One of Our Thursdays Is Missing - Jasper Fforde [45]
“Do you think this is about the Racy Novel peace talks?” I asked a French Wilkins Micawber who was there on an exchange trip.
“Mais oui. But I think ze CofG is being a leetle jittery ’bout Racy Novel,” he explained in a pointlessly overblown French accent. “Zey think zat zere may be fizz columnists eager to cause—’ow you say?—mischief. I’d not like to be without shirt and medallion while Barry White plays in ze background right now, I can tells you.”
“Reason for visit?” asked the Plaid on guard duty.
“I have to report to Mr. Lockheed regarding a crashed-book investigation.”
“Very well,” said the Plaid. “And what’s with the mechanical butler?”
“To lend tone to the proceedings.”
This was enough for the Man in Plaid, and with a gruff “Welcome to the Classics, have an eloquent day,” I was allowed to pass. On our way out of the station, I noticed a small group of characters who had been pulled aside. Some of the women wore miniskirts, tube tops and stilettos, and the men had shirts open to the navel. It seemed as though anyone even remotely resembling someone from Racy Novel was immediately under suspicion. They were protesting their innocence and complaining bitterly about the unfair character profiling, but to little avail.
We took a tram along Austen Boulevard and got out just outside the gates to Sense and Sensibility. This was a large compound, and a high wall topped with barbed wire surrounded the many settings that made up the book. On each corner were watchtowers, from which armed Plaids kept a constant lookout. Such tight security wasn’t just to protect the Dashwoods—the residence of Norland Park within Sense and Sensibility was also the headquarters of Jurisfiction, Fiction’s policing agency.
Waiting at the gates was a group of characters with day passes, ready for the tour. For some reason those in Sci-Fi had a thing about the classics, so of the twenty or thirty characters waiting, at least two-thirds were aliens. Since most of them hailed from the poor end of the genre, they had a lot of tentacles and left sticky trails after themselves, which caused no end of cleaning up.
“No clockwork automatons,” said one of the guards on duty. “You should know better than that, Miss Next.”
I had to explain that I wasn’t that Miss Next, and the guard peered closer at me, grunted and then explained that a Duplex-4 had suffered a mainspring failure several months before and killed eight bystanders, so all cog-based life-forms below the Duplex-6 had been banned.
“The Six has been released?” asked Sprockett, who had a vested interest in the competition. To sentient machines the primary cause of worry was obsolescence, closely followed by metal fatigue and inadequate servicing.
“It was launched just after the remaking,” said the guard, “but I’ve not seen one yet.”
“They must have rushed them into production,” murmured Sprockett. “A risk, if they’re still at the beta-test stage.”
I suggested to Sprockett that he nip into the local Stubbs and not have a coffee or two until I returned, to which he gratefully acquiesced.
After signing the visitors’ book and a risk assessment that included “erasure, swollen ankles and death by drowning,” I was issued a visitor’s pass and allowed to walk up the graveled path towards the house. Since we were now actually within the backstory of Sense and Sensibility, the view upwards was not of the rest of the BookWorld—the curved inside of the sphere and books moving about—but of clouds and a clear blue sky. The trees gently rustled as though in a breeze, and the herbaceous borders were alive with a delicate symphony of color. This was one of the better attributes of the Reader Feedback Loop. When readers imbue a book with their own interpretations, the weather always comes first, then colors,