A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5 (110 page)

“Impact time?”

“Three minutes.”

I had an idea. “How many people are reading
Scarlet Letter
at present?”

“Six hundred and twenty-two,” replied the Cat, who as librarian had these figures at his paws twenty-four hours a day.

“Pleasure readers?”

“Mostly,” replied the Cat, thinking hard, “except for a class of thirty-two English students at Frobisher High School in Michigan who are studying it.”

“Good. Bradshaw? I want you to set up textual sieves in every book ever written by Hemingway—even the bad ones. Sieves are to be set to
coarse
in all short stories, letters,
Winner Take Nothing
and
In Our Time
,
medium
in
The Sun Also Rises
and
The Green Hills of Africa.
I want to channel the storm, slowing it down as it passes. By
A Farewell to Arms
and
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, sieves should be set to
fine.
The storm will bounce between all the works, moving west towards the void between Hemingway and Fitzgerald. If it makes it that far, we'll reset the sieves and attack it again.”

There was a pause.

“But, Thursday,” said Bradshaw slowly, “the storm isn't going to hit Hemingway.”

“It will if we shut
The Scarlet Letter
down.”

“Out of the question!” exploded Senator Jobsworth, spontaneously and automatically rejecting any possible infringements of his sacred regulations. “The rules do not permit any book to be shut down without a vote at the Council of Genres—I can quote the rule number if you wish!”

Technically, he was right. Even with a vote, nobody had tried anything so audacious before. It usually took an hour to shut down a book, more to bring it up to full readability again.

“Is that wise?” asked Dr. Howard.

“Not in the least,” I replied, “but I'm out of time and ideas right now.”

“Isn't anyone listening to me?” continued the senator, more outraged at our lack of respect than at losing
The Scarlet Letter
.

“Oh, we're listening all right,” purred the Cat, “we just don't agree with you.”

“Rules are there for a good reason, Miss Next. We have ordered the demolition of bigger books than
The Scarlet Letter
. I personally—”

“Listen,” I said, “classics have been lost before but never during my tenure as Bellman. Tomorrow morning you can have my badge if I'm wrong and send me packing. Right now you can sit down and shut up. Cat and Bradshaw, are you with me on this?”

“Appreciate a woman who can make bold decisions!” muttered Bradshaw, repeating my orders to the DanverClones. Senator Jobsworth had gone red with impotent fury, and his mouth was twitching as he sought to find words to adequately express his anger at my insubordination.

“Two minutes to impact.”

I picked up the footnoterphone and asked to be put through to the storycode engine floor.

“Bradshaw, I want you to take a trip to the Outland and set the fire alarm off at Frobisher High in exactly seventy-eight seconds. That will give us a few minutes breathing space. The pleasure readers will just think they've got bored and lost concentration when the book shuts down. Hello, storycode floor? This is the Bellman. I want you to divert Hawthorne's
Scarlet Letter
to an
empty storycode engine and shut it down. . . . Yes, that's quite correct. Shut it down. I don't have time to issue a written order so you're going to have to take my word for it. You are to do it in exactly sixty-three seconds.”

“Sieves are going up as requested, Thursday,” reported Bradshaw. “Think they'll hold?”

I shrugged. There was nothing else we could do. The storm plot ran towards
The Scarlet Letter
and struck it just as the storycode engine shut down. The book closed. The characters stopped in their tracks as an all-pervading darkness swept over every descriptive passage, every line of dialogue, every nuance, every concept. Where a moment ago there had been a fascinating treatise on morality, there was now only a lifeless hulk of dark reading matter. It was as if
The Scarlet Letter
had never been written. The storm bounced off, then attracted to the brighter lights of the Hemingway canon next door, struck off on a new course. I breathed a sigh of relief but then held my breath once more as the storm struck
In Our Time
—and glanced off. The sieve had held. Over the next few minutes the WordStorm ran between the books as planned, the textual sieves slowing it down as it brushed past the collected works of Hemingway.

“Damage report?”

“Slight grammatical warpage in
A Farewell to Arms
, but nothing serious,” said the Cat. “
The Sun Also Rises
is reporting isolated bursts of narrative flexations, but nothing we can't handle. All other books report no damage.”

“Good. Bring
The Scarlet Letter
back on-line.”

We watched nervously as the storm slowly subsided. It had littered the Hemingway canon with words and ideas, but nothing violent enough to embed them and change the narrative. As likely as not the residents of the novels would just pick them up and sell them to traveling scrap merchants. But the WordStorm wasn't quite finished with us yet. After brushing past the preface to
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, the storm suddenly sped up and, in its last dying throes, embedded a Bride Shot at the Altar plot device right at the end of Blackmore's
Lorna Doone
, where it remains to
this day. Aside from that minor flexation, no real harm was done by the WordStorm. The senator berated me for a good ten minutes and filed a report on my behavior the following day, which was summarily rejected by the other members of the Jurisfiction oversight committee.

I left the Cat and Bradshaw to log the damage reports and thanked Dr. Howard and his staff for their slavish attention. I decided to walk back home, across the storycode engine floor and down the empty corridors of the Great Library to the Well of Lost Plots and back to bed. I was feeling quite good about myself. I had run a team of highly skilled technicians and saved
The Scarlet Letter
from almost certain devastation. It would be one of my easier tasks as Bellman, but I didn't know that yet. The evening had gone well. Landen would have been proud of me.

Falstaff, the three witches, Banquo's ghost, Beatrice and Benedict—all kindly supplied by Shakespeare (William) Inc.

Our thanks to Mr. Heathcliff for graciously agreeing to appear in this novel.

Uriah Heep kindly loaned by Wickfield & Heep, attorneys-at-law.

My thanks to ScarletBea, Yan, Ben, Carla, Jon, Magda, AllAmericanCutie and Dave at the Fforde Fforum for their nominations in the Bookie Awards.

Hedgepig research,
Anna Karenina
footnoterphone gossip and “dodo egg” sarcasm furnished by Mari Roberts.

Solomon's Judgments © The Council of Genres, 1986.

“Chocolate orange” joke used with the kind permission of John Birmingham.

UltraWord—the Ultimate Reading Experience™ remains a trademark of Text Grand Central.

Bookie category Best Dead Person in Fiction courtesy of C. J. Avery.

Fictionaut
wordsmithed by Jon Brierley.

Evilness consultant: Ernst Blofeld.

Mrs. Bradshaw's gowns by Coco Chanel.

Aornis little-sister idea courtesy of Rosie Fforde.

Our grateful thanks to the Great Panjandrum for help and guidance in the making of this novel.

No unicorns were written expressly for this book, and no animals or Yahoos (other than grammasites) were harmed in its construction.

This novel was written in BOOK V8.3 and was sequenced using an Mk XXIV ImaginoTransferenceDevice. Peggy Malone was the imaginator. Plot Devices and Inciting Incidents supplied by Billy Budd's Bargain Basement and the WOLP Plot Salvage and Recycling Corporation. Generics supplied and trained by St. Tabularasa's. Holes were filled by apprentices at the Holesmiths' Guild, and echolocation and grammatization were undertaken by Outland contractors at Hodder and Viking.

The “galactic cleansing” policy undertaken by Emperor Zhark is a personal vision of the emperor's, and its inclusion in this work does not constitute tacit approval by the author or the publisher for any such projects, howsoever undertaken. Warning: The author may have eaten nuts while writing this book.

Made wholly on location within the Well of Lost Plots.

A Fforde/Hodder/Viking production. All rights reserved.

PERMISSIONS

Extract from
Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh (copyright © Evelyn Waugh, 1945) by permission of Peters, Fraser and Dunlop on behalf of the Evelyn Waugh Trust and the Estate of Laura Waugh.

Reference to the
Just So Stories
by Rudyard Kipling (copyright © The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty) by kind permission of A. P. Watt Ltd.

References to
Shadow the Sheepdog
by Enid Blyton by kind permission of Enid Blyton Limited and with thanks to Chorion plc.

Frederick Warne & Co. is the owner of all rights, copyrights, and trademarks in the Beatrix Potter character names and illustrations.

Extract from
Tiger Tiger
(copyright © Alfred Bester, 1955) by kind permission of the Estate of Alfred Bester and the Sayle Literary Agency.