One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (34 page)

“Oh?”

“Yes. You told me that my assignment with you would be of the utmost secrecy. Look at my study—ransacked!”

“Ah,” I said, glancing around, “I am most dreadfully sorry, Sir Charles. This was done after we came back from . . . ?”

“An afterlifetime’s work
ruined
,” he said in a much-aggrieved tone. “I am most displeased. Good Lord. Who is that mechanical man with the curiously emotive eyebrow?”

“My butler, Sir Charles. You have no objection?”

He stared at Sprockett curiously. “When I was alive, I pursued the advancement of scientific truth with all passion—I am afraid to say that I am at odds to explain Fiction, which often seems to have no basis in logic at all.”

“Some enjoy it precisely for that reason.”

“You may be right. Can he tidy?”

“We can both tidy, Sir Charles.”

And we started to pick up the papers.

“It is most unfortunate,” remarked Sir Charles, “after we had done all that work together.
Most
unfortunate.”

I suddenly felt worried. “Our work together?”

“The report!” he muttered. “All the maps, notes, core samples, graphs, analysis—stolen!”

“Sir Charles,” I said, “this might seem an odd request, but can you go over what was in the report?”

“Again?”

“Again.”

He blinked owlishly at me. “Over tea, Miss Next. First we must . . . tidy.”

“Sir Charles,” I said in a more emphatic tone, “you must tell me what was in the report, and
now
!”

He frowned at me. “As you wish. All that metaphor—”

He didn’t have time to finish his sentence. With a tremendous crash, the door was pushed off its hinges, and two Men in Plaid entered. From door to death was scarcely less than fifteen seconds, and much happened. Sprockett was between us and the MiP, and he valiantly made a lunge for the intruders. The first Plaid was quicker and before we knew it had popped Sprockett’s inspection panel and pressed his emergency spring release. In an instant the butler fell lifeless. Before Sprockett hit the floor, the Plaid had advanced, knocked my pistol from my grasp and pushed me sideways. As I lay sprawling, the second Man in Plaid picked up Sir Charles and threw him bodily out the window, while the first Plaid moved towards me, his expressionless eyes boring into mine like a pair of gimlets. We’d just killed six of their compatriots; I didn’t think there was much room for negotiation.

I quickly scrambled across the floor and was grabbed by my foot. I wriggled out of my boot, and it was this, I think, that saved us. The Man in Plaid was put off balance and gave me the split second I needed to find my pistol. Without hesitation I turned and fired. There was a
whompa
noise, and the air wobbled as the Cherry Fondue hit home. With an agonizing scream of pain, the Man in Plaid exploded into not graphemes but the infinitely more painful
words,
many of which embedded themselves into the woodwork like shards of glass. The blast caught the second Man in Plaid and cut him in two. He fell to the floor with a heavy thump, the lower half of him spilling cogs, springs and brass actuating rods onto the floor.

“You’re robotic?” I said, moving closer. The Man in Plaid was moving his arms in a feeble manner, and his eyes followed me as I approached. He was still functioning, but it was clear he was damaged well beyond economic repair. He looked as though he was out of warranty, too.

“You are impressive, Miss Next,” he managed to say. “A worthy adversary.”

“Who sent you?”

“I don’t answer questions. I ask them.”

I noticed I was shaking. I retrieved my boot and walked to the broken window. Lying on the grass four stories below was Sir Charles. The heavy impact had caused the binding matrix of his body to become fused to the ground, and he was beginning to merge with the lawn. I could see several people staring up and pointing, first at me and then at the remains of Sir Charles. We didn’t have long before someone called Jurisfaction. Lyell could be rewritten, but these things take time and money, and Biography’s budget was tighter than ours.

Sprockett was lying flat on his face in an undignified manner, and I quickly rewound him. As soon as his gyros, thought cogs and speech diaphragm were back to speed, he sat up.

“I’ve had the most peculiar dream,” he told me, his eyebrow clicking through each emotion in turn and then back again, “about being caught by my mother oiling a Mark III Ford Capri in an ‘inappropriate’ manner.”

“I didn’t know you had a mother.”

“I don’t—that’s what was so peculiar.”

“See what you can get out of him,” I said, pointing to the damaged Man in Plaid. “I’m going to have a look around.”

I didn’t waste any time and hunted through the remains of Lyell’s study to see what—if anything—had been left behind. The short answer was not much, until I went through the wastepaper basket and came across a pencil sketch of Racy Novel with WomFic on one side and Dogma on the other. A rough outline of the geology had been sketched in, and for the most part the strata were more or less identical beneath all the genres, except for a shaded patch the shape of a tailless salmon that seemed to be mostly beneath Racy Novel. I returned to where Sprockett had been talking with the badly damaged Plaid.

“He’s a Duplex-6,” said Sprockett with a sense of deep respect. “I was wondering why they managed to stay on our tail so easily during the Oversize Books section.”

“Who is he working for?”

“He won’t tell us, but it’s of no matter—the Duplex automaton’s memories are recorded on punched tape. We can have it read.”

“So remove his tape and let’s get out of here.”

In reply the Duplex-6 took a large brass key from his jacket pocket and inserted it into the socket in the base of his neck. We could see he was almost run down, and before we could stop him, he had started to turn the key.

“Good Lord,” said Sprockett. “The Duplex-6 has a self-wind capability.”

Sprockett tried to stop the damaged Man in Plaid from winding himself up, but the 6’s superior strength was too much, and we watched with increased hopelessness as the Plaid’s tension indicator neared the red line.

“We’re leaving,” said Sprockett, and without waiting for a reply he took me by the hand and we ran to the bathroom window and out the fire escape at the back of the building.

We were two flights down when the Duplex-6’s mainspring finally ruptured in an almighty outburst of stored mechanical energy. There was a loud
twuuung
noise, and the shattered remains of the Man in Plaid erupted out the windows of Lyell’s apartment. We were showered with minute cogs, sprockets, bevel gears, and dogs, chains, pushrods and actuators.

“A self-winding capability,” said Sprockett, who was obviously deeply impressed. “I wonder if they would retrofit that feature for us Duplex-5s?”

W
e dodged Jurisfaction officers for two hours and eventually negotiated a ride home aboard a copy of the recently discredited
President Formby War Diaries
, which was on a one-way trip to Historical Counterfactuals.

“May I be so bold,” said Sprockett once we had landed and were on the train heading back towards Fantasy and home, “as to inquire about our next move?”

“Placating an angry Carmine, I should imagine—I’ve been away a lot these past few days. After that we’ll have to recover anything Horace has stolen again, put up with petulant huffing and tutting from Pickwick—and my dopey father will be complaining about something, I shouldn’t wonder.”

“I was referring to Racy Novel, ma’am. Should you call Commander Bradshaw again?”

I’d asked myself the same question on the way back from Biography. I’d spoken to him briefly while on board the
World Hotel Review
. He had expressed surprise and alarm about the Men in Plaid and had also checked out Mediocre’s address and reported back to us no sign of metaphor—in bridges or otherwise. Unwisely, I had told him we were going on to Biography, and now I didn’t know if I could trust him or not.

“He might have tipped off the Men in Plaid,” I said after airing my thoughts, “or he simply might be having his footnoterphone messages read in transit.”

It wasn’t hard, apparently. All you needed do was to sit in the footnoterphone ducts and read the messages as they flitted past.

“Even if he is on the level,” I added, “it’s not like we have any answers or evidence—just a geologist out to grass and a rough sketch of the strata beneath the northern part of Fiction.”

Sprockett nodded agreement.

“But,” I added, “we know that Thursday would have been working to avert war at the peace talks. If she
was
silenced, the attacks by the Men in Plaid would seem to implicate the Council of Genres, but the CofG want to avoid a war, not start one. It was Senator Jobsworth
himself
who wanted me to go to the peace talks tomorrow. The only person we know who seems to actually welcome war is Speedy Muffler.”

“Would he have access to Duplex-6 automatons that could be made to look like Men in Plaid?” asked Sprockett.

“Duplex will sell to anyone with the cash, but the Council’s strict sales embargoes are hard to circumvent. Not impossible, but hard.”

“What about Red Herring, ma’am?”

“I’m not sure. Is Red Herring a red herring? Or is it the fact that we’re meant to
think
Red Herring is a red herring that is actually the red herring?”

“Or perhaps the fact you’re meant to think Red Herring
isn’t
a red herring is what makes Red Herring a red herring after all.”

“We’re talking serious metaherrings here. Oh, crap, I’m lost again. Who’s talking now?”

“It’s you,” said Sprockett.

“Right.”

“Whatever is going on,” I said, “it’s big.
Really
big. If it’s big enough to risk killing Thursday Next, destroying a book and subverting the Men in Plaid from their usual duties of frightening the citizenry to the more specific duty of frightening
individual
citizens, then there is no limit to what they might do. We need to keep our eyes open at all times.”

 

We took a cab from Le Guin Central and, deep in thought, walked up to the house. I had my hand on the butt of my pistol, just in case. I needn’t have worried. Men in Plaid were never seen without their Buick Roadmasters, and the driveway was empty. I opened the front door and found a dozen members of the cast sitting around the kitchen table.

“Hello,” I said, somewhat surprised. “Have we got a cast meeting scheduled for this evening?”

“We have now,” replied Carmine.

My eyes flicked from face to face, and they seemed very serious. Most of the major players were there—my father, Bowden, Hades, Jack Schitt, Braxton, Rochester, Paige Turner, Joffy, Stig, Victor Analogy, my mother and even Bertha Rochester, although she had been put in a straitjacket in the event she tried to bite anyone.

“What’s going on?”

“You’ve been acting a bit irresponsibly recently,” said Carmine, “running around the BookWorld, pretending to be her. You’ve been neglecting your duties. I’ve been covering for you far more than is written in my contract, and only yesterday you were shouting at us all.”

“I’ve had things on my mind,” I replied by way of excuse, “
important
things.”

“So
you
say. To the casual outside observer, you’re simply getting delusions of adequacy. Play a strong character for too long and it tends to have an unhinging effect.”

“And today,” said Bowden in an annoying “I told you so” sort of voice, “you were threatening to tell the Outland all about the BookWorld. There’s a good reason the real Thursday never put that part of the story in her books, you know.”

“I admit I might have gone too far on that point,” I conceded, but I could see they didn’t believe me.

“None of us are happy,” said my father, “and we feel you might be leading the series into disrepute. If the book gets punished for your transgressions, then every one of us has to suffer. Punish one, punish all. You know how it works.”

I did, far too well. To keep books in line, the entire cast is often disciplined for the misdeeds of one. It generated a certain degree of conformity within the cast—and a lot of ill feeling.

“So what are you saying?” I asked.

My father nudged Bowden, who nudged Victor, who nudged Acheron Hades.

“We’re saying,” said Hades slowly, “that we might need to make some . . .
changes
.”

“Changes? What sorts of changes?”

“Changes in leadership.”

“You want to have me fired? You can’t do that.”

“In point of fact,” piped up Pickwick, “we can. Article 218 of the Textual Code states, ‘If the nominated leader of a book acts in an unlawful or reckless manner that might affect the smooth operation of a book, he or she can be removed by a simple show of hands.’”

There was a deathly hush as they waited to see what I would say.

“The series is operating smoothly. It will be hard to prove recklessness on my part.”

“We don’t need to,” replied Carmine. “We need only prove unlawfulness.”

“And how would you do that?”

“The Toast Marketing Board subplot.
Totally
illegal. You wrote out the new pages in your own handwriting.”