First Among Sequels (Thursday Next 5)

“Wait, wait!” yelled Thursday, holding her head in a massive display of self-control. “That was my last chance, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

She massaged her temples. “I can do this. I’m sor—I’m sor—Soooor—”

“You can say it.”

“I can’t.”

“Try.”

She screwed up her face and forced the word out. “I’m…soorry. I’ll be your apprentice. Jurisfiction has need of people like me, and I am willing to run the gauntlet of your overbearing mediocrity in order to achieve that.”

I stared at her for a moment. “Vague apology accepted.”

I moved away so Thursday1–4 couldn’t hear me and spoke into my mobilefootnoterphone again.

“Bradshaw, how badly do we need to suck up to Jobsworth right now?” 3

I told Bradshaw to rely on me. He thanked me profusely, wished me well and rang off. I snapped the phone shut and placed it back in my bag.

“Right,” I said, tossing Thursday1–4’s badge back at her. “For your first assignment, you are to get Thursday5 back here, chakras realigned or not, and apologize to her.”

Thursday1–4 stared at me for a moment, then dialed her own cell phone. I turned away and walked down the gravel drive, trying to relax. What a start.

I sat on an ornamental lion at the foot of the entrance steps and watched from a distance as Thursday5 reappeared and, after the briefest of altercations, they shook hands. There was a pause and then a few raised voices until finally, incredibly, and with Thursday1–4 as stiff as a poker, she allowed herself to be hugged. I smiled to myself, got up and walked back to where the pair of them were standing, Thursday5 looking optimistically positive and Thursday1–4 brooding stonily.

“Have you two sorted yourselves out?”

They both nodded.

“Good,” I said, consulting my watch. “We’ve got a few hours before we attend the Council of Genres’ policy-directive meeting, but before that—”

“We are attending the CofG meeting?” asked Thursday5 with eyes like saucers.

“Yes, but only in the sort of ‘we’ that means you stand at the back and say nothing.”

“Wow! What will they be discussing?”

“BookWorld policy. Such as whether we should be supplying characters to video games to give them added depth. It’s particularly relevant, as publishing these days doesn’t necessarily restrict books to being just books. It’s said that Harry Potter will make a rare appearance. Now, we’ve got to—”

“Will we really meet Harry Potter?” she asked in a soft whisper, her eyes going all dewy at the mention of the young wizard. Thursday1–4 looked to heaven and stood, arms crossed, waiting for us to get on with the day’s work.

“It depends,” I sighed. “If you pay attention or not. Now for this afternoon’s assignment: relieving the staff who are dealing with the BookWorld’s ongoing piano problem. And for that we need to go to Text Grand Central.”

23.

The Piano Problem

The piano was thought to have been invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori in the early eighteenth century and was originally called the gravicembalo col piano e forte, which was fortunately reduced to pianoforte, then more simply to piano. Composed of 550 pounds of iron, wood, strings and felt, the eighty-eight-key instrument is capable of the subtlest of melodies, yet stored up in the tensioned strings is the destructive power of a subcompact moving at twenty miles per hour.

I f Jurisfiction was the policing agency inside books and the Council of Genres was the political arm, Text Grand Central was the bureaucracy that bridged the two. Right up until the Ultra-word™ debacle, TGC had remained unimpeachably honest, but after that, the Council of Genres—on my advice—took the harsh but only possible course of action to ensure that Text Grand Central would be too inefficient and unimaginative to pose a threat. They appointed a committee to run it.

As we walked onto one of the main Storycode Engine floors, I heard Thursday5 gasp. The proportions of the room were more in keeping with a factory that made Very Large Things, and the stone walls, vaulted ceiling and flickering gas lamps betrayed the room’s provenance as something borrowed from an unpublished Gothic Horror novel. Laid in serried ranks across the echoing vastness of the space were hundreds of Storycode Engines, each one the size of a bus and built of shiny brass, mahogany and cast iron. A convoluted mass of pipes, valves and gauges, they looked like a cross between an espresso machine, a ship’s engine and a euphonium on acid. They were so large there was a catwalk running around the upper section for easy maintenance, with a cast-iron spiral staircase at one end for access.

“These are Imaginotransference Storycode Engines. The most important piece of technology we possess. Remember the pipe leading out of core containment in Pinocchio?”

Thursday5 nodded.