The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [442]
“We plot everything,” he explained as the staff below moved marker tags with long sticks to the orders of the controllers above, “from the largest unconstrained narrative flexation to the smallest tense distortion. Then, by plotting the size of the changes and their positions, a rough map of the BookWorld’s weather can be constructed.”
I looked down at the sea of small markers, which seemed, indeed, to have a sort of swirling pattern to them. He pointed to a mass of reports.
“About two hours ago an outbreak of anomalous plot flexations began in Riders of the Purple Sage.”
“The Minotaur was reported in Zane Grey last week,” I commented.
“That’s what we thought at first,” replied Dr. Howard, “but the slight flexations were moving too fast to be a PageRunner. Within twenty minutes a cloud of grammatical oddities had joined the weather front, and together they left the Western genre. The front brushed the southeast corner of Erotica and vanished ten minutes later into Stream of Consciousness.”
“Vanished?”
“Difficult to spot, perhaps. It’s been quiet in SOC ever since. But that’s not all. At pretty much the same time a cloud of mispunctuation arose in Horror, circled twice and then developed into a pretty stiff breeze of split infinitives and jumbled words before traveling through Fantasy into Romance. Unchallenged, it hit the Farquitt series and split in two. One storm front headed north into Steel, the other along the Collins ridge just east of Krantz. We expect the two fronts to merge just past Cooper in a few minutes.”
“So we can safely say it’s over then?” asked the senator, staring at the plotting table with more than a little confusion.
“Up to a point, Senator,” replied Dr. Howard diplomatically. “As you so expertly point out, it just might dissipate into the Taylor Bradford canon harmlessly.”
“Oh, good!” said the senator with relief.
“However,” continued Dr. Howard, “and far be it from me to contradict Your Grace, it’s equally probable they will strengthen and then careen off on a destructive course towards Drama.”
“Boss!” said a technician who had been staring at a list of recent anomalies. “I think you better see this.”
Below us on the plotting table we could see a small bulge emerge on the western flanks of Stream of Consciousness.
“How fast?” asked Dr. Howard.
“About three pages a second.”
“Give me a projected route.”
The technician picked up a slide rule and scribbled some notes on a pad of paper. Unluckily for us, the front that had begun in Western had traversed Stream of Consciousness and emerged four times as strong.
“I knew we hadn’t seen the last of it,” muttered Howard. “Damn and blast!”
But that wasn’t all. In the next two minutes we watched nervously as the split storm fronts coursing through Romance rejoined, grew stronger and diverted off towards Drama, as feared.
“And that’s why we called you,” said Dr. Howard, gazing at me intently. “In under ten minutes the Romance and Stream of Consciousness frontal systems will merge and strengthen. We’ve got a WordStorm brewing of magnitude five-point-four or more heading straight for Drama.”
“Five-point-four?” echoed the senator. “That’s good, right?”
“In storm terms, it’s very good,” replied Dr. Howard grimly, “make no mistake about that. A two-point-three might only scramble text and change tenses; a three-point-five can muddle chapters and remove entire words. Anything above a five has enough power to tear whole ideas and paragraphs out of a book and dump them several shelves away.”
“O-kay,” I said slowly as Commander Bradshaw appeared, looking a bit bleary-eyed.
“Glad you could make it, Trafford. We’ve got a potential WordStorm brewing.”
“WordStorm, eh?” he mused. “Reminds me of a typhoon that struck The French Lieutenant’s Woman ten years back. By gad, we were picking superfluous adjectives out of the book for a month!”
“And that had been a small one,” added Dr. Howard, “barely a two-point-one.”
“Cat,” I said, “issue a storm warning to the residents