One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (Thursday Next 6)

I went into the study, fetched a chair and pulled Thursday’s shield from where it was still embedded in the ceiling. I turned the shiny badge over in my hand. It was encased in a soft leather wallet and was well worn with use. It could get me almost anywhere in the BookWorld, no questions asked.

“Why would the red-haired gentleman have given this to me?”

“Maybe he was asked to,” said Sprockett. “Thursday has many friends, but there is only one person she knows she can truly trust.”

“And who’s that?”

“Herself.”

“That’s what the red-haired man told me,” I said, suddenly realizing that recent events might have had some greater purpose behind them. “Something happened. Thursday must have left instructions for him to get out of his story, find me and ask me to help.”

“Why didn’t he say so directly?” asked Sprockett, not unreasonably.

“This is Fiction,” I explained. “The exigency of drama requires events to be clouded in ambiguity.” I placed Thursday’s badge in my pocket.

“Is using the shield wise?” asked Sprockett. “The last time you used it, the Men in Plaid were onto us within the hour.”

“It opens doors. And what’s more, I don’t care if the Men in Plaid arrive. We’ll do as Thursday would do.”

“And what would that be, ma’am?”

I opened the bureau drawer, retrieved my second-best pistol and emptied all the ammunition I had into my jacket pocket.

“We kick some butt, Sprockett.”

“Very good, ma’am.”

29.

TransGenre Taxis

The TransGenre Taxi service has been going for almost as long as the BookWorld has been self-aware, and has adapted to the remaking with barely a murmur. TGTs are clean, the drivers have an encyclopedic knowledge of the BookWorld that would put a librarian to shame, and they can be relied upon to bend the rules when required—for a fee. Traditionally, they rarely have change for a twenty.

Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (2nd edition)

The TransGenre Taxi head office was housed over in Nonfiction within the pages of the less-than-thrilling World Taxi Review, published bimonthly. But traveling all the way to Nonfiction would take a needlessly long time and would alert the Men in Plaid before we’d even gotten as far as Zoology. Luckily for us, there was a regional office located within The First Men in the Moon, located over in Sci-Fi/Classic. It was rumored that the propulsion system used by the taxis was based upon a modified Cavorite design, but this was poohpoohed by Sci-Fi purists as “unworkable.” Mind you, so was the “interior of a sphere” BookWorld, but that seemed to work fine, too.

The dispatch clerk was a small, deeply harassed individual with the look of someone who had unwisely conditioned his hair and then slept on it wet.

“No refunds!” he said as soon as we entered.

“I’m not after a refund.”

“You wouldn’t get one if you were. What can I do for you?”

“We’re looking for a missing taxi. Took a fare from Vanity early yesterday morning.”

The dispatch clerk was unfazed. “I’m afraid to say that company policy is quite strict on this matter, madam. You’ll need a Jurisfiction warrant—”

“How’s this?” I asked, slapping Thursday’s shield on the counter.

The dispatch clerk stared at the badge for a moment, then picked up a clipboard from under the counter and started to flick through the pages. There were a lot of them.

“You’re fortunate we still have them,” he said. “We file with Captain Phantastic in an hour.”

He searched though them, chatting as he did so.

“We lose a couple of taxis every day to erasure, wastage, accidental reabsorption or simply to being used in books. For obvious reasons we’re keen to hide the actual number of accidents for fear of frightening people from our cabs.”