“That’s okay. Now, is there anything else to report?”
I told him about Jenny, the comment about Lyell and how Goliath had developed a Green Fairy and wanted to know where the Austen Rover had ended up.
“Goliath is an ongoing thorn,” said Bradshaw grimly, “but we’re dealing with the problem. Anything else?”
I thought for a moment. If I couldn’t trust Bradshaw, I couldn’t trust anyone.
“This morning Jobsworth and Red Herring asked me to pretend to be Thursday and go to the peace talks on Friday.”
“We thought they might.”
“Should I go?”
“It would be my advice that you shouldn’t. Don’t be insulted by this, but civilians are ill equipped to deal with anything beyond that which is normally expected of them. The BookWorld is fraught with dangers, and your time is best served bringing as many readers as you can to your series, then keeping them.”
“Can I go back to the RealWorld?”
“No.”
“I have unfinished business. I did go on a somewhat risky mission for you—I could have ended up erased or dead—or both.”
“You have the gratitude of the head of Jurisfiction,” he said.
“That should be enough. He’s not your husband, Thursday. He’s Thursday’s. Go back to your book and just forget about everything that’s happened. You’re not her and never can be. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Excellent. Appreciate a girl who knows when to call it a day. The frog guy will see you out. Good day.”
And so saying, he turned on his heel and walked into the ballroom. The door closed behind him, leaving me confused, drained and missing Landen. I thought of going to find Whitby to cry on his shoulder, but then I remembered about the nuns.
“Damn,” I said, to no one in particular.
The frog-footman saw me to the front door, then handed me the Rubik’s Cube I’d lent him.
“Here,” he said. “It’s got me flummoxed, I can tell you.”
Despite his working on the puzzle during my absence the cube had remained resolutely unsolved—all six sides were still the same unbroken colors.
28.
Home Again
There are multiple BookWorlds, all coexisting in parallel planes and each unique to its own language. Naturally, varying tastes around the Outland make for varying popularity of genres, so no two BookWorlds are ever the same. Generally, they keep themselves to themselves, except for the annual BookWorld Conference, where the equivalent characters get together to discuss translation issues. It invariably ends in arguments and recriminations.
Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (2nd edition)
I climbed out of the Porsche, slammed the door and leaned against the stone wall. We’d just done the “bad time” section within The Eyre Affair, which was always tiring and a bit spacey. Despite our best endeavors, our sole reader had simply given up and left us dangling less than a page before the end of that chapter—the Outlander equivalent of letting someone reach the punch line before announcing you’d heard the joke before.
Bowden climbed out to join me. I got on better with him than I did with the character who played my father, but that wasn’t saying much. It was like saying sparrows got on better with cats than robins. Bowden had a thing going on with the previous written Thursday, and when he tried to hit on me at the Christmas party, I’d tipped an entire quiche in his lap. Our relationship on and off book had been strained ever since.
“That was just plain embarrassing,” said Bowden. “You were barely even trying.”
I’d taken over from Carmine the second I got home, so I couldn’t blame her. I should have let her just carry on—she was doing fine, after all, but . . . well, I needed the distraction.
“So we had a bit of wastage,” I said. “It happens.”
Reader “wastage” was something one had to get used to but never did. Most of the time it was simply that our book wasn’t the reader’s thing, which was borne with a philosophical shrug. We’d lost six readers at one hit once when my brother Joffy went AWOL and missed an entire chapter. It had never been more tempting to hit the Snooze Button. Mind you, in the annals of reader wastage, our six readers were peanuts. Stig of the Dump once lost seven hundred readers in the early seventies when Stig was kidnapped by Homo erectus fundamentalists, eager to push a promegalith agenda. Unusually, terms were agreed on with the kidnappers and a new megalith section was inserted into the book. It messed slightly with the whole dream/reality issue but never dented the popularity of the novel. On that occasion the Snooze Button was pressed, which accounts for the lack of a sequel. Kitten death—even written kitten death—carries a lot of stigma. Barney eventually handed over the reins to a replacement and works these days at Text Grand Central; Stig is now much in demand as an after-dinner nonspeaker.