A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5 (83 page)

“Poppycock!” replied Miss Havisham.

“Place you hands on the bonnet of the car!” yelled the PA as the airship droned past at treetop level. “You have been warned!”

“Miss Havisham, if they find out who I am, I could be in a lot of trouble!”

“
Nonsense,
girl. Why would they want someone as inconsequential as you?”

The airship swung round with the vectored engines in reverse; once they started asking questions, I'd be answering them for a long time.

“We have to go, Miss Havisham!”

She sensed the urgency in my voice and beckoned for me to get in the car. Within a moment we were away from that place, car and all, back to the lobby of the Great Library.

“You're not so popular in the Outland, then?” Havisham asked, turning off the engine, which spluttered and shook to a halt, the sudden quiet a welcome break.

“You could say that.”

“Broken the law?”

“Not really.”

She stared at me for a moment. “I thought it a bit odd that Goliath had you trapped in their deepest and most secure subbasement. Do you have the film from the speed camera?”

I handed it over.

“I'll get double prints,” she mused. “Thanks for your help. See you at roll call tomorrow—don't be late!”

I waited until she had gone, then retraced my steps to the library where I had left Snell's head-in-a-bag plot device and made my way home. I didn't jump direct; I took the elevator. Bookjumping might be a quick way to get around, but it was also kind of knackering.

ImaginoTransferenceRecordingDevice:
A machine used to write books in the Well, the ITRD resembles a large horn (typically eight feet across and made of brass) attached to a polished mahogany mixing board a little like a church organ but with many more stops and levers. As the story is enacted in front of the
collecting horn,
the actions, dialogue, humor, pathos, etc., are collected, mixed and transmitted as raw data to Text Grand Central, where the wordsmiths hammer it into readable storycode. Once done, it is beamed direct to the author's pen or typewriter, and from there through a live footnoterphone link back to the Well as plain text. The page is read, and if all is well, it is added to the manuscript and the characters move on. The beauty of the system is that authors never suspect a thing—they think
they
do all the work.

COMMANDER TRAFFORD BRADSHAW
,
CBE
Bradshaw's Guide to the BookWorld

I
'
M HOME
!” I yelled as I walked through the door. Pickwick plocked happily up to me, realized I didn't have any marshmallows and then left in a huff, only to return with the gift of a piece of paper she had found in the wastepaper basket. I thanked her profusely and she went back to her egg.

“Hello,” said ibb, who had been experimenting, Beeton-like, in the kitchen. “What's in the bag?”

“You don't want to know.”

“Hmm,” replied ibb thoughtfully, “since I wouldn't have asked if I
didn't
want to know, your response must be another way of saying, ‘I'm not going to tell you, so sod off.' Is that correct?”

“More or less,” I replied, placing the bag in the broom cupboard. “Is Gran around?”

“I don't think so.”

obb walked in a little later, reading a textbook entitled
Personalities for Beginners.

“Hello, Thursday,” it said. “A hedgehog and a tortoise came round to see you this afternoon.”

“What did they want?”

“They didn't say.”

“And Gran?”

“In the Outland. She said not to wait up for her. You look very tired; are you okay?”

It was true, I
was
tired, but I wasn't sure why. Stress? It's not every day that you have to fight swarms of grammasites and deal with Havisham's driving, Yahoos, Thraals, Big Martin's friends or head-in-a-bag plot devices. Maybe it was just the baby playing silly buggers with my hormones.

“What's for supper?” I asked, slumping in a chair and closing my eyes.

“I've been experimenting with alternative recipes,” said ibb, “so we're having Apples Benedict.”

“
Apples
Benedict?”

“Yes; it's like Eggs Benedict but with—”

“I get the picture. Anything else?”

“Of course. You could try Turnips à l'Orange or Macaroni Custard; for pudding I've made Anchovy Trifle and Herring Fool. What will you have?”

“Beans on toast.”

I sighed. It was like being back home at mother's.

I didn't dream that night. Landen was absent, but then so, too, was . . . was . . . what's-her-name. I slept soundly and missed the alarm. I woke up feeling terrible and just lay flat on my back, breathing deeply and trying to push away the clouds of nausea. There was a rap at the door.

“ibb!” I yelled. “Can you get that?”

My head throbbed but there was no answer. I glanced at the clock; it was nearly nine and both of them would be out at St. Tabularasa's practicing whimsical asides or something. I hauled myself out of bed, steadied myself for a moment, wrapped myself in a dressing gown and went downstairs. No one was there when I opened the door. I was just closing it when a small voice said:

“We're down here.”

It was a hedgehog and a tortoise. But the hedgehog wasn't like Mrs. Tiggy-winkle, who was as tall as me; this hedgehog and tortoise were just the size they should have been.

“Thursday Next?” said the hedgehog.

“Yes. What can I do for you?”

“You can stop poking your nose in where it's not wanted,” said the hedgehog haughtily, “that's what you can do.”

“I don't understand.”

“Painted Jaguar?” suggested the tortoise. “
Can't curl, can swim
. Ring any bells, smart aleck?”

“Oh! You must be Stickly-Prickly and Slow-Solid.”

“The same. And that little mnemonic you so
kindly
gave to the Painted Jaguar is going to cause us a few problems—the dopey feline will never forget
that
in a month of Sundays.”

I sighed. Living in the BookWorld was a great deal more complicated than I had imagined.

“Well, why don't you learn to swim or something?”

“Who, me?” said Stickly-Prickly. “Don't be absurd; whoever heard of a hedgehog swimming?”

“And you could learn to curl,” I added to Slow-Solid.

“Curl?” replied the tortoise indignantly. “I don't think so, thank you very much.”

“Give it a go,” I persisted. “Unlace your backplates a little and try and touch your toes.”

There was a pause. The hedgehog and the tortoise looked at one another and giggled.

“Won't Painted Jaguar be surprised!” they chortled, thanked me and left.

I closed the door, sat down and looked in the fridge, shrugged and ate a large portion of Apples Benedict before having a long and relaxing shower.

The corridors of the Well were as busy as the day before. Traders bustled with buyers, deals were done, orders taken, bargains struck. Every now and then I saw characters fading in and out as their trade took them from book to book. I looked at the shop-fronts as I walked past, trying to guess how they did what they did. There were holesmiths, grammatacists, pacesetters, mood-mongers, paginators—you name it.
¹

It was the junkfootnoterphones starting up again. I tried to shut it out but only succeeded in lowering the volume. As I walked along, I noticed a familiar figure amongst the traders and plot speculators. He was dressed in his usual African-explorer garb: safari jacket, pith helmet, shorts, stout boots and a revolver in a leather holster. It was Commander Bradshaw, star of thirty-four thrilling adventure stories for boys available in hardback at 7/6 each. Out of print since the thirties, Bradshaw entertained himself in his retirement by being something of an éminence grise at Jurisfiction. He had seen and done it all—or claimed he had.

“A hundred!” he exclaimed bitterly as I drew closer. “Is that the best you can offer?”

The Action Sequence trader he was talking to shrugged. “We don't get much call for lion attacks these days.”

“But it's terrifying, man, terrifying!” exclaimed Bradshaw.
“Real hot-breath-down-the-back-of-your-neck stuff. Brighten up contemporary romantic fiction no end, I should wager—make a change from parties and frocks, what?”

“A hundred and twenty, then. Take it or leave it.”

“Bloodsucker!” mumbled Bradshaw, taking the money and handing over a small glass globe with the lion attack, I presumed, safely freeze-dried within. He turned away from the trader and caught me looking at him. He quickly hid the cash and raised his pith helmet politely.

“Good morning!”

“Good morning,” I replied.

He waved a finger at me. “It's Havisham's apprentice, isn't it? What was your name again?”

“Thursday Next.”

“Is it, by gum! Well, I never.”

He was, I noticed, a good foot taller than the last time we had met. He now almost came up to my shoulder.

“You're much—” I began, then checked myself.

“Taller?” he guessed. “Quite correct, girlie. Appreciate a woman who isn't trammeled by the conventions of good manners. Melanie—that's the wife, you know—she's pretty rude, too. ‘Trafford,' she says—that's my name, Trafford—‘Trafford,' she said, ‘you are a worthless heap of elephant dung.' Well, this was from out the blue—I had just returned home after a harrowing adventure in Central Africa where I was captured and nearly roasted on a spit. The sacred emerald of the Umpopo had been stolen by two Swedish prospectors and—”

“Commander Bradshaw,” I interrupted, desperate to stop him from recounting one of his highly unlikely and overtly jingoistic adventures, “have you seen Miss Havisham this morning?”

“Quite right to interrupt me,” he said cheerfully, “appreciate a woman who knows when to subtly tell a boring old fart to button his lip. You and Mrs. Bradshaw have a lot in common. You must meet up someday.”

We walked down the busy corridor.
²

I tapped my ears.

“Problems?” inquired Bradshaw.

“Yes, I've got two gossiping Russians inside my head again.”

“Crossed line? Infernal contraptions. Have a word with Plum at JurisTech if it persists. I say,” he went on, lowering his voice and looking round furtively, “you won't tell anyone about that lion-attack sale, will you? If the story gets around that old Bradshaw is cashing in his Action Sequences, I'll never hear the last of it.”

“I won't say a word,” I assured him as we avoided a trader trying to sell us surplus B-3 Darcy clones, “but do many people try and sell off parts of their own books?”

“Oh, yes. But only if they are out of print and can spare it. Trouble is, I'm a bit strapped for the old moola. What with the
BookWorld Awards coming up and Mrs. Bradshaw a bit shy in public, I thought a new dress might be just the ticket—and the cost of clothes are pretty steep down here, y'know.”

“It's the same in the Outland.”

“Is it, by George?” he guffawed. “The Well always reminds me of the market in Nairobi; how about you?”

“There seems to be an awful lot of bureaucracy. I would have thought a fiction factory would be, by definition, a lot more free and relaxed.”

“If you think this is bad, you ought to visit nonfiction. Over there, the rules governing the correct use of a semicolon alone run to several volumes.
Anything
devised by man has bureaucracy, corruption and error hardwired at inception, m'girl. I'm surprised you hadn't figured that out yet. What do you think of the Well?”

“I'm still a bit new to it.”

“Really? Let me help you out.”

He stopped and looked around for a moment, then pointed out a man in his early twenties who was walking towards us. He was dressed in a long riding jacket and carried a battered leather suitcase emblazoned with the names of books and plays he had visited in his trade.

“Yes?”

“He's an artisan—a
holesmith
.”

“He's a plasterer?”

“No; he fills
narrative
holes—plot and expositional anomalies—bloopholes. If a writer said something like ‘The daffodils bloomed in summer' or ‘They checked the ballistics report on the shotgun,' then artisans like him are there to sort it out. It's one of the final stages of construction just before the grammatacists, echolocators and spellcheckers move in to smooth everything over.”

The young man had drawn level with us by this time.

“Hello, Mr. Starboard,” said Bradshaw to the holesmith, who gave a wan smile of recognition.

“Commander Bradshaw,” he muttered slightly hesitantly, “what a truly delightful honor it is to meet you again, sir. Mrs. Bradshaw quite well?”

“Quite well, thank you. This is Miss Next—new at the department. I'm showing her the ropes.”

The holesmith shook my hand and made welcoming noises.

“I closed a hole in
Great Expectations
the other day,” I told him. “Was that one of your books?”

“Goodness me, no!” exclaimed the young man, smiling for the first time. “Holestitching has come a long way since Dickens. You won't find a holesmith worth his thread trying the old ‘door opens and in comes the missing aunt/father/business associate/friend, et cetera,' all ready to explain where they've been since mysteriously dropping out of the narrative two hundred pages previously. The methodology we choose these days is to just go back and patch the hole, or more simply, to
camouflage
it.”

“I see.”

“Indeed,” carried on the young man, becoming more flamboyant in the light of my perceived interest, “I'm working on a system that hides holes by
highlighting
them to the reader, that just says, ‘Ho! I'm a hole, don't think about it!' but it's a little cutting-edge. I think,” added the young man airily, “that you will not find a more experienced holesmith anywhere in the Well; I've been doing it for more than forty years.”

“When did you start?” I asked, looking at the youth curiously. “As a baby?”

The young man aged, grayed and sagged before my eyes until he was in his seventies and then announced, arms outstretched and with a flourish:

“Da-daaaa!”

“No one likes a show-off, Llyster,” said Bradshaw, looking at his watch. “I don't want to hurry you, Tuesday, old girl, but we should be getting over to Norland Park for the roll call.”

He gallantly offered me an elbow to hold and I hooked my arm in his.

“Thank you, Commander.”

“Stouter than stout!” Bradshaw said, laughing, and read us both into
Sense and Sensibility.