First Among Sequels (Thursday Next 5)

A Woman Named

Thursday Next

The Special Operations Network was instigated to handle policing duties considered either too unusual or too specialized to be tackled by the regular force. There were thirty departments in all, starting at the more mundane Neighborly Disputes (SO-30) and going on to Literary Detectives (SO-27) and Art Crime (SO-24). Anything below SO-20 was restricted information, so what they got up to was anyone’s guess. What is known is that the individual operatives themselves are slightly unbalanced. “If you want to be a SpecOp,” the saying goes, “act kinda weird.”

M y father had a face that could stop a clock. I don’t mean that he was ugly or anything; it was a phrase the ChronoGuard used to describe someone who had the power to reduce time to an ultra-slow trickle. Dad had been a Colonel in the ChronoGuard and kept his work very quiet. So quiet, in fact, that we didn’t know he’d gone rogue at all until his timekeeping buddies raided our house one morning clutching a Seize & Eradication Order open-dated at both ends and demanded to know where and when he was. Dad has remained at liberty ever since; we learned from his subsequent visits that he regarded the whole service as “morally and historically corrupt” and was fighting a one-man war against the bureaucrats within the Office for Special Stemporal Temp…Tability. Temporal…Stemp…Special—

“Why don’t we just hold it right there?” I said before Thursday5 tied her tongue in knots.

“I’m sorry,” she said with a sigh. “I think my biorhythms must be out of whack.”

“Remember what we talked about?” I asked her, raising an eyebrow.

“Or perhaps it’s just a tricky line to say. Here goes: Special…Temporal…Stability. Got it!” She smiled proudly at her accomplishment. Then a stab of self-doubt crossed her face. “But aside from that, I’m doing okay, right?”

“You’re doing fine.”

We were standing in the opening chapter of The Eyre Affair, or at least the refurbished first chapter. Evil Thursday’s erasure caused a few ruffled feathers at Text Grand Central, especially when Alice-PON-24330 said that while happy to keep the series running for the time being, she was not that keen about taking on the role permanently—what with all the sex, guns, swearing and stuff. There were talks of scrapping the series until I had a brain wave. With the erasure of The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco, Thursday5 was now bookless and needed a place to live; she could take over. Clearly, there had to be a few changes—quite a lot actually—but I didn’t mind; in fact, I welcomed it. I applied for a whole raft of internal plot adjustments, and Senator Jobsworth, still eager to make amends and keep his job after the reality book farrago, was only too happy to accede to my wishes—as long as I at least tried to make the series commercial.

“Can we get a move on?” asked Gerry, the first assistant imaginator. “If we don’t get to the end of this chapter by lunchtime, we’re going to get behind schedule for the scene at Gad’s Hill tomorrow.”

I left them to it and walked to the back of Stanford Brookes’s café in London, faithfully re-created from my memory and the place where the new Eyre Affair starts, rather than at a burned-out house belonging to Landen, where, in point of fact, I didn’t live for another two years. I watched as the imaginators, characters and technicians translated the story into storycode text to be uploaded to the engines at TGC—and eventually to replace the existing TN series. Perhaps, I mused to myself, life might be getting back to normal after all.

It had been a month since we’d erased Pepys Fiasco, and Racy Novel, despite all manner of threats, had to admit that dirty-bomb technology was still very much in the early stages, so Feminist and Ecclesiastical breathed a combined sigh of relief and returned to arguing with each other about the malecentricity of religion.

At the same time, the gentle elongation of the Now was beginning to take effect: The Read-O-Meter had been steadily clicking upward as ReadRates once again began to rise. In the Outland the reality TV craze was now fortunately on the wane—Samaritan Kidney Swap had so few viewers that by the second week they became desperate and threatened to shoot a puppy on live TV unless a million people phoned in. They had 2 million complaints and were closed down. Bowden and I visited Booktastic! a week ago to find they now had two entire sections of books because, as the manager explained, “there had been a sudden demand.”

As part of the whole ChronoGuard decommissioning process, Dad had been reactualized from his state of quasi nonexistence and turned up at Mum’s carrying a small suitcase and a bunch of flowers. We had a terrific reunion for him, and I invited Major Pickles along, who seemed to hit it off rather well with Aunt Polly.

On other matters, I traveled to Goliathopolis to meet with Jack Schitt and return his wife’s necklace, with an explanation of what had happened to her on board the Hesperus. He took the jewelry and the details of her death in stony silence, thanked me and was gone. John Henry Goliath made no appearance, and I didn’t tell anyone at Goliath that the Austen Rover was, as far as we knew, still adrift without power in intragenre space somewhere between Poetry and Maritime. I didn’t know whether this was the end of the Book Project or not, but TGC was taking no chances and had erected a battery of Textual Sieves in the direction of the Outland and marked any potential transfictional incursions as “high priority.”

I walked out of the café to where Isambard Kingdom Buñuel was waiting for me. We were standing in Hangar Three among the fabric of Affair, ready to be bolted in. Buñuel had already built a reasonable facsimile of Swindon that included my mum’s house and the Literary Detectives’ office, and he was just getting started on Thornfield Hall, Rochester’s house.

“We’ve pensketched the real Thornfield,” he explained, showing me some drawings for approval, “but we were kind of think-worthing how your Porsche was painted?”

“Do you know Escher’s Reptiles?”

“Yes.”

“It’s like that—only in red, blue and green.”

“How about the Prose Portal?”

I thought for a moment. “A sort of large leatherbound book covered in knobs, dials and knife switches.”

He made a note. “And the unextincted Pickwick?”

“About so high and not very bright.”

“Did you bring some snapimagery?”

I rummaged in my shoulder bag, brought out a wad of snaps and went through them.

“That’s Pickers when she still had feathers. It’s blurred because she blinked and fell over, but it’s probably the best. And this is Landen, and that’s Joffy, and that’s Landen again just before his trousers caught fire—that was hilarious—and this is Mycroft and Polly. You don’t need pictures of Friday, Tuesday or Jenny do you?”

“Only Friday birth-plus-two for Something Rotten.”

“Here,” I said, selecting one from the stack. “This was taken on his second birthday.”