One of Our Thursdays Is Missing Read online

  This was an astonishing suggestion. The imaginotransference engines were the machines that transmitted the books in all their subtle glory from the BookWorld to the reader’s imagination. To shut them down meant that reading—all reading—had to stop. I exchanged a nervous glance with Whitby.

  “You mean the Council of Genres is going to shut down the entire BookWorld?”

  Alyona Ivanovna nodded. “It was either that or do it piecemeal, which wasn’t favored, since then half the BookWorld would be operating one system and half the other. It’s simple: All reading needs to stop for the nine minutes it requires to have the BookWorld remade.”

  “But that’s insane!” exclaimed Whitby. “People will notice. There’s always someone reading somewhere.”

  From my own failed experience of joining the BookWorld’s policing agency, I knew that he spoke the truth. There was a device hung high on the wall in the Council of Genres debating chamber that logged the Outland ReadRate—the total number of readers at any one time. It bobbed up and down but rarely dropped below the 20-million mark. But while spikes in reading were easier to predict, such as when a new blockbuster is published or when an author dies—always a happy time for their creations, if not their relatives—predicting slumps was much harder. And we needed a serious slump in reading to get down to the under-fifty-thousand threshold considered safe for a remaking.

  I had an idea. I fetched that morning’s copy of The Word and turned to the week’s forecast. This wasn’t to do with weather, naturally, but trends in reading. Urban Vampires were once more heavily forecast for the week ahead, with scattered Wizards moving in from Wednesday and a high chance of Daphne Farquitt Novels near the end of the week. There was also an alert for everyone at Sports Trivia to “brace themselves,” and it stated the reason.

  “There you go,” I said, tapping the newspaper and showing it to the assembled company. “Right about now the Swindon Mallets are about to defend their title against the Gloucester Meteors, and with live televised coverage to the entire planet there is a huge potential fall in the ReadRate.”

  “You think that many people are interested in Premier League croquet?” asked Razumikhin.

  “It is Swindon versus Gloucester,” I replied, “and after the Malletts’ forward hoop, Penelope Hrah, exploded on the forty-yard line last year, I would expect ninety-two percent of the world will be watching the game—as good a time as any to take the BookWorld offline.”

  “Did they ever find out why Hrah exploded?” asked Whitby.

  “It was never fully explained,” put in Ivanovna, “but traces of Semtex were discovered in her shin guards, so foul play could never be ruled out entirely. A grudge match is always a lot of fu—”

  Her voice was abruptly cut dead, but not in the way one’s is when one has suddenly stopped speaking. Her voice was clipped, like a gap in a recording.

  “Hello?” I said.

  The three Russians made no answer and were simply staring into space, like mannequins. After a moment they started to lose facial definition as they became a series of complex irregular polyhedra. After a while the number of facets of the polyhedra started to lessen, and the Russians became less like people and more like jagged, flesh-colored lumps. Pretty soon they were nothing at all. The Classics were being shut down, and if Text Grand Central was doing it alphabetically, Fantasy would not be far behind. And so it proved. I looked at Whitby, who gave me a wan smile and held my hand. The room grew cold, then dark, and before long the only world that I knew started to disassemble in front of my eyes. Everything grew flatter and lost its form, and pretty soon I began to feel my memory fade. And just when I was starting to worry, everything was cleansed to an all-consuming darkness.

  #shutting down imaginotransference engines, 46,802

  readers

  #active reader states have been cached

  #dismounting READ OS 8.3.6

  #start programs

  #check and mount specified dictionaries

  #check and mount specified thesauri

  #check and mount specified idiomatic database

  #check and mount specified grammatical database

  #check and mount specified character database

  #check and mount specified settings database

  Mount temporary ISBN/BISAC/duodecimal book category

  system

  Mount imaginotransference throughput module

  Accessing “book index” on global bus

  Creating cache for primary plot-development module

  Creating /ramdisk in “story interpretation,”

  default size=300

  Creating directories: irony

  Creating directories: humor

  Creating directories: plot

  Creating directories: character

  Creating directories: atmosphere

  Creating directories: prose

  Creating directories: pace

  Creating directories: pathos

  Starting init process

  #display imaginotransference-engine error messages

  #recovering active readers from cache

  System message=Welcome to Geographic Operating

  System 1.2

  Setting control terminal to automatic

  System active with 46,802 active readers

  “Thursday?”

  I opened my eyes and blinked. I was lying on the sofa staring up at Whitby, who had a concerned expression on his face.

  “Are you okay?”

  I sat up and rubbed my head. “How long was I out?”

  “Eleven minutes,”

  I looked around. “And the Russians?”

  “Outside.”

  “There is no outside.”

  He smiled. “There is now. Come and have a look.”

  I stood up and noticed for the first time that my living room seemed that little bit more realistic. The colors were subtler, and the walls had an increased level of texture. More interestingly, the room seemed to be brighter, and there was light coming in through the windows. It was real light, too, the sort that casts shadows and not the pretend stuff we were used to. I grasped the handle, opened the front door and stepped outside.

  The empty interbook Nothing that had separated the novels and genres had been replaced by fields, hills, rivers, trees and forests, and all around me the countryside opened out into a series of expansive vistas with the welcome novelty of distance. We were now in the southeast corner of an island perhaps a hundred miles by fifty and bounded on all sides by the Text Sea, which had been elevated to “Grade IV Picturesque” status by the addition of an azure hue and a soft, billowing motion that made the text shimmer in the breeze.

  As I looked around, I realized that whoever had remade the BookWorld had considered practicalities as much as aesthetics. Unlike the RealWorld, which is inconveniently located on the outside of a sphere, the new BookWorld was anchored on the inside of a sphere, thus ensuring that horizons worked in the opposite way to those in RealWorld. Farther objects were higher in the visual plane than nearer ones. From anywhere in the BookWorld, it was possible to view anywhere else. I noticed, too, that we were not alone. Stuck on the inside of the sphere were hundreds of other islands very similar to our own, and each a haven for a category of literature therein.

  About ten degrees upslope of Fiction, I could see our nearest neighbor: Artistic Criticism. It was an exceptionally beautiful island, yet deeply troubled, confused and suffused with a blanketing layer of almost impenetrable bullshit. Beyond that were Psychology, Philately, and Software Manuals. But the brightest and biggest archipelago I could see upon the closed sea was the scattered group of genres that made up Nonfiction. They were positioned right on the other side of the inner globe and so were almost directly overhead. On one side of the island the Cliffs of Irrationality were slowly being eroded away, while on the opposite shore the Sands of Science were slowly reclaiming salt marsh from the sea.

  While I stared upwards, openmouthed, a steady stream of boo
ks moved in an endless multilayered crisscross high in the sky. But these weren’t books of the small paper-and-leather variety that one might find in the Outland. These were the collected settings of the book all bolted together and connected by a series of walkways and supporting beams, cables and struts. They didn’t look so much like books, in fact, but more like a series of spiky lumps. While some one-room dramas were no bigger than a double-decker bus and zipped across the sky, others moved slowly enough for us to wave at the occupants, who waved back. As we stood watching our new world, the master copy of Doctor Zhivago passed overhead, blotting out the light and covering us in a light dusting of snow.

  “O brave new world, that has such stories in’t!”

  “What do you think?” asked Whitby.

  “O brave new world,” I whispered as I gave him a hug, “that has such stories in’t!”

  2.

  A Woman Named Thursday Next

  A major benefit of the Internal Sphere model of the remade BookWorld is that gravitational force diminishes with height, so it is easier to move objects the higher you go. You have to be careful, though, for if you go too high, you will be attracted to the gravitational dead spot right in the center of the sphere, from where there could be no return.

  Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (6th edition)

  My father had a face that could stop a clock. I don’t mean that he was ugly or anything; it was a phrase that the Chrono-Guard used to describe someone who had the power to arrest time to an ultraslow trickle—and that’s exactly what happened one morning as I was having a late breakfast in a small café quite near where I worked. The world flickered, shuddered and stopped. The barman of the café froze to a halt in midsentence, and the picture on the television stopped dead. Outside, birds hung motionless in the sky. The sound halted, too, replaced by a dull snapshot of a hum, the world’s noise at that moment in time paused indefinitely at the same pitch and volume.

  “Hello, Sweetpea.”

  I turned. My father was sitting at a table behind me and rose to hug me affectionately.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  “You’re looking good,” he told me.

  “You, too,” I replied. “You’re looking younger every time I see you.”

  “I am. How’s your history?”

  “Not bad.”

  “Do you know how the Duke of Wellington died?”

  “Sure,” I answered. “He was shot by a French sniper early on during the Battle of Waterloo—why?”

  “Oh, no reason,” muttered my father with feigned innocence, scribbling in a small notebook. Once done, he paused for a moment.

  “So Napoléon won at Waterloo, did he?” he asked slowly and with great intensity.

  “Of course not,” I replied. “Field Marshal Blücher’s timely intervention saved the day. This is all high school history, Dad. What are you up to?”

  “Well, it’s a bit of—hang on,” said Dad, or rather the character playing my book-father. “I think they’ve gone.”

  I tasted the air. He was right. Our lone reader had stopped and left us dangling in a narrative dead zone. It’s an odd sensation: a combination of treading on a step that isn’t there, someone hanging up the telephone midspeech without explanation and the feeling you get when you’ve gone upstairs for some reason but can’t think why. Scientists have proved that spaniels spend their entire lives like this.

  “I was marvelous,” intoned my book-father haughtily, the inference being that it was somehow my fault the reader didn’t last until even the end of the first page. “You need to engage the readers more, darling. Project yourself. Make the character come alive.”

  I didn’t agree that I was at fault but wasn’t going to argue. He had played my father longer in the series than I had played Thursday, so he had a kind of seniority, even if I was the protagonist, and first-person player to boot.

  “Sometimes I yearn for the old days,” he said to Hector, his dresser, but obviously intending for me to hear.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  He stared at me for a moment. “This: It was a lot better when we had the previous Thursday play Thursday.”

  “She was violent and immoral, Dad. How could that possibly be better?”

  “She might have been a shit of the highest order, darling, but she brought in the readers. I’ll be in my dressing room. Come, Hector.”

  And so saying, he swept from the café setting with his ever-present dresser, who pouted rudely at me as they left. My book-father had a point, of course, but I was committed to promoting the type of Thursday the real Thursday wanted to see in the series. The series had originally been written to feature a violent and disorderly Thursday Next, who slept her way around the BookWorld and caused no end of murder, misery and despair. I was trying to change all that but had met with stiff resistance from the rest of the cast. They saw my attempt to depict reality as damaging to the overall readability—and for a character, the only thing worse than being read badly is to be badly unread.

  I sighed. Keeping everyone within my series happy and fulfilled and focused was about as hard a job as acting in the book itself. Some books had a page manager to do all that boring stuff, but for financial reasons I had to do it myself with only a defective Mrs. Malaprop for assistance. Making us all readable was the least of my worries.

  I walked slowly home through my book-version of Swindon, which was forty times more compact than the real one. Due to the limited number of locations mentioned in my series, I could go easily from the café to my mother’s house to the GSD church and then on to the SpecOps Building in the space of a few minutes, something that would take the best part of an hour in the real Swindon. There were a few handy shortcuts, too. By opening a door at the back of Our Blessed Lady of the Lobster, I could find myself in the mockup of Thornfield Hall, and by taking the first door on the right past Jane’s bedroom, I could be in the Penderyn Hotel in Wales. All told, the series covered about five acres on six levels and would have been larger if we hadn’t doubled up the East facade of Thornfield with the front of Haworth Parsonage in Yorkshire, and the Gad’s Hill Museum with the redressed lobby of the SpecOps Building. Economies like this were commonplace in remaindered books and helped us keep the cast at almost full strength. Doubling up characters was possible, but it caused problems when they were in scenes with themselves. Some characters could handle it, others could not. On one memorable occasion, Vronsky played all the parts in an abridged version of Anna Karenina whilst the rest of the cast were on strike for more blinis. When asked what it was like, he described it as “like, totally awesome, dude.”

  “Good morning, Pickwick,” I said as I walked into the kitchen, which not only served as the command center of my series but also as the place where tea and toast could be made and eaten. “Good morning, Mrs. Malaprop.”

  “Cod Moaning, Miss Next,” said the defective Mrs. Malaprop, bobbing politely.

  “May I have a word?” asked Pickwick, in a not very subtle aside.

  “Is it important?”

  “It is vitally crucial,” said Pickwick, rolling her eyes oddly.

  We moved out to the hallway.

  “Okay, what’s the problem?” I asked, since Pickwick always had a grievance of some sort—whether it was the cold or the heat or the color of the walls or a hundred and one other things that weren’t quite right. Whitby and I referred to her as “Goldilocks without the manners”—but never to her beak.

  “It’s Mrs. Malaprop,” said the dodo in an affronted tone. “She’s becoming increasingly unintelligible. It would be okay if it were faintly amusing, but it isn’t, and . . . well, quite frankly, there is the risk of infection, and it frightens me.”

  To a text-based life-form, unpredictable syntax and poor grammar is a source of huge discomfort. Ill-fitting grammar are like ill-fitting shoes. You can get used to it for a bit, but then one day your toes fall off and you can’t walk to the bathroom. Poor syntax is even worse. Change word order and a sentence usel
ess for anyone Yoda except you have.

  “Now, then,” I said, using an oxymoron for scolding effect, “it is totally unproven that malapropism is inflectious, and what did we say about tolerating those less fortunate than ourselves?”

  “Even so,” said Pickwick, “I want you to tell her to stop it. And her shoes squeak. And while we’re on the subject, Bowden referred to me as ‘that bird’ again, the baobab in the back garden is cutting out the light from my bedroom, and I’m taking next Wednesday off to have my beak oiled, so you’ll need to get a replacement—and not the penguin like last time. She didn’t do justice to my dynamic personalty and poetic sensibilities. Played it all a bit . . . fishcentric, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I said, making a mental note to definitely rebook the penguin.

  “Good,” said Pickwick. “Have you the paper?”

  We returned to the kitchen, and I found The Word for her.

  “Hmm,” she said thoughtfully, staring at the City pages. “Metaphor has risen by seventeen pounds a barrel. I should dump some metonym and buy into synecdoche futures.”

  “How are things going with Racy Novel?” I asked, since the political problems up in the North had been much in the news recently. A long-running dispute between Racy Novel, Women’s Fiction and Dogma had been getting worse and was threatening to erupt into a genre war at the drop of a hat.

  “Peace talks still on schedule for Friday,” replied Pickwick, “as if that will do any good. Sometimes I think that Muffler nutjob wants nothing but a good scrap. By the way,” she added, “did you hear about Raphael’s Walrus?”

  “No.”

  “Got their eviction papers this morning.”

  This wasn’t surprising. Raphael’s Walrus was a book six doors down that hadn’t been read for a while. I didn’t know them well, but since we were located at the Speculative end of Fantasy, the real estate was valuable. We’d have a new neighbor almost the moment they left.