One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (Thursday Next 6)

“They’ll simply push the rogue genre up north towards Porn and De Sade. Fanny Hill, The Story of O and The Adventures of Tom Jones will be annexed back into Classics, and the territory shared between them. Comedy will still insist upon the buffer zone of Bedroom Farce, and since Comedy is regarded with a certain sense of reluctant admiration by Romance and Dogma, they’ll not want to go any farther.”

He took a deep breath.

“But we can’t risk that kind of disruption. The genres might take months to rebuild to current strength, and the prose will suffer terribly. With the advent of e-books in the Outland, this is not a good time to have a cross-genre war. The battle between Sci-Fi and Horror all those years ago has still left its mark; their reputations as serious literature have still to recover completely—and the civil war inside Fantasy has left the reading public with an entirely unwarranted dismal view of the genre. I can’t have Romance and Female Crime marginalized in the same way—they’re 43.9 percent of our readership.”

“I’m not sure what I can do,” I said. “I’m not much good at negotiating. I tend to want everyone to simply hug and make up.”

“I’m not asking you to do anything, you little fool. We’re putting it about that you—the real Thursday—has irritable vowel syndrome and can’t speak, so Emperor Zhark will be doing the talking. You’ll just sit there and nod and look serious. Muffler might be a troublemaker, but even he will knuckle under if he thinks Thursday Next might be annoyed if he shouts too loudly. How about it?”

He was asking too much. No, it was more than that—insane, even by Council of Genre standards. If Muffler found out I wasn’t her, things might get even worse, and I wasn’t going to have a cross-genre war on my conscience.

“I may have to politely decline,” I said.

/> He stared at me for a moment, then opened a manila folder on his desk.

“Hmm,” he said, “looks like we have a lot of illegal narrative flexations in your series, doesn’t it?”

“I’m playing Thursday as Thursday wants me to.”

“We have only your word for that. There is also a possible charge of your understudy consorting with undesirables and, most seriously, your harboring an illegal alien from Vanity.”

He meant Sprockett.

“We call it Self-Publishing these days.”

“Immaterial. We’ll be taking the Metaphoric River route up-country via paddle steamer. I’ll have a car pick you up Friday morning at 0700. Are we agreed?”

I took a deep breath. “Yes, sir.”

“Excellent!”

He pressed a button on his desk.

“Miss Next, you must also understand that in matters of BookWorld politics like this, it is essential you do not speak of this to anyone, especially that busybody Bradshaw. Jurisfiction has a twisted vision of the good work we do at the council, and I don’t want him to get the wrong idea. Do you understand?”

If there was any lingering doubt that the CofG and Jurisfiction distrusted each other, it was dispelled. Neither wanted the other to know what it was asking me to do. The clerk came back in, and I was escorted from the building by the same two Men in Plaid who had brought me there.

In a very short time, I was deposited back at my front door, and the Roadmaster pulled silently away. Sprockett was waiting for me in the hall, his single eyebrow pointer clicking alternately between “Quizzical” and “Uncomfortable.”

But he knew what to do.

“Can I interest ma’am in a Ludlow Scorcher?”

I told him a cocktail would go down very well so long as he went easy on the parsley, and then I related what had just happened with Jobsworth. I decided not to mention the threats he’d made regarding Sprockett and Carmine, but I did mention that I would be going up-country on Friday—and also the dent and the streak of yellow paint on the Men in Plaid’s Buick Roadmaster.

“The fact that they haven’t tried to kill us again tends to indicate that they believe we have abandoned the investigation,” said Sprockett, handing me the cocktail. “Are you sure it was our yellow paint on the side of their Roadmaster?”

“What else is painted yellow in the BookWorld?”

As soon as I said it, I suddenly remembered something. I stood up and quickly walked to the garage at the bottom of the garden, Sprockett close behind.

“Ma’am?” he said as I swung up the double doors and started to poke amongst the book junk for what I was looking for. I found it easily enough: the back axle that had once been painted yellow. There was no sign of an ISBN, scrubbed or otherwise.

“It wasn’t from The Murders on the Hareng Rouge,” I said excitedly. “It’s from a TransGenre Taxi. I rode back from Poetry stuck onto the side of an ocean tanker, part of a book about the Bermuda Triangle. There was a taxi attached to Murders when it went down, piggybacking from one part of the BookWorld to another. The sabotage might not have been aimed at the book at all—it might have been aimed at whoever was in the cab!”

“Or both,” said Sprockett, annoyingly muddying the waters.

“Or both,” I agreed.