The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [640]
“Consider yourself lucky. Out in the real world, despite huge advances in medical science, the chance of death remains unchanged at a hundred percent. Still, there’s a bright side to the human mortality thing—at least, there is for the BookWorld.”
“Which is?”
“A never-ending supply of new readers. Come on, you can jump me back to the Jurisfiction offices.”
She stared at me for a moment and then said, “You’re not so good at bookjumping anymore, are you?”
“Not really—but that’s between you and me, yes?”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
10.
The Well of Lost Plots
Due to the specialized tasks undertaken by Prose Resource Operatives, JurisTech is permitted to build gadgets deemed outside the usual laws of physics—the only department (aside from the SF genre) licensed to do so. Aside from the famed TravelBook, JurisTech is also responsible for the Textual Sieve, an extremely useful device that can do almost anything—even though its precise use, form and function are never fully explained.
As soon as we were back at the Jurisfiction offices in Norland Park, I gave Thursday5 an hour off for lunch so I could get some work done. I pulled all the files on potential transfictional probe appearances and discovered I had the only solid piece of evidence—all the rest had merely been sightings. It seemed that whenever a Goliath probe appeared, it was gone again in under a minute. The phenomenon had begun seven years ago, reached a peak eight months before and now seemed to be ebbing. Mind you, this was based on only thirty-six sightings and so couldn’t be considered conclusive.
I took the information to Bradshaw, who listened carefully to my report and to what I knew about Goliath, which was quite a lot and none of it good. He nodded soberly as I spoke and, when I had finished, paused for a moment before observing, “Goliath is Outlander and well beyond our jurisdiction. I’m loath to take it to Senator Jobsworth, as he’ll instigate some daft ‘initiative’ or something with resources that we just don’t have. Is there any evidence that these probes do anything other than observe? Throwing a metal ball into fiction is one thing; moving a person between the two is quite another.”
“None at all,” I replied. “But it must be their intention, even if they haven’t managed it yet.”
“Do you think they will?”
“My uncle could do it. And if he could, then it’s possible.”
Bradshaw thought for a moment. “We’ll keep this to ourselves for now. With our plunging ReadRates, I don’t want to needlessly panic the CofG into some insane knee-jerk response. Is there a chance you could find out something from the real world?”
“I could try,” I replied reflectively, “but don’t hold your breath—I’m not exactly on Goliath’s Christmas-card list.”
“On the contrary,” said Bradshaw, passing me the probe, “I’m sure they’d be overjoyed to meet someone who can travel into fiction. Can you check up on the Jane Austen refits this afternoon? Isambard was keen to show us something.”
I told him I’d go down there straightaway, and he thanked me, wished me good luck and departed. I had a few minutes to spare before Thursday5 got back, so I checked the card-index databases for anything about Superreaders, of which there was frustratingly little. Most Superreader legends had their base in the Text Sea, usually from word fishermen home on leave from scrawltrawlers. The issue was complicated by the fact that one Superread is technically identical to a large quantity of simultaneous reads, so only an examination of a book’s maintenance log would identify whether it had been a victim or not.
Thursday5 returned exactly on time, having spent the lunch hour in a mud bath, the details of which she felt compelled to tell me—at length. Mind you, she was a lot more relaxed than I was, so something was working. We stepped outside, and after I argued with TransGenre Taxis’ dispatch for five minutes, we read our-selves to the Great Library, then took the elevator and descended in silence to the