First Among Sequels

20. The Austen Rover

In the center of the room and looking resplendent in the blue-and-yellow livery of some long-forgotten bus company was a flat-fronted single-decker bus that to my mind dated from the fifties. Something my mother, in her long-forgotten and now much-embellished youth, might have boarded for a trip to the seaside, equipped with hampers of food and gallons of ice cream. Aside from the anachronistic feel, the most obvious feature of the bus was that the wheels had been removed and the voids covered over to give the vague appearance of streamlining. Clearly, it wasn’t the only modification. The vehicle in front of me now was probably the most advanced piece of transport technology known to man.

“Why base it on an old bus?” I asked.

John Henry shrugged. “If you’re going to travel, do it in style. Besides, a Rolls-Royce Phantom II doesn’t have enough seats.”

We walked down to the workshop floor, and I took a closer look. On both sides at the rear of the bus and on the roof were small faired outriggers that each held a complicated engine with which I was not familiar. The tight-fitting cowlings had been removed, and the engines were being worked on by white-coated technicians who had stopped what they were doing as soon as we walked in but now resumed their tinkering with a buzz of muted whispers. I moved closer to the front of the bus and ran my fingers across the Leyland badge atop the large and very prominent radiator. I looked up. Above the vertically split front windshield was a glass-covered panel that once told prospective passengers the ultimate destination of the bus. I expected it to read BOURNEMOUTH or PORTSMOUTH but it didn’t. It read NORTHANGER ABBEY.

I looked at John Henry Goliath, who said, “This, Ms. Next, is the Austen Rover-the most advanced piece of transfictional technology in the world!”

“Does it work?” I asked.

“We’re not entirely sure,” remarked John Henry. “It’s the prototype and has yet to be tested.”

He beckoned to the technician who seemed to be in charge and introduced us.

“This is Dr. Anne Wirthlass, the project manager of the Austen Rover. She will answer any questions you have-I hope perhaps you will answer some of ours?”

I made a noncommittal noise, and Wirthlass gave me a hand to shake. She was tall, willowy and walked with a rolling gait. Like everyone in the lab, she wore a white coat with her Goliath ID badge affixed to it, and although I could not see her precise laddernumber, she was certainly within four figures-the top 1 percent. Seriously important.

“I’m pleased to meet you at last,” she said in a Swedish accent. “We have much to learn from your experience.”

“If you know anything about me,” I responded, “you’ll know exactly why it is that I don’t trust Goliath.”

“Ah!” she said, somewhat taken aback. “I thought we’d left those days behind us.”

“I’ll need convincing,” I returned without malice. It wasn’t her fault, after all. I indicated the tour bus. “How does it work?”

She looked at John Henry, who nodded his permission.

“The Austen Rover is a standard Leyland Tiger PS2/3 under a Burlingham body,” she began, touching the shiny coachwork fondly, “but with a few…modifications. Come aboard.”

She stepped up into the bus, and I followed her. The interior had been stripped and replaced with the very latest technology, which she attempted to explain in the sort of technical language where it is possible to understand only one word in eight, if you’re lucky. I came off the bus ten minutes later having absorbed not much more than the fact that it had twelve seats, carried a small thirty-megawatt fusion device in the rear and couldn’t be tested-its first trip would be either an utter failure or a complete success, nothing in between.

“And the probes?”

“Yes, indeed,” replied Wirthlass. “We’ve been using a form of gravity-wave inducer to catapult a small probe into fiction on a one-minute free-return trajectory-think of it as a very large yo-yo. We aimed them at the Dune series, because it was a large and very wordy target that was probably somewhere near the heart of Science Fiction, and after seven hundred and ninety-six subfictional flights we hit pay dirt: The probe returned with a twenty-eight-second audiovisual recording of Paul Atreides riding a sandworm.”

“When was this?” I asked.

“In 1996. We fared better after that and by a system of trial and error have managed to figure out that individual books seem to be clumped together in groups. We’ve started plotting a map-I’ll show you if you like.”

We walked into a room next door that seemed to be filled to capacity with computers and their operators.

“How many probe missions have you sent?”

“About seventy thousand,” said John Henry, who had followed us. “Most come back without recording anything, and over eight thousand never return at all. In total we have had four hundred and twenty successful missions. As you can see, getting into fiction for us is at present a somewhat haphazard affair. The Austen Rover is ready for its first trip-but by simple extrapolation of the probe figures, every journey has a one-in-eight chance of not returning, and only a one-in-one-hundred-and-sixty possibility of hitting something.”

I could see what they were up against-and why. They were hurling probes into a BookWorld that was 80 percent Nothing. The thing was, I could pretty much draw from memory a genre map of the BookWorld. With my help they might actually make it.

“This is the BookWorld as we think it exists,” explained John Henry, laying out a large sheet of paper on a desk. It was patchy in the extreme and full of errors. It was a bit like throwing Ping-Pong balls into a dark furniture store and then trying to list the contents by the noises they made.

“This will take you a long time to figure out,” I murmured.

“Time that we don’t really have, Ms. Next. Despite my position as president, even I have to concede that the amount spent will never be recouped. All funding for this project will be withdrawn in a week.”

It was the first time I’d felt any sort of relief since I arrived. The idea of Goliath’s even setting so much as a toe inside fiction filled me with utter dread. But one question still niggled at me.

“Why?”

“I’m sorry?” said John Henry.

“Why are you trying to get into fiction at all?”

“Book tourism,” he replied simply. “The Austen Rover was designed to take twelve people around the high points of Jane Austen’s work. At five hundred pounds for a twenty-minute hop around the most-loved works, we thought at the time it would be quite profitable. Mind you, that was nine years ago, when people were still reading books.”

“We thought it might reinvigorate the classics,” added Wirthlass.

“And your interest in the classics?”

It was John Henry who answered. “We feel that publishing in general and books in par tic ular are well worth hanging on to.”

“You’ll excuse me if I’m not convinced by your supposed altruism.”

“No altruism, Ms. Next. The fall in revenue of our publishing arm has been dramatic, and since we own little in the way of computer games or consoles, the low ReadRate is something that affects us financially. I think you’ll find that we’re together on this one. What we want is what you want. Even though our past associations have not been happy and I understand your distrust, Goliath in its reborn shape is not quite the all-devouring corporation that you think it is.”

“I haven’t been in the BookWorld since the days of The Eyre Affair.”

John Henry coughed politely. “You knew about the probes, Ms. Next.”

Damn.

“I have…contacts over there.”

I could tell they didn’t believe me, but that was tough. I’d seen enough.

“Looks like you’ve wasted a lot of money,” I said.

“With or without you, we’re going to test it on Friday evening,” announced Wirthlass. “I and two others have decided to risk all and take her out for a spin. We may not return, but if we do, then the data gained would be priceless!”

I admired her courage, but it didn’t matter-I wasn’t going to tell them what I knew.

“Just explain one thing,” said Wirthlass. “Is the force of gravity entirely normal in the BookWorld?”

“What about the universality of physical laws?” piped up a second technician, who’d been watching us.

“And communication between books-is such a thing possible?”

Before long there were eight people, all asking questions about the BookWorld that I could have answered with ease-had I any inclination to do so.

“I’m sorry,” I said as the questions reached a crescendo. “I can’t help you!”

They were all quiet and stared at me. To them this project was everything, and to see its cancellation without fruition was clearly a matter of supreme frustration-especially as they suspected I had the answers.

I made my way toward the exit and was joined by John Henry, who had not yet given up trying to charm me.

“Will you stay for lunch? We have the finest chefs available to make what ever you want.”

“I run a carpet shop, Mr. Goliath, and I’m late for work.”

“A carpet shop?” he echoed with incredulity. “That sells carpets?”

“All sorts of floor coverings, actually.”

“I would offer you discounted carpets for life in order for you to help us,” he said, “but from what I know of you, such a course would be unthinkable. My private Dakota is at Douglas Graviport if you want to use it to fly straight home. I ask for nothing but say only this: We are doing this for the preservation and promotion of books and reading. Try to find it in your heart to consider what we are doing here in an objective light.”

We had by now walked outside the building, and John Henry’s Bentley pulled up in front of us.

“My car is yours. Good day, Ms. Next.”

“Good day, Mr. Goliath.”

He shook my hand and then departed. I looked at the Bentley and then at the ranks of cabs a little way down the road. I shrugged and climbed in the back of the Bentley.

“Where to, madam?” asked the driver.

I thought quickly. I had my TravelBook on me and could jump to the Great Library from here-as long as I could find a quiet spot conducive to bookjumping.

“The nearest library,” I told him. “I’m late for work.”

“You’re a librarian?” he inquired politely.

“Let’s just say I’m really into books.”