One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

39. Story-Ending Options

The trip back downriver was uneventful and over in only twelve words. By the time the Metaphoric Queen had docked, the senator for Farquitt had already denied that her genre had anything to do with Herring’s plan and expressed “great surprise” and “total outrage” that someone had “faked Romantic Troops” in order to attack the Fourteenth Clown. For its part, Comedy had mobilized its Second and Sixth Clown divisions to its borders and was demanding reparations from Farquitt, at the same time bringing pressure to bear on WomFic by threatening to withdraw all humor. Not to be outdone, Speedy Muffler had declared that the “presence of untapped metaphor” within his territory was “unproven and absurd,” and he had so far refused all offers of commercial extraction contracts, further commenting that individual senators were welcome to see him personally in his “love train.”

“Looks like it’s business as usual,” I said to Commander Bradshaw.

We were in the Jurisfiction offices at Norland Park, and I was having a lengthy debrief that same afternoon. I had entered the offices not as a bit player nor an apprentice but on my own merit. Emperor Zhark had awarded me a gift of some valuable jewelry that he said had been buried with his grandfather, Mr. Fainset doffed his cap in an agreeable manner, and Mrs. Tiggy-winkle had kindly offered to do my laundry. It felt like I was part of the family.

“So what are you going to do now?” asked Bradshaw, leaning back in his chair.

“I had a small mutiny in my series,” I explained. “My own fault, really—I was thinking of Thursday and not my books. It’ll need a lot of tact and diplomacy to win it back.”

Bradshaw smiled and thought for a minute. “The BookWorld is falling apart at the seams,” he said, waving his hand at the huge pile of paperwork in his in-tray. “We’ve got a major problem with e-books that we’d never envisioned. The Racy Novel-Farquitt affair will rumble on for years, and I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of Red Herring. Ten Duplex-6s have gone missing, and everyone has escaped from The Great Escape.”

“How is that possible?”

“There was a fourth tunnel we didn’t know about—Tom, Dick, Harry and Keith. There’s a serial killer still at large, not to mention several character assassins—and that pink gorilla running around inside A Tale of Two Cities is really beginning to piss me off.”

He took a sip of coffee and stared at me.

“I’m down to only seven agents. You’ve proved your capacity for this sort of work. I want you to join us here at Jurisfiction.”

“No, no,” I said quickly, “I’ve had quite enough, thank you. The idea that people actually do this because they like it strikes me as double insanity with added insanity. Besides, you’ve already got a Thursday—you just have to find her. That reminds me.” I dug Thursday’s shield from my pocket and pushed it across the desk.

Bradshaw picked it up and rubbed his thumb against the smooth metal. “Where did you get this?”

“The red-haired man. I think Thursday knew she was compromised before she set off on her last trip and wanted me to carry on her work.”

“So that’s why he was out of his book,” muttered Bradshaw. “I’ll see him pardoned at the earliest opportunity.”

Bradshaw looked at the badge, then at me.

“So how do you think this story’s going to end?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Are you sure you’re not her?”

“It’s a tricky one,” I replied after giving the matter some thought, “and there’s evidence to suppose that I am. I can do things only she can do, I can see some things that only she can see. Landen thought I was her, and although he now thinks I’m the written one, that might be part of a fevered delusion. His or mine, I’m not sure. It’s even possible I’ve been Owlcreeked.”

Bradshaw knew what I was talking about. “Owlcreeking” was a Biercian device in which a character could spend the last few seconds of his life in a long-drawn-out digression of what might have happened had he lived. I might be at this very moment spiraling out of control in Mediocre’s cab, Herring’s coup still ahead of me and perfect in its unrevealed complexity.

“Carmine might actually be the Thursday I think I am,” I added. “It’s even possible I’m suffering the hallucinatory aftershock of a recent rewriting. And while we’re pushing the plausibility envelope, the BookWorld might not be real at all, and maybe I’m simply an Acme carpet fitter with a vibrant imagination.”

I shuddered with the possibility that none of this might be happening at all.

“This is Fiction,” said Bradshaw in a calm voice, “and the truth is whatever you make it. You can interpret the situation in any way you want, and all versions could be real—and what’s more, depending on how you act now, any one of those scenarios could become real.”

I frowned. “I can be Thursday just by thinking I am?”

“More or less. We may require you to undergo a short narrative procedure known as a ‘Bobby Ewing,’ where you wake up in the next chapter and it’s all been a dream, but it’s pretty painless so long as you don’t mind any potential readers throwing up their hands in disgust.”

“I can be Thursday?” I said again.

He nodded. “All you have to do is know you are. And don’t deny that you’ve had some doubts over the past few days.”

It was tempting. I could be her and do Thursday things and never have to worry about falling ReadRates, keeping Bowden in line or dealing with Pickwick. I could even have Landen and the kids. I looked around at the Jurisfiction office. The Red Queen was hopping mad as usual, Mr. Fainset was attempting to figure out why Tracy Capulet had locked her sister in a cupboard, Lady Cavendish was drafting an indictment against Red Herring for “impersonating a red herring when you’re not one,” and Emperor Zhark was putting together an interim peace deal for the Northern Genres. It looked enjoyable, relevant and a good use of anyone’s time.

Commander Bradshaw smiled and pushed Thursday’s shield back across the table, where I stared at it. “What do you say?”

“I can be Thursday,” I said slowly. “I can work at Jurisfiction. But at a fictional Jurisfiction. I want to depict the real Thursday doing everything she really did. I want her series to feature the BookWorld and you and Miss Havisham and Zhark and all the rest of them. That’s where I’d like to be Thursday. That’s the Thursday I can be. A fictional one. I’d like to help you out, but I can’t.”

Bradshaw looked at me for a long time.

“I reluctantly respect your decision to stay with your books,” he said at last, “and I understand your wanting to tell it like it is. Naturally we’re very grateful for everything you’ve done, but even if Jobsworth and I sign off on a Textual Flexation Certificate to change your series, I must point out that you can’t truly be Thursday without Landen, and even if you get his permission, you still have to get Thursday’s approval before you even begin to think about trying to change your series. And as far as we know, she may already be . . . dead.”

He had trouble saying the final word and had to almost roll it around in his mouth before he could spit it out.

“She’s not dead,” I said firmly.

“I hope not, too. But without any leads—and we have none—it’s going to be an onerous task to find her. Here in Fiction we have over a quarter of a billion titles. That’s just one island in a BookWorld of two hundred and twenty-eight different and very distinct literary groupings. Most of those islands have fewer titles but some—like Nonfiction—have more. And then there are the foreign-language BookWorlds. Even if you are right—and I hope you are—Thursday could be anywhere from the Urdu translation of Wuthering Heights to the guarantee card on a 1965 Sunbeam Mixmaster.”

“But you’re still looking, right?”

“Of course. We rely on telemetry from our many unmanned probes that move throughout the BookWorld, all Textual Sieves have been set to pick her up if she makes a move, and Text Grand Central is keeping the waste gates on the imaginotransference engines on alert for a ‘Thursday Next’ word string. There’s always hope, but there’s a big BookWorld out there.”

“If she’s alive,” I said in a resolute tone, “I can find her.”

“If you do,” said Bradshaw with a smile, “you can change whatever you want in your book—even introduce the Toast Marketing Board.”

I started. “You heard about that?”

He smiled. “We hear about everything. Take the shield. Use her rights and privileges. You might need them. And if you change your mind and want to be her, call me.”

I picked up the badge from the table and put it in my pocket.

“Commander?” said the Red Queen, who had been hovering and stepped in when she saw that our conversation was at an end. “Text Grand Central has reported a major narrative flexation over in Shakespeare. It seems Othello has murdered his wife.”

“Again? I do wish that trollop Desdemona would be more careful when she’s fooling around. What is it this time? Incriminating love letters?”

The Red Queen looked at her notes. “No, it seems there was this handkerchief—”

“Hell’s teeth!” yelled Bradshaw in frustration. “Do I have to do everything around here? I want Iago in my office in ten minutes.”

“He’s doing that spinoff with Hamlet,” said Mr. Fainset from across the room.

“ Iago v. Hamlet? They got the green light for that?”

“Shylock bankrolled their appeal and got Portia to represent them. They were seriously pissed off about the mandatory European directive of ‘give me my .453 kilo of flesh’—hence the anti-European subplot in Iago v. Hamlet.”

“Get him to see me as soon as he can. What is it, Mr. Fainset?”

“The Unread, sir.”

“Causing trouble again?”

“They’re all over Horror like cheap perfume.”

I moved off, as tales of the Unread gave me the spooks. Most characters who were long unread either made themselves useful like Bradshaw or went into a downward spiral of increased torpidity. Others, for some unknown reason, went bad and became the Unread. They festered in dark alleys, in holes in the ground, the crevices between paragraphs—anywhere they could leap out and ensnare characters and suck the reading light out of them. Even grammasites, goblins and the Danvers avoided them.

I moved away. Bradshaw was busy, and my debrief was over. Thursday was missed, but Jurisfiction’s work couldn’t stop just so it could utilize its full resources to find her. It would be the same for any one of them, and they all knew it.

I walked across to Thursday’s desk and rested my fingertips on the smooth oak surface. The desk was clean and, aside from a SpecOps mug, a picture of Landen, a stack of messages and a goodly caseload in the in-basket, fairly tidy. I looked at the worn chair but didn’t sit down. This wasn’t my desk. I opened the drawers but could find little of relevance, which wasn’t hard—I didn’t know what would be relevant.

I stepped outside the Jurisfiction offices and found the frog-footman dozing on a chair in the lobby.

“Wesley?”

He started at hearing his name called and almost fell off the chair in surprise. “Miss Next?”

“Where do I requisition a vehicle?”

His eyes lit up. “We have a large choice. What would you like?” “A hover car,” I said, having always wanted to ride in one. “A convertible.”

I picked up Sprockett, who had been waiting outside, and soon we were heading west out of HumDram/Classics in a Zharkian Bubble-Drive Hovermatic. We arrived over Thriller within a few minutes and flew slowly over the area in which The Murders on the Hareng Rouge had come down almost a week ago. If Thursday had survived the sabotage, she would have landed somewhere within the half million or so novels along the debris trail.

If Thursday had survived, I reasoned, the cab had come down more or less intact. No one had reported the remains of a taxi falling to earth, and I wanted to know why. We flew up and down the area of the debris trail for a while, searching for even the merest clue of what might have happened but seeing nothing except an endless landscape of novels. We were yelled at several times by cabbies annoyed that we were “hovering about like a bunch of numpties,” and on one occasion we were pulled over by a Thriller border guard and made to explain why we were loitering. I flashed Thursday’s badge, and he apologized and moved on.

“What are we looking for, ma’am?”

“I wish I knew.”

I had a thought and took out my notebook to remind me what Landen had told me when I spoke to him in Fan Fiction.

He had stated that in an emergency, Thursday would try to contact me. As far as I knew, she hadn’t. She had also said, The circumstances of your confusion will be your path to enlightenment.

I stared at the sentence for a long time, then took my Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion from my bag and flicked to the map section at the back. And then all was light. She had been contacting me, and my confusion was indeed the answer.

“Bingo,” I said softly.