Thursday Next in First Among Sequels Read online

  The house was resting incongruously on wooden blocks laid on the hangar floor but without its grounds—they were elsewhere being tended to by a happy buzz of gardeners.

  “We divert the readings to a lesser copy on a standby Storycode Engine, and people read that,” I replied, nodding a greeting to the various technicians who were trying to make good the damage wrought by the last million readings or so. “The book is never quite as good, but the only people who might see a difference are the Austen enthusiasts and scholars. They would notice the slight dulling and lack of vitality, but, unable to come to a satisfactory answer as to why this might be so, they will simply blame themselves—a reading later in the week will once again renew their confidence in the magnificence of the novel.”

  We stepped inside the main doorway of Longbourn, where a similar repair gang was working on the interior. They had only just gotten started, and from here it was easier to see the extent of the corrosion. The paintwork was dull and lifeless, the wallpaper hung off the wall in long strips, and the marble fireplace was stained and darkened by smoke. Everything we looked at seemed tired and worn.

  “Oh, mercy!” came a voice behind us, and we turned to find Mrs. Bennet dressed in a threadbare poke bonnet and shawl. Following her was a construction manager, and behind him was Mr. Bennet.

  “This will never be ready in time,” she lamented, looking around the parlor of her house unhappily, “and every second not spent looking for husbands is a second wasted.”

  “My dear, you must come and have your wardrobe replaced,” implored Mr. Bennet. “You are quite in tatters and unsuited for being read, let alone receiving gentlemen—potential husbands or otherwise.”

  “He’s quite right,” urged the manager. “It is only a refit, nothing more; we will have you back on the shelf in a few days.”

  “On the shelf?” she shrieked. “Like my daughters?”

  And she was about to burst into tears when she suddenly caught sight of me.

  “You there! Do you have a single brother in possession of a good fortune who is in want of a wife?”

  “I’m afraid not,” I replied, thinking of Joffy, who failed on all three counts.

  “Are you sure? I’ve a choice of five daughters; one of them must be suitable—although I have my doubts about Mary being acceptable to anyone. Ahhhhh!”

  She had started to scream.

  “Good lady, calm yourself!” cried Mr. Bennet. “What ever is the matter?”

  “My nerves are so bad I am now seeing double!”

  “You are not, madam,” I told her hastily. “This is my…twin sister.”

  At that moment a small phalanx of seamstresses came in holding a replacement costume. Mrs. Bennet made another sharp cry and ran off upstairs, quickly followed by the wardrobe department, who would doubtless have to hold her down and undress her—like the last time.

  “I’ll leave it in your capable hands,” said Mr. Bennet to the wardrobe mistress. “I am going to my library and don’t wish to be disturbed.”

  He opened the door and found to his dismay that it, too, was being rebuilt. Large portions of the wall were missing, and plasterers were attempting to fill the gaps to the room beyond. There was the flickering light of an arc welder and a shower of sparks. He harrumphed, shrugged, gave us a wan smile and walked out.

  “Quite a lot of damage,” I said to the construction manager, whose name we learned was Sid.

  “We get a lot of this in the classics,” he said with a shrug. “This is the third P2 refit I’ve done in the past fifteen years—but it’s not as bad as the Lord of the Rings trilogy; those things are always in for maintenance. The fantasy readership really gives it a hammering—and the fan fiction doesn’t help neither.”

  “The name’s Thursday Next,” I told him, “from Jurisfiction. I need to speak to Isambard.”

  He led us outside to where the five Bennet sisters were running through their lines with a wordsmith holding a script.

  “But you are not entitled to know mine; nor will such behavior ever induce me to be explicit,” said Elizabeth.

  “Not quite right,” replied the wordsmith as she consulted the script. “You dropped the ‘as this,’ from the middle of the sentence.”

  “I did?” queried Lizzie, craning over to look at the script. “Where?”

  “It still sounded perfect to me,” said Jane good-naturedly.

  “This is all just so boring,” muttered Lydia, tapping her foot impatiently and looking around. Wisely, the maintenance staff had separated the soldiers and especially Wickham from Kitty and Lydia—for their own protection, if not the soldiers’.

  “Lydia dearest, do please concentrate,” said Mary, looking up from the book she was reading. “It is for your own good.”

  “Ms. Next!” came an authoritarian voice that I knew I could ignore only at my peril.

  “Your ladyship,” I said, curtsying neatly to a tall woman bedecked in dark crinolines. She had strongly marked features that might once have been handsome but now appeared haughty and superior.

  “May I present Cadet Next?” I said. “Thursday5, this is the Right Honorable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, widow of Sir Lewis de Bourgh.”

  Thursday5 was about to say something, but I caught her eye and she curtsied instead, which Lady Catherine returned with a slight incline of her head.

  “I must speak to you, Ms. Next,” continued her ladyship, taking my arm to walk with me, “upon a matter of considerable concern. As you know, I have a daughter named Anne, who is unfortunately of a sickly constitution, which has prevented her from making accomplishments she otherwise could not have failed. If good health had been hers, she would have joined Jurisfiction many years ago and about now would begin to accrue the benefits of her age, wisdom and experience.”

  “Doubtless, your ladyship.”

  Lady Catherine gave a polite smile. “Then we are agreed. Miss Anne should join Jurisfiction on the morrow with a rank, salary and duties commensurate with the standing that her ill health has taken from her—shall we say five thousand guineas a year and light work only with mornings off and three servants?”

  “I will bring it to the attention of the relevant authorities,” I told her diplomatically. “My good friend and colleague Commander Bradshaw will attend to your request personally.”

  I sniggered inwardly. Bradshaw and I had spent many years attempting to drop each other in impossible situations for amusement, and he’d never top this.

  “Indeed,” said Lady Catherine in an imperious tone. “I spoke to Commander Bradshaw, and he suggested I speak to you.”

  “Ah.”

  “Shall we say Monday?” continued Lady Catherine. “Jurisfiction can send a carriage for my daughter, but be warned—if it is unfit for her use, it shall be returned.”

  “Monday would be admirable,” I told her, thinking quickly. “Miss Anne’s assumed expertise will be much in demand. As you have no doubt heard, Fanny Hill has been moved from Literary Smut to the Racy Novel genre, and your daughter’s considerable skills may be required for character retraining.”

  Lady Catherine was silent for a moment.

  “Quite impossible,” she said at last. “Next week is the busiest in our calendar. I shall inform you as to when and where she will accept her duties—good day!”

  And with a harrumph of a most haughty nature, she was gone.

  I rejoined Thursday5, who was waiting for me near two carriages that were being rebuilt, and then we made our way toward the engineer’s office. As we passed a moth-eaten horse, I heard it say to another shabby old nag, “So what’s this Pride and Prejudice all about, then?”

  “It’s about a horse who pulls a carriage for the Bennets,” replied his friend, taking a mouthful from the feed bucket and munching thoughtfully.

  “Please come in,” said the construction manager, and we entered the work hut. The interior was a neat and orderly drawing office with a half dozen octopi seated at draftsmen’s desks and dressed in tartan
waistcoats that made them all look like oversize bagpipes—apart from one, who actually was an oversize set of bagpipes. They were all studying plans of the book, consulting damage reports and then sketching repair recommendations on eight different note pads simultaneously. The octopi blinked at us curiously as we walked in, except for one who was asleep and muttering something about his “garden being in the shade,” and another who was playing a doleful tune on a bouzouki.

  “How odd,” said Thursday5.

  “You’re right,” I agreed. “Bruce usually plays the lute.”

  In the center of the room was Isambard Kingdom Buñuel. He was standing in shirtsleeves over the blueprints of the book and was a man in healthy middle age who looked as if he had seen a lot of life and was much the better for it. His dark wool suit was spattered with mud, he wore a tall stovepipe hat, and moving constantly in his mouth was an unlit cigar. He was engaged in animated conversation with his three trusty engineering assistants. The first could best be described as a mad monk who was dressed in a coarse habit and had startling, divergent eyes. The second was a daringly sparkly drag queen who it seemed had just hopped off a carnival float in Rio, and the third was more ethereal—he was simply a disembodied voice known only as Horace. They were all discussing the pros and cons of balancing essential work with budgetary constraints, then about Loretta’s choice of sequins and the available restaurants for dinner.

  “Thursday!” said Isambard as we walked in. “What a very fortuitous happenstance—I trust you are wellhealthy?”

  “Wellhealthy indeedly,” I replied.

  Buñuel’s engineering skills were without peer—not just from a simple mechanistic point of view but also from his somewhat surreal method of problem solving that made lesser book engineers pale into insignificance. It was he who first thought of using custard as a transfer medium for speedier throughput from the books to the Storycode Engines and he who pioneered the hydroponic growth of usable dramatic irony. When he wasn’t working toward the decriminalization of class-C grammatical abuses, such as starting a sentence with “and,” he was busy designing new and interesting plot devices. It was he who suggested the groundbreaking twist in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, and also the “Gally Threepwood memoirs” device in the Blandings series. Naturally, he’d had other, lesser ideas that didn’t find favor, such as the discarded U-boat–Nautilus battle sequence in Mysterious Island, a new process for distilling quotation marks from boiled mice, a method of making books grammasite-proof by marinating them in dew, and a whole host of farcical new words that only he used. But his hits were greater than the sum of his misses, and such is the way with greatness.

  “I hope we are not in any sort of troublesome with Jurisfiction?”

  “Not at all,” I assured him. “You spoke to Bradshaw about something?”

  “My memory is so stringbagness these days,” he said, slapping his forehead with his palm. “Walk with me.”

  We left the work hut at a brisk pace and walked toward the empty book, Thursday5 a few steps behind.

  “We’ve got another seventeen clockchimes before we have to click it all back onwise,” he said, mopping his brow.

  “Will you manage it?”

  “We should be dokey,” replied Isambard with a laugh. “Always supposeding that Mrs. Bennet doesn’t do anything sensible.”

  We walked up a set of wooden stairs and stepped onto the novel. From our vantage point, we could see the empty husk of the book laid out in front of us. Everything had been removed, and it looked like an empty steel barge several hundred acres in size.

  “What’s happening over there?” asked Thursday5, pointing to a group of men working in an area where several girders joined in a delicate latticework of steel and rivets.

  “We’re checklooking for fatigue splitcracks near the irony-expansion slot,” explained Isambard. “The ceaseless flexiblations of a book as readers of varying skill make their way through it can set up a harmonic that exacts stresstications the book was never blueprinted to take. I expect you heard about the mid-read fractsplosion of Hard Times during the postmaintenance testification in 1932?”

  Thursday5 nodded.

  “We’ve had to be more uttercarefulness since then,” continued Isambard, “which is why classics like this come in for rebuildificance every thirty years whether they require it or not.”

  There was a crackle of bright blue light as the work gang effected a repair, and a subengineer supervising the gang waved to Isambard, who waved back.

  “Looks like we found a fatigue crevicette,” he said, “which goes to show that one can never be too carefulphobic.”

  “Commander Bradshaw told me you had something you wanted to say?”

  “That’s true,” replied Buñuel. “I’ve done enough rebuildificances to know when something’s a bit squiddly. It’s the Council of Genres. They’ve been slicedicing bud gets for years, and now they ask us to topgrade the imaginotransference conduits.”

  He pointed at a large pipe that looked like a water main. A conduit that size would take a lot of readers—far more than we had at present. Although in itself a good move, with falling Read-Rates it seemed a little…well, odd.

  “Did they give a reason?”

  “They said Pride and Prejudice has been added to twenty-eight more teachcrammer syllabuses this year, and there’s another silverflick out soon.”

  “Sounds fair to me.”

  “Posstruthful, but it makes nonsense. It’s potentious new books we should be cashsquandering on, not the stalnovelwarts who will be read no matter what. Besides, the costcash of the extra conduits is verlittle compared to the amount of custard needed to fillup all.”

  “I’ll make some inquiries,” I told him.

  We watched as the overhead crane gently lowered Darcy’s stately home of Pemberley back into its position in the book, where it was then securely bolted by a group of men in overalls wielding wrenches as big as they were.

  “Spot-on-time-tastic,” murmured Isambard, consulting a large gold pocketwatch. “We might make the deadule after all.”

  “Mr. Buñuel?” murmured a disembodied voice that sounded as though it came from everywhere at once.

  “Yes, Horace?”

  “Sorry to trouble you, sir,” came the voice again, “but Mrs. Bennet and Lady Catherine de Bourgh have locked antlers in the living room and are threatening to kill each other. What do you want to do?”

  “No time to lose!” exclaimed Buñuel, reaching into his pocket. “I’ll have five guineas on Mrs. Bennet.”

  Thursday5 and I walked out of the maintenance facility and back to the busy corridors of the Well of Lost Plots. I called TransGenre Taxis and was told that my cab was “stuck in a traffic jam in Mrs. Beeton’s” but would “be with you shortly,” so we walked toward the elevators. Buñuel had a point about the extra conduiting—but equally it could be just another of the bizarre accounting anomalies that abound at the council—they once refused to allocate funds for maintenance on Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, despite an almost unprecedented burst of popularity. By the time they agreed to some remedial construction work, it was too late—the first few chapters suffered permanent damage. On the other side of the coin, they had no problem issuing the Danvers with new black uniforms and designer dark glasses so they “looked nice on parade.”

  “Is it true you have a chair at the Council of Genres?” asked Thursday5 with a sense of wholly unwarranted awe in her voice.

  “And a table, too. As an Outlander I don’t have the strictures of the narrative to dictate my actions, so I’m quite good at forward planning and—Hang on a moment.”

  Recalling Landen’s writer’s block, I ducked into a bric-a-brac store full of plot devices, props, backstories and handy snatches of verbal banter for that oh-so-important exchange. I made my way past packing cases full of plot twists and false resolutions and walked up to the counter.

  “Hello, Murray.”

  “Thursday!” replied the own er of the store, a
retired gag-and-groan man who had worked the Comedy genre for years before giving it all up to run a used-plot shop. “What can I do you for?”

  “A plot device,” I said somewhat vaguely. “Something exciting that will change a story from the mundane to the fantastic in a paragraph.”

  “Bud get?”

  “Depends on what you’ve got.”

  “Hmm,” said the shop keep er, thinking hard and staring at the wall of small drawers behind him, which made it look a little like an apothecary’s shop. On each drawer there was a painted label denoting some exciting and improbable plot-turning device. “Tincture of breathlessness,” said one, and “Paternal root,” read another.

  “How about a Suddenly a shot rang out? That’s always a safe bet for mysteries or to get you out of a scrape when you don’t know what to do next.”

  “I think I can afford something better than that. Got anything a bit more…complex?”

  Murray looked at the labels on the drawers again. “I’ve got a And that, said Mr. Wimple, was when we discovered…the truth.”

  “Too vague.”

  “Perhaps, but it’s cheap. Okay. How about a Mysterious stranger arriving during a thunderstorm? We’ve got a special on this week. Take the stranger and you can have a corrupt local chief of police and an escaped homicidal lunatic at no extra charge.”

  But I was still undecided.

  “I was thinking of something more character-than plot-led.”

  “I hope you’ve got deep pockets,” said the shop keep er ominously and with a trace of annoyance, as the line behind me was becoming longer by the second.

  “How about the arrival of a distant and extremely eccentric ex-military uncle upsetting the delicate balance of the ordered house hold?”

  “That sounds like just the thing. How much?”

  “He was pulled out complete and unused a few days ago. Took a lot of skill to pluck him out of the narrative without damage, and with all ancillary props and walk-ons—”

  “Yes, okay, okay, I get the picture—How much?”

  “To you, a thousand guineas.”

  “I get the uncle fully realized for that, yes?”