One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

8. The Shield

The queue to get out of Poetry was long, as always. The smuggling of metaphor out of the genre was a serious problem, and one that made the border guards extremely vigilant. The increased scarcity of raw metaphor in Fiction had driven prices sky-high, and people would take unbelievably foolish risks to smuggle it across. I’d heard stories of metaphor being hidden in baggage, swallowed, even dressed up to look like ordinary objects whose meanings were then disguised to cloak the metaphor. The problem at that point was trying to explain why you had a “brooding thunderstorm” or “broad sunlit uplands” in your luggage.

“Can we take the High Road?” I asked.

She turned around to look at me. Taking the High Road out of Poetry meant only one thing—that I wanted to avoid any entanglements with the border guards.

“My friend Jake was carrying a mule without realizing it last week,” said the cabbie in a meaningful tone. “The mule had two kilos of raw metonym on him—hidden in the saddlebags.”

Metonym wasn’t as dangerous as smuggling raw metaphor, but the underworld would try anything to turn a buck and had set up labs to enrich variable forms of metaphor into the real McCoy. Extracting the “like” from simile was the easiest method, but the resulting metaphor was as weak as wet paper. Synecdoche was used in much the same way; the best minds in Jurisfiction were constantly trying to outwit them, and raided met labs on an almost daily basis.

“Did he get to keep his cab?” I asked. “Your friend Jake, I mean.”

“His entire car was reduced to text with the metonym still in it.”

“Reduced to text?” I echoed. “Sounds like a hammer to break a nut.”

“Poeticals are like that,” said the cabbie with a disrespectful snort. “Prone to fits of violent passion. I think it’s all that absinthe. The point is this: I can get you out of Poetry, but it will cost.”

“I’ll lend you my butler for an afternoon.”

“One afternoon and a garden party.”

“A garden party.”

“Done.”

The cabbie flipped the vectored thrust nozzles, and in an instant we were climbing almost vertically upwards. It took less than a minute to reach the low-lying book traffic, and within a few seconds we had latched onto an academic paper moving from Physics to Biology. We stayed there for a few minutes and then detached, hovered for a moment and then reattached to the keel of an oil tanker that was part of a Bermuda Triangle book on its way to Fiction. We were under the massive rudder at the back, with one of the vast propellers looming over us.

“We’ll ride this baby all the way into Fiction,” said the cabbie as she took out some knitting, “about twenty minutes. We could fly the whole way, but we’d probably be picked up by the book-traffic controllers and get busted.”

“Don’t look now, but I think we just have.”

The flashing red lights of a Jurispoetry squad car close by had alerted me to the fact that the cabbie wasn’t quite as good as I thought she was. We could have detached there and then and dropped the mile towards the Text Sea before leveling out and making a run for the coast, but it was a risky undertaking. Cutting and running meant only one thing: guilty.

“Oh, crap,” said the cabbie, dropping a stitch in surprise. “I hope you’ve got some friends in high places.”

“Hullo,” I said to the officer who was now standing outside the car. He was dressed in a baggy white shirt and smelled strongly of rhyming couplets. He stared at me with the supercilious look of someone who knew he had the upper hand and was certainly going to milk it.

“Oh, to sneak across the border, when it’s plain you should not oughta?”

I had to think quickly. Unlike the Poetry government officials who conversed in rhyme royal, this was a lowly traffic cop who spoke only the gutter doggerel of the streets. He was using a soft-rhyming AA and so was probably not that bright. I hit him with some AABCCB.

“Au contraire, my friend, we did not intend to break any poetical code. We were waved through by others of your crew and simply took the upper road.”

But he didn’t go for it.

“I can see your little plan, but your stanzas barely scan. You, madam, I must nab, so get your butt from out the cab.”

I climbed out and succumbed to a search. He soon found the box the Lady of Shalott had given me.

“Well, lookee here, what have we got? Is this metaphor or is it not?”

“Not one but other, I must confess, the situation’s now a mess.”

He opened the box and stared. It wasn’t metaphor, but contraband nonetheless.

“You’re in big trouble smuggling this junk. What else you got? Let’s pop the trunk.”

We did, and there was Sprockett. The officer stared at him for a moment.

“I’m sure you can explain away why a dead butler’s in your trunk today?”

“He’s a clockwork butler, Duplex-5, and even paused he’s still alive.”

The officer had seen enough and brought out a report sheet to take down some details.

“Name?”

“Thursday Next.”

The officer looked at me, then at my New Agey clothes, then at Sprockett.

“Now, which one could that be? The heroine or the one who likes to hug a tree?”

In for a penny, in for a pound. I had to hope that this guard could be fooled as easily as the Elvis back in Conspiracy.

“I am she, the Thursday proper. Those that cross me come a cropper.”

“That seems likely, but before I yield, let me check your Jurisfiction shield.”

I passed it across. The officer took one look at it, put away his report sheet and told his partner that they were leaving. He smiled and handed me back my badge.

“It’s an honor, I’ll be reckoned. Sorry to have kept you for even a second.”

I signed my name in his autograph book and with growing confusion climbed back into the cab as the Jurispoetry car detached from the hull and fell away from the tanker, leaving us to continue our trip unmolested.

“You’re Thursday Next?” said the cabbie, her attitude suddenly changed. “This ride is for free, kiddo. But listen, the next time you’re in the RealWorld, can you find out why there have to be over a hundred different brands of soap? I’d really like to know.”

“Okay,” I muttered, “no problem.”

The remainder of the journey was unremarkable, except for one thing: I spent the entire trip staring at the Jurisfiction shield that had allowed me not once but twice to squeak out of trouble. It wasn’t my shield at all. It was Thursday’s. The real Thursday’s. Someone had slipped it into my pocket that morning. And the more I thought about the morning’s events, the more I realized that I might have become involved—quite against my will—with a matter of some considerable consequence.