The room was grubby and the floor scattered with discarded pizza containers and empty hyphen cans. The TV was still on and was tuned to a shopping channel, and his record collection contained Hooked on Classics and Footloose. Mediocre lived up to his name.
“What do you make of this?” asked Sprockett, who had come across a large model of the Forth Rail Bridge. It had large spans that in reality would have thrust boldly across the Forth Estuary, not just to connect two landmasses separated by a barrier that was also an arterial trade route but to demonstrate man’s technological prowess in the face of natural obstacles.
“It’s not a bridge,” I whispered, “it’s metaphor.”
We started opening boxes and found three more bridges, two rivers and a distant mountain range, swathed in mist with a road leading to unknown valleys beyond. Loser Gatsby was at the door, mouth open.
“Tell me,” I said, “where did your brother get all this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Truthfully?”
“I’m a loser,” she said. “If I’d known about this little lot, I would have sold it all, gone on a bender and had a dolphin tattooed on my left boob.”
Her logic was impeccable. I questioned her further, but she knew nothing.
“In two minutes the Men in Plaid will be coming through that door,” I told her. “Believe me, you don’t want to be here when they do.”
I didn’t need to say it twice, and she and the rest of the loser literary siblings made a hasty exit down the stairs.
“So,” said Sprockett, staring at all the metaphor, “stolen?”
“Not if Mediocre was as his name suggests,” I replied. “How much do you think this is all worth?”
“Twenty grand,” said Sprockett. “People will pay good money to get hold of raw metaphor. There’s enough here to keep a man comfortable for a long time.”
“Or even enroll at character college,” I said holding up a prospectus from St. Tabularasa’s. “Looks like Mediocre was trying to better himself and shed his epithet. A cabbie couldn’t earn this much in a decade of Octobers.” I added, “I reckon we’re looking at a bribe.”
“To do what?”
“I don’t know.”
I picked up Mediocre’s account book. It outlined all the trips he had done and which needed to be billed. The last day was not there, of course, but the previous day was.
“Well, well,” I said, “looks like Thursday went on a trip to Biography the day before she vanished. And that’s not all,” I added. “Every single fare Mediocre accepted was picked up from the same place—Sargasso Plaza, just outside the entrance to Fan Fiction. Coincidence?”
“We have company,” murmured Sprockett, who’d been standing at the window.
I joined him and noted that a 1949 Buick Roadmaster had pulled up outside the building. Two Men in Plaid got out and looked around.
“Time we weren’t here.”
We crossed to the other side of the room and exited though the French windows, which opened onto a veranda. From there we climbed down onto the roof of a garden shed, then let ourselves out into an alley beyond. We walked back around the house and watched as the Plaids went into the building.
“What now, ma’am?”
I handed him a set of keys I’d found in Mediocre’s room and nodded towards the brand-new taxi parked outside. “Can you drive one of those?”
“If it has wheels, I can drive it, ma’am. Are we heading for Biography?”
“We are.”
“And what will we do when we get there?”
“Find out if Lyell is as boring as Thursday said he was.”
30.
High Orbit
Sooner or later a resident of the BookWorld will start to question what is beyond the internal sphere that we call home. Stated simply, what would happen if one burrowed directly downwards? In pursuit of an answer, noted explorer Arne Saknussemm entered a disused metaphor mine to see if a way through could be found. As this edition went to press, he has not yet returned.
Sprockett reversed the cab out of the garage, engaged the Technobabble™ Swivelmatic vectored-ion plasma drive and powered vertically upwards from Parody Valley and Vanity. I was pressed back into my seat by the acceleration and the ascent angle, and I might have been frightened had my mind not been tumbling with what we’d discovered so far—or even with what we had still yet to find out. Within a few minutes, we were hanging in the heavens a couple of thousand feet from the surface, right at the cruising altitude of local books that were being moved around Fiction. Below us the islands that made up the Fiction Archipelago were laid out in precise detail.
“Would it be impertinent to point out that visiting another island in the BookWorld without transit papers is strictly forbidden?”
“What does Thursday Next care for transit papers?”
“I would politely point out that you’re not her, ma’am.”
“I might as well be. I have a shield and I look like her. Who can say I’m not?”
“Who indeed, ma’am?”
I looked behind us and out to sea. Biography was situated beyond Artistic Criticism, and it was unlikely that any books would be going that way at this lower level. I wound down the window, poked my head out and looked up. Several miles above us, I could see the high-level books crisscrossing the sky, their journey made less arduous by traveling at the precise altitude where the force of gravity from below cancels the force of gravity from above—the gravopause. At that height you could usually find someone going your way—so long as you could get up there. The Technobabble™ drive on the cab would get us to local traffic height, but after that we were on our own.
We had to wait a nail-biting two and three-quarters minutes, every second worrying that the Plaids would spot us.
“Buckle up, ma’am,” said Sprockett. “Looks like someone’s been discovered.”
As we watched, an entire section of Vanity Island seemed to fall away. A book had been accepted into the mainstream and was rising from the flanks of Mount Sleeper, trailing the debris of a ramshackle group of shameless Zadie Smith rip-offs that had been unwisely built on top of it.
The settings—mostly of a winter scene in London, it appeared—rotated slowly about its axis as it rose vertically to meet us, and just as it transitioned into forward flight, Sprockett stepped on the throttle and accelerated to meet the book, which loomed as large as eight cathedrals in the windscreen. As soon as we were close enough, Sprockett slewed the vehicle to a stop on the side of a dream sequence—a picnic the family had once spent on a grassy hill in spring, where a silver pond alive with bulrushes lay within the dappled glade of beech trees.
“Congratulations on the publication,” I said to a small boy who was playing with a tin train, and he waved shyly in return. We weren’t there for long. Piggybacking around the BookWorld was a dark art that needed calm nerves and good timing; within a few minutes, Sprockett lifted off again and made the short hop to a historical novel that was moving up to join the High Stream in order to make its way to History for fact-checking. They looked less friendly in this book, so Sprockett simply fired one of the vehicle’s two grapnels into the soft intratextual matrix to which the book’s settings were bolted, and we began the tow into the high orbit dangling on the end of a slender length of steel cable.
“Okay,” I said as we moved steadily upwards, the cab’s altimeter winding around like a top, “how’s this for a scenario? Thursday is investigating something that requires her to stay out of sight. She hides out in Vanity, somewhere near Sargasso Plaza. The Mediocre Gatsby always hangs out there, waiting for fares. He takes her to Biography and the following day picks her up to go to the Council of Genres. He piggybacks The Murders on the Hareng Rouge, which is heading—ISBN already scrubbed—towards the Ungenred Zone to be scrapped. Somewhere above Aviation the rhetorical device is activated. The book explodes into a zillion fragments within a fraction of a second, taking with it Thursday, Mediocre, and the TransGenre Taxi. It’s just another book coming to grief that would be swiftly investigated, and then as swiftly dismissed as an accident.”