One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

  “The thought had occurred to me, ma’am. In fact, the precise reason you were selected for this investigation, given your lack of adequacy, has been troubling me for some time.”

  I thought about Acheron’s comments with regard to the fact that Carmine was an A-4.

  “I so need that sort of comment right now.”

  His eyebrow clicked from “Bingo” to “Apologetic.”

  “Merely the facts as I see them, ma’am.”

  I thought carefully. Part of me—the Thursday part—was outraged over the crime, but the rest of me was more realistic. There were some things that were simply not worth meddling with, and anyone willing to engineer the destruction of an entire book wouldn’t think twice about eliminating me. There were few—if any—characters who couldn’t be replaced.

  “Have you told anyone about this?” I asked, and Sprockett shook his head.

  “Keep it that way,” I murmured. “I think all we’ve found is what Red Herring wanted me to find: an unprecedented event that is unrepeatable.”

  “If asked for an opinion, ma’am,” said Sprockett in an unusually forceful turn of phrase, “I should like to find out who asked Commander Herring to allocate you to this investigation.”

  I stared at him. I should like to know, too, but I couldn’t think of a way to frame the question that wouldn’t have me in the trunk of a car heading towards the traditional place to dump bodies, the New Jersey area of Crime.

  “This was never meant to be reported,” I said. “This was meant for looking the other way and carrying on with life as though nothing had happened. There was a good reason I was asked to do this, and I will not impugn my lack of competence by being irresponsibly accurate. I have a reputation to uphold.”

  It was a hopelessly poor argument, and he and I both knew it. I sat down at my desk and drew a sheet of writing paper from my stationery drawer.

  “Permission to speak openly?” he asked.

  I took a deep breath. “I don’t want to hear what you have to say, but I should.”

  “It’s not what Thursday Next would have done.”

  “No,” I replied, “but then Thursday could deal with this sort of stuff. She enjoyed it. A woman has to know her limitations. If Herring had wanted this accident to be investigated properly, he would have given it to someone else. Maybe it’s for the best. Maybe there really are wheels within wheels. Maybe some stuff has to be left, for the good of all of us. We leave crime to the authorities, right?”

  “That would certainly seem to be the safe and conventional option, ma’am.”

  “Exactly,” I replied. “Safe. Conventional. Besides, I have a series to look after and dignity to be maintained for Thursday. If anything happened to me, as likely as not Carmine would take over, and I’m not convinced she’d uphold the standards quite as I do, what with the goblins and the hyphenating and such.”

  I looked away as I said it and began to rearrange the objects on my desk. I suddenly felt hot and a bit peculiar and didn’t want to look Sprockett in the eye.

  “As madam wishes.”

  Sprockett bowed and withdrew, and I spent the next hour writing up a report for Herring. It wasn’t easy to write. Try as I might, I couldn’t make the report longer than forty words, and it deserved more than that. I managed at one point to write a hundred words, but after I’d taken out the bit about the epizeuxis worm and the scrubbed ISBN, it was down to only thirty-seven again. I decided to ask Whitby his hypothetical opinion and finish the report after lunch.

  I called the Jurisfiction offices again to see if Thursday was available to talk.

  “She’s still unavailable,” I reported as I trotted into the kitchen. “I might try to speak to her when I go over to deliver the report to Commander Herring this afternoon. Do you think I’m dressed okay for Whitby or should I . . .”

  My voice had trailed off because something was wrong. Sprockett and Mrs. Malaprop were looking at me in the sort of way I imagine disgruntled parents might.

  “You tell her,” said Mrs. Malaprop.

  “It’s Whitby,” said Sprockett.

  I suddenly had a terrible thought. This being fiction, long-unrequited romances often end in tragedy just before they finally begin, inevitably leading to a lifetime’s conjecture of what might have happened and all manner of tedious and ultimately overwritten soul-searching. The scenario was almost as hideous as actually losing Whitby.

  “He’s dead?”

  “No, ma’am, he’s not dead. At least he was still alive two minutes ago.”

  “He was here? Why isn’t he here now?”

  Sprockett coughed politely. “I am sorry to say, ma’am, that I had to send Mr. Jett away.”

  I stared at him, scarcely believing what I was hearing. “Why would you do something like that?”

  “I feel, ma’am, that he is unsuitable.”

  “What?”

  He showed me a newspaper clipping that was about two years old. “I exhort you to read it, ma’am, no matter how painful.”

  So I did.

  “It is the painful duty of this journalist,” went the article, “to report an act of such base depravity that it causes the worst excesses of Horror to pale into insignificance. Last Tuesday an unnamed man, for reasons known only to himself, set fire to a busload of nuns who were taking their orphaned puppies to a ‘How cute is your puppy?’ competition. Unfortunately, the perpetrator of this vile and heartless act is still at liberty, and . . .”

  I stopped reading as a sense of confusion and disappointment welled up inside me. There was a picture accompanying the article, and even though the piece did not mention Whitby by name, there was a photograph of a man whom “Jurisfiction wanted to question.” It was Jett, without a doubt—holding a two-gallon gasoline can and chuckling. I didn’t really know what was worse—Whitby killing the busload of nuns or me having finally plucked up the courage to have lunch at the Elbow Rooms, only for the rug to be pulled from under my feet.

  “Is this true?”

  “I’m afraid so. I’m sorry, ma’am. Was I wrong to send him away?”

  “No, you were right.”

  I sighed and stared at the report I was carrying. “Better call a cab. I’m going to tell Herring what he wants to hear. At least that way someone gets to be happy today. You can come, too.”

  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.”

  “I’m a footman,” he explained. “We’re trained to be not-there-but-there. Being ignored is the yardstick of a footman’s professional abilities. My father was sixty-seven years in the employ of the first Lord Spongg and wasn’t acknowledged once. He went to his grave a fulfilled man. If you want to be ignored by the movers and shakers of the BookWorld,” concluded the frog-footman proudly, “this is the place to do it.”

  “You’ve very fortunate,” I said, humoring him. “Some people don’t get to be ignored at all.”

  “Don’t I know it,” he replied, licking the end of his pencil and consulting his clipboard. “Now, reason for visit?”

  “I’m to see Mr. Lockheed at Accident Investigation.”

  “Correct. This way.”

  The entrance hall was large and empty except for a round mahogany table in the middle, upon which stood a vase of flowers. The way to Herring’s office took us past the ballroom, from which Jurisfiction’s agents were given their instructions and posted to all corners of the BookWorld to face adversaries so dangerous that it was truly astonishing that anyone ever survived. I had been in there a few times when I’d been a trainee of the real Thursday, but I hadn’t visited since I failed my training day. I slowed my pace as we passed, for the door was open and I could see Jurisfiction’s elite talking and laughing. I recognized Emperor Zhark and a large hedgepig that could only be Mrs. Tiggy-winkle. The Red Queen was there, too, and several others.

  The frog-footman coughed his disapproval, and we made to move on. But at that moment a short man in late middle age and dressed as a big-game hunter stepped out of the open door. He was wearing a pith helmet and a safari suit, and across his body was slung a Sam Brown belt and holster, with the outfit finished off by a pair of brown leather riding boots. Since Thursday’s disappearance, he was probably the third-most-important person in the BookWorld after Senator Jobsworth and Red Herring. His name was Commander Bradshaw, and his expert guidance at Jurisfiction had kept the agency at the top of its game for almost as long as anyone could remember—his exploits ensured that he was hardly ever off the front page of The Word, and his much-updated BookWorld Companion was the definitive work on the BookWorld, both before and after the remaking.

  He was deep in conversation with a youngish agent. I felt out of place, so I looked straight ahead and quickened my pace. But he noticed me and without pausing for a second took me firmly by the arm and steered me to an alcove.

  “Thursday,” he hissed in an agitated manner, “why are you dressed in those ridiculous clothes, and where in heaven’s name have you been?”

  “I’m not her, sir. I’m the one who looks after her
series. I’m actually A8-V-67987-FP.”

  He frowned, then stared at me for a moment. “You’re telling me you’re the written one?”

  I nodded, and he burst into laughter.

  “Well, strike me pink!” he said. “You gave me a turn and no mistake. I was . . . ah, expecting Thursday to be here any moment,” he added, looking at his watch in an unsubtle manner. “I suspect she has been delayed.”

  His explanation didn’t ring true at all. Thursday was definitely more missing than he would like me to know. We returned to where Bradshaw’s companion was waiting for us. He was studiously ignoring the frog-footman, who for his part was accepting the snub with quiet dignity.

  “I’d forgotten just how identical you looked,” he said. “Are you keeping well?”

  “I am, sir,” I managed to mumble. “I trust you are well read?”

  It was a stupid gaffe; Bradshaw’s brand of jingoistic Imperialist fiction hadn’t been read for a half century. But he took no offense.

  “Not read anymore, and quite right, too,” he said laughingly, then stared at me for a while before saying to his companion, “You’ve met the other Thursday, the real one?”

  “Sure have,” he replied. “One helluva goddamn fine operative.”

  “Look alike, don’t they? Apart from the clothes, of course.”

  “Like two peas in a pod.”

  Bradshaw thought for a moment. “Has Thursday been down to see you recently?” he asked me with an air of feigned nonchalance.

  “Not since the remaking, sir,” I replied. “May I ask a question?”

  “Of course.”

  “Am I to understand that Thursday Next is . . . missing?”

  “She’s currently on leave in the RealWorld,” he said in a dismissive manner, “enjoying some time off with her family before the peace negotiations on Friday.”

  “Are you sure about that? I saw—”

  I checked myself. I could get into big trouble for sneak-peeking the RealWorld, and the Lady of Shalott could get into bigger trouble for letting me.