First Among Sequels

21. Holmes

A few minutes and several pints of rehydrating water later, I walked into the Jurisfiction offices at Norland Park. Thursday5 was waiting for me by my desk, looking decidedly pleased with herself.

“Guess what!” she enthused.

“I have no idea.”

“Go on, guess!”

“I don’t want to guess,” I told her, hoping the tedium in my voice would send out a few warning bells. It didn’t.

“No, you must guess!”

“Okay,” I sighed. “You’ve got some new beads or something.”

“Wrong,” she said, producing a paper bag with a flourish. “I got you the bacon roll you wanted!”

“I never would have guessed that,” I replied, sitting before a desk that seemed to be flooded with new memos and reports, adding, in an unthinking moment, “How are things with you?”

“I didn’t sleep very well last night.”

I rubbed my forehead as she sat down and stared at me intently, hands clasped nervously in front of her. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that my inquiry over her health was merely politeness. I didn’t actually want to know. Quite the reverse, in fact.

“Really?” I said, trying to find a memo that might be vaguely relevant to something.

“No. I was thinking about the Minotaur incident yesterday, and I want to apologize-again.”

“It’s past history. Any messages?”

“So I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted. Now: Any messages?”

“I wrote you a letter outlining my apology.”

“I won’t read it. The matter is closed.”

“Yes…well…right,” she began, flustered that we weren’t going to analyze the previous day at length and trying to remember everything she’d been told that morning. “Mr. Buñuel called to say that he’d completed the refit of Pride and Prejudice and it was online again this morning. He’s got Northanger Abbey in the maintenance bay at the moment, and it should be ready on time as long as Catherine stops attempting to have the book ‘Gothicized.’”

“Good. What else?”

“The Council of Genres,” she announced, barely able to control her excitement. “Senator Jobsworth’s secretary herself called to ask you to appear in the debating chamber for a policy-directive meeting at three this afternoon!”

“I wonder what the old bore wants now? Anything else?”

“No,” replied Thursday5, disappointed that I didn’t share her unbridled enthusiasm over an appearance at the CofG. I couldn’t. I’d been there so many times I just saw it as part of my duties, nothing more.

I opened my desk drawer to take out a sheet of letterhead and noticed Thursday5’s assessment letter where I’d put it the night before. I thought for a moment and decided to give her one more chance. I left it where it was, pulled out a sheet of paper and wrote a letter to Wing Commander Scampton-Tappett, telling him to get out of Bananas for Edward, since Landen wasn’t currently working on it, and move instead to The Mews of Doom, which he was. I folded up the letter, placed it in an envelope and told Thursday5 to deliver it to Scampton-Tappett in person. I could have asked her to send it by courier, but twenty minutes’ peace and quiet had a great deal of appeal to it. Thursday5 nodded happily and vanished.

I had just leaned back in my chair and was thinking about Felix8, the possible End of Time and the Austen Rover when a hearty bellow of “Stand to!” indicated the imminence of Bradshaw’s daily Jurisfiction briefing. I dutifully stood up and joined the other agents who had gathered in the center of the room.

After the usual apologies for absence, Bradshaw climbed on to a table, tinkled a small bell and said, “Jurisfiction meeting number 43370 is now in session. But before all that we are to welcome a new agent to the fold: Colonel William Dobbin!”

We all applauded as Colonel Dobbin gave a polite bow and remarked in a shy yet resolute manner that he would do his utmost to further the good work of Jurisfiction.

“Jolly good,” intoned Bradshaw, eager to get on. “Item One: An active cell of bowdlerizers has been at work again, this time in Philip Larkin and ‘This Be the Verse.’ We’ve found several editions with the first line altered to read ‘They tuck you up, your mum and dad,’ which is a gross distortion of the original intent. Who wants to have a go at this?”

“I will,” I said.

“No. What about you, King Pellinore?”

“Yes-yes what-what hey-hey?” said the white-whiskered knight in grubby armor.

“You’ve had experience dealing with bowdlerizers in Larkin before-cracking the group that altered the first line of ‘Love Again’ to read: ‘Love again: thanking her at ten past three’ was great stuff-fancy tackling them again?”

“What-what to go a mollocking for the bowlders?” replied Pellinore happily. “’Twill be achieved happily and in half the time.”

“Anyone want to go with him?”

“I’ll go.” I said.

“Anyone else?”

The Red Queen put up her hand.

“Item Two: The Two Hundred Eighty-seventh Annual Book-World Conference is due in six months’ time, and the Council of Genres has insisted we need to have a security review after last year’s…problems.”

There was a muttering from the assembled agents. BookCon was the sort of event that was too large and too varied to keep all factions happy, and the previous year’s decision to lift the restriction on Abstract Concepts attending as delegates opened the floodgates to a multitude of Literary Theories and Grammatical Conventions who spent most of the time pontificating loftily and causing trouble in the bar, where fights broke out at the drop of a participle. When Poststructuralism got into a fight with Classicism, they were all banned, something that upset the Subjunctives no end, who complained bitterly that if they had been fighting, they would have won.

“Are the Abstracts allowed to attend this year?” asked Lady Cavendish.

“I’m afraid so,” replied Bradshaw. “Not to invite them would be seen as discriminatory. Volunteers?”

Six of us put up our hands, and Bradshaw diligently scribbled down our names.

“Top-notch,” he said at last. “The first meeting will be next week. Now, Item Three, and this one is something of a corker: We’ve got a Major Narrative Flexation brewing in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.”

“Is it the Watson bullet-wound problem again?” asked Mr. Fainset.

“No, it’s more serious than that. Sherlock Holmes…has been murdered!”

There was a spontaneous cry of shock and outrage from the assembled agents. The Holmes series was a perennial favorite and thus of par tic ular concern-textual anomalies in unread or unpopular books were always lower priority, or ignored altogether. Bradshaw handed a stack of papers to Lady Cavendish, who distributed them.

“It’s in ‘The Final Problem.’ You can read it yourself, but essentially Sherlock travels to Switzerland to deal with Professor Moriarty. After the usual Holmesian escapades, Watson follows Sherlock to the Reichenbach Falls, where he discovers that Holmes has apparently fallen to his death-and the book ends twenty-nine pages before it was meant to.”

There was a shocked silence as everyone took this in. We hadn’t had a textual anomaly of this size since Lucy Pevensie refused to get into the wardrobe at the beginning of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

“But The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes was the fourth volume,” observed Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, looking up from her ironing. “With Sherlock dead at the Reichenbach, it would render the remaining five volumes of stories narratively unsustainable.”

“Partly right,” replied Bradshaw. “The Hound of the Baskervilles was written after Memoirs but is set earlier-I think we can keep hold of that one. But yes, the remaining four in the series will start to spontaneously unravel unless we do something about it. And we will, I assure you-erasure is not an option.”

This was not as easy as it sounded despite Bradshaw’s rhetoric, and we all knew it. The entire Sherlock Holmes series was closed books, unavailable to enter until someone had actually booksplored his or her way in-and the Holmes canon had continuously resisted exploration. Gomez was the first Jurisfiction booksplorer to try by way of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, but he mistakenly became involved in the narrative and was shot dead by Lord Roxton. Harris Tweed tried it next and was nearly trampled by a herd of angry Stegosauri.

“I want everyone in on this problem. The Cat Formerly Known as Cheshire will be keeping a careful eye on the narrative corruption of the series up at Text Grand Central, and I want Beatrice, Benedict, Zhark and Tiggy-Winkle to try to find a way of using the other books in the Conan Doyle oeuvre-I suggest the Professor Challenger stories. Fainset and Foyle, I want you to explore the possibility of communication with anyone inside the Holmes series-they may not even know they have a problem.”

“They’re well outside the footnoterphone network,” said Mr. Fainset. “Any suggestions?”

“I’m relying on Foyle’s ingenuity. If anyone sees Hamlet or Peter and Jane before I do, send them immediately to me. Any questions?”

“What do you want me to do?” I asked, wondering why I had been left out of everything important so far.

“I’ll speak to you later. Okay, that’s it. Good luck, and…let’s be careful out there.”

The collected agents instantly started chattering. We hadn’t had anything like this for years, which made it seem even more stupid that Bradshaw wasn’t including me on the assignment. I caught up with him as he sat at his desk.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “You need me on this.”

“Hello, my dear! Not like you to nearly miss a session-problems in the Outland?”

“I was up at Goliath.”

He raised an eyebrow. “How do things look?”

I explained at length what I had seen, ending with the observation that it wasn’t likely they’d perfect a transfictional machine anytime soon, if at all-but we needed to keep our eyes on them.

Bradshaw nodded sagely, and I reiterated my feeling that I was being somehow “left out” of the Holmes inquiry.

“How’s Friday? Still a bed slug?”

“Yes-but nothing I can’t handle.”

“Have you told Landen about us yet?”

“I’m building up to it. Bradshaw, you’re flanneling-why aren’t I on the Holmes case?”

He gestured for me to sit and lowered his voice. “I had a call from Senator Jobsworth this morning. He’s keen to reinstate a certain cadet that we recently…had to let go.”

I knew the cadet he was referring to. There was a sound reason for her rejection-she’d been euphemistically entitled “unsuitable.” Not in the way that my nice-but-a-bit-dopey cadet was unsuitable, but unsuitable as in obnoxious. She’d gone through five tutors in as many days. Even Emperor Zhark said that he’d preferred to be eaten alive by the Snurgg of Epsilon-7 than spend another five minutes in her company.

“Why has Jobsworth requested her? There are at least ten we rejected that are six times better.”

“Because we’re light on agents in contemporary fiction, and the CofG thinks she checks all the genre boxes.”

“He’s wrong, of course,” I said quite matter-of-factly, but people like Jobsworth are politicians and have a different set of rules. “I can see his point, though. The question is, what are you going to do about it? She’s exhausted all the agents licensed to take apprentices.”

Bradshaw said nothing and stared at me. In an instant I understood.

“Oh, no,” I said, “not me. Not in a thousand years. Besides, I’ve already got a cadet on assessment.”

“Then get rid of her. You told me yourself that her timidity would get her killed.”

“It will-but I feel kind of responsible. Besides, I’ve already got a full caseload. The Mrs. Danvers that went berserk in The God of Small Things still needs investigating, the Minotaur tried to kill me-not to mention about thirty or so cold cases, some of which are potentially solvable-especially the Drood case. I think it’s possible Dickens was…murdered.”

“In the Outland? And for what reason?”

“To silence Edwin Drood-or someone else in the book.”

I wasn’t sure about this, of course, and any evidence was already over a hundred years old, but I would do anything not to get stuck with this apprentice. Sadly, Bradshaw wasn’t taking no for an answer or softening to my pleas.

“Don’t make me order you, old girl. It will embarrass us both. Besides, if you fail her-as I’m sure you shall-then we really have run out of tutors, and I can tell Jobsworth we did everything in our power.”

I groaned. “How about I take her next week? That way I can come to grips with the Holmes death thing.”

“Senator Jobsworth was most insistent,” added Bradshaw. “He’s been on the footnoterphone three times this morning already.”

I knew what he meant. When Jobsworth got his teeth into something, he rarely let go. The relationship between us was decidedly chilly, and we were at best only cordial. The crazy thing was, we both wanted the best for the BookWorld-we just had different methods of trying to achieve it.

“Very well,” I said finally. “I’ll give her a day-or a morning, if she lasts that.”

“Good lass!” exclaimed Bradshaw happily. “Appreciate a woman who knows when she’s being coerced. I’ll get her to meet you outside Norland.”

“Is that all?” I asked somewhat crossly.

“No. It seems someone’s made an ass of themselves over at Resource Management regarding maintenance schedules, and we’ve got a-Well, see for yourself.”

He handed me a report, and I flicked through the pages with a rising sense of despair. It was always the same. Someone at admin screws up and we have to pick up the pieces.

“The Piano Squad has been on the go for eight hours straight,” he added, “so I’d like you to step in and relieve them for a rest period. Take your cadets with you. Should be a useful training session.”

My heart sank.

“I’ve got to appear at the CofG later this afternoon,” I explained, “and if I’ve a second cadet to nursemaid-”

“I’ll make it up to you,” interrupted Bradshaw. “It’ll be a doddle-a walk in the park. How much trouble can anyone get into with pianos?”