Джаспер Ффорде: One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

“I used to keep a scrapbook of the real Thursday Next.”

“If you’re here to catch a glimpse of her, it’s unlikely. She dropped in once soon after the remaking, but not since then.”

“I’m really just after the work, Miss Next.”

She handed me her CV. It wasn’t long, nor particularly impressive. She was from an original manuscript sitting abandoned in a drawer somewhere in the Outland. She would have handled loss, love, uncertainty and a corkingly good betrayal. It looked like it might have been a good gig. But after fifteen years and not a single reader, it was time to move on.

“So . . . why do you want to work in my series?”

“I’m eager to enter a new and stimulating phase of my career,” she said brightly, “and I need a challenging and engaging book in which I can learn from a true professional.”

It was the usual bullshit, and it didn’t wash.

“You could get a read anywhere,” I said, handing back the CV, “so why come to the speculative end of Fantasy?”

She bit her lip and stared at me.

“I’ve only ever been read by one person at a time,” she confessed. “I took a short third-person locum inside a Reader’s Digest version of Don Quixote as Dulcinea two weeks ago. I had a panic attack when the read levels went over twenty-six and went for the Snooze.”

I heard Mrs. Malaprop drop a teacup in the kitchen. I was shocked, too. The Snooze Button was reserved only for dire emergencies. Once it was utilized, a reverse throughput capacitor on the imaginotransference engines would cause the reader instantaneous yawning, drowsiness and then sleep. Quick, simple—and the readers suspected nothing.

“You hit Snooze?”

“I was stopped before I did.”

“I’m very relieved.”

“Me, too. Rocinante had to take over my part—played her rather well, actually.”

“Did the Don notice? Rocinante playing you, I mean?”

“No.”

Carmine was just what I was looking for. Overqualified understudies rarely stayed long, but what with her being severely readerphobic, the low ReadRates would suit her down to the ground. I was mildly concerned over her eagerness to hit Snooze. To discourage misuse, every time the button was pressed, one or more kittens were put to death somewhere in the BookWorld. It was rarely used.

“Okay,” I said, “you’re hired. One caveat: You don’t get the Snooze Button access codes. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

“Excellent. How much reading time do you have?”

“Aside from my own book, I’ve got eighty-seven pages.”

It was a lamentably small amount. A single quizzical reader hunting for obscure hidden meanings would have her in a stammering flat spin in a second.

“Get your coat and a notebook,” I said. “We’re going to go greet our new neighbors—and have a chat.”

After taking a pager off the counter so Mrs. Malaprop could reach me in case a reader turned up unexpectedly, we stepped out of the main gate and walked down the street. The remade Geographic BookWorld was as its name suggested—geographic—and the neighborhoods were laid out like those in an Outland housing estate. A single road ran down between the books, with sidewalks, grass verges, syntax hydrants and trees. To the left and right were compounds that contained entire novels with all their settings. In one was a half-scale Kilimanjaro, and in another a bamboo plantation. In a third an electrical storm at full tilt.

“We’re right on the edge of Fantasy,” I explained. “Straight ahead is Human Drama, and to your right is Comedy. I’ll give you Wednesdays off, but I expect you to be on standby most of the time.”

“The more first-person time I can put in,” replied Carmine, “the better. Is there anything to do around here when I’m off-duty, by the way?”

“If Fantasy is your thing,” I said, “plenty. Moving cross-genre is not recommended, as the border guards can get jumpy, and it will never do to be caught in another genre just when you’re needed. Oh, and don’t do anything that my dodo might disapprove of.”

“Such as what?”

“The list is long. Here we are.”

We had arrived on the top of a low rise where there was a convenient park bench. From this vantage point, we could see most of Fiction Island.

“That’s an impressive sight,” said Carmine.

There was no aerial haze in the BookWorld, and because the island was mildly dished where it snuggled against the interior of the sphere, we could see all the way to the disputed border between Racy Novel and Women’s Fiction in the far north of the island, and beyond that the unexplored Dismal Woods.

“That’s the Metaphoric River,” I explained, pointing out the sinuous bends of the waterway whose many backwaters, bayous, streams and rivulets brought narrative ambiguity and unnecessarily lengthy words to the millions of books that had made their home in the river’s massive delta. “To the east of Racy Novel is Outdated Religious Dogma.”

“Shouldn’t that be in Nonfiction?” asked Carmine.

“It’s a contentious issue. It was removed from Theology on the grounds that the theories had become ‘untenable in a modern context’ and ‘were making us look medieval.’”

“And that island off the coast of Dogma?” she asked, pointing to a craggy island partially obscured by cloud.

“The smaller of the two is Sick Notes, and the larger is Lies, Self-Delusion and Excuses You Can Use to Justify Poor Behavior. South of Dogma is Horror, then Fantasy, with Adventure and Science Fiction dominating the south coast.”

“I’ll never remember all that.”

I handed her my much-thumbed copy of Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion. “Use this,” I said, showing her the foldout map section and train timetables. “I’ve got the new edition on order.”

Whilst we had been sitting there, the recently evicted book had been unbolted by a team of Worker Danvers.

“ Raphael’s Walrus has been unread for over two years,” I explained, “so it’s off to the narrative doldrums of the suburbs. Not necessarily permanent, of course—a resurgence of interest could bring it back into the more desirable neighborhoods in an instant.”

“How come your series is still here?” she asked, then put her hand over her mouth. “Sorry, was that indelicate of me?”

“No, most people ask that. The Text Grand Central Mapping Committee keeps us here out of respect.”

“For you?”

“No—for the real Thursday Next.”

A smattering of soil and pebbles descended to earth as Raphael’s Walrus rose into the air, the self-sealing throughput and feedback conduits giving off faint puffs of word vapor as they snapped shut. This was how the new Geographic BookWorld worked. Books arrived, books left, and the boundaries of the various genres snaked forwards and backwards about the land, reflecting the month-to-month popularity of the various genres. The Crime genre was always relatively large, as were Comedy, Fantasy and Science Fiction. Horror had gotten a boost recently with the burgeoning Urban Vampires sector, while some of the lesser-known genres had shrunk to almost nothing. Squid Action/Adventure was deleted quite recently, and Sci-Fi Horse Detective looked surely set to follow.