soft stuff that keeps events firmly embedded in a small cocoon of prolonged event—the Now.”

  “Oooh!” murmured Tuesday, who twigged it first. “They’ve been mining the Now!”

  “Exactly, sis,” said Friday, sweeping the hair from his eyes. “The Short Now is the direct result of the time industry’s unthinking depredations. If the ChronoGuard continues as it is, within a few years there won’t be any Now at all, and the world will move into a Dark Age of eternal indifference.”

  “You mean TV could get worse?” asked Landen.

  “Much worse,” replied Friday grimly. “At the rate the Now is being eroded, by this time next year Samaritan Kidney Swap will be considered the height of scholarly erudition. But easily digestible TV is not the cause—it’s the effect. A Short Now will also spell the gradual collapse of forward planning, and mankind will slowly strangulate itself in a downward spiral of uncaring self-interest and short-term instant gratification.”

  There was a bleak silence as we took this on board. We could see it all now. Short attention spans, a general malaise, no tolerance, no respect, no rules. Short-termism. No wonder we were seeing Outlander ReadRates go into free fall. The Short Now would hate books; too much thought required for not enough gratification. It brought home the urgency to find the recipe, wherever it was: Without unscrambled eggs, there was no time travel, no more depredation of the Now, and we could look to a brighter future of long-term thought—and more reading. Simple.

  “Shouldn’t this be a matter for public debate?” asked Landen.

  “What would that achieve, Dad? The ChronoGuard doesn’t have to disprove that the reduction of the Now is caused by humans—they only have to create doubt. They’ll always be Short Now deniers, and the debate will become so long and drawn out that as soon as we realize there is a problem, we won’t care enough to want to do anything about it. This issue is not for debate—the ChronoGuard cannot get hold of that recipe. I’m staking my career on it. And believe me, I would have had an excellent career to stake.”

  There was silence after Friday’s speech. We all realized that he was right, of course, but I was also thinking about how proud I was of him and how refreshing it was to hear such eloquence and moral lucidity from such a grubby and disheveled individual who was wearing a WAYNE SKUNK IS THE BALLOCKS T-shirt.

  Polly sighed, breaking the silence. “If only Mycroft were alive. we could ask him where he put it.”

  And then I understood.

  “Aunt,” I said, “come with me. Friday—you, too.”

  It was dusk by now, and the last rays of evening light were shining through the dusty windows of Mycroft’s workshop. It seemed somehow shabbier in the twilight.

  “All those memories!” breathed Polly, hobbling across the concrete floor with Friday holding her arm. “What a life. Yes indeed, what a life. I’ve not been in here since before he…you know.”

  “Don’t be startled,” I told her, “but I’ve seen Mycroft twice in here over the past two days. He came back to tell us something, and until now I had no idea what it was. Polly?”

  Her eyes had filled with tears as she stared into the dim emptiness of the workshop. I followed her gaze, and as my eyes became accustomed to the light, I could see him, too. Mycroft’s opacity was low, and the color seemed to have drained from his body. He was barely there at all.

  “Hello, Poll,” he said with a smile, his voice a low rumble. “You’re looking positively radiant!”

  “Oh, Crofty!” she murmured. “You’re such a fibber—I’m a doddering wreck ready for the scrap heap. But one that has missed you so much!”

  “Mycroft,” I said in a respectful whisper, “I don’t want to keep you from your wife, but time is short. I know why you came back.”

  “You mean it wasn’t Farquitt or the chairs?”

  “No. It was about the recipe for unscrambled eggs.”

  “We need to know,” added Polly, “where you left it.”

  “Is that all?” laughed Mycroft. “Why, goodness—I put in my jacket pocket!”

  He was beginning to fade, and his voice sounded hollow and empty. His post-life time was almost up.

  “And after that?”

  He faded some more. I was worried that if I blinked, he’d go completely.

  “Which jacket, my darling?” asked Polly.

  “The one you gave me for Christmas,” came an ethereal whisper, “the blue one…with the large checks.”

  “Crofty?”

  But he had vanished. Friday and I rushed to support Polly, who had gone a bit wobbly at the knees.

  “Damn!” said Friday. “When does he next come back?”

  “He doesn’t,” I said. “That was it.”

  “Then we’re no closer to knowing where it is,” said Friday. “I’ve been through all his clothes—there isn’t one with blue checks in his closet.”

  “There’s a reason for that,” said Polly, her eyes glistening with tears. “He left it on the Hesperus. I scolded him at the time, but now I see why he did it.”

  “Mum? Does this make any sense to you?”

  “Yes,” I said with a smile. “It’s somewhere the ChronoGuard can’t get to it. Back in 1985, before he used the Prose Portal to send Polly into ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,’ he tested it on himself. The jacket is right where he left it—in the teeth of an Atlantic gale inside Henry Longfellow’s poem ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus.’”

  “Inside the BookWorld?”

  “Right,” I replied, “and nothing—repeat, nothing—would compel me to return there. In two days the ChronoGuard will be gone, and the slow repair of the Now can begin. You did good, Sweetpea.”

  “Thanks, Mum,” he said, “but please—don’t call me Sweetpea.”

  31.

  Spending the Surplus

  The Commonsense Party’s first major policy reversal of perceived current wisdom was with the scrapping of performance targets, league standings and the attempt to make subtle human problems into figures on a graph that could be solved quickly and easily through “initiatives.” Arguing that important bodies such as the Health Ser vice should have the emphasis on care and not on administration, the Commonsense Party forced through legislation that essentially argued, “If it takes us ten years to get into the shit, it will take us twenty years to get out—and that journey starts now.”

  We stayed at Mum’s for dinner, although “dinner” in this context might best be described as a loose collection of foodstuffs tossed randomly into a large saucepan and then boiled for as long as it took for all taste to vanish, never to return. Because
of this we missed Redmond van de Poste’s Address to the Nation, something that didn’t really trouble us, as the last address had been, as they always were, unbelievably dreary but astute and of vital importance. It was just so good to talk to Friday again one-to-one. I’d forgotten how pleasant he actually was. He lost no time in telling me that he was going to have to stay undercover as a lazy good-for-nothing until the ChronoGuard had ceased operations—and this meant that I shouldn’t even attempt to wake him until at least midday, or two on weekends.

  “How convenient,” I observed.

  Tuesday had been thoughtful for some time and finally asked, “But can’t the ChronoGuard go back to the time between when Great-Uncle Mycroft wrote the recipe and when he left it on the Hesperus?”

  “Don’t worry,” said Friday with a wink. “It was only twenty-eight minutes, and the older me has it covered at the other end. The only thing we have to do is make sure the recipe stays in ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus.’ We can win this fight with nothing more than inaction, which as a teenager suits me just fine.”

  It was only as we were driving home that I suddenly thought of Jenny.

  “Oh, my God!” I said in a panic. “We left Jenny at home on her own!”

  Landen took hold of my arm and squeezed it, and I felt Friday rest his hand on my shoulder.

  “It’s all right, darling, calm down,” Landen soothed. “We left her with Mrs. Berko-Boyler.”

  I frowned. “No, we didn’t. You said she was making a camp in the attic. We came straight out. How could we have forgotten?”

  “Sweetheart,” said Landen with a deep breath, “there is no Jenny.”

  “What do you you mean?” I demanded, chuckling at the stupidity of his comment. “Of course there’s a Jenny!”

  “Dad’s right,” said Friday soothingly. “There has never been a Jenny.”

  “But I can remember her!”

  “It’s Aornis, Mum,” added Tuesday. “She gave you this mindworm seven years ago, and we can’t get rid of it.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said beginning to panic. “I can remember everything about her! Her laugh, the holidays, the time she fell off her bicycle and broke her arm, her birth—everything!”

  “Aornis did this to you for revenge,” said Landen. “After she couldn’t wipe me from your memory, she left you with this—that’s what she’s doing her forty-year stretch for.”

  “The bitch!” I yelled. “I’ll kill her for this!”

  “Language, Mum,” said Tuesday. “I’m only twelve. Besides, even if you did kill her, we think Jenny would still be with you.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said as reason started to replace confusion and anger. “That’s why she never turns up at mealtimes.”

  “We pretend there is a Jenny to minimize the onset of an attack,” said Landen. “It’s why we keep her bedroom as it is and why you’ll find her stuff all around the house—so when you’re alone, you don’t go into a missing-daughter panic.”

  “The evil little cow!” I muttered, rubbing my face. “But now that I know, we can do something about it, right?”

  “It’s not as easy as that, sweetheart,” said Landen with a note of sadness in his voice. “Aornis is truly vindictive—in a few minutes you won’t remember any of this and you’ll again believe that you have a daughter named Jenny.”

  “You mean,” I said slowly, “I’ve done this before?”

  We pulled up outside the house, and Landen turned off the engine. There was silence in the car.

  “Sometimes you can go weeks without an attack,” said Landen quietly. “At other times you can have two or three an hour.”

  “Is that why you work from home?”

  “Yeah. We can’t have you going to school every day expecting to pick up a daughter who isn’t there.”

  “So…you’ve explained all this to me before?”

  “Many times, darling.”

  I sighed deeply. “I feel like a complete twit,” I said in a soft voice. “Is this my first attack today?”

  “It’s the third,” said Landen. “It’s been a bad week.”

  I looked at them all in turn, and they were all staring back at me with such a sense of loving concern for my well-being that I burst into tears.

  “It’s all right, Mum,” said Tuesday, holding my hand. “We’ll look after you.”

  “You are the best, most loving, supportive family anyone could ever have,” I said through my sobs. “I’m so sorry if I’m a burden.”

  They all told me not to be so bloody silly, I told them not to swear, and Landen gave me his handkerchief for my tears.

  “So,” I said, wiping my eyes, “how does it work? How do I stop remembering the fact that there’s no Jenny?”

  “We have our ways. Jenny’s at a sleepover with Ingrid. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  He leaned across and kissed me, smiled and said to the kids, “Right, team, do your stuff.”

  Friday poked Tuesday hard in the ribs, and she squealed, “What was that for!?”

  “For being a geek!”

  “I’d rather be a geek than a duh-brain. And what’s more, Strontium Goat is rubbish and Wayne Skunk couldn’t play a guitar if his life depended on it!”

  “Say that again!”

  “Will you two cut it out!” I said crossly. “Honestly, I think Friday’s proved he’s no duh-brain over the Short Now thing, so just pack it in. Right. I know your gran gave us some food, but does anybody want anything proper to eat?”

  “There’s some pizza in the freezer,” said Landen. “We can have that.”

  We all got out of the car and walked up to the house with Friday and Tuesday bickering.

  “Geek.”

  “Duh-brain.”

  “Geek.”

  “Duh-brain.”

  “I said cut it out.” I suddenly thought of something. “Land, where’s Jenny?”

  “At a sleepover with Ingrid.”

  “Oh, yeah. Again?”

  “Thick as thieves, those two.”

  “Yeah,” I said with a frown, “thick as thieves, those two.”

  Bowden called during dinner. This was unusual for him, but not totally unexpected. Spike and I had crept away from Acme like naughty schoolkids, as we didn’t want to get into trouble over the cost of Major Pickles’s carpet, not to mention that it had taken us both all day and we’d done nothing else.

  “It’s not great, is it?” said Bowden in the overserious tone he used when he was annoyed, upset or angry. To be honest, I had the most shares in Acme, but he was the managing director, so day-to-day operations were up to him.

  “I don’t think it’s all that bad,” I said, going on the defensive.

  “Are you insane?” replied Bowden. “It’s a disaster!”

  “We’ve had bigger problems,” I said, beginning to get annoyed. “I think it’s best to keep a sense of proportion, don’t you?”

  “Well, yes,” he replied, “but if we let this sort of thing take a hold, you never know where it might end up.”

  I was pissed off now.

  “Bowden,” I said, “just cool it. Spike got stuck to the ceiling by Raum, and if Pickles hadn’t given the demi-devil the cold steel, we’d both be pushing up daisies.”

  There was silence on the line for a moment, until Bowden said in a quiet voice, “I’m talking about van de Poste’s Address to the Nation—what are you talking about?”

  “Oh—nothing. What did he say?”

  “Switch on the telly and you’ll see.”

  I asked Tuesday to switch channels. OWL-TV was airing the popular current-affairs show Fresh Air with Tudor Webastow, and Tudor, who was perhaps not the best but certainly the tallest reporter on TV, was interviewing the Commonsense minister of culture, Cherie Yogert, MP.

  “…and the first classic to be turned into a reality book show?”

  “Pride and Prejudice,” announced Yogert proudly. “It will be renamed The Bennets and will be serialized live in your house
hold copy the day after tomorrow. Set in starchy early-nineteenth-century En gland, the series will feature Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and their five daughters being given tasks and then voted out of the house one by one, with the winner going on to feature in Northanger Abbey, which itself will be the subject of more ‘readeractive’ changes.”

  “So what van de Poste is sanctioning,” remarked Webastow slowly, “is the wholesale plunder of everything the literary world holds dear.”

  “Not everything,” corrected Ms. Yogert. “Only books penned by English authors. We don’t have the right to do dumb things with other nations’ books—they can do that for themselves. But,” she went on, “I think ‘plunder’ would be too strong a word. We would prefer to obfuscate the issue by using nonsensical jargon such as ‘market-led changes’ or ‘user-choice enhancments.’ For centuries now, the classics have been dreary, overlong and incomprehensible to anyone without a university education. Reality book shows are the way forward, and the Interactive Book Council are the people to do it for us!”

  “Am I hearing this right?”

  “Unfortunately,” murmured Landen, who was standing next to me.

  “We have been suffering under the yoke of the Stalinist principle of one-author books,” continued Ms. Yogert, “and in the modern world we must strive to bring democracy to the writing process.”

  “I don’t think any authors would regard their writing process as creative totalitarianism,” said Webastow uneasily. “But we’ll move on. As I understand it, the technology that will enable you to alter the story line of a book will change it permanently, and in every known copy. Do you not think it would be prudent to leave the originals as they are and write alternative versions?”

  Yogert smiled at him patronizingly. “If we did that,” she replied, “it would barely be stupid at all, and the Commonsense Party takes the stupidity surplus problem extremely seriously. Prime Minister van de Poste has pledged to not only reduce the current surplus to zero within a year but to also cut all idiocy emissions by seventy percent in 2020. This requires unpopular decisions, and he had to compare the interests of a few die-hard, elitist, dweeby, bespectacled book fans with those of the general voting public. Better still, because this idea is so idiotic that the loss of a single classic—say, Jane Eyre—will offset the entire nation’s stupidity for an entire year. Since we have the potential to overwrite all the English classics to reader choice, we can do really stupid things with impunity. Who knows? We may even run a stupidity deficit—and can then afford to take on other nations’ idiocy at huge national profit. We see the UK as leading the stupidity-offset-trading industry—and the idiocy of that idea will simply be offset against the annihilation of Vanity Fair. Simple, isn’t it?”