Thursday Next in First Among Sequels

by Jasper Fforde

  I realized I was still holding the phone. “Bowden, are you there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “This stinks to high heaven. Can you find out something about this so-called Interactive Book Council? I’ve never heard of such a thing. Call me back.”

  I returned my attention to the TV.

  “And when we’ve lost all the classics and the stupidity surplus has once again ballooned?” asked Webastow. “What happens then?”

  “Well,” said Ms. Yogert with a shrug, “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, eh?”

  “You’ll forgive me for saying this,” said Webastow, looking over his glasses, “but this is the most harebrained piece of unadulterated stupidity that any government has ever undertaken anywhere.”

  “Thank you very much,” replied Ms. Yogert courteously. “I’ll make sure your compliments are forwarded to Prime Minister van de Poste.”

  The program changed to a report on how the “interactive book” might work. Something about “new technologies” and “user-defined narrative.” It was all baloney. I knew what was going on. It was Senator Jobsworth. He’d pushed through that interactive book project of Baxter’s. Worse, he’d planned this all along—witness the large throughput conduits in Pride and Prejudice and the recent upgrading of all of Austen’s work. I wasn’t that concerned with how they’d managed to overturn my veto or even open an office in the real world—what worried me was that I needed to be in the Book-World to stop the nation’s entire literary heritage from being sacrificed on the altar of popularism.

  The phone rang. It was Bowden again. I made a trifling and wholly unbelievable excuse about looking for a hammer, then vanished into the garage so Landen couldn’t hear the conversation.

  “The Interactive Book Council is run out of an office in West London,” Bowden reported when I was safely perched on the lawn mower. “It was incorporated a month ago and has the capacity to take a thousand simultaneous calls—yet the office itself is barely larger than the one at Acme.”

  “They must have figured a way to transfer the calls en masse to the BookWorld,” I replied. “I’m sure a thousand Mrs. Danvers would be overjoyed to be working in a call center rather than bullying characters or dealing with rampant mispellings.”

  I told Bowden I’d try to think of something and hung up. I stepped out of the garage and went back into the living room, my heart thumping. This was why I had the veto—to protect the BookWorld from the stupefyingly shortsighted decisions of the Council of Genres. But first things first. I had to contact Bradshaw and see what kind of reaction Jurisfiction was having to the wholesale slaughter of literary treasures—but how? JurisTech had never devised a two-way communication link between the Book-World and the Outland, as I was the only one ever likely to use it.

  “Are you all right, Mum?” asked Tuesday.

  “Yes, poppet, I’m fine,” I said, tousling her hair. “I’ve just got to muse on this awhile.”

  I went upstairs to my office, which had been converted from the old box room, and sat down to think. The more I thought, the worse things looked. If the CofG had discounted my veto and forced the interactivity issue, it was entirely possible that they would also be attacking Speedy Muffler and Racy Novel. The only agency able to police these matters was Jurisfiction—but it worked to Text Grand Central’s orders, which was itself under the control of the Council of Genres, so Jobsworth was ultimately in command of Jurisfiction—and he could do with it what he wanted.

  I sighed, leaned forward and absently pulled out my hair tie, then rubbed at my scalp with my fingertips. Commander Bradshaw would never have agreed to this interactivity garbage and would resign out of principle—as he had hundreds of times before. And if I were there, I could reaffirm my veto. It was a right given me by the Great Panjandrum, and not even Jobsworth would go against her will. This was all well and good but for one thing: I’d never even considered the possibility of losing my TravelBook, so I’d never worked out an emergency strategy for getting into the BookWorld without it.

  The only person I knew who could bookjump without a book was Mrs. Nakajima, and she was in retirement at Thornfield Hall. Ex–Jurisfiction agent Harris Tweed had been banished permanently to the Outland, and without his TravelBook he was as marooned as I was. Ex-chancellor Yorrick Kaine, real these days and currently licking his wounds from a cell at Parkhurst, was no help at all, and neither was the only other fictionaut I knew still living, Cliff Hangar. I thought again about Commander Bradshaw. He’d certainly want to contact me and was a man of formidable resources—if I were him, how would I go about contacting someone in the real world? I checked my e-mails but found nothing and looked to see if I had any messages on my cell phone, which I hadn’t. My mobilefootnoterphone, naturally, was devoid of a signal.

  I leaned back in my chair to think more clearly and let my eyes wander around the room. I had a good collection of books, amassed during my long career as a Literary Detective. Major and minor classics, but little of any great value. I stopped and thought for a moment, then started to rummage through my bookshelf until I found what I was looking for—one of Commander Bradshaw’s novels. Not one he wrote, of course, but one of the ones that featured him. There were twenty-three in the series, written between 1888 and 1922, and all featured Bradshaw either shooting large animals, finding lost civilizations or stopping “Johnny Foreigner” from causing mischief in British East Africa. He had been out of print for over sixty years and hadn’t been read at all for more than ten. Since no one was reading him, he could say what he wanted in his own books, and I would be able to read what he said. But there were a few problems: one, that twenty-three books would take a lot of reading; two, that Text Grand Central would know if his books were being read; and three, that it was simply a one-way conduit, and if he did leave a message, he would never know if it was me who’d read it.

  I opened Two Years Amongst the Umpopo and flicked through the pages to see if anything caught my eye, such as a double line space or something. It didn’t, so I picked up Tilapia, the Devil-Fish of Lake Rudolph and, after that, The Man-Eaters of Nakuru. It was only while I was idly thumbing through Bradshaw Defies the Kaiser that I hit pay dirt. The text of the book remained unaltered, but the dedication had changed. Bradshaw was smart; only a variance in the story would be noticed at Text Grand Central—they wouldn’t know I was reading it at all. I took the book back to my desk and read:

  Thursday, D’girl.

  If you can read this, you have realized that something is seriously squiffy in the BookWorld. Plans had been afoot for weeks, and none of us had seen them. Thursday1–4 (yes, it’s true) has taken your place as the CofG’s LBOCS and is rubber-stamping all of Jobsworth’s idiotic schemes. The interactivity idea is going ahead full speed, and even now Danverclones are massing on the borders of Racy Novel, ready to invade. Evil Thursday has loaded Text Grand Central with her toadies in order to keep a careful watch for any textual anomalies that might give them—and her—a clue as to whether you have returned. For it is this that Evil Thursday fears more than anything: that you will return, unmask her as an impostor and retake your place. She has suspended Jurisfiction and had all agents confined to their books, and she now commands a legion of Danverclones, who are waiting to capture you should you appear in the BookWorld. We stole back your TravelBook and have left it for you with Captain Carver inside It Was a Dark and Stormy Night if you can somehow find a way in. This dedication will self-erase in two readings. Good luck, old girl—and Melanie sends her love.

  Bradshaw.

  I read the dedication again and watched as the words slowly dissolved from the page. Good old Bradshaw. I had been to It Was a Dark and Stormy Night a couple of times, mostly for training. It was a maritime adventure set aboard a tramp steamer on the Tasman Sea in 1924. It was a good choice, because it came under the deregulated area of the library known as Vanity Publishing. Text Grand Central wouldn’t even know I was there. I replaced Bradshaw Defies the Kaiser on the
shelf, then unlocked the bottom drawer and took out my pistol and eraserhead cartridges. I stuffed them in my bag, noted that it was almost ten and knocked on Friday’s door.

  “Darling?”

  He looked up from the copy of Strontmania he was reading.

  “Yuh?”

  “I’m sorry, Sweetpea, but I have to go back to the BookWorld. It may put the unscrambled-eggs recipe in jeopardy.”

  He sighed and stared at me. “I knew you would.”

  “How?”

  He beckoned me to the window and pointed to three figures sitting on a wall opposite the house. “The one in the middle is the other me. It shows there is still a chance they’ll get hold of the recipe. If we’d won, they’d be long gone.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, laying a hand on his. “I know how important the length of the Now is to all of us. I won’t go anywhere near ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus.’”

  “Mum,” he said in a quiet voice, “if you get back home and I’m polite, well-mannered and with short hair, don’t be too hard on me, eh?”

  He was worried about being replaced.

  “It won’t come to that, Sweetpea. I’ll defend your right to be smelly and uncommunicative…with my life.”

  We hugged and I said good-bye, then did the same to Tuesday, who was reading in bed, giggling over the risible imperfections of the Special Theory of Relativity. She knew I was going somewhere serious, so she got out of bed to give me an extra hug just in case. I hugged her back, tucked her in, told her not to make Einstein look too much of a clot in case it made her look cocky. I then went to say good-bye to Jenny and can remember doing so, although for some reason Friday and Tuesday picked that moment to argue about the brightness of the hall light. After sorting them out, I went downstairs to Landen.

  “Land,” I said, unsure of what to say, since I rarely got emergency call-outs for carpet laying, and to pretend I did now would be such an obvious lie, “you do know I love you?”

  “More than you realize, sweetheart.”

  “And you trust me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. I’ve got to go and—”

  “Do some emergency carpet laying?”

  I smiled. “Yeah. Wish me luck.”

  We hugged, I put on my jacket and left the house, hailing a cab to take me to the Clary-LaMarr Travelport. When I was safely on the bullet train to Saknussemm, I took out my cell phone and keyed in a number. I stared out at the dark Wessex countryside that zipped past so fast the few streetlamps I could see were almost orange streaks. The cell was picked up, and I paused, heart thumping, before speaking.

  “My name’s Thursday Next. I’d like to speak to John Henry Goliath. You’re going to have to wake him. It’s a matter of some importance.”

  32.

  The Austen Rover Roving

  The basis for the Austen Rover, I learned much later, was a bus that the Goliath Corporation had bought in 1952 to transport its employees to the coast on “works days out,” a lamentable lapse in Goliath’s otherwise fine record of rampant worker exploitation. The error was discovered after eight years and the day trips discontinued. True to form, Goliath docked the wages of all who attended and charged them for the trip—with back-dated interest.

  The Austen Rover has two separate systems,” explained Dr. Anne Wirthlass, “the transfictional propulsion unit and the book-navigation protocol. The former we have worked out—the latter is something you need to update us on.”

  It was almost noon of the following day, and I was being brought up to speed on the Rover’s complexities by the brilliant Dr. Wirthlass, who had thanked me profusely for changing my mind so close to the time before they were to fire themselves off into the unknown.

  “It was the least I could do,” I replied, keeping the real reason to myself.

  There had been an excited buzz among the technicians in the lab that morning, and I had been introduced to more specialists in an hour than I’d met in a lifetime. John Henry Goliath himself was on hand to smooth over any problems we might have, and there had already been a propulsion test. The Austen Rover had been chained to the floor, and the engines had been spooled up. With a deafening roar, the Rover had flexed at the chains while an inky black void had opened up in front of it. The engines had been throttled back, and the void had closed. It didn’t have the quiet subtleness of Mycroft’s Prose Portal, but it had certainly been impressive.

  That had been three hours earlier. Right now we were in the control room, and I’d been trying to explain to them just what form the BookWorld takes, which was a bit odd, as it was really only my interpretation of it, and I had a feeling that if they accepted my way, it would become the way, so I was careful not to describe anything that might be problematical later. I spread a sheet of paper on the table and drew a rough schematic of the various genres that made up the BookWorld, but without too many precise locations—just enough for them to get us inside and then to It Was a Dark and Stormy Night without any problems.

  “The Nothing is a big place,” I said without fear of understatement, “and mostly empty. Theoretical storyologists have calculated that the readable BookWorld makes up only twenty-two percent of visible reading matter—the remainder is the unobservable remnants of long-lost books, forgotten oral tradition and ideas still locked in writers’ heads. We call it ‘dark reading matter.’”

  “Why is so much of it unread and untold?”

  I shrugged. “We’re not altogether sure, but we think ninety-eight percent of the world’s fiction was wiped out by the accidental death of an Iron Age storyteller about three thousand years ago. It was what we call a ‘mass erasure’—we wouldn’t see anything of that size until human perfidy, fire and mold wiped out seventy-five percent of Greek drama at the CE boundary. The reason I mention it is that navigating through the Nothing could be more treacherous than you imagine—colliding with a lost work of Aeschylus or being pulled apart by the Hemingway ‘lost suitcase of manuscripts’ could bring your trip to a painfully verbose. And incorrectly punctuated. End.”

  Dr. Wirthlass nodded sagely.

  I drew a rough circle near the Maritime Adventure (Civilian) genre. “We think that this area is heavy with detritus from an unknown genre—possibly Squid Action/Adventure—that failed to fully form a century ago. Twice a year Maritime is pelted with small fragments of ideas and snatches of inner monologue regarding important invertebrate issues that don’t do much harm, but bookjumping through this zone has always been a bit bumpy. If we wanted to go from Maritime to Frontier quickly and easily, we wouldn’t jump direct but go through Western.”

  We talked along these lines for a good four hours; it surprised me that I knew so much about the BookWorld without really having had to sit down and learn it, and it also surprised me to what an advanced stage the Goliath Book Project had progressed. By agreement they would drop me on page 68 of It Was a Dark and Stormy Night before slingshotting back to Goliath, then await my return and a debrief before attempting any further travel. I had made my demands clearly when I’d spoken to John Henry the previous evening. They would do this my way or not at all, something that he was happy to agree with. He also proposed some sort of business partnership where I could oversee the whole Austen Rover project and determine in what direction book tourism would go. I still didn’t like the idea of it, but if the alternative was the wholesale loss of all the classics through reality book shows, then I’d pretend to go along. I told John Henry we could discuss the precise details upon my return. Throughout the day I’d been having nagging doubts about cozying up to Goliath despite their entreaties, and in an afternoon rest break I wandered into the employees’ canteen area, where there was a TV showing a program all about the upcoming Pride and Prejudice reality show.

  “Welcome to Bennetmania,” said a lively young man with painfully fashionable facial hair. He was presenting one of several reality book TV shows that had been rushed onto the schedules to cater to the latest fad. “…And our studio panel w
ill be here to give an up-to-date analysis of the book’s unfolding drama as soon as it begins. Dr. Nessecitar, our resident pseudopyschologist, will point out the bleeding obvious about the Bennet house mates’ progress, and our resident experts will give their opinions and advice on whom should be voted out. But first let’s have a rundown on who our house mates actually are.”

  I stood and stared with a kind of numb fascination as a jaunty tune started up under an annoyingly buoyant voice-over that accompanied “artists’ impressions” of the family.

  “Mr. Bennet is the father of the clan, and when he’s not chastizing his younger daughters for their silliness or teasing his wife, he likes nothing better than to sit in his study and conduct his affairs. His wife is Mrs. Bennet, who has a brother in trade and is convinced that her daughters should marry up. This old bunny is highly unstable, prone to panic attacks and socially awkward, so keep your eyes fixed on her for some seriously good fireworks.”

  The illustration changed to that of the sisters, with each being highlighted in turn as the voice-over described them.

  “None of the daughters will inherit Longbourn due to the lack of an heir, and the apparent absence of any suitable males in Meryton makes the issue of potential husbands a major concern. Curvaceous, doe-eyed Jane, twenty-two, is the beauty of the family, with a kindly temperament to match. And if Bingley looks at another woman, hold on for the waterworks! Next in line is the thinker of the house and Mr. Bennet’s favorite: Lizzie, who is twenty. Willful, skillful and adept with words, she is certainly one to watch—never mind the looks, check out the subtext! Third eldest is Mary, who just likes to read and criticize the rest of them. Dreary and unappealing, and we don’t think she’ll last long. Kitty and Lydia are the two youngest of the Bennets and the silliest and most excitable of them all, especially when there’s a uniform around, or even the sniff of a party. Impetuous and uncontrollable—these are the two that all eyes will be riveted upon!”