“Oh,” said Sprockett, who perhaps had been expecting a story with a happier ending. “So what had really happened?”
I sighed. “Someone had simply left the plug out of the Thames and it had drained away.”
We walked on in silence for a moment.
“Ma’am, if you would forgive the impertinence, might I place one small condition upon my employment?”
I nodded, so he continued.
“I have an overriding abhorrence for honey. No matter what happens, it always seems to end up in my insides, and it is the very devil to remove. In my last employ, my master insisted upon honey for breakfast, and a small quantity became lodged in my thought cogs. Until steam-cleaned, I became convinced I was the Raja of Sarawak.”
“No honey,” I said. “Promise.”
And so, fully introduced, we talked about the much-heralded and much-delayed introduction of the advanced Duplex-6 clockwork automaton. And, after that, the relative merits of phosphor-bronze over stainless steel for knee joints. So it was that I arrived, thoroughly versed in the Matters of the Cog, at the regional Conspiracy offices a few minutes later.
6.
The Bed-Sitting Room
The ISBN security numbering system achieved little. Thieves simply moved into stealing and trading sections of older books. The members of the Out-of-Print Brigade were furious; after looking forward to a long and happy retirement, they instead found their favorite armchairs pinched from under them as they dozed. Entire books were stripped of all nouns, and in the very worst cases large sections of dramatic irony were hacked from the books and boiled down to extract the raw metaphor, rendering once-fine novels mere husks suitable only for scrapping.
The local genre representative was sitting on a wicker chair on the veranda of his office, a clapboard affair that looked much ravaged by overreading. The rep was described as what we termed “UK-6 Aristocracy Dapper-12,” which meant that he had a fine pencil mustache and spoke as though he were from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. I told Sprockett to wait for me outside, which he unhesitatingly agreed to do.
The rep did not rise from his chair and instead looked me up and down and then said in a disparaging tone, “You’re a long way from Mind, Body and Soul, old girl.”
It’s true that I may have looked a bit New Agey, but I didn’t really need this. Bolstered by my earlier claim to be the real Thursday, I decided to try the same here.
“The name’s Thursday Next,” I said, waving my shield. The reaction was electric. He choked on his afternoon tea and crumpet and, in his hurry to get to his feet, nearly woke a large and very hairy Sasquatch who dozed in a wicker chair a little way down the veranda.
“Good gracious!” exclaimed the genre rep. “Please excuse me. The name’s Bilderberg. Roswell Bilderberg. My office is your office. Hey!” He kicked the foot of the Sasquatch, who opened one eye and stared at him indifferently. “Thursday Next,” hissed Roswell, nodding in my direction.
The Sasquatch opened his eyes wide and jumped to his feet. “I was nowhere near the Orient Express that evening,” he said hurriedly, “and even if I was, I had nothing against Mr. Cassetti—isn’t that right, Roswell?”
“Don’t drag me into your web of deceit,” replied Roswell out of the side of his mouth, still smiling at me. “Now, how can we help you, Miss Next? Pleasure or business?”
“ Official business,” I said as the Sasquatch nonchalantly picked up a set of snowshoes and sneaked guiltily away.
“What sort of official business?” asked Roswell suspiciously. “We’ve heard that the Council of Genres was planning on moving us across to Juvenilia as part of a secret cross-BookWorld plan to marginalize those genres that don’t toe the official line. And if we didn’t comply, we would all be murdered in our sleep by government assassins who can drip poison into your ear down a thread—if such a thing is possible, or even likely.”
As far as I knew, no such plans were afoot. But you didn’t live in Conspiracy for long without imagining all sorts of nonsense. Not that Conspiracy always got it wrong. On the few occasions they were correct, a rapid transfer to Nonfiction was in order—which threw those who were left behind into something of a dilemma. Being in Fiction meant a wider readership, something that Nonfiction could never boast. Besides, a conspiracy theory that turned out to be real wasn’t a theory anymore, and the loss of wild uncorroborated speculation could be something of a downer.
“I’m working with JAID—the Jurisfiction Accident Investigation Department.”
“Ah!” he replied, suddenly realizing what I was here for. “The Lola incident. I believe that Commander Herring is already up there. Can I stress at this time that we will afford Jurisfiction’s representatives all possible help and assistance?”
It was all he could say, really. No one wanted to fall afoul of Jurisfiction or the Council of Genres. This was Fiction. There were skeletons in everyone’s closet.
“It came to earth nine hours ago,” he said as we walked past two faked moon landings, three UFO abductions and a grassy knoll. “It bounced on a pamphlet regarding the notion that Diatrymas are being bred by the Goliath Corporation to keep people out of the New Forest, then landed on a book outlining the somewhat dubious circumstances surrounding the death of Lola Vavoom.”
With Sprockett following at a discreet distance, we took a shortcut through a field of crop circles, passed a laboratory covertly designing infectious diseases for population control, moved aside as a white Fiat Uno drove after a black Mercedes, then entered the subgenre of Lola Vavoom Suspicious Death. Roswell pushed open the swinging doors of a concrete multistory car park that opened directly onto the tenth floor, and standing next to a large lump of tattered wreckage the size of a truck were two men. I didn’t recognize the more disheveled of the two, but the older, wiser and clearly the boss was someone I did recognize: Regional Commander Herring of the BookWorld Policing Agency.
He was very much a hands-on type of administrator. He had no staff, carried all his notes in his head and was one of the few people who still jumped from book to book rather than taking a taxi or public transport. He was a BGH-87 character type. Male, persnickety and highly efficient, but seemingly without humor. He was about fifty and was dressed in a short-sleeved white shirt with an infinite quantity of pens in his top pocket and a garish tie. He wore spectacles, but only for effect. He was high up in the chain of command at the Council of Genres and had access, it was said, to Senator Jobsworth himself. He was the most powerful man I knew.
“About time,” he said when I appeared. “Places to be, people to visit—wheels within wheels.”
“Wheels within wheels,” echoed the man next to him.
“This is Martin Lockheed,” explained Herring. “You’ll answer to him, as I am a busy man. After this meeting I do not expect us to meet again.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Your Three Men in a Boat investigation didn’t really impress,” he began.
“Yes, I’m sorry about that.”
“Apologies don’t really cut it, Next, but I am a man loyal to friends, and the real Miss Next has always intimated in the past that you may show promise one day.”