First Among Sequels Read online

  “It’s a reader with an unprecedented power of comprehension, someone who can pick up every subtle nuance, all the inferred narrative and deeply embedded subtext in one-tenth the time of normal readers.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  “Not really. A dozen or so Superreads could strip all the meaning out of a book, leaving the volume a tattered husk with little characterization and only the thinnest of plots.”

  “So…most Daphne Farquitt novels have been subjected to a Superreader?”

  “No, they’re just bad.”

  I thought for a moment, made a few notes in the pad I kept in my pocket and then picked up the Outlander probe. I tried to call Bradshaw to tell him but got only his answering machine. I placed the probe in my bag, recalled that I was also here to tell Thursday5 something about the imaginotransference technology and turned to the crickets.

  “Where’s the core-containment chamber?”

  “Cri-cri-cri,” muttered the cricket, thinking hard. “I think it’s one of the doors off the kitchen.”

  “Right.”

  I bade farewell to the crickets, who had begun to bicker when the one with the pillbox hat suggested it was high time he did his own stunts.

  “I say, do you mind?” inquired Pinocchio indolently, neither opening his eyes nor removing his feet from the brazier. “Some of us are trying to get some shut-eye.”

  8.

  Julian Sparkle

  Standard-issue equipment to all Jurisfiction agents, the dimensionally ambivalent TravelBook contains information, tips, maps, recipes and extracts from popular or troublesome novels to enable speedier intrafiction travel. It also contains numerous JurisTech gadgets for more specialized tasks, such as an MV Mask, TextMarker and Eject-O-Hat. The TravelBook’s cover is read-locked to each individual operative and contains a standard emergency alert and autodestruct mechanism.

  W e entered the kitchen of Geppetto’s small house. It had a sort of worthy austerity about it but was clean and functional. A cat was asleep next to a log basket, and a kettle sang merrily to itself on the range. But we weren’t the only people in the kitchen. There were two other doors leading off, and in front of each was a bored-looking individual sitting on a three-legged stool. In the center of the room was what appeared to be a quiz-show host dressed in a gold lamé suit. He had a fake tan that was almost orange, was weighed down with heavy gold jewelry, and had a perfectly sculpted hairstyle that looked as though it had been imported from the fifties.

  “Ah!” he said as soon as he saw us. “Contestants!”

  He picked up his microphone.

  “Welcome,” he said with faux bonhomie, showing acres of perfect white teeth, “to Puzzlemania, the popular brain game. I’m your host, Julian Sparkle.”

  He smiled at us and an imaginary audience and beckoned Thursday5 closer, but I indicated for her to stay where she was.

  “I can do this!” she exclaimed.

  “No,” I whispered. “Sparkle might seem like an innocuous game-show host, but he’s a potential killer.”

  “I thought you said overcaution was for losers?” she returned, attempting to make up for the bacon-roll debacle. “Besides, I can look after myself.”

  “Then be my guest,” I said with a smile. “Or, rather, you can be his guest.”

  My namesake turned to Sparkle and walked up to a mark on the floor that he had indicated. As she did so, the lights in the room dimmed, apart from a spotlight on the two of them. There was a short blast of applause, seemingly from nowhere.

  “So, Contestant Number One, what’s your name, why are you in Geppetto’s kitchen, and where do you come from?”

  “My name’s Thursday Next–5, I want to visit the core-containment chamber as part of a training mission, and I’m from The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco.”

  “Well, then, if you can contain your excitement, you could have a prize visited upon you—fail and it might well be a fiasco.”

  Thursday5 blinked at him uncomprehendingly.

  “Contain your excitement…prize visited…not a fiasco?” repeated Sparkle, trying to get her to understand his appalling attempts at humor.

  She continued to stare at him blankly.

  “Never mind. All righty, then. Ms. Next who wants to visit core containment, today we’re going to play…Liars and Tigers.”

  He indicated the two doors leading off the kitchen, each with a bored-looking individual staring vacantly into space in front of it.

  “The rules are very simple: You have two identical doors. Behind one is the core-containment chamber you seek, and behind the other…is a tiger.”

  The confident expression dropped from Thursday5’s face, and I hid a smile.

  “A what?” she asked.

  “A tiger.”

  “A real one or a written one?”

  “It’s the same thing. Guarding each door is an individual, one who always tells the truth and another who always lies. You can’t know which is which, nor which door is guarded by whom—and you have one question, to one guard, to discover the correct door. Ms. Next, are you ready to play Liars and Tigers?”

  “A tiger? A real tiger?”

  “All eight feet of it.” Julian smiled, enjoying himself again. “Teeth one end, tail the other, claws at all four corners. Are you ready?”

  “If it’s just the same to you,” she said politely, “I’ll be getting on my way.”

  In a flash, Sparkle had pulled out a shiny automatic and pressed it hard into her cheek.

  “You’re going to play the game, Next,” he growled. “Get it right and you win today’s super-duper prize. Get it wrong and you’re tiger poo. Refuse and I play the Spread the Dopey Cow All Over the Kitchen game.”

  “Can’t we form a circle of trust, have a cup of herbal tea and then discuss our issues?”

  “That,” said Sparkle softly, a maniacal glint in his eyes, “was the incorrect answer.”

  His finger tightened on the trigger, and the two guards both covered their heads. This had gone far enough.

  “Wait!” I shouted.

  Sparkle stopped and looked at me. “What?”

  “I’ll take her place.”

  “It’s against the rules.”

  “Not if we play the Double-Death Tiger-Snack game.”

  Sparkle looked at Thursday5, then at me. “I’m not fully conversant with that one,” he said slowly, eyes narrowed.

  “It’s easy,” I replied. “I take her place, and if I lose, then you get to feed us both to the tiger. If I win, we both go free.”

  “Okay,” said Sparkle, and he released Thursday5, who ran and hid behind me.

  “Shoot him,” she said in hoarse whisper.

  “What about the herbal tea?”

  “Shoot him.”

  “That’s not how we do things,” I said in a quiet voice. “Now, just watch and listen and learn.”

  The two guards donned steel helmets, and Sparkle himself retreated to the other side of the room, where he could escape if the tiger was released. I walked up to the two individuals, who looked at me with a quizzical air and started to rub some tiger repellent on themselves from a large tube. The doors were identical, and so were the guards. I scratched my head and thought hard, considering my question. Two doors, two guards. One guard always told the truth, one always lied—and one question to one guard to find the correct door. I’d heard of this puzzle as a kid but never thought my life might depend upon it. But hey, this was fiction. Strange, unpredictable—and fun.

  9.

  Core Containment

  For thousands of years, OralTrad was the only Story Operating System and indeed is still in use today. The recordable Story Operating Systems began with ClayTablet V2.1 and went through several competing systems (WaxTablet, Papyrus, VellumPro) before merging into the award-winning SCROLL, which was upgraded eight times before being swept aside by the all new and clearly superior BOOK V1. Stable, easy to store and transport, compact and with a workable index, BOOK has led th
e way for nearly eighteen hundred years.

  I turned to the guard on the left.

  “If I asked the other guard,” I said with some trepidation, “which was the door to the core-containment chamber, which one would he say?”

  The guard thought for a moment and pointed to one of the doors, and I turned back to look at Sparkle and the somewhat concerned face of Thursday5, who was rapidly coming to terms with the idea that there was a lot of weird shit in the BookWorld that she’d no idea how to handle—such as potential tiger attacks inside Pinocchio.

  “Have you chosen your door, Ms. Next?” asked Julian Sparkle. “Remember, if you win, you get through to core containment—and if you lose, there is a high probability of being eaten. Choose your door…wisely.”

  I gave a smile and grasped the handle—not on the door that had been indicated by the guard but the other one. I pulled it open to reveal…a flight of steps leading downward.

  Sparkle’s eyebrow twitched, and he grimaced momentarily before breaking once more into an insincere grin. The two guards breathed a sigh of relief and removed their helmets to mop their brows—it was clear that dealing with tigers wasn’t something they much liked to do—and the tiger, itself a bit miffed, growled from behind the other door.

  “Congratulations,” muttered Sparkle. “You have chosen…correctly.”

  I nodded to Thursday5, who joined me at the doorway, leaving Sparkle and the two guards arguing over what my super-duper prize should be.

  “How did you know which guard was which?” she asked in a respectful tone.

  “I didn’t,” I replied, “and still don’t. But I assumed that the guards would know who told the truth and who didn’t. Since my question would always show me the wrong door irrespective of whom I asked, I just took the opposite of the one indicated.”

  “Oh!” she said, trying to figure it out. “What were they doing there anyway?”

  “Sparkle and the others are what we call ‘anecdotals.’ Brain teasers, puzzles, jokes, anecdotes and urban legends that are in the oral tradition but not big enough to exist on their own. Since they need to be instantly retrieved, they have to be flexible and available at a moment’s notice—so we billet them unseen around the various works of fiction.”

  “I get it,” replied Thursday. “We had the joke about the centipede playing rugby with us at Fiasco for a while. Out of sight of the readers, of course. Total pest—we kept on tripping over his boots.”

  We stopped at the foot of the stairs. The room was about the size of a double garage and seemed to be constructed of riveted brass that was green with oxidization. The walls were gently curved, giving the impression that we were inside a huge barrel, and there was a hollow, cathedral-like quality to our voices. In the center of the room was a circular, waist-high bronze plinth about the size and shape of a ship’s capstan, upon which two electrodes sprouted upward and then bent gently outward until they were about six inches apart. At the end of each electrode was a carbon sphere no bigger than a Ping-Pong ball, and between the two of them a languid blue arc of electricity crackled quietly to itself.

  “What’s that?” asked Thursday5 in a deferential whisper.

  “It’s the spark, the notion, the core of the book, the central nub of energy that binds a novel together.”

  We watched for a few moments as the arc of energy moved in a lazy wave between the poles. Every now and then, it would fizzle as though somehow disturbed by something.

  “It moves as the crickets talk to each other upstairs,” I explained. “If the book were being read, you’d really see the spark flicker and dance. I’ve been in the core of Anna Karenina when it was going full bore with fifty thousand simultaneous readings, and the effect was better than any fireworks display—a multi-stranded spark in a thousand different hues that snaked and arced out into the room and twisted around one another. A book’s reason for being is to be read; the spark reflects this in a shimmering light show of dynamic proportions.”

  “You speak as though it were alive.”

  “Sometimes I think it is,” I mused, staring at the spark. “After all, a story is born, it can evolve, replicate and then die. I used to go down to core containment quite a lot, but I don’t have as much time for it these days.”

  I pointed at a pipe about the width of my arm that led out from the plinth and disappeared into the floor.

  “That’s the throughput pipe that takes all the readings to the Storycode Engine Floor at Text Grand Central and from there to the Outland, where they’re channeled direct to the reader’s imagination.”

  “And…all books work this way?”

  “I wish. Books that are not within the influence of Text Grand Central have their own onboard Storycode Engines, as do books being constructed in the Well of Lost Plots and most of the vanity publishing genre.”

  Thursday5 looked thoughtful. “The readers are everything, aren’t they?”

  “Now you’ve got it,” I replied. “Everything.”

  We stood in silence for a moment.

  “I was just thinking about the awesome responsibility that comes with being a Jurisfiction agent,” I said at last. “What were you thinking about?”

  “Me?”

  I looked around the empty room. “Yes, you.”

  “I was wondering if extracting aloe vera hurt the plant. What’s that?”

  She was pointing at a small round hatch that was partially hidden behind some copper tubing. It looked like something you might find in the watertight bulkhead of a submarine. Riveted and of robust construction, it had a large central lever and two locking devices farther than an arm span apart, so it could never be opened accidentally by one person.

  “That leads to…Nothing,” I murmured.

  “You mean a blank wall?”

  “No, a blank wall would be something. This is not a nothing but the Nothing, the Nothing by which all Somethings are defined.”

  She looked confused, so I beckoned her to a small porthole next to the hatch and told her to look out.

  “I can’t see anything,” she said after a while. “It’s completely black…. No, wait, I can see small pinpoints of light—like stars.”

  “Not stars,” I told her. “Books. Each one adrift in the firmament and each one burning not just with the light that the author gave it upon creation but with the warm glow of being read and appreciated. The brighter ones are the most popular.”

  “I can see millions of them,” she murmured, cupping her hands around her face to help her eyes penetrate the inky blackness.

  “Every book is a small world unto itself, reachable only by bookjumping. See how some points of light tend to group near others?”

  “Yes?”

  “They’re clumped together in genres, attracted by the gravitational tug of their mutual plotlines.”

  “And between them?”

  “An abstraction where all the laws of literary theory and storytelling conventions break down—the Nothing. It doesn’t support textual life and has no description, form or function.”

  I tapped the innocuous-looking hatch.

  “Out there you’d not last a second before the text that makes up your descriptive existence was stripped of all meaning and consequence. Before bookjumping was developed, every character was marooned in his or her own novel. For many of the books outside the influence of the Council of Genres and Text Grand Central, it’s still like that. Pilgrim’s Progress and the Sherlock Holmes series are good examples. We know roughly where they are, due to the literary influence they exert on similar books, but we still haven’t figured out a way in. And until someone does, a bookjump is impossible.”

  I switched off the light, and we returned to Geppetto’s kitchen.

  “Here you go,” said Julian Sparkle, handing me a cardboard box. Any sort of enmity he might have felt toward us had vanished.

  “What’s this?”

  “Why, your prize, of course! A selection of Tupperware™ containers. Durable and with ingenio
us spillproof lids, they’re the ideal way to keep food fresh.”

  “Give them to the tiger.”

  “He doesn’t like Tupperware—the lids are tricky to get off with paws.”

  “Then you have them.”

  “I didn’t win them,” replied Sparkle with a trace of annoyance, but then he added after a moment’s thought, “However, if you would like to play our Super Wizzo Double Jackpot game, we can double your prize the next time you play!”

  “Good, fine—whatever,” I said as a phone on the kitchen table started jangling. Julian picked it up.

  “Hello? Two doors, one tiger, liar/nonliar puzzle speaking.” He raised his eyebrows and grabbed a handy pen to scribble a note. “We’ll be onto it right away.”

  He replaced the phone and addressed the two guards, who were watching him expectantly. “Scramble, lads. We’re needed on a boring car journey on the M4 westbound near Lyneham.”

  The room was suddenly a whirl of activity. Each guard removed his door, which seemed to be on quick-release hinges, and then held it under his arm. The first guard placed his hand on the shoulder of Sparkle, who had turned his back, and the second on the shoulder of his compatriot. The tiger, now free, stood behind the second guard and placed one paw on his shoulder and with the other lifted the telephone off the table.

  “Ready?” called out Sparkle to the odd line that had formed expertly behind him.

  “Yes,” said the first guard.

  “No,” said the second.

  “Growl,” said the tiger, and turned to wink at us.

  There was a mild concussion as they all jumped out. The fire blazed momentarily in the grate, the cat ran out of the room, and loose papers were thrown into the air. Phone call to exit had taken less then eight seconds. These guys were professionals.

  Thursday5 and I, suitably impressed and still without a taxi, jumped out of Pinocchio and were once again in the Great Library.

  She replaced the book on the shelf and looked up at me.