One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (Thursday Next 6)

“Pretty much,” he replied glumly. “And some very good cuisine. And the smells. You’ll like those, I assure you. And real sex—not like the oddly described stuff we have to make do with in here.”

“I assure you I’m not going to the RealWorld for the sex.”

“When tourism was permitted, many visitors used it for little else. Anything that is impossible to describe adequately in the BookWorld was much sought and, coincidentally, usually beginning with c: cooking, copulation, Caravaggio, coastlines and chocolate. Will you do me a favor and bring some back? I adore chocolate. As much as you can carry, in fact. And none of that Lindt or Nestlé muck—Cadbury’s the thing.”

I promised him I would, and he opened the hatch at the back of the cannon.

“Good luck,” he said

. “Don’t worry if it seems a bit odd to begin with. You’re made in the image of the flesh-and-bloods, so there’s nothing you can’t figure out as long as you keep your wits about you. It helps if you crouch tight, like a hedgehog. It’s why Mrs. Tiggy-winkle was so good at moving across.”

I crawled inside and crunched myself up into the fetal position. Plum instructed me to hold my breath when he reached the count of two, as it helped to have a breath in you when you arrived, since breathing out can give a good indication of how breathing actually works. I thanked him for the advice, and he closed the hatch. I looked along the barrel of the cannon to the muzzle, and beyond that to the series of textual sieves that would chop me into the smallest component parts imaginable. I admit it, I was nervous. I waited for about a minute in the gloom, and then, when nothing had happened, I called out.

“Sorry!” came Plum’s voice. “I’m just winding her up to speed. If I don’t get you to exactly .346 of Absurd Speed, all you’ll be is a tattered mass of text caught in the sieves. If I fire you too fast, you’ll be embedded in the back of the laboratory.”

“What would happen then?”

“Paper over you, I suppose.”

I wasn’t particularly reassured by this but waited patiently for another half minute until I heard a faint whine that grew in pitch as Plum counted down from ten. When he got to five, the whine had grown so loud I could hardly hear him, so I guessed when two would be and took a deep breath. I was just thinking that perhaps this wasn’t such a great idea after all and I should really be getting back to my series and staying there for a sensible period of time—such as forever—when there was a noise like a thousand metallic frogs all croaking at the same time and my body was suddenly skewered by a thousand hot needles. Before I could cry out, the pain passed, and after a low hum and a sensation of treacle, Klein Blue and Wagner all mixed together but not very well, there was a brilliant flash of light.

20.

Alive!

The “Alive” simulator at the BookWorld Conference is one of those devices that all characters should try at least once. The experience of being real has two purposes: firstly, to assist characters in their quest for a greater understanding of people and, secondly, to discourage characters from ever attempting to escape to the RealWorld. Most customers last ten minutes before hitting the panic button and being led shaken from the simulator.

Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (8th edition)

I heard a gurgling sound, a heavy thumping and something odd in my nose that generated backstory memories I hadn’t had for a while—something about going for walks in the park when I was small. It was dark, too, and I felt a pain in my chest. I didn’t know what it was until, with a sound like a tornado, a hot gush of foul air erupted from within me and blew out of my mouth. Before I could recover from this shock, I spontaneously did the opposite and drew in an equally fast gush of air that cooled my teeth and tasted of pine needles.

“It’s called breathing,” came a voice close at hand. “It’s very simple, and everyone does it. Just relax and go with the flow.”

“I used to ‘take a breath’ and ‘exhale uneasily’ at home,” I managed to say, “but this is quite different.”

“Those were merely descriptive terms intended to suggest a mood,” came the voice again, which sounded how I imagined a cheese straw might sound. “Here you are doing it to stay alive. Can you hear a thumping and a gushing noise, and a few rumbles, grunts, squeaks and growls?”

“Yes.”

“It’s your body. The thumping is your heart. It’s all new to you, so it will fit oddly, like a new pair of shoes, but you’ll get used to it. Feel your wrist.”

I did so and was surprised to note that my skin was warm, soft and ever so slightly tacky. It was also thumping. It was my pulse, and I was sweating. Not for any descriptive reasons but because I was alive. After a few minutes of doing nothing but breathing, I spoke again.

“What’s that random sensation of memories I keep getting?”

“It’s smells. They have a way of firing off recollections. No one knows why.”

I didn’t understand and moved rapidly on. “Why can’t I see anything?”

“You need to open your eyes.”

So I did. I sat and blinked for some minutes. The view was quite astonishing, not only in range but in detail. I had been used to seeing only what was relevant within a scene. Back home, anything extra would have been unnecessary and was a pasty shade of magnolia with the texture of uncooked dough. Here there was everything, in all directions, in full color and in full detail. Several books’ worth of description was just sitting there, with no one except me to revel in its glorious detail. The trees swayed ever so gently in the breeze, and the clouds moved slowly across the heavens. It was summer, and the flower beds had erupted in a sumptuous palette of color, while on the air were delicate tastes of cooking and garbage and rain and earth. I could hear stuff, too, except not one thing at a time, but all things at all times. The delicate symphony of sounds that reached my ears so heaped together that it was difficult to separate anything out at all, and I sat there quite numbed by the overload of sensations.

“How do they filter it out?” I asked.

“Humans filter well,” said the voice. “In fact, they can filter out almost anything. Sound, vision, smells, love, anger, passion, reason. Everything except hunger and thirst, cold and hot. No need to hurry. Take your time.”

I sat there for an hour, attempting to make sense of the world, and I did reasonably well, all things considered. In that time I managed to figure out I was sitting on a bench in a small and well-kept park hemmed in by redbrick houses on every side. There was a children’s play area, a pond, a flower bed and two trees, both silver birch. A main road was to one side, and on a building opposite were two billboards. One was advertising the Goliath Corporation’s supposed good work on behalf of the community, and the other promoted “Daphne Farquitt Day” on Friday, which began with a celebration of her works and ended with a Farquitt Readathon. It was a name I recognized, or course. The popularity of the romance author dictated that she had a genre all her own.