Thursday5 looked curiously around as a gang of riveters walked past, laughing loudly and talking about a spine they’d been working on.
“So once the book is built, it’s moved to the Great Library?” she asked.
“If only,” I replied. “Once completed and the spark has been ignited, it undergoes a rigorous twelve-point narrative safety-and-compliance regime before being studiously and penetratively test-read on a special rig. After that, the book is taken on a trial reading by the Council of Genres Book Inspectorate before being passed-or not-for publication.”
We walked on and presently saw the Book Maintenance Facility hangars in the distance, rising above the low roofs of the street like the airship hangars I knew so well back home. They were always full; book maintenance carried on 24/7. After another five minutes’ walk and with the street expanding dramatically to be able to encompass the vast size of the complex, we arrived outside the Book Maintenance Facility.
11. The Refit
Books suffer wear and tear, just the same as hip joints, cars and reputations. For this reason all books have to go into the maintenance bay for a periodic refit, either every thirty years or every million readings, whichever comes first. For those books that suffer a high initial readership but then lose it through boredom or insufficient reader intellect, a partial refit may be in order. Salmon Thrusty’s intractable masterpiece The Demonic Couplets has had its first two chapters rebuilt six times, but the rest is relatively unscathed.
Ever since the ProCaths had mounted a guerrilla-style attack on Wuthering Heights during routine maintenance, security had been increased, and tall cast-iron railings now separated the Book Maintenance Facility from the rest of the Well. Heathcliff-possibly the most hated man inside fiction-had not been harmed, partly due to the vigilance of the Jurisfiction agents who were on Heathcliff Protection Duty that day but also due to a misunderstanding of the word “guerrilla,” a woeful lexicological lapse that had left five confused apes dead and the facility littered with bananas. There was now a guard house, too, and it was impossible to get in unless on official business.
“Now, here’s an opportunity,” I whispered to Thursday5, “to test your aggressiveness. These guys can be tricky, so you need to be firm.”
“Firm?”
“Firm.”
She took a deep breath, steeled herself and marched up to the guard house in a meaningful manner.
“Next and Next,” she announced, passing our IDs to a guard who was sitting in a small wooden shed at the gates of the facility. “And if you cause us any trouble, we’ll…not be happy. And then you’ll not be happy, because we can do unhappy things…to people…sometimes.”
“I’m sorry?” said the guard, who had a large white mustache and seemed to be a little deaf.
“I said…ah, how are you?”
“Oh, we’re fine, thank you, missy,” replied the guard amiably. Thursday5 turned to me and gave me the thumbs-up sign, and I smiled. I actually quite liked her, but there was a huge quantity of work to be done before she might be considered Jurisfiction material. At present I was planning on assessing her “potential with retraining” and sending her back to cadet school.
I looked around as the guard stared at our identification and then at us. Above the hangars I could see tall chimneys belching forth clouds of smoke, while in the distance we could hear the ring of hammers and the rumble of machinery.
“Which one is Thursday Next?” asked the guard, staring closely at the almost identical IDs.
“Both of us,” said Thursday5. “I’m Thursday5, and she’s the Outlander.”
“An Outlander?” repeated the guard with great interest. I glared at Thursday5. My Outlander status wasn’t something I liked to bandy about.
“Hey, Bert!” he said to the other guard, who seemed to be on permanent tea break. “We’ve got an Outlander here!”
“No!” he said, getting up from a chair that had its seat polished to a high shine. “Get out of here!”
“What an honor!” said the first guard. “Someone from the real world.” He thought for a moment. “Tell me, if it rains on a really hot day, do sheep shrink?”
“Is that a security question?”
“No, no,” replied the guard quickly. “Bert and I were just discussing it recently.”
This wasn’t unusual. Characters in fiction had a very skewed view of the real world. To them the extreme elements of human experience were commonplace, as they were generally the sorts of issues that made it into books, which left the mundanities of real life somewhat obscure and mysterious. Ask a resident of the Book-World about terminal diseases, loss, gunshot trajectories, dramatic irony and problematic relatives and he’d be more expert than you or me-quiz him on paintbrushes and he’d spend the rest of the week trying to figure out how the paint stays on the bristles until it touches another surface.
“It’s woolens that shrink,” I explained, “and it has to be very hot.”
“I told you so,” said Bert triumphantly.
“Thank you,” I said, taking the security badges from the guard while I signed the ledger. He admitted us both to the facility, and almost from nowhere a bright yellow jeep appeared with a young man dressed in blue overalls and a cap sporting the BMF logo.
“Can you take us to Isambard Kingdom Buñuel?” I said as we climbed in the back.
“Yes,” replied the driver without moving.
“Then would you?”
“I suppose.”
The jeep moved off. The hangars were, as previously stated, of gigantic proportions. Unlike the real world, where practical difficulties in civil engineering might be a defining factor in the scale of a facility, here it was not a consideration at all. Indeed, the size of the plant could expand and contract depending on need, a little like Mary Poppins’s suitcase, which was hardly surprising, as they were designed by the same person. We drove on for a time in silence.
“What’s in Hangar One at the moment?” I asked the driver.
“The Magus.”
“Still?”
Even the biggest refit never took more than a week, and John Fowles’s labyrinthine-plotted masterpiece had been in there nearly five.
“It’s taking longer than we thought-they removed all the plot elements for cleaning, and no one can remember how they go back together again.”
“I’m not sure it will make a difference,” I murmured as we pulled up outside Hangar Eight. The driver said nothing, waited until we climbed out and then drove off without a word.
To say that the interior of the hangar was vast would have been pointless, as the Great Library, Text Grand Central and the CofG also had vast interiors, and continued descriptions of an increasingly hyperbolic nature would be insufferably repetitious. Suffice it to say that there was room on the hangar floor for not only Darcy’s country home of Pemberley but also Rosings, Netherfield and Longbourn as well. They had all been hoisted from the book by a massive overhead crane so the empty husk of the novel could be checked for fatigue cracks before being fumigated for nesting grammasites and then repainted. At the same time, an army of technicians, plasterers, painters, carpenters and so forth were crawling over the houses, locations, props, furnishings and costumes, all of which had been removed for checking and maintenance.
“If this is Pride and Prejudice,” said Thursday5 as we walked toward the Bennets’ property of Longbourn, “then what are people reading in the Outland?”
The house was resting incongruously on wooden blocks laid on the hangar floor but without its grounds-they were elsewhere being tended to by a happy buzz of gardeners.