“So,” said Sprockett, staring at all the metaphor, “stolen?”
“Not if Mediocre was as his name suggests,” I replied. “How much do you think this is all worth?”
“Twenty grand,” said Sprockett. “People will pay good money to get hold of raw metaphor. There’s enough here to keep a man comfortable for a long time.”
“Or even enroll at character college,” I said holding up a prospectus from St. Tabularasa’s. “Looks like Mediocre was trying to better himself and shed his epithet. A cabbie couldn’t earn this much in a decade of Octobers.” I added, “I reckon we’re looking at a bribe.”
“To do what?”
“I don’t know.”
I picked up Mediocre’s account book. It outlined all the trips he had done and which needed to be billed. The last day was not there, of course, but the previous day was.
“Well, well,” I said, “looks like Thursday went on a trip to Biography the day before she vanished. And that’s not all,” I added. “Every single fare Mediocre accepted was picked up from the same place—Sargasso Plaza, just outside the entrance to Fan Fiction. Coincidence?”
“We have company,” murmured Sprockett, who’d been standing at the window.
I joined him and noted that a 1949 Buick Roadmaster had pulled up outside the building. Two Men in Plaid got out and looked around.
“Time we weren’t here.”
We crossed to the other side of the room and exited though the French windows, which opened onto a veranda. From there we climbed down onto the roof of a garden shed, then let ourselves out into an alley beyond. We walked back around the house and watched as the Plaids went into the building.
“What now, ma’am?”
I handed him a set of keys I’d found in Mediocre’s room and nodded towards the brand-new taxi parked outside. “Can you drive one of those?”
“If it has wheels, I can drive it, ma’am. Are we heading for Biography?”
“We are.”
“And what will we do when we get there?”
“Find out if Lyell is as boring as Thursday said he was.”
30.
High Orbit
Sooner or later a resident of the BookWorld will start to question what is beyond the internal sphere that we call home. Stated simply, what would happen if one burrowed directly downwards? In pursuit of an answer, noted explorer Arne Saknussemm entered a disused metaphor mine to see if a way through could be found. As this edition went to press, he has not yet returned.
Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (3rd edition)
Sprockett reversed the cab out of the garage, engaged the Technobabble™ Swivelmatic vectored-ion plasma drive and powered vertically upwards from Parody Valley and Vanity. I was pressed back into my seat by the acceleration and the ascent angle, and I might have been frightened had my mind not been tumbling with what we’d discovered so far—or even with what we had still yet to find out. Within a few minutes, we were hanging in the heavens a couple of thousand feet from the surface, right at the cruising altitude of local books that were being moved around Fiction. Below us the islands that made up the Fiction Archipelago were laid out in precise detail.
“Would it be impertinent to point out that visiting another island in the BookWorld without transit papers is strictly forbidden?”
“What does Thursday Next care for transit papers?”
“I would politely point out that you’re not her, ma’am.”
“I might as well be. I have a shield and I look like her. Who can say I’m not?”
“Who indeed, ma’am?”
I looked behind us and out to sea. Biography was situated beyond Artistic Criticism, and it was unlikely that any books would be going that way at this lower level. I wound down the window, poked my head out and looked up. Several miles above us, I could see the high-level books crisscrossing the sky, their journey made less arduous by traveling at the precise altitude where the force of gravity from below cance
ls the force of gravity from above—the gravopause. At that height you could usually find someone going your way—so long as you could get up there. The Technobabble™ drive on the cab would get us to local traffic height, but after that we were on our own.