One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (Thursday Next 6)

He shrugged. “He helped me out once when I over ordered some EZ-Read PlotHoleFiller. I owed him. A weekend of all-consuming guilt seemed easy enough. I could keep myself to myself, get totally hyphenated, and no one need ever know.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “He’s legged it.”

Whitby nodded as the cabbie changed down a gear and moved onto the Dickens Freeway.

“I don’t know where Dermot’s gone. In fact, I think he might have been planning this for a while. I feel such an idiot—and what’s more, I think he put Jurisfiction onto me. You won’t tell them, will you?”

“Not yet, but I will. You can’t set fire to people—nuns or otherwise—and expect to get away with it.”

“I know,” he said sadly. “It weighs heavily on my conscience. The yapping, oh, the yapping.”

I sat in silence for a moment. The thing about backstories is that once you’ve taken one on, they’re true and real, irrespective of who owned them before you. You could pass it on, of course, but it was understandably tricky. Who wants a busload of burning nuns and puppies on his conscience?

“So what do you want?” I asked.

“I just wanted to see you,” he said simply, “and hear your voice.”

“Well, now you have,” I replied, a bit more harshly than perhaps I should have. “Maybe we should say good-bye.”

“I’m living over in Hemingway if you need anything,” he said, not wanting to give up on the slimmest chance a date was still possible. “Page 127, To Have and Have Not. If you need anything, just whistle. You can drop me on this corner, driver.”

The cabbie pulled up, and Whitby got out. He told me to take care and then hurried off around a street corner. The taxi moved on, and I slumped back into my seat as we turned onto Austen Boulevard. I thought of turning him in, then of not turning him in. It was a tricky call, but luckily the least of my worries.

I wasn’t feeling that good about the trip, to be honest. A nervy, sickly feeling was festering in the pit of my stomach—and not just from the difficulty of making the move across, or what I might find there or the truth about The Murders on the Hareng Rouge. Notwithstanding the recent developments with Whitby, I was most worried about meeting Landen. He was the man I was written to love and never meet. And now I was going to meet him.

19.

JurisTech, Inc.

The JurisTech Museum is open Monday to Friday, a half day on Wednesday. A whole range of technologies both past and present is on display, including an impressive array of BookWorld weaponry, grammasite traps, word dams, Eject-O-Hats, TextMarkers, grapheme splitters and noun-to-verb alchemical technologies. On Tuesdays there is a technical demonstration of the Textual Sieve (not to be missed).

Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (3rd edition)

I turned up at the front gate of Sense and Sensibility and showed the guards the authorization given to me by Bradshaw. The guards rang through and spoke briefly to JurisTech before I was once more issued a docket and ushered in. I met the frog-footman at the front door, who was surprised to see me again so soon.

“You again?” he said, staring at the docket. “What do you want with JurisTech?”

Fortified by the mission entrusted

to me by Bradshaw, I was no longer so frightened of him.

“None of your business,” I replied, and his face lit up. This was more how he liked it.

“Labs or office?”

“Labs.”

He guided me though the long corridors of Norland Park, down several flights of steps and an elevator or two before we stopped outside an inconspicuous door with a pair of milk bottles outside.

“The JurisTech Labs,” announced the frog-footman. “My instructions are to wait for you.”

“It’ll be a long wait. Pick me up in twelve hours. Here,” I said, handing him a Rubik’s Cube. “See if you can figure this out.”

The frog-footman stared at the cube curiously. All six faces were quite naturally the same color, and all was orderly and neat.

“You have to try to make it random,” I said, “by twisting the faces.”

The frog-footman twisted the faces in a fairly haphazard manner, but try as he might, every face remained the same color. For a BookWorld puzzle, it was a classic. The lack of randomness within the orderly structure of the BookWorld tended not to permit disorder. As far as I knew, no one had yet managed to scramble a Rubik’s, but I thought it might pass the time for him.