One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (21 page)

“What else is painted yellow in the BookWorld?”

As soon as I said it, I suddenly remembered something. I stood up and quickly walked to the garage at the bottom of the garden, Sprockett close behind.

“Ma’am?” he said as I swung up the double doors and started to poke amongst the book junk for what I was looking for. I found it easily enough: the back axle that had once been painted yellow. There was no sign of an ISBN, scrubbed or otherwise.

“It wasn’t from
The Murders on the Hareng Rouge,
” I said excitedly. “It’s from a TransGenre Taxi. I rode back from Poetry stuck onto the side of an ocean tanker, part of a book about the Bermuda Triangle. There was a taxi attached to
Murders
when it went down, piggybacking from one part of the BookWorld to another. The sabotage might not have been aimed at the book at all—
it might have been aimed at whoever was in the cab!”

“Or both,” said Sprockett, annoyingly muddying the waters.

“Or both,” I agreed.

“Where
is
the rest of the cab?” asked Sprockett.

“Who knows? Either vaporized or embedded somewhere in the unread backwaters of Thriller. Here’s the deal: You’re going to call the TransGenre Taxi offices and find out about any missing cabs, and I’m going to find out more about
The Murders on the Hareng Rouge
and Adrian Dorset.”

“But where, ma’am? If Captain Phantastic doesn’t know, it’s unknowable.”

“In the RealWorld, Sprockett. Cheers.”

I tried the Scorcher. It wasn’t too bad. A bit loamy for my taste, but otherwise good.

I went upstairs and packed a small tote bag. A few clothes and some spare underwear—I’d heard all the scare stories—then worried about taking my pistol or not, but eventually I did. After that I dithered over taking ammunition and decided to, but only one cartridge and of the armor-piercing variety. I argued to myself that I would be too scared to use it, so I wouldn’t. I gave Carmine some last-minute instructions in case of emergencies, ignored her protestations about “having to face more readers than she was happy with” and then ordered a cab. “If I have to press the Snooze Button,” said Mrs. Malaprop as I waited, “it’s on your conch séance, not mine.”

“Agreed.”

 

“Where to?” asked the cabbie when he pulled up ten minutes later.

“Norland Park,” I said, “
Sense and Sensibility
. Any route you like.”

But at that moment someone else got into the cab by way of the opposite door. He was wearing a large floppy hat that partially obscured his features.

“Sorry,” I said, “cab taken.”

The other passenger lifted the brim of the hat so I could see his face. It was Whitby.

“It’s okay,” I said to the cabbie, and we moved off.

“Holy cow!” I said, turning to Whitby, “you’ve got a nerve. When were you going to tell me about setting fire to that busload of nuns? Two years I spent building myself up to a date, and then I find that you’re a homicidal maniac.”

“
Lots
of people are homicidal maniacs,” he replied. “Throw a stick into Crime and you’ll hit six of them.”

“But we’re not in Crime, are we?”

He stared at me for a moment. “I’ve done lots of good in my life, Thursday—helped people to narrative independence, coached Generics through entrance exams, was EZ-Read’s Employee of the Month three months running, and I even helped little old ladies across the road—some when they actually wanted to go. Do I get credit for that? No. All you want to think about is the nuns.”

“
Orphaned
nuns,” I reminded him.

“Actually, it was the puppies who were orphaned,” he said petulantly. “Let’s stick to the facts here.”

“Does it matter?”

“Not really. But I don’t think that one teensy-weensy incident with a small busload of nuns and puppies should taint a man’s life.”

“I think it does, Whitby. You might have told me.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Why?”

He sighed. “You remember Dermot McGruber? EZ-Read’s rep over in HumDram?”

“Yes.”

“He wanted to impress a girl. But he’d done some seriously bad shit when he was a character in Crime.”

“The nuns?”

“Right. With a backstory like that hanging around his neck and guilt consuming his every moment, he couldn’t even
begin
to get a date. So I said I’d look after his backstory for the weekend so he could ask her out, guilt-free and with an easy heart.”

“That was generous of you.”

He shrugged. “He helped me out once when I over ordered some EZ-Read PlotHoleFiller. I owed him. A weekend of all-consuming guilt seemed easy enough. I could keep myself to myself, get totally hyphenated, and no one need ever know.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “He’s legged it.”

Whitby nodded as the cabbie changed down a gear and moved onto the Dickens Freeway.

“I don’t know where Dermot’s gone. In fact, I think he might have been planning this for a while. I feel such an idiot—and what’s more, I think he put Jurisfiction onto me. You won’t tell them, will you?”

“Not yet, but I will. You can’t set fire to people—nuns or otherwise—and expect to get away with it.”

“I know,” he said sadly. “It weighs heavily on my conscience. The yapping, oh, the
yapping
.”

I sat in silence for a moment. The thing about backstories is that once you’ve taken one on, they’re true and real, irrespective of who owned them before you. You could pass it on, of course, but it was understandably tricky. Who wants a busload of burning nuns and puppies on his conscience?

“So what do you want?” I asked.

“I just wanted to see you,” he said simply, “and hear your voice.”

“Well, now you have,” I replied, a bit more harshly than perhaps I should have. “Maybe we should say good-bye.”

“I’m living over in Hemingway if you need anything,” he said, not wanting to give up on the slimmest chance a date was still possible. “Page 127,
To Have and Have Not
. If you need anything, just whistle. You can drop me on this corner, driver.”

The cabbie pulled up, and Whitby got out. He told me to take care and then hurried off around a street corner. The taxi moved on, and I slumped back into my seat as we turned onto Austen Boulevard. I thought of turning him in, then of not turning him in. It was a tricky call, but luckily the least of my worries.

I wasn’t feeling that good about the trip, to be honest. A nervy, sickly feeling was festering in the pit of my stomach—and not just from the difficulty of making the move across, or what I might find there or the truth about
The Murders on the Hareng Rouge.
Notwithstanding the recent developments with Whitby, I was most worried about meeting Landen. He was the man I was written to love and never meet. And now I was going to meet him.

I
turned up at the front gate of
Sense and Sensibility
and showed the guards the authorization given to me by Bradshaw. The guards rang through and spoke briefly to JurisTech before I was once more issued a docket and ushered in. I met the frog-footman at the front door, who was surprised to see me again so soon.

“You again?” he said, staring at the docket. “What do you want with JurisTech?”

Fortified by the mission entrusted to me by Bradshaw, I was no longer so frightened of him.

“None of your business,” I replied, and his face lit up. This was more how he liked it.

“Labs or office?”

“Labs.”

He guided me though the long corridors of Norland Park, down several flights of steps and an elevator or two before we stopped outside an inconspicuous door with a pair of milk bottles outside.

“The JurisTech Labs,” announced the frog-footman. “My instructions are to wait for you.”

“It’ll be a long wait. Pick me up in twelve hours. Here,” I said, handing him a Rubik’s Cube. “See if you can figure this out.”

The frog-footman stared at the cube curiously. All six faces were quite naturally the same color, and all was orderly and neat.

“You have to try to make it random,” I said, “by twisting the faces.”

The frog-footman twisted the faces in a fairly haphazard manner, but try as he might, every face remained the same color. For a BookWorld puzzle, it was a classic. The lack of randomness within the orderly structure of the BookWorld tended not to permit disorder. As far as I knew, no one had yet managed to scramble a Rubik’s, but I thought it might pass the time for him.

“Thank you,” replied the frog-footman, and he sat crosslegged on the floor, twisting the cube this way and that as he tried to scramble the faces.

I knocked on the door, and it was soon answered by a small man in a brown boiler suit that was liberally covered in oil stains, food and science merit badges.

“Good Lord!” he said when he saw me. “Thursday? Come inside quick.”

Once safely away from the prying ears of the frog-footman, I explained who I was—or, more important, who I wasn’t—and showed Professor Plum the authorization from Bradshaw.

“Did he give you a code word?”

“What?”

“A code word.”

“The commander didn’t say anything about a code word.”

“Correct. There is no code word—but only Bradshaw would know that. Follow me.”

The basement was twice the size of a cathedral and quite full to capacity with machinery. An army of technicians scurried around looking purposeful while lights blinked on and off as arcs of electricity discharged into the air at regular intervals.

“That’s mostly for effect,” explained Plum as we moved among the machines. “It’s sometimes of equal importance to have a machine’s form and function in equilibrium. Who wants an italicizer that can be carried around in the pocket? Much better to have a large device that flashes lights randomly and occasionally goes bzzz.”

I agreed, even if I’d never
seen
an italicizer, much less
used
one.

“All this technology,” I mused. “Is there any limit to what you can do?”

“If there is, we haven’t found it,” replied Plum. “We can figure out most technologies, and those that we can’t are subcontracted to Technobabble™ Industries, which can usually cobble something together. The good thing about being in the BookWorld is that we aren’t hampered by anything as awkward as physical laws. The RealWorld must be hideously annoying to do science in, but given how difficult it is, I suppose breakthroughs are of greater value. In here, for example, perpetual-motion machines are quite feasible.”

“What’s stopping us from using them?”

“Finding a way to make them
stop
. Once we’ve figured that out, we’ll have perpetual engines in every minicab and bus in the BookWorld.”

He paused while I stared at a machine that could transform dark humor to sarcasm and then back again with no loss of narrative mass.

“As you know,” continued Plum, “the Council of Genres permits us to suspend the rules of physics in order that we can develop the somewhat unique technologies that the BookWorld requires. See this?”

We had stopped next to a large machine that seemed to be nothing but a riveted tube about a yard thick running through the entire length of the workshop. It appeared through one wall and then vanished out the other. If I hadn’t known any better, I would have thought it a throughput pipe or a footnoterphone conduit.

“This is just a small part of the Large Metaphor Collider.”

“What does that do?”

Professor Plum stopped for a moment at the control panel. “You know we’ve got a serious metaphor deficit at present?”

I nodded. The problem was well documented. Most of Fiction’s rhetorical power, dramatic irony and pathos were brought naturally by the mighty Metaphoric River that snaked about the island. But the huge influx of novels in the past century had exacted a burden on the waterway as the much-needed metaphor was abstracted on a massive scale, and these days it was no longer considered possible that the river could supply all of Fiction’s requirements, hence the trade in raw metaphor and JurisTech’s attempts to synthesize it.

“This collider,” continued Professor Plum, “will take depleted metaphor—simile, in effect—and accelerate it in a circular trackway over eighteen miles long to a velocity approaching ninety-five percent of absurd, at which point it will be collided with indisputable fact. There is a brief flash of energy as the two different modes of communication are fused together and then explode in a burst of high-energy subcomprehension particles. We then record the event as traces on a sheet of onionskin paper.”

“The flimsy blue variety?”

“
Exactly
. In this manner we hope not only to figure out the individual building blocks of STORY in order to have a better understanding of how it all works but also to use it as a way of extracting usable quantities of metaphor from even the most prosaic, tired or clumsily constructed simile.”

“Does it work?”

“I was just about to test it. You can help if you want.”

I said I would be delighted, and Plum pointed me in the direction of a lidded crucible that was steaming gently to itself.

“You’ll find some tongs and gloves over there—I need that simile in the accelerator chamber.”

He carried on with his measurements. The crucible was steaming not from heat but from cold. Liquid nitrogen was keeping a raw simile in an inactive state. So much so that I couldn’t tell what it was, as the meaning and illusion were all contracted and frozen into one lump. I put on the glove and, using the wooden pincers, placed the simile in the acceleration chamber.