First Among Sequels (Thursday Next 5)

“If I asked the other guard,” I said with some trepidation, “which was the door to the core-containment chamber, which one would he say?”

The guard thought for a moment and pointed to one of the doors, and I turned back to look at Sparkle and the somewhat concerned face of Thursday5, who was rapidly coming to terms with the idea that there was a lot of weird shit in the BookWorld that she’d no idea how to handle—such as potential tiger attacks inside Pinocchio.

“Have you chosen your door, Ms. Next?” asked Julian Sparkle. “Remember, if you win, you get through to core containment—and if you lose, there is a high probability of being eaten. Choose your door…wisely.”

I gave a smile and grasped the handle—not on the door that had been indicated by the guard but the other one. I pulled it open to reveal…a flight of steps leading downward.

Sparkle’s eyebrow twitched, and he grimaced momentarily before breaking once more into an insincere grin. The two guards breathed a sigh of relief and removed their helmets to mop their brows—it was clear that dealing with tigers wasn’t something they much liked to do—and the tiger, itself a bit miffed, growled from behind the other door.

“Congratulations,” muttered Sparkle. “You have chosen…correctly.”

I nodded to Thursday5, who joined me at the doorway, leaving Sparkle and the two guards arguing over what my super-duper prize should be.

“How did you know which guard was which?” she asked in a respectful tone.

“I didn’t,” I replied, “and still don’t. But I assumed that the guards would know who told the truth and who didn’t. Since my question would always show me the wrong door irrespective of whom I asked, I just took the opposite of the one indicated.”

“Oh!” she said, trying to figure it out. “What were they doing there anyway?”

“Sparkle and the others are what we call ‘anecdotals.’ Brain teasers, puzzles, jokes, anecdotes and urban legends that are in the oral tradition but not big enough to exist on their own. Since they need to be instantly retrieved, they have to be flexible and available at a moment’s notice—so we billet them unseen around the various works of fiction.”

“I get it,” replied Thursday. “We had the joke about the centipede playing rugby with us at Fiasco for a while. Out of sight of the readers, of course. Total pest—we kept on tripping over his boots.”

We stopped at the foot of the stairs. The room was about the size of a double garage and seemed to be constructed of riveted brass that was green with oxidization. The walls were gently curved, giving the impression that we were inside a huge barrel, and there was a hollow, cathedral-like quality to our voices. In the center of the room was a circular, waist-high bronze plinth about the size and shape of a ship’s capstan, upon which two electrodes sprouted upward and then bent gently outward until they were about six inches apart. At the end of each electrode was a carbon sphere no bigger than a Ping-Pong ball, and between the two of them a languid blue arc of electricity crackled quietly to itself.

“What’s that?” asked Thursday5 in a deferential whisper.

“It’s the spark, the notion, the core of the book, the central nub of energy that binds a novel together.”

We watched for a few moments as the arc of energy moved in a lazy wave between the poles. Every now and then, it would fizzle as though somehow disturbed by something.

“It moves as the crickets talk to each other upstairs,” I explained. “If the book were being read, you’d really see the spark flicker and dance. I’ve been in the core of Anna Karenina when it was going full bore with fifty thousand simultaneous readings, and the effect was better than any fireworks display—a multi-stranded spark in a thousand different hues that snaked and arced out into the room and twisted around one another. A book’s reason for being is to be read; the spark reflects this in a shimmering light show of dynamic proportions.”

“You speak as though it were alive.”

“Sometimes I think it is,” I mused, staring at the spark. “After all, a story is born, it can evolve, replicate and then die. I used to go down to core containment quite a lot, but I don’t have as much time for it these days.”

I pointed at a pipe about the width of my arm that led out from the plinth and disappeared into the floor.

“That’s the throughput pipe that takes all the readings to the Storycode Engine Floor at Text Grand Central and from there to the Outland, where they’re channeled direct to the reader’s imagination.”

“And…all books work this way?”

“I wish. Books that are not within the influence of Text Grand Central have their own onboard Storycode Engines, as do books being constructed in the Well of Lost Plots and most of the vanity publishing genre.”

Thursday5 looked thoughtful. “The readers are everything, aren’t they?”

“Now you’ve got it,” I replied. “Everything.”

We stood in silence for a moment.

“I was just thinking about the awesome responsibility that comes with being a Jurisfiction agent,” I said at last. “What were you thinking about?”

“Me?”

I looked around the empty room. “Yes, you.”

“I was wondering if extracting aloe vera hurt the plant. What’s that?”