One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (24 page)

“If you can manage crowd work, you can handle almost anything,” said Square. “You know about flocks of starlings and schools of fish, how they all seem to move at the same time?”

I told him that I had heard of this but not witnessed it.

“Humans are exactly the same when they get into crowds. By using subtle sensory cues and working to a set of basic rules, you can enter a crowd full of people all heading in different directions and come out the other side without touching anyone or causing an accident.”

“How?” I said, looking suspiciously at the swirling mass of humanity.

“Think of it as a subtle dance, where you have to avoid touching anyone. You have to jog and dodge your way around but also have to know when people are going to dodge and jink round
you
. Give it a whirl.”

I stepped into the crowd, and almost immediately a woman stopped dead in front of me.

“Sorry,” I said, and walked on. I could sense I was disrupting the smooth liquidity of the crowd, and based on the noises people were making, it wasn’t appreciated. I got to the other side of the street without bumping into anyone, but only just.

“Not so easy, is it?” said Square, and I had to admit he was right. I had thought being in the RealWorld would be simple, or at least a lot like home, but it wasn’t. Nothing here was assumed; everything had to be actually
done
, and witnessed. Weirder still, once something
was
done, it was gone, and the knowledge of it faded almost immediately into memory. Once or twice I found myself attempting to move backwards or forwards in time before realizing that that’s not how it worked. If I wanted to be five minutes in the future, I had to laboriously
run
the five minutes in real time, and if I wanted to go back, I couldn’t. It was how I imagined the narrator in
À la Recherche du Temps Perdu
spent most of his life—trapped in a noisy, brightly colored cage barely two or three seconds wide.

After twenty minutes I could walk through the crowd without too much difficulty, but once or twice I found myself in the situation where the people I was trying to avoid met me head on, and I moved left, and they did, so I moved right, and they did, too, and so on, for up to five times, which elicited nothing more than a chuckle from my dancing partner.

“The old ‘back and forth’ happens a lot when real and fictional people meet,” said Square when I’d returned to where he was waiting for me. “If the Outlanders had any idea we were amongst them, it would be the surest way to tell. That and a certain confusion when it comes to everyday tasks. If you see someone unable to boil a kettle, open a sash window or understand he has an appalling haircut, it probably means he’s fictional.”

“Hmm,” I said, “why is that woman in the annoyingly flamboyant clothes staring at me?”

“Probably because she recognizes you.”

“Don’t I have to know who she is before she can recognize me?”

“It doesn’t work that way.”

“Thursday?” said the woman, bounding up to me with a huge grin and a clatter of beads. “Is that really you? Where have you been hiding these past few months?”

I recognized her from the vague approximation that had made it through to my series. It was Cordelia Flakk, ex-SpecOps publicity guru and now . . . well, I had no idea what she did.

“Hello, Cordelia.”

“How are Landen and the kids?”

“Apparently they’re very well.”

“Did you hear about Hermione? Went to the slammer for trying to fiddle her taxes and then tried to escape. She was caught between the wire with two saber-toothed tigers. They didn’t know what had happened to her until a bangle and parts of her synthetic kidney turned up in one of the sabers’ . . . well, I don’t want the story to get too gruesome.”

“Too late.”

“You old wag, you! Will you be coming to Penelope’s for the Daphne Farquitt reading party Friday afternoon? She wants us all to come round to her place for the readathon, and she’s dying to show off her new man.” She leaned closer. “A
neanderthal
, you know. Frightfully polite, of course, but likes to sleep in the garden shed. She has a few stories about matters south, I should warrant—a few glasses and she’ll spill the beans, if you know what I mean.”

The woman laughed.

“Goodness, is that the time? How I prattle so!” She suddenly lowered her voice. “By the way, are you still dealing in cheese?”

“Not really—”

“A pound of Limburger would set us straight. Just a taster, then—anything, in fact. I mean, it’s not like we’re asking for any X-14. Oh. Sorry, is that still a sore point? Why not bring a taster of cheese to Penelope’s do on Friday? We can enhance them with some pineapple chunks. Cheese and Farquitt! Naughty us! Ta-ra!”

And she tossed her head and moved off.

“Did you understand any of that?” asked Square.

“About one word in eight.”

“That many?”

I stood there, stunned by the fact that I had no idea what Thursday actually
did
in the RealWorld, nor what had happened and what hadn’t. The recent exchange told me that she
had
been involved in the illegal cheese market, and we had walked past the abandoned Special Operations Division headquarters earlier, so I knew that at least some of her SpecOps adventures had been real. But what else had happened in her life I had no idea. If anyone asked me anything specific, I was going to have to wing it, or simply grin stupidly. Best of all, stay well away from anyone who might know me.

“Was that meeting at all relevant?” I asked Square. “In the grand scheme of things, I mean?”

“Probably not,” replied Square. “Just a chance meeting that means nothing. If this were a book, Cordelia wouldn’t have survived the first draft.”

I spent the next two hours walking around trying to figure out how the world worked. It was confusing and tiring, and it seemed that much energy was expended for very little outcome. I had my first real pee, which was pretty bizarre, then ate some chocolate, which was hugely enjoyable. Mostly I listened in on conversations and was dismayed to note that Professor Plum had been correct. A lot of what was said was superficially very banal. Less of a sense of communication and more to do with being comfortable and secure amongst members of one’s own species—the modern equivalent of being huddled together in the dark.

“There seems to be a tremendous fear of being alone,” I said once we had stopped for a break in the graveyard of the Blessed Lady of the Lobster.

“My theory is that it’s all misdirection.”

“From what?”

“The depressing certainty that one day all of us will die.”

“Speak for yourself. What’s your story, Square?”

“I used to work in
Flatland
but was fired after ‘artistic differences’ with Circle. After that I was recruited by Bradshaw for deep-cover operations in the Outland. I was here on assignment when the RealWorld travel ban came down, so I took Blue Fairy, became real and volunteered to stay.”

He sighed deeply, in a thin, two-dimensional sort of way. “Blue Fairy” was the term used to describe the only way in which fictional people could become real, and unsurprisingly, the Blue Fairy from
Pinocchio
was the only person who could do it. She used to do it for free if you asked nicely and had a chit from the CofG, but now she is not permitted to conduct any realizations at all and is paid handsomely by the council for the honor of doing nothing. Nice work if you can get it.

“When do you get to go home?” I asked.

“I don’t get to return home. The only good thing about this place is that it’s fantastically roomy. Are you ready?”

I said I was, and we walked the three blocks to Landen and Thursday’s house, situated in a quiet part of the Old Town. I asked Square to keep a low profile, took a deep breath, walked up the garden path and stared at the front door, heart beating furiously. This time for real.

I
knocked twice. There was the sound of noises from within, and the door opened. It was Landen, and we stared at each other for a few seconds.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hello,” said Landen.

“Hello,” I said again.

“Are you her?” he asked.

“No, not really.”

“Then you’d better come in.”

He moved aside, and I stepped into the hallway that was familiar to mine, but only in layout. Thursday’s real house was more real, more worn, more lived in. The banisters were chipped, the newel post was draped with discarded clothes, and a tide mark of children’s fingerprints ran along the wall and up the staircase. Pictures hung askew, and there was a small cobweb around the lampshade. Landen led me through to the kitchen, which was a big extension at the back of the house, partly consuming the garden and covered with a large glazed roof above the junk-strewn kitchen table. It was packed with the chaotic assortment of the minutiae of life being lived—not the sanitized shorthand we get in the BookWorld, even with the Reader Feedback Loop set to max. Life seemed to be a lot messier than people wanted fiction to be. Feedback reflected hopes, not realities. I looked around carefully and sat in the seat he had indicated.

“Tea?” he asked.

“Do I drink it?”

“Gallons of it, usually.”

“At a single sitting?”

“No, generally one cup at a time.”

“Then I’d love some, thank you.”

He went to put the kettle on.

“You look a lot like Thursday,” he said.

“I’m often mistaken for her,” I replied, feeling less nervous around familiar questions. “In fact, I’m surprised you needed so little convincing I wasn’t the real Thursday.”

“I don’t know that for certain,” he replied. “Not yet anyway. I’d like you to be her, naturally, but there have been others who looked a lot like her. Not quite as much as you do, but pretty similar. Goliath is keen to know what Thursday gets up to when she’s not at home, and they’ve sent one or two to try to trick me into giving information. The first was just a voice on the phone, then one who could be seen only from a distance. The last one almost took me in, but up close she didn’t pass muster. Her texture was all wrong, the smell was different, the smile lopsided and the ears too high. I don’t know why they keep sending them, to be honest—nor where they end up. After I booted the last one out the door, someone from Goliath’s Synthetic Human Division came round demanding to know what I’d done with it. Then, after I asked about the legality of such a device, he denied there had been any, or even that he was from the Synthetic Human Division. He then asked to read the meter.”

“So how can they lose two synthetic Thursdays?”

“They lost three. There was
another
that I hadn’t even seen. They said it was the best yet. They dropped it off two weeks ago near Clary-LaMarr and haven’t heard anything since. Are you that one?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I replied, vaguely indignant. “I’m not a Goliath robot.”

“Not a robot—a
synthetic
. Human in everything but name.”

I took a deep breath. I had to lay my cards on the table. “She’s missing, isn’t she?”

There was a flicker of consternation on Landen’s face. “Not at all. Her absences are quite long, admittedly, but we’re always in constant communication.”

“From the BookWorld?”

He laughed. “That old chestnut! It was never
proved
she could move across at will. I think you’ve perhaps spent a little too much time listening to deranged theories.”

It sounded like a cover story to keep the real nature of the BookWorld secret. I didn’t expect him to tell me anything. He didn’t know who or what I was, after all. But he had to know.

“I’m the
written
her,” I told him. “She may have spoken to you about me. I was the tree-hugging version in the Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco, who then took over from the evil Thursday who was deleted with Pepys. I run books one to five now—less along the lines of the old Thursday, but more how the real Thursday wanted them to be. Less sex and violence. It explains why we’re out of print.”

If I thought he would be surprised or shocked, however, I was mistaken. I guess when you’re married to Thursday, the nature of weird becomes somewhat relative. Landen smiled.

“That’s a novel approach. Mind you, there’s nothing you’ve told me that I couldn’t find out by rereading
First Among Sequels.
Goliath has access to that book, too, so if you
were
one of the synthetic Thursdays, I’d expect you to come up with something like that.”

“Commander Bradshaw of Jurisfiction sent me.”

He stared at me. The relevance wasn’t lost on him. Jurisfiction and Bradshaw were never mentioned in the books.

“I’m not yet convinced,” he said, giving nothing away, “but let’s suppose Thursday
is
missing—you want my help to find her?”

“If she’s missing, then you and I can help each other. I’ll be going home in less than twelve hours. Any information learned out here might be helpful.”

He took a deep breath. “She’s been gone four weeks, that much is common knowledge. Everyone wants to find her. It’s a national obsession.
The Mole, The Toad
, Goliath, SO-5, the police, the Cheese Squad, the government, the NSA—and now you claim the BookWorld, too.”