The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [425]
“Hold tight,” he said, “and empty your mind. We’re going to go abstract.”
I cleared my mind as much as I could and—1
“How odd!” said Tweed, walking to the place he had last seen Thursday. He knew she couldn’t jump without her book, but something was wrong. She had vanished—not with the fade out of a standard bookjump, but an instantaneous departure.
Heep and the Bellman joined him, Heep with a bookhound on a leash, who sniffed the ground and whimpered and yelped noisily, chops slobbering.
“No scent?” said the Bellman in a puzzled tone. “No destination signature? Harris, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know, sir. With your permission I’d like to set up textual sieves on every floor of the Great Library. Heep will be your personal bodyguard from now on; Next is quite clearly insane and will try to kill you—I have no doubt about that. Do I have your permission to apply for an Extremely Prejudicial Termination order from the Council of Genres?”
“No, that is one step I am not prepared to take. Order the death of an Outlander? Not I.”
Tweed made to move off but the Bellman called him back. “Tweed, Thursday said there was a problem with UltraWord™ do you think we should contact Text Grand Central and delay its release?”
“You mean you take all this seriously, sir?” exclaimed Tweed in a shocked tone. “Excuse me for being so blunt, but Next is a murderer and a liar—how many more people does she have to kill before she is stopped?”
“UltraWord™ is bigger than all of us,” said the Bellman slowly, “even if she is a murderer, she still might have found something wrong. I cannot afford to take any risks over the new upgrade.”
“Well, we can delay,” said Tweed slowly, “but that would take the inauguration of the new Operating System out of your term as Bellman. If you think that is the best course of action, perhaps we should take it. But whichever Bellman signs Ultra Word™ into law might be looked on favorably by history, do you not think?”
The Bellman rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
“What more tests could we do?” he asked at length.
Tweed smiled. “I’m not sure, sir. We fixed the flight manual conflict and debugged AutoPageTurnDeluxe™. The raciness overheat problem has been fixed, and the Esperanto translation module is now working one hundred percent. All these faults have been dealt with openly and transparently. We need to upgrade and upgrade now—the popularity of nonfiction is creeping up and we have to be vigilant.”
Heep ran up and whispered in Tweed’s ear.
“That was one of our intelligence sources, sir. It seems that Next has been suffering from a mnemonomorph recently.”
“Great Scott!” gasped the Bellman. “She might not even know she had done it!”
“It would explain that convincing act,” added Tweed. “A woman with no memory of her evil has no guilt. Now, do I have your permission to apply for an Extremely Prejudicial Termination order?”
“Yes,” sighed the Bellman, taking a seat, “yes, you better had—and Ultra Word™ is to go ahead, as planned. We have dithered enough.”
We jumped back into the Jurisfiction offices. Tweed and Heep were alone with the Bellman, overseeing a document that I found out later was my termination warrant. I had Deane’s gun pointed—at Deane. He had his hands up. Heep and Tweed exchanged nervous glances.
“I’ve brought you Deane, Bellman,” I announced. “I had no other way of proving my innocence. Vern, tell them what you told me.”
“Go to hell!”
I whacked him hard on the back of the head with the butt of his pistol and he fell to the ground, momentarily stunned. Blood welled up in his hairline and I winced; luckily, no one saw me.
“That’s for Miss Havisham,” I told