One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

18. Senator Jobsworth

The senator was sitting behind his desk as I was ushered into his office. Several men and women dressed in the uniform of almost every military conflict there was were in attendance, as well as a couple of high-ranking generals, Colonel Barksdale and Commander Herring, the chief of staff.

“Would you excuse us?” said the senator, and everyone except Red Herring and Colonel Barksdale filed out, looking at me suspiciously as they did so. I stood in front of Jobsworth’s desk while he finished what he was doing. I didn’t know which book he had come from, but wagging tongues suggested he was an illegal immigrant from Quackery, a subgenre within Lies & Self-Delusion, just off the north coast. I don’t think anyone ever raised it with him, or if they did, no answer was forthcoming. It didn’t really much matter, since Jobsworth had been the overall leader of the Council of Genres for as long as it had been in existence, and his unassailable position as head of the council looked set to continue far into the future. He had the ear, apparently, of the Great Panjandrum himself, who could fix almost everything when he had a mind to.

“They say she’s dead, you know,” said Jobsworth, striding to the large window in his office that looked out over the BookWorld, the islands of the various categories of books patches of verdant green against the dark slatey gray of the Text Sea. “Killed in the Outland, killed in the BookWorld—who knows? What do you think?”

“I have no opinion on the matter, sir. I just play her in the series.”

“You must have some idea.”

I looked across at the chief of staff, who was gazing at me intently. “No.”

Jobsworth stared at me for a long while, then grunted and looked outside his office again. Yet this time he wasn’t looking at the larger BookWorld, but rather at the island of Fiction below him. The Ungenred Zone was on the west coast about halfway up. Crime was just to the north, but the areas I knew best—Adventure, Fantasy and Sci-Fi—were situated in the southeast, out of sight. It was Herring who spoke next.

“Ever been up-country?”

“I’ve been to Crime.”

“Farther. Towards Racy Novel.”

“No.”

“So there is a good chance they haven’t seen you up there? Or even know about you?”

I suddenly had a very unpleasant feeling and turned back to Jobsworth. “What is it you want me to do, Senator?”

“A small favor. I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t important. And if you do this for us, I’m sure it will be to your benefit if you reapply to join Jurisfiction.”

I was right. If that was the carrot, I could be in for some serious stick.

“It’s nothing too onerous,” added Colonel Barksdale, who had so many campaign medals on his chest that he was probably bulletproof. “It simply requires you to take Thursday’s place at the peace talks on Friday.”

I was momentarily at a loss for words. I should have tried to extricate myself, but I had paused too long.

“Splendid,” said Jobsworth, crossing to a scale model of the island that was built upon a large oak table. “Let me give you some background.”

“Would you excuse me?” said Herring. “I have to revise the upcoming Linguistic Hygiene Bill if we’re to have any chance of rejecting it.”

“Thank you, Red.”

Herring wished me good day, thanked me for my selfless adherence to duty and walked from the room. Jobsworth beckoned me closer to the large model of the island, where the topography was perfectly realized in miniature, including the individual genres along with their borders, railway networks, major rivers and capital novels. He swept his hand in the direction of the Northern Genres.

“You’ve heard about Speedy Muffler’s threats and the peace talks on Friday?”

I said that I had.

“Speedy Muffler claims to have developed a dirty bomb,” announced Jobsworth with a grimace, “a loosely bound collection of badly described scenes of a sexual nature. The detonation of such a bomb could cause untold damage, flinging wholly gratuitous sex scenes as far as Mrs. Dalloway.”

“But has he really?” I asked, since the possession of the bomb was only conjecture, much like Comedy’s claim to be experimenting with a fifty-megaton-yield deep satire device.

“Do you know,” said Jobsworth, “it doesn’t matter. Feminism and Dogma are taking the threat seriously and are massing armies on the border ready to take preemptive action ahead of the peace talks. And we can’t have that.”

“Invasion?” I said. “What would Feminism and Dogma do with Racy Novel?”

“They’ll simply push the rogue genre up north towards Porn and De Sade. Fanny Hill, The Story of O and The Adventures of Tom Jones will be annexed back into Classics, and the territory shared between them. Comedy will still insist upon the buffer zone of Bedroom Farce, and since Comedy is regarded with a certain sense of reluctant admiration by Romance and Dogma, they’ll not want to go any farther.”

He took a deep breath.

“But we can’t risk that kind of disruption. The genres might take months to rebuild to current strength, and the prose will suffer terribly. With the advent of e-books in the Outland, this is not a good time to have a cross-genre war. The battle between Sci-Fi and Horror all those years ago has still left its mark; their reputations as serious literature have still to recover completely—and the civil war inside Fantasy has left the reading public with an entirely unwarranted dismal view of the genre. I can’t have Romance and Female Crime marginalized in the same way—they’re 43.9 percent of our readership.”

“I’m not sure what I can do,” I said. “I’m not much good at negotiating. I tend to want everyone to simply hug and make up.”

“I’m not asking you to do anything, you little fool. We’re putting it about that you—the real Thursday—has irritable vowel syndrome and can’t speak, so Emperor Zhark will be doing the talking. You’ll just sit there and nod and look serious. Muffler might be a troublemaker, but even he will knuckle under if he thinks Thursday Next might be annoyed if he shouts too loudly. How about it?”

He was asking too much. No, it was more than that— insane, even by Council of Genre standards. If Muffler found out I wasn’t her, things might get even worse, and I wasn’t going to have a cross-genre war on my conscience.

“I may have to politely decline,” I said.

He stared at me for a moment, then opened a manila folder on his desk.

“Hmm,” he said, “looks like we have a lot of illegal narrative flexations in your series, doesn’t it?”

“I’m playing Thursday as Thursday wants me to.”

“We have only your word for that. There is also a possible charge of your understudy consorting with undesirables and, most seriously, your harboring an illegal alien from Vanity.”

He meant Sprockett.

“We call it Self-Publishing these days.”

“Immaterial. We’ll be taking the Metaphoric River route up-country via paddle steamer. I’ll have a car pick you up Friday morning at 0700. Are we agreed?”

I took a deep breath. “Yes, sir.”

“Excellent!”

He pressed a button on his desk.

“Miss Next, you must also understand that in matters of BookWorld politics like this, it is essential you do not speak of this to anyone, especially that busybody Bradshaw. Jurisfiction has a twisted vision of the good work we do at the council, and I don’t want him to get the wrong idea. Do you understand?”

If there was any lingering doubt that the CofG and Jurisfiction distrusted each other, it was dispelled. Neither wanted the other to know what it was asking me to do. The clerk came back in, and I was escorted from the building by the same two Men in Plaid who had brought me there.

In a very short time, I was deposited back at my front door, and the Roadmaster pulled silently away. Sprockett was waiting for me in the hall, his single eyebrow pointer clicking alternately between “Quizzical” and “Uncomfortable.”

But he knew what to do.

“Can I interest ma’am in a Ludlow Scorcher?”

I told him a cocktail would go down very well so long as he went easy on the parsley, and then I related what had just happened with Jobsworth. I decided not to mention the threats he’d made regarding Sprockett and Carmine, but I did mention that I would be going up-country on Friday—and also the dent and the streak of yellow paint on the Men in Plaid’s Buick Roadmaster.

“The fact that they haven’t tried to kill us again tends to indicate that they believe we have abandoned the investigation,” said Sprockett, handing me the cocktail. “Are you sure it was our yellow paint on the side of their Roadmaster?”

“What else is painted yellow in the BookWorld?”

As soon as I said it, I suddenly remembered something. I stood up and quickly walked to the garage at the bottom of the garden, Sprockett close behind.

“Ma’am?” he said as I swung up the double doors and started to poke amongst the book junk for what I was looking for. I found it easily enough: the back axle that had once been painted yellow. There was no sign of an ISBN, scrubbed or otherwise.

“It wasn’t from The Murders on the Hareng Rouge,” I said excitedly. “It’s from a TransGenre Taxi. I rode back from Poetry stuck onto the side of an ocean tanker, part of a book about the Bermuda Triangle. There was a taxi attached to Murders when it went down, piggybacking from one part of the BookWorld to another. The sabotage might not have been aimed at the book at all— it might have been aimed at whoever was in the cab!”

“Or both,” said Sprockett, annoyingly muddying the waters.

“Or both,” I agreed.

“Where is the rest of the cab?” asked Sprockett.

“Who knows? Either vaporized or embedded somewhere in the unread backwaters of Thriller. Here’s the deal: You’re going to call the TransGenre Taxi offices and find out about any missing cabs, and I’m going to find out more about The Murders on the Hareng Rouge and Adrian Dorset.”

“But where, ma’am? If Captain Phantastic doesn’t know, it’s unknowable.”

“In the RealWorld, Sprockett. Cheers.”

I tried the Scorcher. It wasn’t too bad. A bit loamy for my taste, but otherwise good.

I went upstairs and packed a small tote bag. A few clothes and some spare underwear—I’d heard all the scare stories—then worried about taking my pistol or not, but eventually I did. After that I dithered over taking ammunition and decided to, but only one cartridge and of the armor-piercing variety. I argued to myself that I would be too scared to use it, so I wouldn’t. I gave Carmine some last-minute instructions in case of emergencies, ignored her protestations about “having to face more readers than she was happy with” and then ordered a cab. “If I have to press the Snooze Button,” said Mrs. Malaprop as I waited, “it’s on your conch séance, not mine.”

“Agreed.”

“Where to?” asked the cabbie when he pulled up ten minutes later.

“Norland Park,” I said, “ Sense and Sensibility. Any route you like.”

But at that moment someone else got into the cab by way of the opposite door. He was wearing a large floppy hat that partially obscured his features.

“Sorry,” I said, “cab taken.”

The other passenger lifted the brim of the hat so I could see his face. It was Whitby.

“It’s okay,” I said to the cabbie, and we moved off.

“Holy cow!” I said, turning to Whitby, “you’ve got a nerve. When were you going to tell me about setting fire to that busload of nuns? Two years I spent building myself up to a date, and then I find that you’re a homicidal maniac.”

“ Lots of people are homicidal maniacs,” he replied. “Throw a stick into Crime and you’ll hit six of them.”

“But we’re not in Crime, are we?”

He stared at me for a moment. “I’ve done lots of good in my life, Thursday—helped people to narrative independence, coached Generics through entrance exams, was EZ-Read’s Employee of the Month three months running, and I even helped little old ladies across the road—some when they actually wanted to go. Do I get credit for that? No. All you want to think about is the nuns.”

“Orphaned nuns,” I reminded him.

“Actually, it was the puppies who were orphaned,” he said petulantly. “Let’s stick to the facts here.”

“Does it matter?”

“Not really. But I don’t think that one teensy-weensy incident with a small busload of nuns and puppies should taint a man’s life.”

“I think it does, Whitby. You might have told me.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Why?”

He sighed. “You remember Dermot McGruber? EZ-Read’s rep over in HumDram?”

“Yes.”

“He wanted to impress a girl. But he’d done some seriously bad shit when he was a character in Crime.”

“The nuns?”

“Right. With a backstory like that hanging around his neck and guilt consuming his every moment, he couldn’t even begin to get a date. So I said I’d look after his backstory for the weekend so he could ask her out, guilt-free and with an easy heart.”

“That was generous of you.”

He shrugged. “He helped me out once when I over ordered some EZ-Read PlotHoleFiller. I owed him. A weekend of all-consuming guilt seemed easy enough. I could keep myself to myself, get totally hyphenated, and no one need ever know.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “He’s legged it.”

Whitby nodded as the cabbie changed down a gear and moved onto the Dickens Freeway.

“I don’t know where Dermot’s gone. In fact, I think he might have been planning this for a while. I feel such an idiot—and what’s more, I think he put Jurisfiction onto me. You won’t tell them, will you?”

“Not yet, but I will. You can’t set fire to people—nuns or otherwise—and expect to get away with it.”

“I know,” he said sadly. “It weighs heavily on my conscience. The yapping, oh, the yapping.”

I sat in silence for a moment. The thing about backstories is that once you’ve taken one on, they’re true and real, irrespective of who owned them before you. You could pass it on, of course, but it was understandably tricky. Who wants a busload of burning nuns and puppies on his conscience?

“So what do you want?” I asked.

“I just wanted to see you,” he said simply, “and hear your voice.”

“Well, now you have,” I replied, a bit more harshly than perhaps I should have. “Maybe we should say good-bye.”

“I’m living over in Hemingway if you need anything,” he said, not wanting to give up on the slimmest chance a date was still possible. “Page 127, To Have and Have Not. If you need anything, just whistle. You can drop me on this corner, driver.”

The cabbie pulled up, and Whitby got out. He told me to take care and then hurried off around a street corner. The taxi moved on, and I slumped back into my seat as we turned onto Austen Boulevard. I thought of turning him in, then of not turning him in. It was a tricky call, but luckily the least of my worries.

I wasn’t feeling that good about the trip, to be honest. A nervy, sickly feeling was festering in the pit of my stomach—and not just from the difficulty of making the move across, or what I might find there or the truth about The Murders on the Hareng Rouge. Notwithstanding the recent developments with Whitby, I was most worried about meeting Landen. He was the man I was written to love and never meet. And now I was going to meet him.