Джаспер Ффорде: One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

“Did they ever find out why Hrah exploded?” asked Whitby.

“It was never fully explained,” put in Ivanovna, “but traces of Semtex were discovered in her shin guards, so foul play could never be ruled out entirely. A grudge match is always a lot of fu—”

Her voice was abruptly cut dead, but not in the way one’s is when one has suddenly stopped speaking. Her voice was clipped, like a gap in a recording.

“Hello?” I said.

The three Russians made no answer and were simply staring into space, like mannequins. After a moment they started to lose facial definition as they became a series of complex irregular polyhedra. After a while the number of facets of the polyhedra started to lessen, and the Russians became less like people and more like jagged, flesh-colored lumps. Pretty soon they were nothing at all. The Classics were being shut down, and if Text Grand Central was doing it alphabetically, Fantasy would not be far behind. And so it proved. I looked at Whitby, who gave me a wan smile and held my hand. The room grew cold, then dark, and before long the only world that I knew started to disassemble in front of my eyes. Everything grew flatter and lost its form, and pretty soon I began to feel my memory fade. And just when I was starting to worry, everything was cleansed to an all-consuming darkness.

#shutting down imaginotransference engines, 46,802

readers

#active reader states have been cached

#dismounting READ OS 8.3.6

#start programs

#check and mount specified dictionaries

#check and mount specified thesauri

#check and mount specified idiomatic database

#check and mount specified grammatical database

#check and mount specified character database

#check and mount specified settings database

Mount temporary ISBN/BISAC/duodecimal book category

system

Mount imaginotransference throughput module

Accessing “book index” on global bus

Creating cache for primary plot-development module

Creating /ramdisk in “story interpretation,”

default size=300

Creating directories: irony

Creating directories: humor

Creating directories: plot

Creating directories: character

Creating directories: atmosphere

Creating directories: prose

Creating directories: pace

Creating directories: pathos

Starting init process

#display imaginotransference-engine error messages

#recovering active readers from cache

System message=Welcome to Geographic Operating

System 1.2

Setting control terminal to automatic

System active with 46,802 active readers

“Thursday?”

I opened my eyes and blinked. I was lying on the sofa staring up at Whitby, who had a concerned expression on his face.

“Are you okay?”

I sat up and rubbed my head. “How long was I out?”

“Eleven minutes,”

I looked around. “And the Russians?”

“Outside.”

“There is no outside.”

He smiled. “There is now. Come and have a look.”

I stood up and noticed for the first time that my living room seemed that little bit more realistic. The colors were subtler, and the walls had an increased level of texture. More interestingly, the room seemed to be brighter, and there was light coming in through the windows. It was real light, too, the sort that casts shadows and not the pretend stuff we were used to. I grasped the handle, opened the front door and stepped outside.

The empty interbook Nothing that had separated the novels and genres had been replaced by fields, hills, rivers, trees and forests, and all around me the countryside opened out into a series of expansive vistas with the welcome novelty of distance. We were now in the southeast corner of an island perhaps a hundred miles by fifty and bounded on all sides by the Text Sea, which had been elevated to “Grade IV Picturesque” status by the addition of an azure hue and a soft, billowing motion that made the text shimmer in the breeze.

As I looked around, I realized that whoever had remade the BookWorld had considered practicalities as much as aesthetics. Unlike the RealWorld, which is inconveniently located on the outside of a sphere, the new BookWorld was anchored on the inside of a sphere, thus ensuring that horizons worked in the opposite way to those in RealWorld. Farther objects were higher in the visual plane than nearer ones. From anywhere in the BookWorld, it was possible to view anywhere else. I noticed, too, that we were not alone. Stuck on the inside of the sphere were hundreds of other islands very similar to our own, and each a haven for a category of literature therein.

About ten degrees upslope of Fiction, I could see our nearest neighbor: Artistic Criticism. It was an exceptionally beautiful island, yet deeply troubled, confused and suffused with a blanketing layer of almost impenetrable bullshit. Beyond that were Psychology, Philately, and Software Manuals. But the brightest and biggest archipelago I could see upon the closed sea was the scattered group of genres that made up Nonfiction. They were positioned right on the other side of the inner globe and so were almost directly overhead. On one side of the island the Cliffs of Irrationality were slowly being eroded away, while on the opposite shore the Sands of Science were slowly reclaiming salt marsh from the sea.

While I stared upwards, openmouthed, a steady stream of books moved in an endless multilayered crisscross high in the sky. But these weren’t books of the small paper-and-leather variety that one might find in the Outland. These were the collected settings of the book all bolted together and connected by a series of walkways and supporting beams, cables and struts. They didn’t look so much like books, in fact, but more like a series of spiky lumps. While some one-room dramas were no bigger than a double-decker bus and zipped across the sky, others moved slowly enough for us to wave at the occupants, who waved back. As we stood watching our new world, the master copy of Doctor Zhivago passed overhead, blotting out the light and covering us in a light dusting of snow.

“What do you think?” asked Whitby.

“O brave new world,” I whispered as I gave him a hug, “that has such stories in’t!”

My father had a face that could stop a clock. I don’t mean that he was ugly or anything; it was a phrase that the Chrono-Guard used to describe someone who had the power to arrest time to an ultraslow trickle—and that’s exactly what happened one morning as I was having a late breakfast in a small café quite near where I worked. The world flickered, shuddered and stopped. The barman of the café froze to a halt in midsentence, and the picture on the television stopped dead. Outside, birds hung motionless in the sky. The sound halted, too, replaced by a dull snapshot of a hum, the world’s noise at that moment in time paused indefinitely at the same pitch and volume.