Jasper Fforde_Thursday Next_05 (8 page)

“Which were?”

“An import ban on metaphor, characterization and competent description. Speedy Muffler is a bit of a megalomaniac, and both Feminist and Ecclesiastical thought containment was better than out-and-out conflict. The problem is, Racy Novel claims that this is worse than a slow attritional war, as these sanctions deny it the potential of literary advancement beyond the limited scope of its work.”

“I can’t say I’m very sympathetic to that cause.”

“It’s not important that you are—your role in Jurisfiction is only to defend the status—”

I stopped talking, as something seemed to be going on down in the debating chamber. In a well-orchestrated lapse of protocol, delegates were throwing their ballot papers around, and among the jeering and catcalls Muffler was struggling to make himself heard. I shook my head sadly.

“What is it?”

“Something that Racy Novel has been threatening for some time—they’ve claimed to have developed and tested a…dirty bomb.”

“A what?”

“It’s a tightly packed mass of inappropriate plot devices, explicit suggestions and sexual scenes of an expressly gratuitous nature. The ‘dirty’ elements of the bomb fly apart at a preset time and attach themselves to any unshielded prose. Given the target, it has the potential for untold damage. A well-placed dirty bomb could scatter poorly described fornication all across drab theological debate or drop a wholly unwarranted scene of a sexually exploitative nature right into the middle of
Mrs. Dalloway

.”

Even Thursday5 could see this was not a good thing. “Would he do that?”

“He just might. Senator Muffler is as mad as a barrel of skunks, and the inclusion of Racy Novel in the Council of Genres’ definition of the ‘Axis of Unreadable’ along with Misery Memoirs and Pseudointellectual Drivel didn’t help matters a bit. It’ll be all over the BookWorld by nightfall, mark my words—the papers love this kind of combative, saber-rattling crap.”

“Ms. Next!” came an annoying, high-pitched voice. I turned to find a small weasel of a man with pinched features, dressed in robes and with a goodly retinue of self-important assistants stacked up behind him.

“Good morning, Senator,” I said, bowing as protocol demanded. “May I introduce my apprentice, Thursday5? Thursday5, this is Senator Jobsworth, director-general of the CofG and head of the Pan-Genre Treaty Organization.”

“Sklub,” gulped Thursday5, trying to curtsy, bob and bow all at the same time. The senator nodded in her direction, then dismissed everyone before beckoning me to join him at the large picture window.

“Ms. Next,” he said in a quiet voice, “how are things down at Jurisfiction?”

“Underfunded as usual,” I replied, well used to Jobsworth’s manipulative ways.

“It needn’t be so,” he replied. “If I can count on your support for policy direction in the near future, I am sure we can rectify the situation.”

“You are too kind,” I replied, “but I will judge my decisions on what is best for the BookWorld as a whole, rather than the department I work in.”

His eyes flashed angrily. Despite his being the head of the council, policy decisions still had to be made by consensus—and it annoyed the hell out of him.

“With Outlander ReadRates almost in free fall,” continued Jobsworth with a snarl, “I’d have thought you’d be willing to compromise on those precious scruples of yours.”

“I don’t compromise,” I told him resolutely, repeating, “I base my decisions on what is best for the BookWorld.”

“Well,” said Jobsworth with an insincere smile, “let’s hope you don’t regret any of your decisions. Good day.”

And he swept off with his entourage at his heels. His threats didn’t frighten me; he’d been making them—and I’d been ignoring them—for almost as long as we’d known each other.

“I didn’t realize you were so close to Senator Jobsworth,” said Thursday5 as soon as she had rejoined me.

“I have a seat at the upper-level policy-directive meetings as the official LBOCS. Since I’m an Outlander, I have powers of abstract and long-term thought that most fictioneers can only dream about. The thing is, I don’t generally toe the line, and Jobsworth doesn’t like that.”

“Can I ask a question?” asked Thursday5 as we took the elevator back down into the heart of the Great Library.

“Of course.”

“I’m a little confused over how the whole imaginotransference technology works. I mean, how do books
here
get to be read out
there
?”

I sighed. Cadets were supposed to come to me for assessment when they already knew the basics. This one was as green as
Brighton Rock
. The elevator stopped on the third floor, and I pulled open the gates. We stepped out into one of the Great Library’s endless corridors, and I waved a hand in the direction of the bookshelves.

“Okay: imaginotransference. Did any of your tutors tell you even vaguely how the reader-writer thing actually
works
?”

“I think I might have been having a colonic that morning.”

I moved closer to the shelves and beckoned her to follow. As I came to within a yard of the books, I could feel their influence warm me like a hot radiator. But it wasn’t heat I was feeling; it was the warmth of a good story, well told. A potpourri of jumbled narrative, hovering just above of the books like morning mist on a lake. I could actually feel the emotions, hear the whispered snatches of conversation and see the images that momentarily broke free of the gravity that bound them to the story.

“Can you feel that?” I whispered.

“Feel what?”

I sighed. Fictional people were less attuned to
story;
it was rare indeed that anyone in the BookWorld actually read a book—unless the narrative called for it.

“Place your hands gently against the spines.”

She did as I asked, and after a moment’s puzzlement she smiled.

“I can hear voices,” she whispered back, trying not to break the moment, “and a waterfall. And joy, betrayal, laughter—and a young man who has lost his hat.”

“What you’re feeling is the raw imaginotransference energy, the method by which all books are dispersed into the reader’s imagination. The books we have in the Outland are no more similar to these than a photograph is to the subject—these books are
alive,
each one a small universe unto itself—and by throughputting some of that energy from here to their counterparts in the real world, we can transmit the story direct to the reader.”

Thursday took her hand from the books and experimented to see how far out she had to go before losing the energy. It was barely a few inches.

“Throughputting? Is that where Textual Sieves come into it?”

“No. I’ve got to go and look at something for Bradshaw, so we’ll check out core containment—it’s at the heart of the imaginotransference technology.”

We walked a few yards up the corridor, and after carefully consulting the note Bradshaw had given me, I selected a book from the bewildering array of the same title in all its various incarnations. I opened the volume and looked at the stats page, which blinked up a real-time Outland ReadRate, a total of the editions still in existence and much else besides.

“The 1929 book-club deluxe leatherbound edition with nine copies still in circulation from a total of twenty-five hundred,” I explained, “and with no readers actually making their way through it. An ideal choice for a bit of training.”

I rummaged in my bag and brought out what looked like a large-caliber flare pistol. Thursday5 regarded me nervously.

“Are you expecting trouble?”

“I
always
expect trouble.”

“Isn’t that a TextMarker?” she asked, her confusion understandable, because this wasn’t officially a weapon at all. These were generally used to mark the text of a book from within so an agent could be extracted in an emergency. Once an essential piece of equiment, they were carried less and less as the mobilefootnoterphone had made such devices redundant.

“It was,” I replied, breaking open the stubby weapon and taking a single brass cartridge from a small leather pouch. “But I’ve modified it to take an eraserhead.”

I slipped the cartridge in, snapped the pistol shut and put it back in my bag. The eraserhead was just one of the many abstract technologies that JurisTech built for us. Designed to sever the bonds between letters in a word, it was a devastating weapon to anyone of textual origin—a single blast from one of these and the unlucky recipient would be nothing but a jumbled heap of letters and a bluish haze. Its use was strictly controlled—Jurisfiction agents only.

“Gosh,” said Thursday after I’d explained it to her. “I don’t carry any weapons at all.”

“I’d so love not to have to,” I told her, and with the taxi still nowhere in sight, I passed the volume across to her. “Here,” I said, “let’s see how good you are at taking a passenger into a book.”

She accepted the novel without demur, opened it and started to read. She had a good speaking voice, fruity and expressive, and she quickly began to fade from view. I grabbed hold of her cuff so as not to be left behind, and she instantly regained her solidity; it was the library that was now faded and indistinct. Within a few more words, we had traveled into our chosen book. The first thing I noticed as we arrived was that the chief protagonist’s feet were on fire. Worse still,
he
hadn’t noticed.
7.
A Probe Inside
Pinocchio

Although the idea of using footnotes as a communication medium was suggested by Dr. Faustus as far back as 1622, it wasn’t until 1856 that the first practical footnoterphone was demonstrated. The first transgenre trunk line between Human Drama and Crime was opened in 1915, and the network has been expanded and improved ever since. Although the system is far from complete, with many books still having only a single payfootnoterpayphone, on the outer reaches of the known BookWorld many books are without any coverage at all.
I
t was Pinocchio, of course, I’d know that nose anywhere. As we jumped into the toy workshop on page 26, the wooden puppet—Geppetto’s or Collodi’s creation, depending on which way you looked at it—was asleep with his feet on a brazier. The workbench was clean and tidy. Half-finished wooden toys filled every available space, and all the woodworking tools were hung up neatly upon the wall. There was a cot in one corner, a sideboard in another, and the floor was covered with curly wood shavings, but there was no sawdust or dirt. The fictional world was like that, a sort of narrative shorthand that precluded any of the shabby grottiness and
texture
that gives the real world its richness. Pinocchio was snoring loudly. Comically, almost. His feet were smoldering, and within a few lines it would be morning and he would have nothing left but charred stumps. He wasn’t the only person in the room. On the sideboard were two crickets watching the one-day test match on a portable TV. One was wearing a smoking jacket and a pillbox hat and held a cigarette in a silver holder, and the other had a broken antennae, a black eye and one leg in a sling.

“The name’s Thursday Next,” I announced to them both, holding up my Jurisfiction badge, and this is…Thursday Next.”

“Which is the real one?” asked the cricket in the pillbox hat—somewhat tactlessly, I thought.

“I am,” I replied through gritted teeth. “Can’t you tell?”

“Frankly, no,” replied the cricket, looking at the pair of us in turn. “So…which is the one that does naked yoga?”

“That would be me,” said Thursday5 brightly. I groaned audibly.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, amused by my prudishness. “You should try it someday. It’s relaxing and very empowering.”

“I don’t do yoga,” I told her.

“Take it up and drop the bacon sandwiches and it will put ten years on your life.”

The cricket, who spoke in a clipped accent reminiscent of Noël Coward’s, folded up his paper and said,

“We don’t often get visitors, you know—the last lot to pass through this way was the Italian Translation Inspectorate making sure we were keeping to the spirit of the original.”

The cricket had a sudden thought and indicated the damaged cricket sitting next to him. “How rude could I be? This is Jim ‘Bruises’ McDowell, my stunt double.”

Bruises looked as though the stunt sequence with the mallet hadn’t gone quite as planned.

“Hello,” said the stunt cricket with an embarrassed shrug. “I had an accident during training. Some damn fool went and moved the crash mat.” As he said it, he looked at the other cricket, who did nothing but puff on his cigarette and preen his antennae in a nonchalant fashion.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said by way of conversation—a good relationship with the characters within the BookWorld was essential in our work. “Have you been read recently?”

The cricket in the pillbox hat suddenly looked embarrassed.

“The truth is,” he said awkwardly, “we’ve
never
been read. Not once in seventy-three years. Deluxe book-club editions are like that—just for show. But if we
did
have a reading, we’d all be primed and set to go.”

“I can do a lot more than the ‘being hit with the mallet’ stunt,” added Bruises excitedly. “Would you like me to set myself on fire and fall out of a window? I can wave my arms very convincingly.”

“No thanks.”

“Shame,” replied Bruises wistfully. “I’d like to broaden my skills to cover car-to-helicopter transfers and being dragged backwards by a horse—whatever that is.”

“When the last of the nine copies of this book have gone,” pointed out the cricket, “we can finally come off duty and be reassigned. I’m studying for the lead in
Charlotte’s Web.
”

“Do you know of any other books that require stunt crickets?” asked Bruises hopefully. “I’ve been practicing the very dangerous and not-at-all-foolhardy leap over seventeen motorcycles in a double-decker bus.”

“Isn’t it meant to be the other way around?”

“I told you it seemed a bit rum,” said the cricket as Bruises’ shoulders sagged. “But never mind all that,”

he added, returning his attention to me. “I suppose you’re here about…the
thing?
”

“We are, sir. Where is it?”