While I stared upwards, openmouthed, a steady stream of boo
ks moved in an endless multilayered crisscross high in the sky. But these weren’t books of the small paper-and-leather variety that one might find in the Outland. These were the collected settings of the book all bolted together and connected by a series of walkways and supporting beams, cables and struts. They didn’t look so much like books, in fact, but more like a series of spiky lumps. While some one-room dramas were no bigger than a double-decker bus and zipped across the sky, others moved slowly enough for us to wave at the occupants, who waved back. As we stood watching our new world, the master copy of Doctor Zhivago passed overhead, blotting out the light and covering us in a light dusting of snow.
“O brave new world, that has such stories in’t!”
“What do you think?” asked Whitby.
“O brave new world,” I whispered as I gave him a hug, “that has such stories in’t!”
2.
A Woman Named Thursday Next
A major benefit of the Internal Sphere model of the remade BookWorld is that gravitational force diminishes with height, so it is easier to move objects the higher you go. You have to be careful, though, for if you go too high, you will be attracted to the gravitational dead spot right in the center of the sphere, from where there could be no return.
Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (6th edition)
My father had a face that could stop a clock. I don’t mean that he was ugly or anything; it was a phrase that the Chrono-Guard used to describe someone who had the power to arrest time to an ultraslow trickle—and that’s exactly what happened one morning as I was having a late breakfast in a small café quite near where I worked. The world flickered, shuddered and stopped. The barman of the café froze to a halt in midsentence, and the picture on the television stopped dead. Outside, birds hung motionless in the sky. The sound halted, too, replaced by a dull snapshot of a hum, the world’s noise at that moment in time paused indefinitely at the same pitch and volume.
“Hello, Sweetpea.”
I turned. My father was sitting at a table behind me and rose to hug me affectionately.
“Hi, Dad.”
“You’re looking good,” he told me.
“You, too,” I replied. “You’re looking younger every time I see you.”
“I am. How’s your history?”
“Not bad.”
“Do you know how the Duke of Wellington died?”
“Sure,” I answered. “He was shot by a French sniper early on during the Battle of Waterloo—why?”
“Oh, no reason,” muttered my father with feigned innocence, scribbling in a small notebook. Once done, he paused for a moment.
“So Napoléon won at Waterloo, did he?” he asked slowly and with great intensity.
“Of course not,” I replied. “Field Marshal Blücher’s timely intervention saved the day. This is all high school history, Dad. What are you up to?”
“Well, it’s a bit of—hang on,” said Dad, or rather the character playing my book-father. “I think they’ve gone.”
I tasted the air. He was right. Our lone reader had stopped and left us dangling in a narrative dead zone. It’s an odd sensation: a combination of treading on a step that isn’t there, someone hanging up the telephone midspeech without explanation and the feeling you get when you’ve gone upstairs for some reason but can’t think why. Scientists have proved that spaniels spend their entire lives like this.
“I was marvelous,” intoned my book-father haughtily, the inference being that it was somehow my fault the reader didn’t last until even the end of the first page. “You need to engage the readers more, darling. Project yourself. Make the character come alive.”
I didn’t agree that I was at fault but wasn’t going to argue. He had played my father longer in the series than I had played Thursday, so he had a kind of seniority, even if I was the protagonist, and first-person player to boot.
“Sometimes I yearn for the old days,” he said to Hector, his dresser, but obviously intending for me to hear.
“What do you mean by that?”
He stared at me for a moment. “This: It was a lot better when we had the previous Thursday play Thursday.”
“She was violent and immoral, Dad. How could that possibly be better?”