One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (Thursday Next 6)

“Of course,” I replied, and placed the box in my shoulder bag. I walked outside the castle and returned to where the taxi was waiting to take me home. I was none the wiser as to where Thursday was, but I could reasonably surmise she was missing in the Outland, too. I took a deep breath. It had been, as always, difficult. I loved and hated seeing him, all at the same time. But it helped when it came to finally going on a date with Whitby. It lessened the sense of betrayal.

8.

The Shield

The evidence for the existence of Dark Reading Matter remains obscure at best. Supposedly the vast amount of unread material either forgotten or deleted, DRM is also said to be home to the Unread: zombielike husks of former characters, their humanity sucked from their heads by continued unreadfulness. It is generally agreed that these stories belong to metamyth—stories within stories—and are used by drill sergeants at character college to frighten recruits into compliance.

Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (8th edition)

The queue to get out of Poetry was long, as always. The smuggling of metaphor out of the genre was a serious problem, and one that made the border guards extremely vigilant. The increased scarcity of raw metaphor in Fiction had driven prices sky-high, and people would tak

e unbelievably foolish risks to smuggle it across. I’d heard stories of metaphor being hidden in baggage, swallowed, even dressed up to look like ordinary objects whose meanings were then disguised to cloak the metaphor. The problem at that point was trying to explain why you had a “brooding thunderstorm” or “broad sunlit uplands” in your luggage.

“Can we take the High Road?” I asked.

She turned around to look at me. Taking the High Road out of Poetry meant only one thing—that I wanted to avoid any entanglements with the border guards.

“My friend Jake was carrying a mule without realizing it last week,” said the cabbie in a meaningful tone. “The mule had two kilos of raw metonym on him—hidden in the saddlebags.”

Metonym wasn’t as dangerous as smuggling raw metaphor, but the underworld would try anything to turn a buck and had set up labs to enrich variable forms of metaphor into the real McCoy. Extracting the “like” from simile was the easiest method, but the resulting metaphor was as weak as wet paper. Synecdoche was used in much the same way; the best minds in Jurisfiction were constantly trying to outwit them, and raided met labs on an almost daily basis.

“Did he get to keep his cab?” I asked. “Your friend Jake, I mean.”

“His entire car was reduced to text with the metonym still in it.”

“Reduced to text?” I echoed. “Sounds like a hammer to break a nut.”

“Poeticals are like that,” said the cabbie with a disrespectful snort. “Prone to fits of violent passion. I think it’s all that absinthe. The point is this: I can get you out of Poetry, but it will cost.”

“I’ll lend you my butler for an afternoon.”

“One afternoon and a garden party.”

“A garden party.”

“Done.”

The cabbie flipped the vectored thrust nozzles, and in an instant we were climbing almost vertically upwards. It took less than a minute to reach the low-lying book traffic, and within a few seconds we had latched onto an academic paper moving from Physics to Biology. We stayed there for a few minutes and then detached, hovered for a moment and then reattached to the keel of an oil tanker that was part of a Bermuda Triangle book on its way to Fiction. We were under the massive rudder at the back, with one of the vast propellers looming over us.

“We’ll ride this baby all the way into Fiction,” said the cabbie as she took out some knitting, “about twenty minutes. We could fly the whole way, but we’d probably be picked up by the book-traffic controllers and get busted.”

“Don’t look now, but I think we just have.”

The flashing red lights of a Jurispoetry squad car close by had alerted me to the fact that the cabbie wasn’t quite as good as I thought she was. We could have detached there and then and dropped the mile towards the Text Sea before leveling out and making a run for the coast, but it was a risky undertaking. Cutting and running meant only one thing: guilty.

“Oh, crap,” said the cabbie, dropping a stitch in surprise. “I hope you’ve got some friends in high places.”

“Hullo,” I said to the officer who was now standing outside the car. He was dressed in a baggy white shirt and smelled strongly of rhyming couplets. He stared at me with the supercilious look of someone who knew he had the upper hand and was certainly going to milk it.

“Oh, to sneak across the border, when it’s plain you should not oughta?”

I had to think quickly. Unlike the Poetry government officials who conversed in rhyme royal, this was a lowly traffic cop who spoke only the gutter doggerel of the streets. He was using a soft-rhyming AA and so was probably not that bright. I hit him with some AABCCB.

“Au contraire, my friend, we did not intend to break any poetical code. We were waved through by others of your crew and simply took the upper road.”

But he didn’t go for it.

“I can see your little plan, but your stanzas barely scan. You, madam, I must nab, so get your butt from out the cab.”