One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (Thursday Next 6)

It took me twenty minutes to coax Carmine out of her bedroom. I assured her it wasn’t so bad, because Sprockett had caught the goblin and recovered the swag, so he wasn’t technically a thief. I had to tell her that he wasn’t that unhandsome—for a goblin—and that no, I was sure he wasn’t just saying nice things to her so he could be invited across the threshold. I told her she was now on book duty, as I would be out for a while, and she replied, “Yes, okay, fine,” but wouldn’t look at me, so I left her staring angrily at the patterned wallpaper in the front room.

12.

Jurisfiction

Budgetary overruns almost buried the remaking before the planning stage, until relief came from an unexpected quarter. A spate of dodgy accounting practices in the Outland necessitated a new genre in Fiction: Creative Accountancy. Shunned by many as “not a proper genre at all,” the members’ skills at turning thin air into billion-dollar profits were suddenly of huge use, and the remaking went ahead as planned. Enron may have been a pit of vipers in the Outland, but they quite literally saved the BookWorld.

Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (16th edition)

I took the bus to Le Guin Central and then the first train to HumDram/Classics. As the train slowly steamed from the station, I sat back and stared out the window. I was mildly interested to learn that Heathcliff was on the same train, although we didn’t see him—just a lot of screaming and fainting girls on the platform whenever we stopped. We halted briefly at Gaiman Junction before steaming on a wide arc to Shakespeare Terminus. There was a delay leaving the platform, as security was being taken a little more seriously than usual. A group of heavily armed Men in Plaid were scrutinizing everyone

’s IDs.

“Do you think this is about the Racy Novel peace talks?” I asked a French Wilkins Micawber who was there on an exchange trip.

“Mais oui. But I think ze CofG is being a leetle jittery ’bout Racy Novel,” he explained in a pointlessly overblown French accent. “Zey think zat zere may be fizz columnists eager to cause—’ow you say?—mischief. I’d not like to be without shirt and medallion while Barry White plays in ze background right now, I can tells you.”

“Reason for visit?” asked the Plaid on guard duty.

“I have to report to Mr. Lockheed regarding a crashed-book investigation.”

“Very well,” said the Plaid. “And what’s with the mechanical butler?”

“To lend tone to the proceedings.”

This was enough for the Man in Plaid, and with a gruff “Welcome to the Classics, have an eloquent day,” I was allowed to pass. On our way out of the station, I noticed a small group of characters who had been pulled aside. Some of the women wore miniskirts, tube tops and stilettos, and the men had shirts open to the navel. It seemed as though anyone even remotely resembling someone from Racy Novel was immediately under suspicion. They were protesting their innocence and complaining bitterly about the unfair character profiling, but to little avail.

We took a tram along Austen Boulevard and got out just outside the gates to Sense and Sensibility. This was a large compound, and a high wall topped with barbed wire surrounded the many settings that made up the book. On each corner were watchtowers, from which armed Plaids kept a constant lookout. Such tight security wasn’t just to protect the Dashwoods—the residence of Norland Park within Sense and Sensibility was also the headquarters of Jurisfiction, Fiction’s policing agency.

Waiting at the gates was a group of characters with day passes, ready for the tour. For some reason those in Sci-Fi had a thing about the classics, so of the twenty or thirty characters waiting, at least two-thirds were aliens. Since most of them hailed from the poor end of the genre, they had a lot of tentacles and left sticky trails after themselves, which caused no end of cleaning up.

“No clockwork automatons,” said one of the guards on duty. “You should know better than that, Miss Next.”

I had to explain that I wasn’t that Miss Next, and the guard peered closer at me, grunted and then explained that a Duplex-4 had suffered a mainspring failure several months before and killed eight bystanders, so all cog-based life-forms below the Duplex-6 had been banned.

“The Six has been released?” asked Sprockett, who had a vested interest in the competition. To sentient machines the primary cause of worry was obsolescence, closely followed by metal fatigue and inadequate servicing.

“It was launched just after the remaking,” said the guard, “but I’ve not seen one yet.”

“They must have rushed them into production,” murmured Sprockett. “A risk, if they’re still at the beta-test stage.”

I suggested to Sprockett that he nip into the local Stubbs and not have a coffee or two until I returned, to which he gratefully acquiesced.

After signing the visitors’ book and a risk assessment that included “erasure, swollen ankles and death by drowning,” I was issued a visitor’s pass and allowed to walk up the graveled path towards the house. Since we were now actually within the backstory of Sense and Sensibility, the view upwards was not of the rest of the BookWorld—the curved inside of the sphere and books moving about—but of clouds and a clear blue sky. The trees gently rustled as though in a breeze, and the herbaceous borders were alive with a delicate symphony of color. This was one of the better attributes of the Reader Feedback Loop. When readers imbue a book with their own interpretations, the weather always comes first, then colors, symmetry, trees, architecture, fixtures and fittings and finally texture. Birdsong, however, is generally not something brought alive by the reader’s imagination, so the birds still have to be provided. Since we were now in the unread zone of the novel, the birds were either off-duty or populating another book elsewhere. There is a certain degree of economics within the BookWorld; Austen birds are the same as Brontë ones—listen carefully and you’ll hear.

I stopped at the front door to Norland Park and gave my name to the footman, who looked as much like a frog as you can without actually being one. He gazed at me for a long time and opened his eyes so wide I thought for a moment they might fall out, and I readied myself with a pocket handkerchief in case they did. But they didn’t fall out, and after another minute’s thought he relaxed and said, “You do look like her, don’t you?”

I thought of telling him that he looked very much like a frog but thought better of it.

“You’re the first person not to confuse me with her for a while,” I remarked. “How did you know?”

“The real Thursday always ignored me,” he replied, “walked past without a word. But never in a bad way—she always did it respectful like.”

“Do you get ignored a lot?”

“I do, and not just by ordinary citizens. I’ve been ignored by some of the greats, you know.” He then proceeded to list twenty or so major characters who hadn’t acknowledged his existence on a regular basis. He had a particular fondness for David Copperfield, whom he had escorted almost three hundred times “without a glance in my direction.”

“That must be quite upsetting.”