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.”