“You’re making a mistake, Mr. Bellman,” I said angrily, “a very—”

  “Oooh!” said Heep, who had been rummaging in my pockets and taking the opportunity to try to touch my breasts again. “Look what I’ve found!”

  It was the Suddenly, a Shot Rang Out! plot device Snell had given me at the Slaughtered Lamb.

  “A plot device, Miss Next?” said Tweed, taking the small glass globe from Heep. “Do you have any paperwork for this?”

  “No. It’s evidence. I just forgot to sign it in.”

  “Illegal carriage of all Narrative Turning Devices is strictly illegal. Are you a dealer? Who’s your source? Peddle this sort of garbage in teenage fiction?”

  “Blow it out of your arse, Tweed.”

  “What did you say?”

  “You heard me.”

  He went crimson and might have hit me, but all I wanted was for him to move close enough for me to kick him—or his hand, at least.

  “You piece of crap,” he sneered. “I’ve known you were no good from the moment I saw you. Think you’re something special, Miss SpecOps Outlander supremo?”

  “At least I don’t work for the Skyrail, Tweed. Inside fiction you’re a big cheese, but out in the real world you’re less than a nobody!”

  It had the desired effect. He took a step closer and I kicked out, connected with his hand and the small glass globe went sailing into the air, high above our heads. Heep, coward that he now was, dived for cover, but Tweed and the Red Queen, wary of a Narrative Turning Device going off in a confined area, tried to catch it. They might have been successful if just one of them had attempted it. As it was, they collided with a grunt and the small glass globe fell to the floor and shattered as they looked on helplessly.

  Suddenly, a shot rang out. I didn’t see where it came from but felt its full effect; the bullet hit the chain that was holding me to the anvils, shattering it neatly. I didn’t pause for breath. I was off and running towards the door. I didn’t know where I was heading; without my TravelBook I was trapped and Sense and Sensibility was not that big. Tweed and Heep were soon on their feet, only to hit the floor again as a second volley followed the first. I ducked through the door and came upon . . . Vernham Deane, pistol in hand. Heep and Tweed returned fire as Deane holstered his pistol and took both my hands.

  “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 him.

  “Miss Havisham?” echoed the Bellman.

  “Oh, yes,” I replied. “Bastard.”

  Deane touched the back of his head and looked at his hand.

  “Bitch!” he muttered. “I’d have killed you, too!”

  He turned and leaped at me with surprising speed, grasped me by the throat before I could stop him, and we both crashed to the floor, knocking over a table as we went. It was an impressive charade.

  “The little slut serving wench deserved to die!” he screamed. “How dare she spoil the happy life that could have been mine!”

  I couldn’t breath and started to black out. I had wanted it to look realistic—and so, I suppose, did he.

  Tweed placed a gun under Deane’s chin and forced him off. He spat in my face as I lay there, trying to get my breath back. Deane was then set upon by Heep, who took an unhealthy delight in beating him despite apologizing superciliously every time he struck him.

  “Stop!” yelled the Bellman. “Calm down, all of you!”

  They propped the now bleeding Deane in a chair and Heep bound his hands.

  “Did you kill Perkins?” asked the Bellman, and Deane nodded sullenly.

  “He was going to blow the whistle on me—Havisham, too. Snell and Mathias just got in the way. Happiness should have been mine!” he sobbed. “Why did the slut have to turn up with that little bastard—I should have married Miss O’Shaugnessy—all I wanted was something no evil squire in Farquitt ever gets!”

  “And what was that?” asked the Bellman sternly.

  “A happy ending.”

  “Pitiful, wouldn’t you say, Tweed?”

  “Pitiful, yes, sir,” he replied stonily, staring at me as I picked myself off the floor.

  The Bellman tore up my termination order. “It looks like we have underestimated you,” he said happily. “I knew Havisham couldn’t be wrong. Tweed, I think you owe Miss Next an apology.”

  “I apologize unreservedly,” replied Tweed through gritted teeth.

  “Good,” said the Bellman. “Now, Thursday, what’s the problem with Ultra Word™?”

  It was a sticky moment. We had to take this higher than the Bellman. With Libris and the whole of Text Grand Central involved, there was no knowing what they would do. I remembered an error from an early Ultra Word™ test version.

  “Well,” I began, “I think there is a flight manual conflict. If you read an UltraWord™ book on an airship, it can play havoc with the flight manuals.”

  “That’s been cured,” said the Bellman kindly, “but thank you for being so diligent.”

  “That’s a relief. May I have some leave?”

  “Of course. And if you find any other irregularities in UltraWord™, I want them brought to me and me alone.”

  “Yes, sir. May I?” I indicated my TravelBook.

  “Of course! Very impressive job capturing Deane, don’t you think, Tweed?”

  “Yes,” replied Tweed grimly, “very impressive—well done, Next.”

  I opened my TravelBook and read myself to Solomon’s outer office. Tweed wouldn’t try anything at the C of G, and the following three days were crucial. Everything I needed to say to the Bellman would have to wait until I had seven million witnesses.

  32.

  The 923rd Annual BookWorld Awards

  The Annual BookWorld Awards (or Bookies) were instigated in 1063 C.E. and for the first two hundred years were dominated by Aeschylus and Homer, who won most of the awards in the thirty or so categories. Following the expansion in fiction and the inclusion of the oral tradition, categories totaled two hundred by 1423. Technical awards were introduced twenty years later and included Most Used English Word and the Most Widely Mispelt Word, witch has remained a contentious subject ever since. By 1879 there were over six hundred categories, but neither the length of the awards nor the vote-rigging scandal in 1964 has dented the popularity of this glittering occasion—it will remain one of the BookWorld’s most popular fixtures for years to come.

  COMMANDER TRAFFORD BRADSHAW, CBE,

  Bradshaw’s Guide to the BookWorld

  I STOOD OFFSTAGE AT the Starlight Room, one in a long line of equally minor celebrities, all awaiting our turn to go and read the nominations. The hospitality lounge where we had all been mustered was about the size of a football pitch, and the massed babble of excited voices sounded like rushing water. I had been trying to avoid Tweed all evening. But whenever I lost him, Heep would take over. There were others about, too. Bradshaw had pointed out Orlick and Legree, two other assistants of Tweed’s that he thought I should be wary of.

  Of them all, Heep was the most amateur. His skills at unobserved observation were woefully inadequate.

  “Well!” he said when I caught him staring at me. “You and me both waiting for awards!” He rubbed his hands and tapped his long fingers together. “I ask you, me all humble and you an Outlander. Thanks to you and the mispeling incident I’m up for Most Creepy Character in a Dickens Novel. What would you be up for?”

  “I’m giving one, not accepting one, Uriah—and why are you following me?”

  “Apologies, ma’am,” he said, squirming slightly and clasping his hands together to try to stop them from moving, “Mr. Tweed asked me to keep a particular close eye on you in case of an attack, ma’am.”

  “Oh, yes?” I replied, unimpressed by the lame cover story. “From whom?”

  “Those who would wish you harm, of course. ProCaths, bowdlerizers—even the townspeople from Shadow. It was them what tried to kill you at Solomon’s, I’ll be bound.”

  Sadly, it was true. There had been two attempts on my life since Deane’s arrest. The first had been a tiger released in Kenneth’s office. I thought at first it was Big Martin catching up with me—but it wasn’t. Bradshaw had dealt with the creature; he sent it on a one-way trip to Zenobians. The second had been a contract killing. Fortunately for me, Heep’s handwriting was pretty poor and Thursby from The Maltese Falcon was shot instead. It was only because I was an Outlander that I was still alive—if I’d been a Generic, Text Grand Central could have erased me at source long ago.

  “Mr. Tweed said that Outlanders have to stick together,” carried on Heep, “and look after each other. Outlanders have a duty—”

  “This is all really very sweet of him,” I interrupted, “but I can look after myself. Good luck with your award; I’m sure you’ll win.”

  “Thank you!” he said, fidgeting for a moment before moving off a little way and continuing to stare at me in an unsubtle manner.

  I was summoned towards the stage where I could see the master of ceremonies winding up the previous award. He reminded me of Adrian Lush—all smiles, insincerity and bouffant hair.

  “So,” he carried on, “ ‘teleportation’ a clear winner for the Most Implausible Premise in an SF Novel, which was hard luck on ‘And they lived happily after,’ which won last year. If I could thank all the nominees and especially Ginger Hebblethwaite for presenting it.”

  There was applause; a freckled youth in a flying jacket waved to the crowd and winked at me as he trotted offstage.

  The emcee took a deep breath and consulted his list. Unlike awards at home, there was no TV coverage as no one in the BookWorld had a TV. You didn’t need one. The Generics who had remained in the books as a skeleton staff to keep the stories in order were kept up-to-date with a live footnoterphone link from the Starlight Room. With all the usual characters away at the awards, fiction wasn’t quite so good, but no one generally noticed. This was often the reason people in the Outland argued over the quality of a recommended book. They had read it during the Bookies.

  “The next award, ladies, gentleman and, er, things, is to be given by the newest Jurisfiction agent to join the ranks of the BookWorld’s own policing agency. Fresh from a glittering career in the Outland and engineer of the improved ending to Jane Eyre, may I present—Thursday Next!”

  There was applause and I walked on, smiling dutifully. I shook the hand of the emcee and looked out into the auditorium.

  It was vast. Really vast. The Starlight Room was the largest single-function room ever described in any book. A lit candelabra graced each of the hundred thousand tables, and as I looked into the room, all I could see was a never-ending field of white lights, flickering in the distance like stars. Seven million characters were here tonight, but by using a convenient temporal-field displacement technology borrowed from the boys in the SF genre, everyone in the room had a table right next to the stage and could hear and see us with no problems at all.

  “Good evening,” I said, staring out at the sea of faces, “I am here to read the nominations and announce the winner of the Best Chapter Opening in the English Language category.”

  I started to feel hot under the lights. I composed myself and read the back of the envelope.

  “The nominations are The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, and A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.”

  I waited until the applause had died down and then opened the envelope.

  “And the winner is . . . Brideshead Revisited!”

  There was thunderous applause and I smiled dutifully as the emcee bent closer to the microphone.

  “Wonderful!” he said enthusiastically as the applause subsided. “Let’s hear the winning paragraph, shall we?”

  He placed the short section of writing into the Imagino TransferenceDevice that had been installed on the stage. But this wasn’t a recording ITD like the ones they used to create books in the Well—it was a transmitter. The words of Waugh’s story were read by the machine and projected directly into the crowd’s imagination.

  “. . . I have been here before,” I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and although I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest . . .”

  There was more applause from the guests, and when finally it stopped, the emcee announced, “Mr. Waugh can’t be with us tonight, so I would like to ask Sebastian to accept the award on his behalf.”

  There was a drumroll and a brief alarum of music as Sebastian walked from his table, up the steps to the podium and after kissing me on the cheek shook the emcee’s hand warmly.

  “Goodness!” he said, taking a swig from the glass he had brought with him. “It’s a great honor to accept the award on behalf of Mr. Waugh. I know he would want me to thank Charles, from whose mouth all the words spring, and also Lord Marchmain for his excellent death scene, my mother, of course, and Julia, Cords—”

  “What about me?” said a small voice from the Brideshead table.

  “I was getting to you, Aloysius.” Sebastian cleared his throat and took another swig. “Of course, I would also like to say that we in Brideshead could not have done it all on our own. I’d like to thank all the other characters in previous works who have done so much to lay the groundwork. I’d particularly like to mention Captain Grimes, Margot Metroland, and Lord Copper. In addition . . .”

  He droned on like this for almost twenty minutes, thanking everyone he could think of before finally taking the Bookie statuette and returning to his table. I was thanked by the emcee and walked off the stage feeling really quite relieved, the voice of the emcee echoing behind me:

  “And for the next category, Most Incomprehensible Plot in Any Genre, we are very pleased to welcome someone who has kindly taken a few hours’ leave of his grueling schedule of sadistic galactic domination. Ladies, gentlemen and things, his Supreme Holiness Emperor Zhark!”

  “You’re on,” I whispered to the emperor, who was trying to calm his nerves with a quick cigarette in the wings.

  “How do I look? Enough to strike terror into the hearts of millions of merciless life-forms?”