First Among Sequels

  Even before we left the dock at Tarbuck International, I had the idea that I was being watched. As the Goliath ground-effect transport jetted across the Irish Sea, several of the Goliath employees on the craft looked at me cautiously, and when I sat down in the coffee shop, the people near me moved away. It was kind of flattering, really, but since I had trounced the corporation in the very biggest way possible at least once, they clearly regarded me as something of a threat. How big a threat was revealed to me when we docked at Goliathopolis forty minutes later. There was a welcoming committee already waiting for me. But I don’t mean “welcoming committee” in the ironic sense of large men with no necks and blackjacks—they had laid out the red carpet, bedecked the jetty with bunting and put on a baton-twirling demonstration by the Goliathopolis Majorettes. More important, the entire upper echelons of Goliath management had turned out to greet me, which included the president, John Henry Goliath V, and a dozen or so of his executive officers, all of whom had a look of earnest apprehension etched upon their pasty faces. As someone who’d cost the company dearly over the past two decades, I was clearly feared—and possibly even revered.

  “Welcome back to Goliathopolis,” said John Henry politely, shaking my hand warmly. “I hope that your stay is a happy one and that what ever brings you here can be a matter of mutual concern. I hardly need to stress the respect in which we hold you and would hate that you might find reason to act upon us without first entertaining the possibility of a misunderstanding.”

  He was a large man. It looked as though someone had handed his parents a blueprint of a baby and told them to scale it up by a factor of one and a quarter.

  “This is a joke, right?”

  “On the contrary, Ms. Next. Based on past experiences, we have decided that complete and utter disclosure is the only policy worth pursuing as far as your good self is concerned.”

  “You’ll excuse me if I remain unconvinced by your perceived honesty.”

  “It’s not honesty, Ms. Next. You personally cost us over a hundred billion pounds in lost revenue, so we regard our openness as a sound business strategy—albeit of an abstract nature. Because of this, there is no door closed to you, no document unreadable, no member to whom you may not speak. I hope I am candid?”

  “Very,” I replied, put off my guard by the corporation’s attitude. “I have a matter I’d like to discuss with you.”

  “Naturally,” replied John Henry. “The majorettes would like to perform, if that’s all right with you?”

  “Of course.”

  So we watched the majorettes march up and down for twenty minutes to music of the Goliath Brass Band, and when it was over, I was driven in John Henry’s Bentley toward the Goliath head office, a mighty 110-story building right at the heart of Goliathopolis.

  “Your son and family are well?” asked John Henry, who aside from a few more gray hairs didn’t seem to have aged a great deal since we last met. He fixed me with his piercing green eyes and poured on the natural charm he’d been blessed with.

  “I expect you know full well they are,” I replied, “and everything else about me.”

  “On the contrary,” protested John Henry. “We thought that if even the sniff of surveillance was detected, you might decide to take action, and action from you, as we have seen to our cost, is never less than devastating to our interests.”

  “Ah,” I murmured, suddenly realizing why there had been a deafening silence from Goliath over the years.

  “So how can we help?” asked John Henry. “If,” he added, “we can help at all.”

  “I want to find out what advances you have made in transfictional travel.”

  John Henry raised his eyebrows and smiled genially. “I never thought it would remain a secret from you forever.”

  “You’ve been leaving Outlander probes scattered all over the BookWorld.”

  “The research and development on the Book Project has been somewhat hit or miss, I’ll admit that,” replied John Henry candidly. “To be honest, I had expected you to call on us sooner than you have.”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “Of course. And since you are here, perhaps you would grace us with your comments on the technical aspects of our project.”

  “I promise nothing, but I’d certainly like to see what you’re up to.”

  The car drove toward the glassy modern towers of the corporate center of the multinational and past well-tailored executives going about their administrative business. A few minutes later, we pulled up outside the front entrance of the Goliath headquarters, which was comfortably nestled into the hillside.

  “I don’t suppose that you would want to freshen up or anything before we show you around?” asked John Henry hopefully.

  “And miss something you might try and hide from me?” I answered. “No, if it’s all the same to you, I’d really like to see how far you’ve gotten.”

  “Very well,” said John Henry without any sense of concern, “come with me.”

  We walked into the expansive lobby and crossed not to the elevators or the Apologarium, where I’d been last time, but to where a golf cart was at the ready. A curious crowd of Goliath employees had gathered to watch our progress with undisguised inquisitiveness. I couldn’t think it was just me—I don’t suppose many of them had ever seen John Henry Goliath either.

  We drove out of the lobby and into a tunnel that led directly back into the hillside. It was crudely utilitarian after the simple elegance of the entrance vestibule, with roughly concreted walls and lit by overhead track lights. The roadway was smooth concrete, and there were cable conduits attached to the walls. The subterranean vaults of Goliath R&D were at least half a mile inside the hill, and on the journey, John Henry and I chatted amiably about national politics and global economics. Surprisingly, a more intelligent and well-informed conversation about current affairs I have yet to have. I might even have liked him, but for the utter ruthlessness and singularity of purpose that ran through his speech. Excusable in a person of little or no power, but potentially devastating in one such as John Henry Goliath.

  We encountered three different levels of security on the way, each of them waved aside by John Henry. Beyond the third security checkpoint was a large set of steel blast doors, and after abandoning the golf cart we proceeded on foot. John Henry had his tie knot scanned to confirm his identity, and the doors slid open to let us in. I gasped at the sight that met my eyes. Their technology had gone beyond the small metal probe I’d already seen. It had gone further—much further.

  20.

  The Austen Rover

  I had been aware for many years of Goliath’s endeavors to enter fiction. Following their abortive attempt to use the fictional world to “actualize” flawed technology during the Plasma Rifle debacle of ’85, they had embarked upon a protracted R&D project to try to emulate Mycroft’s Prose Portal. Until the appearance of the probe, the furthest I thought they’d gotten was to synthesize a form of stodgy grunge from volumes one to eight of The World of Cheese.

  I n the center of the room and looking resplendent in the blue-and-yellow livery of some long-forgotten bus company was a flat-fronted single-decker bus that to my mind dated from the fifties. Something my mother, in her long-forgotten and now much-embellished youth, might have boarded for a trip to the seaside, equipped with hampers of food and gallons of ice cream. Aside from the anachronistic feel, the most obvious feature of the bus was that the wheels had been removed and the voids covered over to give the vague appearance of streamlining. Clearly, it wasn’t the only modification. The vehicle in front of me now was probably the most advanced piece of transport technology known to man.

  “Why base it on an old bus?” I asked.

  John Henry shrugged. “If you’re going to travel, do it in style. Besides, a Rolls-Royce Phantom II doesn’t have enough seats.”

  We walked down to the workshop floor, and I took a closer look. On both sides at the rear of the bus and on the roof were small faired outr
iggers that each held a complicated engine with which I was not familiar. The tight-fitting cowlings had been removed, and the engines were being worked on by white-coated technicians who had stopped what they were doing as soon as we walked in but now resumed their tinkering with a buzz of muted whispers. I moved closer to the front of the bus and ran my fingers across the Leyland badge atop the large and very prominent radiator. I looked up. Above the vertically split front windshield was a glass-covered panel that once told prospective passengers the ultimate destination of the bus. I expected it to read BOURNEMOUTH or PORTSMOUTH but it didn’t. It read NORTHANGER ABBEY.

  I looked at John Henry Goliath, who said, “This, Ms. Next, is the Austen Rover—the most advanced piece of transfictional technology in the world!”

  “Does it work?” I asked.

  “We’re not entirely sure,” remarked John Henry. “It’s the prototype and has yet to be tested.”

  He beckoned to the technician who seemed to be in charge and introduced us.

  “This is Dr. Anne Wirthlass, the project manager of the Austen Rover. She will answer any questions you have—I hope perhaps you will answer some of ours?”

  I made a noncommittal noise, and Wirthlass gave me a hand to shake. She was tall, willowy and walked with a rolling gait. Like everyone in the lab, she wore a white coat with her Goliath ID badge affixed to it, and although I could not see her precise laddernumber, she was certainly within four figures—the top 1 percent. Seriously important.

  “I’m pleased to meet you at last,” she said in a Swedish accent. “We have much to learn from your experience.”

  “If you know anything about me,” I responded, “you’ll know exactly why it is that I don’t trust Goliath.”

  “Ah!” she said, somewhat taken aback. “I thought we’d left those days behind us.”

  “I’ll need convincing,” I returned without malice. It wasn’t her fault, after all. I indicated the tour bus. “How does it work?”

  She looked at John Henry, who nodded his permission.

  “The Austen Rover is a standard Leyland Tiger PS2/3 under a Burlingham body,” she began, touching the shiny coachwork fondly, “but with a few…modifications. Come aboard.”

  She stepped up into the bus, and I followed her. The interior had been stripped and replaced with the very latest technology, which she attempted to explain in the sort of technical language where it is possible to understand only one word in eight, if you’re lucky. I came off the bus ten minutes later having absorbed not much more than the fact that it had twelve seats, carried a small thirty-megawatt fusion device in the rear and couldn’t be tested—its first trip would be either an utter failure or a complete success, nothing in between.

  “And the probes?”

  “Yes, indeed,” replied Wirthlass. “We’ve been using a form of gravity-wave inducer to catapult a small probe into fiction on a one-minute free-return trajectory—think of it as a very large yo-yo. We aimed them at the Dune series, because it was a large and very wordy target that was probably somewhere near the heart of Science Fiction, and after seven hundred and ninety-six subfictional flights we hit pay dirt: The probe returned with a twenty-eight-second audiovisual recording of Paul Atreides riding a sandworm.”

  “When was this?” I asked.

  “In 1996. We fared better after that and by a system of trial and error have managed to figure out that individual books seem to be clumped together in groups. We’ve started plotting a map—I’ll show you if you like.”

  We walked into a room next door that seemed to be filled to capacity with computers and their operators.

  “How many probe missions have you sent?”

  “About seventy thousand,” said John Henry, who had followed us. “Most come back without recording anything, and over eight thousand never return at all. In total we have had four hundred and twenty successful missions. As you can see, getting into fiction for us is at present a somewhat haphazard affair. The Austen Rover is ready for its first trip—but by simple extrapolation of the probe figures, every journey has a one-in-eight chance of not returning, and only a one-in-one-hundred-and-sixty possibility of hitting something.”

  I could see what they were up against—and why. They were hurling probes into a BookWorld that was 80 percent Nothing. The thing was, I could pretty much draw from memory a genre map of the BookWorld. With my help they might actually make it.

  “This is the BookWorld as we think it exists,” explained John Henry, laying out a large sheet of paper on a desk. It was patchy in the extreme and full of errors. It was a bit like throwing Ping-Pong balls into a dark furniture store and then trying to list the contents by the noises they made.

  “This will take you a long time to figure out,” I murmured.

  “Time that we don’t really have, Ms. Next. Despite my position as president, even I have to concede that the amount spent will never be recouped. All funding for this project will be withdrawn in a week.”

  It was the first time I’d felt any sort of relief since I arrived. The idea of Goliath’s even setting so much as a toe inside fiction filled me with utter dread. But one question still niggled at me.

  “Why?”

  “I’m sorry?” said John Henry.

  “Why are you trying to get into fiction at all?”

  “Book tourism,” he replied simply. “The Austen Rover was designed to take twelve people around the high points of Jane Austen’s work. At five hundred pounds for a twenty-minute hop around the most-loved works, we thought at the time it would be quite profitable. Mind you, that was nine years ago, when people were still reading books.”

  “We thought it might reinvigorate the classics,” added Wirthlass.

  “And your interest in the classics?”

  It was John Henry who answered. “We feel that publishing in general and books in particular are well worth hanging on to.”

  “You’ll excuse me if I’m not convinced by your supposed altruism.”

  “No altruism, Ms. Next. The fall in revenue of our publishing arm has been dramatic, and since we own little in the way of computer games or consoles, the low ReadRate is something that affects us financially. I think you’ll find that we’re together on this one. What we want is what you want. Even though our past associations have not been happy and I understand your distrust, Goliath in its reborn shape is not quite the all-devouring corporation that you think it is.”

  “I haven’t been in the BookWorld since the days of The Eyre Affair.”

  John Henry coughed politely. “You knew about the probes, Ms. Next.”

  Damn.

  “I have…contacts over there.”

  I could tell they didn’t believe me, but that was tough. I’d seen enough.

  “Looks like you’ve wasted a lot of money,” I said.

  “With or without you, we’re going to test it on Friday evening,” announced Wirthlass. “I and two others have decided to risk all and take her out for a spin. We may not return, but if we do, then the data gained would be priceless!”

  I admired her courage, but it didn’t matter—I wasn’t going to tell them what I knew.

  “Just explain one thing,” said Wirthlass. “Is the force of gravity entirely normal in the BookWorld?”

  “What about the universality of physical laws?” piped up a second technician, who’d been watching us.

  “And communication between books—is such a thing possible?”

  Before long there were eight people, all asking questions about the BookWorld that I could have answered with ease—had I any inclination to do so.

  “I’m sorry,” I said as the questions reached a crescendo. “I can’t help you!”

  They were all quiet and stared at me. To them this project was everything, and to see its cancellation without fruition was clearly a matter of supreme frustration—especially as they suspected I had the answers.

  I made my way toward the exit and was joined by John Henry, who had not yet given up tryin
g to charm me.

  “Will you stay for lunch? We have the finest chefs available to make whatever you want.”

  “I run a carpet shop, Mr. Goliath, and I’m late for work.”

  “A carpet shop?” he echoed with incredulity. “That sells carpets?”

  “All sorts of floor coverings, actually.”

  “I would offer you discounted carpets for life in order for you to help us,” he said, “but from what I know of you, such a course would be unthinkable. My private Dakota is at Douglas Graviport if you want to use it to fly straight home. I ask for nothing but say only this: We are doing this for the preservation and promotion of books and reading. Try to find it in your heart to consider what we are doing here in an objective light.”

  We had by now walked outside the building, and John Henry’s Bentley pulled up in front of us.

  “My car is yours. Good day, Ms. Next.”

  “Good day, Mr. Goliath.”

  He shook my hand and then departed. I looked at the Bentley and then at the ranks of cabs a little way down the road. I shrugged and climbed in the back of the Bentley.