“Just what in Wheatley’s name is going on here, Next?”
My mind was still racing. There was the fate of the Fourteenth Clown to think of, and the broader implications of regional stability, pretty nurses, handsome doctors and fire retardant.
“Time is of the essence. Senator, I need you to do something without question.”
“And that is?”
“Shut down every single Feedback Loop north of Three Men in a Boat.”
“Are you mad?” he said. “That’s almost three hundred million books!”
“Mad? Perhaps. But if you don’t do what I ask, you’ll have a genre war on your hands so devastating it will turn your blood to ice.”
“My blood is already ice, Miss Next.”
The senator paused, then looked at Zhark, who nodded his agreement.
“Very well.”
Jobsworth instructed Barnes to get the message to Text Grand Central in any way he could—and to expedite, code puce.
“And you,” said Jobsworth, pointing a finger at me, “have some serious explaining to do.”
We convened in the bar almost immediately. Jobsworth was there with Herring, Barksdale, the captain and Emperor Zhark—as well as all of Jobsworth’s D-3s and Sprockett, who had divested himself of his bar-steward disguise and was once more in full butler regalia.
“Where would you like me to start?” I asked.
“At the beginning,” said Jobsworth, “and don’t stop until you get to the end.”
I took a deep breath and showed them the map Lyell had drawn.
“We won’t find out exactly how she knew until we find her, but the real Thursday Next became aware that there might exist a huge quantity of raw metaphor under the Northern Genres. Such a state of affairs would throw the entire power balance of Fiction on its head, so she needed to make sure. She took leading geologist Sir Charles Lyell up-country to conduct some test drilling, and it seems she was right. Buried beneath Racy Novel are the largest reserves of untapped metaphor the BookWorld has ever seen.”
I had everyone’s attention by now—you could have heard a pin drop.
“It was potentially explosive news, and Thursday knew that she would be in severe danger if this got out—so she hid among the flat Thursdays out in Fan Fiction. Despite her precautions, her activities were being scrutinized without her knowledge, and Thursday—reliably touted as ‘the second-hardest person to kill in the BookWorld’—had to be gotten rid of. A cabbie named the Mediocre Gatsby was bribed to hang around Fan Fiction on the off chance she would want picking up. A previously scrapped book called The Murders on the Hareng Rouge was being kept in Vanity and as soon as she was in the cab, the book was dispatched to the Council of Genres. Mediocre piggybacked the book for the trip as instructed, and a second later a rhetorical device was detonated, leaving the book, the cabbie and, it was hoped, Thursday herself little more then textual confetti—a million graphemes littered all over Fiction.”
There was silence, so I carried on. “That might have been the end of it. Most of the book was just small, tattered remnants not dissimilar to the usual detritus that flutters occasionally from the heavens and is absorbed into the ground, except that for some reason, Adrian Dorset described a bed-sitting room so well that it survived the sabotage intact and came to rest in Conspiracy, and JAID had to be alerted. This was tricky, because a diligent investigator might start to ask awkward questions, so Lockheed was ordered to employ his most useless investigator to look into it. Me. And that’s not a coincidence. Why would that be, Sprockett?”
“There are no coincidences in the BookWorld—so long as you don’t count the last chapters in some of Charles Dickens’s books.”
“Exactly. But we do find problems—the fact that someone scrubbed off the ISBN to avoid discovery, and the epizeuxis device. And as we look, we find ourselves one step behind the Men in Plaid, who are silencing anyone who had anything to do with the attempted hit on Thursday Next.”
“Rogue Men in Plaid?” said Emperor Zhark in an accusatory tone, staring at Jobsworth and Herring—the two who were responsible for them.
“Scrubbed ISBN?” demanded Jobsworth. “Dead geologists? Epizeuxis devices? Who is responsible for this outrage?”
“One of us present here.”
They all looked at one another.
“It was little things to begin with—things that didn’t click until later. I learned from Adrian Dorset that he destroyed The Murders on the Hareng Rouge a month back, yet it was still floating around Vanity waiting to intercept Thursday. The rules state that it has to be scrapped immediately—on Red Herring’s signature.”
They all looked at Herring, who had started to go pale.
“He controls the Book Transit Authority, and also the Men in Plaid. He’s the second-in-command to the BookWorld, but he wanted more. He was after the top job and, what’s more, control of the vast stores of metaphor that are lying under Racy Novel. He knew that whoever controlled the metaphor would control Fiction.”
“But how could he control Speedy Muffler and Racy Novel?” asked Zhark.