First Among Sequels (Thursday Next 5)

“What an honor!” said the first guard. “Someone from the real world.” He thought for a moment. “Tell me, if it rains on a really hot day, do sheep shrink?”

“Is that a security question?”

“No, no,” replied the guard quickly. “Bert and I were just discussing it recently.”

This wasn’t unusual. Characters in fiction had a very skewed view of the real world. To them the extreme elements of human experience were commonplace, as they were generally the sorts of issues that made it into books, which left the mundanities of real life somewhat obscure and mysterious. Ask a resident of the Book-World about terminal diseases, loss, gunshot trajectories, dramatic irony and problematic relatives and he’d be more expert than you or me—quiz him on paintbrushes and he’d spend the rest of the week trying to figure out how the paint stays on the bristles until it touches another surface.

“It’s woolens that shrink,” I explained, “and it has to be very hot.”

“I told you so,” said Bert triumphantly.

“Thank you,” I said, taking the security badges from the guard while I signed the ledger. He admitted us both to the facility, and almost from nowhere a bright yellow jeep appeared with a young man dressed in blue overalls and a cap sporting the BMF logo.

“Can you take us to Isambard Kingdom Buñuel?” I said as we climbed in the back.

“Yes,” replied the driver without moving.

“Then would you?”

“I suppose.”

The jeep moved off. The hangars were, as previously stated, of gigantic proportions. Unlike the real world, where practical difficulties in civil engineering might be a defining factor in the scale of a facility, here it was not a consideration at all. Indeed, the size of the plant could expand and contract depending on need, a little like Mary Poppins’s suitcase, which was hardly surprising, as they were designed by the same person. We drove on for a time in silence.

“What’s in Hangar One at the moment?” I asked the driver.

“The Magus.”

“Still?”

Even the biggest refit never took more than a week, and John Fowles’s labyrinthine-plotted masterpiece had been in there nearly five.

“It’s taking longer than we thought—they removed all the plot elements for cleaning, and no one can remember how they go back together again.”

“I’m not sure it will make a difference,” I murmured as we pulled up outside Hangar Eight. The driver said nothing, waited until we climbed out and then drove off without a word.

To say that the interior of the hangar was vast would have been pointless, as the Great Library, Text Grand Central and the CofG also had vast interiors, and continued descriptions of an increasingly hyperbolic nature would be insufferably repetitious. Suffice it to say that there was room on the hangar floor for not only Darcy’s country home of Pemberley but also Rosings, Netherfield and Longbourn as well. They had all been hoisted from the book by a massive overhead crane so the empty husk of the novel could be checked for fatigue cracks before being fumigated for nesting grammasites and then repainted. At the same time, an army of technicians, plasterers, painters, carpenters and so forth were crawling over the houses, locations, props, furnishings and costumes, all of which had been removed for checking and maintenance.

“If this is Pride and Prejudice,” said Thursday5 as we walked toward the Bennets’ property of Longbourn, “then what are people reading in the Outland?”

The house was resting incongruously on wooden blocks laid on the hangar floor but without its grounds—they were elsewhere being tended to by a happy buzz of gardeners.

“We divert the readings to a lesser copy on a standby Storycode Engine, and people read that,” I replied, nodding a greeting to the various technicians who were trying to make good the damage wrought by the last million readings or so. “The book is never quite as good, but the only people who might see a difference are the Austen enthusiasts and scholars. They would notice the slight dulling and lack of vitality, but, unable to come to a satisfactory answer as to why this might be so, they will simply blame themselves—a reading later in the week will once again renew their confidence in the magnificence of the novel.”

> We stepped inside the main doorway of Longbourn, where a similar repair gang was working on the interior. They had only just gotten started, and from here it was easier to see the extent of the corrosion. The paintwork was dull and lifeless, the wallpaper hung off the wall in long strips, and the marble fireplace was stained and darkened by smoke. Everything we looked at seemed tired and worn.

“Oh, mercy!” came a voice behind us, and we turned to find Mrs. Bennet dressed in a threadbare poke bonnet and shawl. Following her was a construction manager, and behind him was Mr. Bennet.

“This will never be ready in time,” she lamented, looking around the parlor of her house unhappily, “and every second not spent looking for husbands is a second wasted.”

“My dear, you must come and have your wardrobe replaced,” implored Mr. Bennet. “You are quite in tatters and unsuited for being read, let alone receiving gentlemen—potential husbands or otherwise.”

“He’s quite right,” urged the manager. “It is only a refit, nothing more; we will have you back on the shelf in a few days.”

“On the shelf?” she shrieked. “Like my daughters?”

And she was about to burst into tears when she suddenly caught sight of me.

“You there! Do you have a single brother in possession of a good fortune who is in want of a wife?”