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There was a crackle in the air, and Commander Bradshaw suddenly appeared just next to us. Zhark and Tiggy-Winkle looked guilty all of a sudden, and the hedgepig washerwoman made a vain attempt to hide the ironing she was doing.
“I thought I would find you here,” he said, mustache all atwitch, as it was when he was a bit peeved. “That wouldn’t be moonlighting, would it, Agent Tiggy-Winkle?”
“Not at all,” she replied. “I spend so much time at Jurisfiction I can hardly get through the ironing I need to do for my own book!”
“Very well,” said Bradshaw slowly, turning to me. “I thought I’d find you here, too. I have a job that only you can handle.”
“I thought I was suspended?”
He passed me my badge. “The suspension was purely for the CofG’s benefit.
The disciplinary paperwork was accidentally eaten by snails. Most perplexing.”
I smiled. “What’s up?”
“A matter of great delicacy. There were a few minor textual irregularities in…the Thursday books.”
“Which ones?” I asked, suddenly worried that Thursday5 might have taken her failure to heart.
“The first four. Since you know them quite well and no one else wants to touch them or her with a barge pole, I thought you might want to check it out.”
“What sorts of irregularities?”
“Small ones,” said Bradshaw, handing me a sheet of paper. “Nothing you’d notice from the Outland unless you were a committed fan. I’m thinking it might be the early stage of a breakdown.”
He didn’t mean a breakdown in the Outlander sense. In the BookWorld a breakdown meant an internal collapse of the character’s pattern of reason—the rules that made one predictable and understandable. Some, like Lucy Deane, collapsed spontaneously and with an annoying regularity; others just crumbled slowly from within, usually as a result of irreconcilable conflicts within their character. In either case, replacement by a fully trained-up generic was the only option. Of course, it might be nothing and very possible that Thursday1–4 was just angry about being fired and venting her spleen on the co-characters in the series.
“I’ll check her out.”
“Good,” said Bradshaw, turning to Zhark and Tiggy-Winkle. “And you two—I want you all geared up and ready to try to get into ‘The Speckled Band’ by way of ‘The Disintegrator Ray’ by fourteen hundred hours.”
Bradshaw looked at his clipboard and then vanished. We all stood up.
“Do you want us to come with you?” asked Zhark. “Strictly speaking, your checking up on Thursday1–4 is a conflict-of-interest transgression.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said, and the pair of them wished me well and vanished, like Bradshaw, into thin air.
26.
Thursday Next
I was only vaguely consulted when the first four of the Thursday Next books were constructed. I was asked about my car, my house, and I even lent them a photo album (which I never got back). I was also introduced to the bland and faceless generic who would eventually become Thursday1–4. The rest was created from newspaper reports and just plucked from the air. If I’d cared more about how it all was going to turn out, perhaps I would have given them more time.
A fter another fruitless argument with the dispatcher at TransGenre Taxis, who told me they had two drivers off sick and it wasn’t their fault but they would “see what could be done,” I took the elevator down to the sixth floor of the Great Library and walked to the section of shelving that carried all five of the Thursday books, from The Eyre Affair all the way through to The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco. There was every edition, too—from publisher’s proof to hardback, large print and mass-market paperback. I picked up a copy of The Eyre Affair and looked carefully for a way in. I knew that the book was first-person narrative, and having a second me clearly visible to readers would be wildly confusing—if the book wasn’t confusing enough already. I soon found what I was looking for: a time lapse of six weeks after Landen’s death near the beginning of the book. I scanned the page for the correct place, and, using an oblique, nonappearing-entry method taught to me by Miss Havisham, I slipped unseen into the end of chapter one.
I arrived in the written Swindon just as the sun was dipping below the horizon, and I was standing opposite our house in the Old Town. Or at least it was the remains of our house. The fire had just been put out, and the building was now a blackened ruin, the still-hot timbers steaming as they were doused with water. Through the twinkling of blue and red emergency lights, I could see a small figure sitting in the back of an ambulance, a blanket draped across her shoulders. The legal necessity of removing Landen from the series was actually a blessing in disguise for the publishers. It freed up their Thursday romantically and also gave a reason for her psychotic personality. Boy, was this book ever crap.
I waited in the crowd for a moment until I could sense that the chapter was over, then approached Thursday1–4, who had her back to me and was talking to a badly realized version of Bowden, who in this book was known by the legally unactionable “Crowden Babel.”
“Good evening,” I said, and Thursday jumped as though stuck with a cattle prod.
“What are you doing here?” she asked without turning around.
“Text Grand Central saw a few wrinkles in the narrative, and you’re too unpleasant for anyone other than me to come and have a look.”
“It’s okay,” she said, “everything’s fine. It’s probably a Storycode Engine on the fritz. A buildup of irony on the dialogue injectors or something.”
She seemed jittery but still didn’t want to turn and look at me straight on.
