One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

38. Answers

One of Jobsworth’s D-3 minions had been given the task of keeping an eye on the riveted box that contained the valuable plot-line gifts for Speedy Muffler, and he noticed me only when I was halfway across the foredeck, my intention already clear to those present. He dropped his copy of The Word and took a pace towards me. I caught him on the solar plexus with the ball of my hand, and he reeled over backwards. The foredeck would have been in plain view from the wheelhouse, and the captain pulled on the steam whistle and sent a deafening blast echoing across Racy Novel, temporarily quenching the sounds of the enthusiastic moans that echoed over the water.

The whistle also drowned out the sound of the padlock being smashed off, and I had the lid open and was looking at the contents when Zhark and Jobsworth arrived beside me. They stopped, too, and stared inside the box.

“Those aren’t plot lines,” said Jobsworth.

“No,” I replied, looking up the river to where I could just see Lady Chatterley’s Lover appear around the next bend, less than five hundred yards away, “and you need to stop the boat before we get to Racy Classics.”

“Captain!” yelled Jobsworth, who knew how to act properly when evidence presented itself. The captain opened the wheelhouse window and leaned out, cupping a hand to his ear.

“Turn the Queen about and get us downstream. If we go up, I want to be taking only Racy Pulp with us!”

The captain needed no further bidding, and he ordered the helm hard over to turn midriver.

I leaned in and examined the contents of the box. It was a classy job. There was a single glass jar that contained, as far as I could see, a lot of foam. This was attached to a funnel and a time switch, and wrapped around all this was a series of embarrassingly bad descriptions of sexual congress. Emperor Zhark moved closer and put on his glasses.

“By the seven-headed Zook of Zargon,” he breathed. “It’s full of antikern.”

“It’s full of what?”

“Kerning is the adjustment of the white spaces between the letters,” he explained, “in order to make the letters seem proportionally spaced. What this does is remove the white spaces entirely—within an instant this entire boat and everyone in it will implode into nothing more than an oily puddle of ink floating on the river.”

I pointed to the poorly written descriptions of sexual congress wrapped around the device.

“With a few telltale descriptions of a sexual nature to point the finger toward Speedy Muffler.”

“So it would appear. Blast!”

Emperor Zhark had been examining the device carefully.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“No blue wire. There’s usually a choice of wires to cut, and by long convention it’s always the blue one. Without that there’s no way we can know how to defuse it.”

I glanced at the timing device, which also by long convention was prominently featured—and had two and a half minutes to go.

“Can we throw it overboard?” asked Jobsworth.

“Not unless you want to see the entire Metaphoric River vanish in under a second.”

“We could abandon the steamer.”

“It’ll be a tight fit in the one tender remaining—and those high privet hedges along the riverbank won’t make for an easy escape.”

“I’ll take it in a boat with me.”

It was Drake Foden, adventurer.

“I don’t want any arguments,” he said. “This is my function. I’m the fodder.”

“I told you he was,” said Barksdale, jabbing Jobsworth on the shoulder with his index finger.

There was no time to do anything else, and at a single word from the captain the second tender was lowered over the side and the riveted box placed inside. Drake turned to me and took my hands in his.

“Good-bye, Thursday. I’m sorry we didn’t get to sleep together and perhaps have a few jokes and get into a couple of scrapes and thus make this farewell more poignant and mournful, which it isn’t.”

“Yes,” I replied. “I’ll always regret not knowing you at all or even liking you very much. Perhaps next time.”

“There won’t be a next time.”

“I know that. Drake?”

“Yes?”

“You have something stuck in your teeth.”

“Here?”

“Other side.”

“Thanks.”

And without another word, Drake clambered aboard, cast off the mooring and began to row quickly away from the steamer.

“Hey!” I yelled across the water. “Aren’t you glad it wasn’t a poison dart in your—”

But I didn’t get a chance to say any more. Drake, the tender and the iron box suddenly imploded with a sound like a cough going backwards, accompanied by a swift rush of air that sucked in to fill the void and made our ears pop. I’d never seen text destroyed so rapidly—even an eraserhead takes a half second to work.

“Slow ahead,” ordered Jobsworth, “and wire the delegation that we have been ‘unavoidably delayed.’”

He turned to me.

“Just what in Wheatley’s name is going on here, Next?”

My mind was still racing. There was the fate of the Fourteenth Clown to think of, and the broader implications of regional stability, pretty nurses, handsome doctors and fire retardant.

“Time is of the essence. Senator, I need you to do something without question.”

“And that is?”

“Shut down every single Feedback Loop north of Three Men in a Boat.”

“Are you mad?” he said. “That’s almost three hundred million books!”

“Mad? Perhaps. But if you don’t do what I ask, you’ll have a genre war on your hands so devastating it will turn your blood to ice.”

“My blood is already ice, Miss Next.”

The senator paused, then looked at Zhark, who nodded his agreement.

“Very well.”

Jobsworth instructed Barnes to get the message to Text Grand Central in any way he could—and to expedite, code puce.

“And you,” said Jobsworth, pointing a finger at me, “have some serious explaining to do.”

We convened in the bar almost immediately. Jobsworth was there with Herring, Barksdale, the captain and Emperor Zhark—as well as all of Jobsworth’s D-3s and Sprockett, who had divested himself of his bar-steward disguise and was once more in full butler regalia.

“Where would you like me to start?” I asked.

“At the beginning,” said Jobsworth, “and don’t stop until you get to the end.”

I took a deep breath and showed them the map Lyell had drawn.

“We won’t find out exactly how she knew until we find her, but the real Thursday Next became aware that there might exist a huge quantity of raw metaphor under the Northern Genres. Such a state of affairs would throw the entire power balance of Fiction on its head, so she needed to make sure. She took leading geologist Sir Charles Lyell up-country to conduct some test drilling, and it seems she was right. Buried beneath Racy Novel are the largest reserves of untapped metaphor the BookWorld has ever seen.”

I had everyone’s attention by now—you could have heard a pin drop.

“It was potentially explosive news, and Thursday knew that she would be in severe danger if this got out—so she hid among the flat Thursdays out in Fan Fiction. Despite her precautions, her activities were being scrutinized without her knowledge, and Thursday—reliably touted as ‘the second-hardest person to kill in the BookWorld’—had to be gotten rid of. A cabbie named the Mediocre Gatsby was bribed to hang around Fan Fiction on the off chance she would want picking up. A previously scrapped book called The Murders on the Hareng Rouge was being kept in Vanity and as soon as she was in the cab, the book was dispatched to the Council of Genres. Mediocre piggybacked the book for the trip as instructed, and a second later a rhetorical device was detonated, leaving the book, the cabbie and, it was hoped, Thursday herself little more then textual confetti—a million graphemes littered all over Fiction.”

There was silence, so I carried on. “That might have been the end of it. Most of the book was just small, tattered remnants not dissimilar to the usual detritus that flutters occasionally from the heavens and is absorbed into the ground, except that for some reason, Adrian Dorset described a bed-sitting room so well that it survived the sabotage intact and came to rest in Conspiracy, and JAID had to be alerted. This was tricky, because a diligent investigator might start to ask awkward questions, so Lockheed was ordered to employ his most useless investigator to look into it. Me. And that’s not a coincidence. Why would that be, Sprockett?”

“There are no coincidences in the BookWorld—so long as you don’t count the last chapters in some of Charles Dickens’s books.”

“Exactly. But we do find problems—the fact that someone scrubbed off the ISBN to avoid discovery, and the epizeuxis device. And as we look, we find ourselves one step behind the Men in Plaid, who are silencing anyone who had anything to do with the attempted hit on Thursday Next.”

“Rogue Men in Plaid?” said Emperor Zhark in an accusatory tone, staring at Jobsworth and Herring—the two who were responsible for them.

“Scrubbed ISBN?” demanded Jobsworth. “Dead geologists? Epizeuxis devices? Who is responsible for this outrage?”

“One of us present here.”

They all looked at one another.

“It was little things to begin with—things that didn’t click until later. I learned from Adrian Dorset that he destroyed The Murders on the Hareng Rouge a month back, yet it was still floating around Vanity waiting to intercept Thursday. The rules state that it has to be scrapped immediately—on Red Herring’s signature.”

They all looked at Herring, who had started to go pale.

“He controls the Book Transit Authority, and also the Men in Plaid. He’s the second-in-command to the BookWorld, but he wanted more. He was after the top job and, what’s more, control of the vast stores of metaphor that are lying under Racy Novel. He knew that whoever controlled the metaphor would control Fiction.”

“But how could he control Speedy Muffler and Racy Novel?” asked Zhark.

“That’s the clever bit. He planned to invade—using an army mustered from one of the most powerful genres on the island.”

“Women’s Fiction?” said Colonel Barksdale with a smirk. “Not possible. They have neither the manpower nor the inclination.”

Emperor Zhark and Jobsworth nodded their heads vigorously; WomFic was wholly against any sort of warfare and had agreed to sanctions only as a last resort.

“Not WomFic,” I said. “A smaller subgenre with enough shock troops to take on the Fourteenth Clown and win. A genre that has for many years been the buffer zone between WomFic and Racy Novel. A genre that has successfully blended raciness and euphemism to create an empire that sells books by the billion—Daphne Farquitt. More readers than almost any other writer, and eighteen percent of total global readership.”

“They don’t have any troops,” scoffed Barksdale. “You’re mistaken.”

I chose my words carefully. Despite recent events, I’d be pushing my luck if I admitted I’d been in the RealWorld.

“Today is Daphne Farquitt Day in the Outland. As we speak, a massive readathon is in progress. At even conservative estimates, there must be upwards of two hundred million readers making their way through Farquitt’s three hundred seventy-two novels. There will be speed-reading events, trivia quizzes and read-ins. The power of the Feedback Loop will be astronomical—and easy enough to create an unstoppable army of ditzy romantic heroines and their lantern-jawed potential husband/lovers.”

“The nurses, secretaries and medical equipment you saw at Middle Station?”

“ Exactly,” I replied. “Not civilians at all—but the romantically involved honored dead. The Farquitt Army was working against Racy Novel by taking a preemptive strike and eradicating any possible threat from Speedy Muffler’s allies in Comedy. With members of the peace envoy all assassinated in an apparent Muffler attack, there would be no opposition to the total and complete invasion of Racy Novel by the Farquitt Army and, with it, control of the vast stocks of metaphor beneath our feet.”

There was silence in the room. They all looked stunned. Barksdale was the first to speak.

“That explanation,” he said in admiration, “was of a complexity that would gather plaudits from even the most intractable of political thrillers. With all of us dead in an attack that could be blamed on Speedy Muffler, Red Herring would step into the top slot, direct his allies to annex Racy Novel, secure the metaphor and set himself up as supreme dictator of Fiction.”

“It’s a brilliant scheme,” murmured Zhark in admiration.

“I’ll definitely be using it on the Rambosians next week. The little devils. They love a good subjugation. Senator?”

“A plan of titanic proportions. If he weren’t going to be erased for treason, I’d offer him a job.”

Red Herring was starting to shake when he heard this. He tried to speak, but only a strangled squeak came out.

“Might I make an observation?” asked Sprockett.

“Go ahead,” replied Jobsworth, who was now in a generous mood.

“Mr. Herring is here with us now—how could he seize power if he was assassinated along with the rest of us?”

Barksdale’s and Zhark’s faces fell, and even Jobsworth’s smile dropped from his face. They looked at me.

“Simple,” I said, placing my hand on Herring’s shoulder. “This isn’t Red Herring. Figuring that out was the key to the whole thing.”

“That’s absurd,” remarked Jobsworth. “We were discussing the minutiae of the peace talks on the way in. He can’t be anything but.”

“I assure you,” said Faux Herring, who had finally managed to find his voice. “I’m not Red Herring.”

“He’s right,” I said. “This is Herring’s stunt double, Fallon Hairbag. He took Herring’s place when Red Herring made his escape in the boat’s tender.”

“You’re the mysterious passenger?” asked Zhark, and the Herring-that-wasn’t nodded unhappily.

“Mr. Herring promised me the pick of all the stunt work in the BookWorld if I did this for him. He said it was for a prank. That it would be funny.”

“I overheard Herring and his stunt double talking in the cabin—about ‘not doing the talks’—and my butler discovered knee and elbow pads as well as a gallon of fire retardant.”

“Whatever for?” asked Barksdale.

“Just in case I had to set myself on fire and leap out a window waving my arms,” replied Fallon wistfully. “It always pays to be prepared.”

“The switch was subtly done,” I said, “but when I met the replaced Herring later on, he was polite and asked me if I wanted a doughnut—the real Herring would never have been so accommodating.”

“I’ve heard enough,” announced Senator Jobsworth, rising to his feet. “Send word that the peace talks are postponed. I want an emergency meeting of everyone in the debating chamber this evening, a press conference at five and the WomFic and Farquitt senators in my office the minute we get back. Barnes?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Implement Emergency Snooze Protocol 7B on the whole Farquitt canon immediately. I want every Farquitt reader yawning and nodding off in under ten minutes. We need to not only close down their feedback but send Daphne Farquitt a clear message that we will not be trifled with.”

“What about the kittens?” asked Zhark in a shocked tone.

“It’s a feline-compliant executive order,” replied Jobsworth grandly. “No kittens will be harmed in the great Farquitt Snoozathon.”

While Barnes and the rest of the D-3s scurried off to do Jobsworth’s bidding, the senator and the others put their heads together. I told Fallon to go hide in his cabin until we got in, by which time he would doubtless be forgotten. He thanked me and gave me his card in case I needed someone to attempt to leap fourteen motorcycles in a double-decker bus or something, and Sprockett and I went and sat on the foredeck to watch the riverbank drift slowly past. Despite keeping a careful eye out for Herring, we saw only the upturned tender he had escaped in and figured that he was either making his escape to Farquitt or had been eaten by a crocodile who had mistaken him for fodder.

“Well,” said Sprockett, “that denouement went very well. Your first?”

“Did it show?”

“Not at all.”

I was glad of this. “I think Thursday might have been proud.”

“Yes,” agreed Sprockett, “I think she might.”