I moved away so Thursday1-4 couldn’t hear me and spoke into my mobilefootnoterphone again.
“Bradshaw, how badly do we need to suck up to Jobsworth right now?”[3]
I told Bradshaw to rely on me. He thanked me profusely, wished me well and rang off. I snapped the phone shut and placed it back in my bag.
“Right,” I said, tossing Thursday1-4’s badge back at her. “For your first assignment, you are to get Thursday5 back here, chakras realigned or not, and apologize to her.”
Thursday1-4 stared at me for a moment, then dialed her own cell phone. I turned away and walked down the gravel drive, trying to relax. What a start.
I sat on an ornamental lion at the foot of the entrance steps and watched from a distance as Thursday5 reappeared and, after the briefest of altercations, they shook hands. There was a pause and then a few raised voices until finally, incredibly, and with Thursday1-4 as stiff as a poker, she allowed herself to be hugged. I smiled to myself, got up and walked back to where the pair of them were standing, Thursday5 looking optimistically positive and Thursday1-4 brooding stonily.
“Have you two sorted yourselves out?”
They both nodded.
“Good,” I said, consulting my watch. “We’ve got a few hours before we attend the Council of Genres’ policy-directive meeting, but before that-”
“We are attending the CofG meeting?” asked Thursday5 with eyes like saucers.
“Yes, but only in the sort of ‘we’ that means you stand at the back and say nothing.”
“Wow! What will they be discussing?”
“BookWorld policy. Such as whether we should be supplying characters to video games to give them added depth. It’s particularly relevant, as publishing these days doesn’t necessarily restrict books to being just books. It’s said that Harry Potter will make a rare appearance. Now, we’ve got to-”
“Will we really meet Harry Potter?” she asked in a soft whisper, her eyes going all dewy at the mention of the young wizard. Thursday1-4 looked to heaven and stood, arms crossed, waiting for us to get on with the day’s work.
“It depends,” I sighed. “If you pay attention or not. Now for this afternoon’s assignment: relieving the staff who are dealing with the BookWorld’s ongoing piano problem. And for that we need to go to Text Grand Central.”
23. The Piano Problem
The piano was thought to have been invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori in the early eighteenth century and was originally called the gravicembalo col piano e forte, which was fortunately reduced to pianoforte, then more simply to piano. Composed of 550 pounds of iron, wood, strings and felt, the eighty-eight-key instrument is capable of the subtlest of melodies, yet stored up in the tensioned strings is the destructive power of a subcompact moving at twenty miles per hour.
If Jurisfiction was the policing agency inside books and the Council of Genres was the political arm, Text Grand Central was the bureaucracy that bridged the two. Right up until the Ultra-word™ debacle, TGC had remained unimpeachably honest, but after that, the Council of Genres-on my advice-took the harsh but only possible course of action to ensure that Text Grand Central would be too inefficient and unimaginative to pose a threat. They appointed a committee to run it.
As we walked onto one of the main Storycode Engine floors, I heard Thursday5 gasp. The proportions of the room were more in keeping with a factory that made Very Large Things, and the stone walls, vaulted ceiling and flickering gas lamps betrayed the room’s provenance as something borrowed from an unpublished Gothic Horror novel. Laid in serried ranks across the echoing vastness of the space were hundreds of Storycode Engines, each one the size of a bus and built of shiny brass, mahogany and cast iron. A convoluted mass of pipes, valves and gauges, they looked like a cross between an espresso machine, a ship’s engine and a euphonium on acid. They were so large there was a catwalk running around the upper section for easy maintenance, with a cast-iron spiral staircase at one end for access.
“These are Imaginotransference Storycode Engines. The most important piece of technology we possess. Remember the pipe leading out of core containment in Pinocchio?”
Thursday5 nodded.
“The throughput is radiated across the intragenre Nothing and ends up here, where they are then transmitted into the reader’s imagination.”
I knew why it worked but not how. Indeed, I was suspicious that perhaps there wasn’t an explanation at all-or indeed any need for one. It was something we called an “abstract narrative imperative”: They work solely because it’s expedient that they do. The BookWorld is like that. Full of wholly improbable plot devices that are there to help grease the storytelling cogs.
I paused so they could both watch the proceedings for a moment. Thursday5 made no secret of her fascination, but Thursday1-4 stifled a faux yawn. Despite this, she still looked around. It was hard not to be impressed-the machines stretched off into the hazy distance almost as far as you could see. Technicians scurried like ants over the whirring machinery checking dials, oiling, venting off steam and filling out reports on clipboards. Others moved between machines with trolleys full of papers to be filed, and the air was full of the smell of hot oil and steam. Above our heads a series of clanking shafts and flapping leather belts brought power to the engines, and the combined clatter and hum in the vast chamber sounded like a cascading waterfall.
“Five hundred machines on each floor!” I shouted above the tumult. “With each one capable of handling up to fifty thousand concurrent readings. The ones in the blue overalls are the storycode technicians, known affectionately as ‘word monkeys.’ They keep the engines running smoothly, clean out the dialogue injectors and make sure there isn’t a buildup of irony on the compressors. The man dressed in the white lab coat is the ‘text collector.’ There is a reader echo that pings back to the engine to throughput the next word, so we can use that to check if the book is running true to the author’s original wishes. Any variance is termed a ‘textual anomaly’ and is caught in the waste gate of the echo skimmers, which are those large copper things on the top.”
“This is all really fascinating technological stuff,” observed Thursday1-4 drily, “but I’m waiting to see how it relates to pianos.”
“It doesn’t, O sarcastic one. It’s called education.”
“Pointless exposition, if you ask me.”
“She’s not asking you,” retorted Thursday5.
“Exactly,” I replied, “and some people enjoy the techie stuff. Follow me.”
I opened an arched oak door that led off the engine floor and into the administrative section of Text Grand Central, a labyrinth of stone corridors lit by flaming torches affixed to the walls. It was insufferably gloomy but economical-part of the unfinished Gothic Horror novel from which all of TGC was fashioned. As soon as the door closed, the noise from the main engine floor ceased abruptly.
“I was just trying to explain,” I said, “how we find out about narrative flexations. Most of the time, the anomalies are just misreads and lazy readers getting the wrong end of the stick, but we have to check everything, just in case.”
“I can get this on the Text Grand Central tour for twenty shillings and with better company,” said Thursday1-4, looking pointedly at Thursday5.
“I’m interested, ma’am.”
“Creep.”
“Slut.”
“What did you call me?”
“Hey!” I shouted. “Cut it out!”
“She started it,” said Thursday1-4.
“I don’t care who started it. You’ll both be fired if you carry on like this.”
They fell silent, and we walked along the echoing corridors, past endless oak doors, all relating to some textual activity such as word meanings, idea licensing and grammasite control.
3
“Bundles, old girl. Do this as a favor to old Bradders, eh? Just until the end of the day.”