One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (Thursday Next 6)

He carried on with his measurements. The crucible was steaming not from heat but from cold. Liquid nitrogen was keeping a raw simile in an inactive state. So much so that I couldn’t tell what it was, as the meaning and illusion were all contracted and frozen into one lump. I put on the glove and, using the wooden pincers, placed the simile in the acceleration chamber.

“Excellent,” said Plum, who closed the door and spun a wheel on the front to effect a secure lock. He then pressed a button, and there was a low humming noise, which gradually increased in pitch as the simile started to move around the accelerator. There was a dial marked “Absurd Velocity,” and the needle began to rise as the simile zipped round at ever increasing speeds.

“The Council of Genres is very keen to have this up and running as soon as possible,” he said, staring at the dials carefully. “Synthesizing metaphor is the holy grail of the BookWorld, if you don’t count finding the Holy Grail, which confusingly is also the holy grail of the BookWorld.”

The Large Metaphor Collider had by now wound itself up to a whine so high-pitched that I couldn’t hear it, and all the equipment on the desk was vibrating. As the needle nudged up to .95 Absurd, Plum took a deep breath and pressed the red button, which instantaneously brought indisputable fact into the path of the absurdly fast simile.

It is difficult to describe what happened next. The machine changed from being something akin to an engine with a throttle stuck wide open to that of a Brave New Dawn. I saw the Clouds Open and the Rain Stop. The Lark Ascended, and I saw Saint John on the island of Patmos, and a New Heaven and a New Earth. I saw—But in another second, those feelings had vanished, and all we were left with was the collider, humming down to speed.

“What was that?” I asked.

“A sudden flash of pure metaphor,” replied Plum excitedly. “This kind of event usually liberates about a hundred and twenty PicoMets.”

“Is that safe?”

“Don’t worry,” he said with a smile. “The background metaphor le

vel is about fifty PicoMets, and a fatal dose is up around the forty-MilliMet mark. You’d have to do something daft for that to happen, although there have been accidents. A few years ago, a colleague of mine was experimenting with a few grams of dead metaphor when it went critical. He was bathed in almost a hundred MilliMets and started barking on about Prometheus stealing fire from the gods before he exploded into a ball of fire and ascended into the night sky, where he could be seen for many weeks, a salutary lesson of the dangers of playing with metaphor. Wrecked the laboratory, too. Let me see.”

Professor Plum pulled the single sheet of onionskin from the annihilation chamber and looked at it, brows knitted. The paper had recorded the subword particles. Some were dotted, others colored, some hatched. There was even a legend at the bottom explaining what each one meant. Fiction has no time for lengthy and potentially confusing data analysis, so experimentation is always followed by easily interpretable and generally unequivocal results.

“That’s alliteration,” said Plum, tracing the various paths with his finger. “Anaphora, epistrophe, epanalepsis, analepsis, hyperbole and polyptoton.”

In all, he could list twenty-nine submeaning particles, but of pure metaphor there was no evidence at all.

“You felt it, though, didn’t you?”

I answered that I had. A feeling of a new dawn and old things being swept away.

Plum stared at the paper for a long time. So long, in fact, that I thought he might have gone to sleep standing up and might need catching when he fell over.

“Well,” he said at last, “back to the drawing board.”

“But we felt something, didn’t we?” I said.

“Without proof we’ve got nothing,” he said in a resigned voice. “Perhaps metaphor has no mass. If so, I’m very surprised—although it might explain why Dark Reading Matter is undetectable. It could be mostly metaphorical. Come on. Let’s get you real.”

The professor led me to the back of the workshop, past the entrance to a scrubbing device for declichéing otherwise healthy idioms and down a corridor to a door obscured by several discarded packing cases and a stack of unread copies of the almost fatally dull JurisTech Review.

“We haven’t used the Jumper for over eighteen months,” he explained, struggling with a padlock that had grown rusty with age. “Not since the imaginatively titled ‘RealWorld Travel Ban’ banned all travel to the RealWorld.”

“Why the ban?”

“I didn’t ask, and neither should you. If anyone at the CoG gets wind of this, you and I are nothing but text.”

I didn’t like the sound of this.

“But Bradshaw—”

“Bradshaw is a good man,” interrupted Plum, “but in matters like this he’d deny he even knew you. And me. And himself, it it came to that. I agree with him. To maintain the integrity of Jurisfiction, I would accept being reduced to a bucket of graphemes. And so should you.”

He left me thinking about this and pulled opened the door. He paused, the interior of the lab a dark hole.

“You can leave now if you want to.”

“No, I’m okay,” I said, even if I wasn’t. “Let’s just get on with it, yes?”

He turned on the light to reveal a large room that was musty and hung with cobwebs. Occasionally there was a low rumble, and dust trickled from the ceiling.