The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [337]
“No. They’re still a long way away. They’d been trying to send an unmanned probe into The Listeners, but from what I saw, with little success.”
“Okay,” replied the Bellman, “we’ll keep an eye on them. What was their name again?”
“Goliath,” I said.
He made a note.
“Item five. All of the punctuation has been stolen from the final chapter of Ulysses. Probably about five hundred assorted full stops, commas, apostrophes and colons.” He paused for a moment. “Vern, weren’t you doing some work on this?”
“Indeed,” replied the squire, stepping forward and opening a notebook, “we noticed the theft two days ago. To take so much punctuation in one hit initially sounds audacious, but perhaps the thief thought no one would notice as most readers never get that far into Ulysses—you will recall the theft of chapter sixty-two from Moby-Dick, where no one noticed? Well, this theft was noted, but initial reports show that readers are regarding the lack of punctuation as not a cataclysmic error but the mark of a great genius, so we’ve got some breathing space.”
“Are we sure it was a thief?” asked Beatrice. “Couldn’t it just be grammasites?”
“I don’t think so,” replied Perkins, who had made book-zoology into something closely resembling a science. “Punctusauroids are pretty rare, and to make off with so many punctuations you would need a flock of several hundred. Also, I don’t think they would have left the last full stop—that looks to me like a mischievous thief.”
“Okay,” said the Bellman, “so what are we to do?”
“The only ready market for stolen punctuation is in the Well.”
“Hmm,” mused the Bellman. “A Jurisfiction agent down there is about as conspicuous as a brass band at a funeral. We need someone to go undercover. Any volunteers?”
“It’s my case,” said Vernham Deane. “I’ll go. That is—if no one thinks themselves better qualified.”
There was silence.
“Looks like you’re it!” enthused the Bellman, writing a note on his clipboard. “Item six. As you recall, David and Catriona Balfour were lost a few weeks back. Because there can’t be much to Kidnapped and Catriona without them and Robert Louis Stevenson remains a popular author, the Council of Genres have licensed a pair of A-4 Generics to take their place. They’ll be given unlimited access to all Stevenson’s books, and I want you all to make them feel welcome.”
There was a murmuring from the collected agents.
“Yes,” said the Bellman with a resigned air, “I know they’ll never be exactly the same, but with a bit of luck we should be okay; no one in the Outland noticed when David Copperfield was replaced, now did they?”
No one said anything.
“Good. Item seven. As you know, I am retiring in two weeks’ time and the Council of Genres will need a replacement. All nominations are to be given direct to the Council for consideration.
He paused again.
“Item eight. As you all know, Text Grand Central have been working on an upgrade to the Book Operating System for the last fifty years—”
The assembled agents groaned. Clearly this was a matter of some contention. Snell had explained about the imaginotransference technology behind books in general, but I had no idea how it worked. Still don’t, as a matter of fact.
“Do you know what happened when they tried to upgrade SCROLL?” said Bradshaw. “The system conflict wiped out the entire library at Alexandria—they had to torch the lot to stop it spreading.”
“We knew a lot less about operating systems then, Commander,” replied the Bellman in a soothing voice, “and you can rest assured that early upgrading problems have not been ignored. Many of us have reservations about the standard version of BOOK that all our beloved works are recorded in, and I think the latest upgrade to BOOK V9 is something that we should all welcome.”
No one said anything. He had our attention.
“Good. Well, I could rabbit on all day but I really feel that it would be better to let WordMaster Libris, all the way from Text Grand Central, tell you the full story. Xavier?”
11.
Introducing UltraWord™
First