One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (4 page)

“I hope it’s not Sword and Sorcery,” said Pickwick with a shudder. “Goblins really drag down the neighborhood.”

“Goblins might say the same about dodos.”

“Impossible!” she retorted. “Dodos are cute and cuddly and lovable and . . . don’t steal stuff and spread disease.”

People often wondered why my written dodo was such a pain in the ass when the real Pickwick was so cute. The reason was simple: lack of choice. There are only three dodos in fiction. One was dangerously psychotic, the second was something big over in Natural History, which left only one: The dodo from
Alice
is the same bespectacled know-it-all in my series. Her name wasn’t actually Pickwick—it was Lorina Peabody III, but we called her Pickwick, and she didn’t much mind either way. She put down the paper, announced to the room that she would be taking her siesta and waddled off.

“Mrs. Malaprop,” I said once Pickwick had left, “are you still attending your therapy sessions?”

Mrs. Malaprop arched a highbrow. She knew well enough who had complained about her.

“Eggs tincture is too good for that burred,” she said in a crabby tone, “but isle do as Uri quest.”

The average working life of a Mrs. Malaprop in
The Rivals
was barely fifty readings. The unrelenting comedic misuse of words eventually caused them to suffer postsyntax stress disorder, and once their speech became irreversibly abstruse, they were simply replaced. Most “retired” Mrs. Malaprops were released into the BookWorld, where they turned ferrule, but just recently rehoming charities were taking note of their plight. After they’d undergone intensive Holorime Bombardment Therapy to enable them to at least
sound
right even if they didn’t
read
right, people like me offered them a home and a job. Our Malaprop was an early model—Number 862, to be precise—and she was generally quite helpful if a little tricky to understand. There was talk of using Dogberry stem cells to cure her, but we didn’t hold our broth.

I stared at the diagnostics board that covered one wall of the kitchen. The number of readers on the Read-O-Meter was stuck firmly at zero, with thirty-two copies of my novels listed “bookmarked and pending.” Of these, eighteen were active/ resting between reads. The rest were probably lying under a stack of other unfinished books. I checked the RealWorld clock. It was 0842. Years ago I was read on the train, but that hadn’t happened for a while. Unreadfulness was a double-edged sword. More leisure time, but a distinct loss of purpose. I turned to Mrs. Malaprop.

“How are things looking in the series?”

She stared at her clipboard.

“Toll rubble. Twenty-six care actors Aaron leaf or training courses; all can be covered by eggs Hastings characters. Of the settings, only Hayworth House is clothes bee coarse of an invest station of grammasites.”

“Has Jurisfiction been informed?”

“We’re low prior Tory, so they said a towers.”

“How close is our nearest reader?”

“Nine teas heaven minutes’ read time away.”

It wasn’t going to be a problem. He or she wouldn’t pickup the book again until this evening, by which time the problem would have resolved itself.

“If the reading starts early for any reason,” I said, “we’ll use the front room of Thornfield Hall as a stand-in. Oh, and my father has a flea in his ear about something, so keep an eye on him in case he tries to do his own lines. I got a letter last week from Text Grand Central about illegal dialogue flexations.”

Mrs. Malaprop nodded and made a note. “Come harder hearing cold,” she said.

“Sorry?”

“Comma DeHare ring cooled.”

“I’m . . . still not getting this.”

Mrs. Malaprop thought hard, trying to place the correct words in the correct place to enable me to understand. It was painfully difficult for her, and if Sheridan had known the misery that using acyrologia in a comedic situation would bring, he would possibly have thought butter of it.

“Come hander hair-in culled!”
she said again in an exasperated tone, sweating profusely and starting to shake with the effort.

“Commander Herring called?” I said, suddenly getting it. “What about?”

“A naval antecedent,” she said urgently, “in evasion.”

She meant that a novel had met with an accident in Aviation.

“Why would he be calling me after I blew it so badly last time?”

“It sea reprised me, too. Here.”

She handed me a scrap of paper. Commander James “Red” Herring was overall leader of the BookWorld Policing Agency. He was in command not only of the Fiction Police known as Jurisfiction but also of Text Grand Central’s Metaphor Squad and at least eighteen other agencies. One of these was Book Traffic Control—and part of that was the Jurisfiction Accident Investigation Department, or JAID, a department I occasionally worked for. The overhead book traffic, despite its usefulness, was not without problems. Fiction alone could see up to two thousand book-movements a day, and the constant transportation of the novels across the fictional skies was not without mishap. I spent at least a day a week identifying sections that had fallen off books passing overhead, trying to get them returned—and, if possible, find out why they’d come unglued. Despite safety assurances, improved adhesives and updated safety procedures, books would keep on shedding bits. The loss of a pig out of
Animal Farm
was the most celebrated incident. It fell several thousand feet and landed inside a book of short stories by Graham Greene. Disaster was averted by a quick-thinking Jurisfiction agent who expertly sewed the pig into the narrative. It was Jurisfiction at its very best.

“Did Commander Herring say which book or why he was calling me?”

“A very spurious accident, Walsall he said. You’re to to me, Tim, at this address.”

I took the address and stared at it. Commander Herring’s calling me
personally
was something of a big deal. “Anything else?”

“Your new-ender study is waiting to be interviewed in the front room.”

This was good news. My book was first-person narrative, and if I wanted to have any sort of life outside my occasional readings—such as a date with Whitby or to have a secondary career—I needed someone to stand in for me.

I walked through to the front room. My potential understudy looked pleasant enough and had troubled to integrate herself into my body type and vague looks. She had a Thursday Next outfit on, too. She wanted this job badly.

“The written Thursday Next,” I said, shaking her hand.

“Carmine O’Kipper,” she replied with a nervous smile. “ID A4-5619-23. Pleased to be here.”

“You’re an A-4, Miss O’Kipper?”

“Call me Carmine. Is that a problem?”

“Not at all.”

An A-4 character was theoretically only three steps down from the Jane Eyres and Scout Finches. To be able to handle first person, you had to be an A-grade, but none of the other understudies had been higher than an A-9.

“You must be at least an A-2, yes?” she asked.

“Something like that,” I replied as we sat. “Do you know of the series?”

“I used to keep a scrapbook of the
real
Thursday Next.”

“If you’re here to catch a glimpse of her, it’s unlikely. She dropped in once soon after the remaking, but not since then.”

“I’m really just after the work, Miss Next.”

She handed me her CV. It wasn’t long, nor particularly impressive. She was from an original manuscript sitting abandoned in a drawer somewhere in the Outland. She would have handled loss, love, uncertainty and a corkingly good betrayal. It looked like it might have been a good gig. But after fifteen years and not a single reader, it was time to move on.

“So . . . why do you want to work in my series?”

“I’m eager to enter a new and stimulating phase of my career,” she said brightly, “and I need a challenging and engaging book in which I can learn from a true professional.”

It was the usual bullshit, and it didn’t wash.

“You could get a read anywhere,” I said, handing back the CV, “so why come to the speculative end of Fantasy?”

She bit her lip and stared at me.

“I’ve only ever been read by one person at a time,” she confessed. “I took a short third-person locum inside a
Reader’s Digest
version of
Don Quixote
as Dulcinea two weeks ago. I had a panic attack when the read levels went over twenty-six and went for the Snooze.”

I heard Mrs. Malaprop drop a teacup in the kitchen. I was shocked, too. The Snooze Button was reserved only for dire emergencies. Once it was utilized, a reverse throughput capacitor on the imaginotransference engines would cause the reader instantaneous yawning, drowsiness and then sleep. Quick, simple—and the readers suspected nothing.

“You hit Snooze?”

“I was stopped before I did.”

“I’m very relieved.”

“Me, too. Rocinante had to take over my part—played her rather well, actually.”

“Did the Don notice? Rocinante playing you, I mean?”

“No.”

Carmine was just what I was looking for. Overqualified understudies rarely stayed long, but what with her being severely readerphobic, the low ReadRates would suit her down to the ground. I was mildly concerned over her eagerness to hit Snooze. To discourage misuse, every time the button was pressed, one or more kittens were put to death somewhere in the BookWorld. It was rarely used.

“Okay,” I said, “you’re hired. One caveat: You don’t get the Snooze Button access codes. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“Excellent. How much reading time do you have?”

“Aside from my own book, I’ve got eighty-seven pages.”

It was a lamentably small amount. A single quizzical reader hunting for obscure hidden meanings would have her in a stammering flat spin in a second.

“Get your coat and a notebook,” I said. “We’re going to go greet our new neighbors—and have a chat.”

A
fter taking a pager off the counter so Mrs. Malaprop could reach me in case a reader turned up unexpectedly, we stepped out of the main gate and walked down the street. The remade Geographic BookWorld was as its name suggested—geographic—and the neighborhoods were laid out like those in an Outland housing estate. A single road ran down between the books, with sidewalks, grass verges, syntax hydrants and trees. To the left and right were compounds that contained entire novels with all their settings. In one was a half-scale Kilimanjaro, and in another a bamboo plantation. In a third an electrical storm at full tilt.

“We’re right on the edge of Fantasy,” I explained. “Straight ahead is Human Drama, and to your right is Comedy. I’ll give you Wednesdays off, but I expect you to be on standby most of the time.”

“The more first-person time I can put in,” replied Carmine, “the better. Is there anything to do around here when I’m off-duty, by the way?”

“If Fantasy is your thing,” I said, “plenty. Moving cross-genre is not recommended, as the border guards can get jumpy, and it will never do to be caught in another genre just when you’re needed. Oh, and don’t do anything that my dodo might disapprove of.”

“Such as what?”

“The list is long. Here we are.”

We had arrived on the top of a low rise where there was a convenient park bench. From this vantage point, we could see most of Fiction Island.

“That’s an impressive sight,” said Carmine.

There was no aerial haze in the BookWorld, and because the island was mildly dished where it snuggled against the interior of the sphere, we could see all the way to the disputed border between Racy Novel and Women’s Fiction in the far north of the island, and beyond that the unexplored Dismal Woods.

“That’s the Metaphoric River,” I explained, pointing out the sinuous bends of the waterway whose many backwaters, bayous, streams and rivulets brought narrative ambiguity and unnecessarily lengthy words to the millions of books that had made their home in the river’s massive delta. “To the east of Racy Novel is Outdated Religious Dogma.”

“Shouldn’t that be in Nonfiction?” asked Carmine.

“It’s a contentious issue. It was removed from Theology on the grounds that the theories had become ‘untenable in a modern context’ and ‘were making us look medieval.’”

“And that island off the coast of Dogma?” she asked, pointing to a craggy island partially obscured by cloud.

“The smaller of the two is Sick Notes, and the larger is Lies, Self-Delusion and Excuses You Can Use to Justify Poor Behavior. South of Dogma is Horror, then Fantasy, with Adventure and Science Fiction dominating the south coast.”

“I’ll never remember all that.”

I handed her my much-thumbed copy of
Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion.
“Use this,” I said, showing her the foldout map section and train timetables. “I’ve got the new edition on order.”

Whilst we had been sitting there, the recently evicted book had been unbolted by a team of Worker Danvers.

“
Raphael’s Walrus
has been unread for over two years,” I explained, “so it’s off to the narrative doldrums of the suburbs. Not necessarily permanent, of course—a resurgence of interest could bring it back into the more desirable neighborhoods in an instant.”

“How come your series is still here?” she asked, then put her hand over her mouth. “Sorry, was that indelicate of me?”

“No, most people ask that. The Text Grand Central Mapping Committee keeps us here out of respect.”