First Among Sequels

7. A Probe Inside Pinocchio

It was Pinocchio, of course, I’d know that nose anywhere. As we jumped into the toy workshop on page 26, the wooden puppet-Geppetto’s or Collodi’s creation, depending on which way you looked at it-was asleep with his feet on a brazier. The workbench was clean and tidy. Half-finished wooden toys filled every available space, and all the woodworking tools were hung up neatly upon the wall. There was a cot in one corner, a sideboard in another, and the floor was covered with curly wood shavings, but there was no sawdust or dirt. The fictional world was like that, a sort of narrative shorthand that precluded any of the shabby grottiness and texture that gives the real world its richness.

Pinocchio was snoring loudly. Comically, almost. His feet were smoldering, and within a few lines it would be morning and he would have nothing left but charred stumps. He wasn’t the only person in the room. On the sideboard were two crickets watching the one-day test match on a portable TV. One was wearing a smoking jacket and a pillbox hat and held a cigarette in a silver holder, and the other had a broken antennae, a black eye and one leg in a sling.

“The name’s Thursday Next,” I announced to them both, holding up my Jurisfiction badge, and this is…Thursday Next.”

“Which is the real one?” asked the cricket in the pillbox hat-somewhat tactlessly, I thought.

“I am,” I replied through gritted teeth. “Can’t you tell?”

“Frankly, no,” replied the cricket, looking at the pair of us in turn. “So…which is the one that does naked yoga?”

“That would be me,” said Thursday5 brightly.

I groaned audibly.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, amused by my prudishness. “You should try it someday. It’s relaxing and very empowering.”

“I don’t do yoga,” I told her.

“Take it up and drop the bacon sandwiches and it will put ten years on your life.”

The cricket, who spoke in a clipped accent reminiscent of Noël Coward’s, folded up his paper and said, “We don’t often get visitors, you know-the last lot to pass through this way was the Italian Translation Inspectorate making sure we were keeping to the spirit of the original.”

The cricket had a sudden thought and indicated the damaged cricket sitting next to him. “How rude could I be? This is Jim ‘Bruises’ McDowell, my stunt double.”

Bruises looked as though the stunt sequence with the mallet hadn’t gone quite as planned.

“Hello,” said the stunt cricket with an embarrassed shrug. “I had an accident during training. Some damn fool went and moved the crash mat.” As he said it, he looked at the other cricket, who did nothing but puff on his cigarette and preen his antennae in a nonchalant fashion.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said by way of conversation-a good relationship with the characters within the BookWorld was essential in our work. “Have you been read recently?”

The cricket in the pillbox hat suddenly looked embarrassed.

“The truth is,” he said awkwardly, “we’ve never been read. Not once in seventy-three years. Deluxe book-club editions are like that-just for show. But if we did have a reading, we’d all be primed and set to go.”

“I can do a lot more than the ‘being hit with the mallet’ stunt,” added Bruises excitedly. “Would you like me to set myself on fire and fall out of a window? I can wave my arms very convincingly.”

“No thanks.”

“Shame,” replied Bruises wistfully. “I’d like to broaden my skills to cover car-to-helicopter transfers and being dragged backwards by a horse-whatever that is.”

“When the last of the nine copies of this book have gone,” pointed out the cricket, “we can finally come off duty and be reassigned. I’m studying for the lead in Charlotte’s Web.”

“Do you know of any other books that require stunt crickets?” asked Bruises hopefully. “I’ve been practicing the very dangerous and not-at-all-foolhardy leap over seventeen motorcycles in a double-decker bus.”

“Isn’t it meant to be the other way around?”

“I told you it seemed a bit rum,” said the cricket as Bruises’ shoulders sagged. “But never mind all that,” he added, returning his attention to me. “I suppose you’re here about…the thing?”

“We are, sir. Where is it?”

The cricket pointed with three of his legs at a pile of half-finished toys in the corner and, thus rendered lopsided, fell over. His stunt double laughed until the cricket glared at him dangerously.

“It appeared unannounced three days ago-quite ruined my entrance.”

“I thought you’d never been read?”

“Rehearsals, dahling. I do like to keep the thespian juices fresh-and Bruises here likes to practice his celebrated ‘falling from the wall after being struck by a mallet’ stunt-and then the leg twitching and death throes, which he does so well.”

Bruises said nothing and studied the tips of his antennae modestly.

I cautiously approached the area of the room the cricket had indicated. Half hidden behind a marionette with no head and a hobby horse in need of sanding was a dull metallic sphere about the size of a grapefruit. It had several aerials sticking out of the top and an array of lenses protruding from the front. I leaned closer and sniffed at it cautiously. I could smell the odor of corrosion and see the fine pits on the heat-streaked surface. This wasn’t an errant space probe from the Sci-ficanon; it was too well described for that. Bradshaw had been right-it was trans-fictional.

“Where do you think it’s from?” asked the cricket. “We get scraps of other books blowing in from time to time when there’s a WordStorm, but nothing serious. Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream sheltered here for a while during the textphoon of ’32 and picked up a thing or two from Lamp-Wick, but only the odd verb or two otherwise. Is it important?”

“Not really,” I replied. It was a lie, of course-but I didn’t want a panic. This was anything but unimportant. I gently rotated the probe and read the engraved metal plate on the back. There was a serial number and a name that I recognized only too well-the Goliath Corporation. My least favorite multinational and a thorn in my side for many years. I was annoyed and heartened all at the same time. Annoyed that they had developed a machine for hurling probes inside fiction, but heartened that this was all they had managed to achieve. As I peered closer at the inert metallic ball, there was a warning chirp from my bag. I quickly dug out a small instrument and tossed it to Thursday5.

“A reader?” she said with surprise. “In here?”

“So it seems. How far away?”

She flipped the device open and stared at the flickering needle blankly. Technology was another point she wasn’t that strong on. “We’re clear. The reader is…er, two paragraphs ahead of us.”

“Are you sure?”

She looked at the instrument again. It was a Narrative Proximity Device, designed to ensure that our intrafictional perambulations couldn’t be seen by readers in the Outland. One of the odd things about the BookWorld was that when characters weren’t being read, they generally relaxed and talked, rehearsed, drank coffee, watched cricket or played mah-jongg. But as soon as a reading loomed, they all leaped into place and did their thing. They could sense the reading approaching out of long experience, but we couldn’t-hence the Narrative Proximity Device. Being caught up in a reading wasn’t particularly desirable for a Jurisfiction agent, as it generally caused a certain degree of confusion in the reader. I was spotted once myself-and once is once too often.

“I think so,” replied Thursday, staring at the meter again. “No, wait-yes.”

“A positive echo means the reader is ahead of us, a negative means…?”

“Bother,” she muttered. “Paragraphs behind and coming this way-Ma’am, I think we’re about to be read.”

“Is it a fast reader?”

She consulted the meter once more. If the reader was fast-a fan on a reread or a bored student-then we’d be fine. A slow reader searching every word for hidden meaning and subtle nuance and we might have to jump out until whoever it was had passed.

“Looks like a 41.3.”

This was faster than the maximum throughput of the book, which was pegged at about sixteen words per second. It was a speed-reader, as likely as not reading every fifth word and skimming over the top of the prose like a stone skipping on water.

“They’ll never see us. Press yourself against the wall until the reading moves through.”

“Are you sure?” asked Thursday5, who had done her basic training with the old Jurisfiction adage “Better dead than read” ringing in her ears.

“You should know what a reading looks like if you’re to be an asset to Jurisfiction. Besides,” I added, “overcaution is for losers.”

I was being unnecessarily strict. We could quite easily have jumped out or even hopped back a few pages and followed the narrative behind the reading, but cadets need to sail close to the wind a few times. Both the crickets were in something of a tizzy at the prospect of their first-ever reading and tried to run in several directions at once before vanishing off to their places.

“Stand still,” I said as we pressed ourselves against the least-well-described part of the wall and looked again at the NPD. The needle was rising rapidly and counting off the words to what we termed “Read Zero”-the actual time and place, the comprehension singularity, where the story was actually being read.

There was a distant hum and a rumble as the reading approached. Then came a light buzz in the air like static and an increased heightening of the senses as the reader took up the descriptive power of the book and translated it into his or her own unique interpretation of the events-channeled from here through the massive imaginotransference Storycode Engines back at Text Grand Central and into the reader’s imagination. It was a technology of almost incalculable complexity, which I had yet to fully understand. But the beauty of the whole process was that the reader in the Outland never suspected there was any sort of process at all-the act of reading was to most people, myself included, as natural as breathing.

Geppetto’s woodworking tools started to jiggle on the workbench, and a few of the wood shavings started to drift across the floor, gaining more detail as they moved. I frowned. Something wasn’t right. I had expected the room to gain a small amount of increased reality as the reader’s imagination bathed it in the power of his or her own past experiences and interpretations, but as the trembling and warmth increased, I noticed that this small section of Collodi’s eighteenth-century allegorical tale was being raised into an unprecedented level of descriptive power. The walls, which up until then had been a blank wash of color, suddenly gained texture, a myriad of subtle hues and even areas of damp. The window frames peeled and dusted up, the floor moved and undulated until it was covered in flagstones that even I, as an Outlander, would not be able to distinguish from real ones. As Pinocchio slept on, the reading suddenly swelled like a breaking ocean roller and crossed the room in front of us, a crest of heightened reality that moved through us and imparted a warm feeling of well-being. But more than that, a rare thing in fiction, a delicate potpourri of smells. Freshly cut wood, cooking, spice, damp-and Pinocchio’s scorched legs, which I recognized were carved from cherry. There was more, too-a strange jumble of faces, a young girl laughing and a derelict castle in the moonlight. The smells grew stronger, to the point where I could taste them in my mouth, the dust and grime in the room seemingly accentuated until there was a faint hiss and a ploof sound and the enhanced feelings dropped away in an instant. Everything once more returned to the limited reality we had experienced when we arrived-the bare description necessary for the room to be Geppetto’s workshop. I nudged Thursday5, who opened her eyes and looked around with relief.

“What was that?” she asked, staring at me in alarm.

“We were read,” I said, a little rattled myself. Whoever it was could not have failed to see us.

“I’ve been read many times,” murmured Thursday5, “from perfunctory skim to critical analysis, and nothing ever felt like that.”

She was right. I’d stood in for GSD knows how many characters over the years, but even I’d never felt such an in-depth reading.

“Look,” she said, holding up the Narrative Proximity Device. The read-through rate had peaked at an unheard-of 68.5.

“That’s not possible,” I muttered. “The imaginotransference bandwidth doesn’t support readings of that depth at such a speed.”

The reading suddenly swelled like a breaking ocean roller and crossed the room in front of us.

“Do you think they saw us?”

“I’m sure of it,” I replied, my ears still singing and a strange woody taste still in my mouth. I consulted the NPD again. The reader was now well ahead of us and tearing through the prose toward the end of the book.

“Goodness!” exclaimed the cricket, who looked a little flushed and spacey when he reappeared along with his stunt double a few minutes later. “That was every bit as exhilarating as I thought it would be-and I didn’t dry. I was excellent, wasn’t I?”

“You were just wonderful, darling,” said his stunt double. “The whole of Allegorical Juvenilia will be talking about you-one for the envelope, I think.”

“And you, sir,” returned the cricket, “that fall from the wall-simply divine.”

But self-congratulatory crickets didn’t really concern me right now, and even the Goliath probe was momentarily forgotten.

“A Superreader,” I breathed. “I’ve heard the legends but thought they were nothing more than that, tall tales from burned-out text jockeys who’d been mainlining on irregular verbs.”

“Superreader?” echoed Thursday5 inquisitively, and even the crickets stopped congratulating each other on a perfect performance and leaned closer to listen.

“It’s a reader with an unprecedented power of comprehension, someone who can pick up every subtle nuance, all the inferred narrative and deeply embedded subtext in one-tenth the time of normal readers.”

“That’s good, right?”

“Not really. A dozen or so Superreads could strip all the meaning out of a book, leaving the volume a tattered husk with little characterization and only the thinnest of plots.”

“So…most Daphne Farquitt novels have been subjected to a Superreader?”

“No, they’re just bad.”

I thought for a moment, made a few notes in the pad I kept in my pocket and then picked up the Outlander probe. I tried to call Bradshaw to tell him but got only his answering machine. I placed the probe in my bag, recalled that I was also here to tell Thursday5 something about the imaginotransference technology and turned to the crickets.

“Where’s the core-containment chamber?”

“Cri-cri-cri,” muttered the cricket, thinking hard. “I think it’s one of the doors off the kitchen.”

“Right.”

I bade farewell to the crickets, who had begun to bicker when the one with the pillbox hat suggested it was high time he did his own stunts.

“I say, do you mind?” inquired Pinocchio indolently, neither opening his eyes nor removing his feet from the brazier. “Some of us are trying to get some shut-eye.”