“You speak as though it were alive.”

  “Sometimes I think it is,” I mused, staring at the spark. “After all, a story is born, it can evolve, replicate and then die. I used to go down to core containment quite a lot, but I don’t have as much time for it these days.”

  I pointed at a pipe about the width of my arm that led out from the plinth and disappeared into the floor.

  “That’s the throughput pipe that takes all the readings to the Storycode Engine Floor at Text Grand Central and from there to the Outland, where they’re channeled direct to the reader’s imagination.”

  “And…all books work this way?”

  “I wish. Books that are not within the influence of Text Grand Central have their own onboard Storycode Engines, as do books being constructed in the Well of Lost Plots and most of the vanity publishing genre.”

  Thursday5 looked thoughtful. “The readers are everything, aren’t they?”

  “Now you’ve got it,” I replied. “Everything.”

  We stood in silence for a moment.

  “I was just thinking about the awesome responsibility that comes with being a Jurisfiction agent,” I said at last. “What were you thinking about?”

  “Me?”

  I looked around the empty room. “Yes, you.”

  “I was wondering if extracting aloe vera hurt the plant. What’s that?”

  She was pointing at a small round hatch that was partially hidden behind some copper tubing. It looked like something you might find in the watertight bulkhead of a submarine. Riveted and of robust construction, it had a large central lever and two locking devices farther than an arm span apart, so it could never be opened accidentally by one person.

  “That leads to…Nothing,” I murmured.

  “You mean a blank wall?”

  “No, a blank wall would be something. This is not a nothing but the Nothing, the Nothing by which all Somethings are defined.”

  She looked confused, so I beckoned her to a small porthole next to the hatch and told her to look out.

  “I can’t see anything,” she said after a while. “It’s completely black…. No, wait, I can see small pinpoints of light—like stars.”

  “Not stars,” I told her. “Books. Each one adrift in the firmament and each one burning not just with the light that the author gave it upon creation but with the warm glow of being read and appreciated. The brighter ones are the most popular.”

  “I can see millions of them,” she murmured, cupping her hands around her face to help her eyes penetrate the inky blackness.

  “Every book is a small world unto itself, reachable only by bookjumping. See how some points of light tend to group near others?”

  “Yes?”

  “They’re clumped together in genres, attracted by the gravitational tug of their mutual plotlines.”

  “And between them?”

  “An abstraction where all the laws of literary theory and storytelling conventions break down—the Nothing. It doesn’t support textual life and has no description, form or function.”

  I tapped the innocuous-looking hatch.

  “Out there you’d not last a second before the text that makes up your descriptive existence was stripped of all meaning and consequence. Before bookjumping was developed, every character was marooned in his or her own novel. For many of the books outside the influence of the Council of Genres and Text Grand Central, it’s still like that. Pilgrim’s Progress and the Sherlock Holmes series are good examples. We know roughly where they are, due to the literary influence they exert on similar books, but we still haven’t figured out a way in. And until someone does, a bookjump is impossible.”

  I switched off the light, and we returned to Geppetto’s kitchen.

  “Here you go,” said Julian Sparkle, handing me a cardboard box. Any sort of enmity he might have felt toward us had vanished.

  “What’s this?”

  “Why, your prize, of course! A selection of Tupperware™ containers. Durable and with ingenious spillproof lids, they’re the ideal way to keep food fresh.”

  “Give them to the tiger.”

  “He doesn’t like Tupperware—the lids are tricky to get off with paws.”

  “Then you have them.”

  “I didn’t win them,” replied Sparkle with a trace of annoyance, but then he added after a moment’s thought, “However, if you would like to play our Super Wizzo Double Jackpot game, we can double your prize the next time you play!”

  “Good, fine—whatever,” I said as a phone on the kitchen table started jangling. Julian picked it up.

  “Hello? Two doors, one tiger, liar/nonliar puzzle speaking.” He raised his eyebrows and grabbed a handy pen to scribble a note. “We’ll be onto it right away.”

  He replaced the phone and addressed the two guards, who were watching him expectantly. “Scramble, lads. We’re needed on a boring car journey on the M4 westbound near Lyneham.”

  The room was suddenly a whirl of activity. Each guard removed his door, which seemed to be on quick-release hinges, and then held it under his arm. The first guard placed his hand on the shoulder of Sparkle, who had turned his back, and the second on the shoulder of his compatriot. The tiger, now free, stood behind the second guard and placed one paw on his shoulder and with the other lifted the telephone off the table.

  “Ready?” called out Sparkle to the odd line that had formed expertly behind him.

  “Yes,” said the first guard.

  “No,” said the second.

  “Growl,” said the tiger, and turned to wink at us.

  There was a mild concussion as they all jumped out. The fire blazed momentarily in the grate, the cat ran out of the room, and loose papers were thrown into the air. Phone call to exit had taken less then eight seconds. These guys were professionals.

  Thursday5 and I, suitably impressed and still without a taxi, jumped out of Pinocchio and were once again in the Great Library.

  She replaced the book on the shelf and looked up at me.

  “Even if I had played Liars and Tigers,” she said with a mournful sigh, “I wouldn’t have been able to figure it out. I’d have been eaten.”

  “Not necessarily,” I replied. “Even by guessing, your chances were still fifty-fifty, and that’s thought favorable odds at Jurisfiction.”

  “You mean I have a fifty percent chance of being killed in the ser vice?”

  “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 subbasements, which had been known colloquially as the Well of Lost Plots for so long that no one could remember their proper name—if they’d ever had one. It was here that books were actually constructed. The “laying of the spine” was the first act in the process, and after that a continuous series of work gangs would toil tirelessly on the novel, embedding plot and subtext within the fabric of the narrative. They carefully lowered in the settings and atmosphere before the characters, fresh from dialogue training and in the presence of a skilled imaginator, would record the book onto an ImaginoTransferoRecordingDevice ready for reading in the Outland. It was slow, manpower-intensive and costly—any Supervising Book Engineer who could construct a complex novel in the minimum of time and on bud get was much in demand.

  “I was thinking,” said Thursday5 as the elevator plunged downward, “about being a bit more proactive. I would have been eaten by that tiger, and it was, I must confess, the seventh time you’ve rescued me over the past day and a half.”

  “Eighth,” I pointed out. “Remember you were attacked by that adjectivore?”

  “Oh, yes. It didn’t really take to my suggestion of a discussion group to reappraise the passive role of grammasites within the BookWorld, now, did it?”

  “No. All it wanted was to tear the adjectives from your still-breathing body.”

  “Well, my point is that I think I need to be more aggressive.”

  “Sounds like a good plan,” I replied. “If a situation arises, we’ll see how you do.”

  The elevator stopped, and we stepped out. Down here in the Well, the subbasements looked more like narrow Elizabethan streets than corridors. It was here that purveyors of book-construction-related merchandise could be found displaying their wares in a multitude of specialty shops that would appeal to any genre, style or setting. The corridors were alive with the bustling activity of artisans moving hither and thither in the gainful pursuit of book building. Plot traders, backstoryists, hole stitchers, journeymen and generics trotted purposefully in every direction, and cartloads of prefabricated sections for protobooks were being slowly pulled down the center of the street by Pitman ponies, which are a sort of shorthand horse that doesn’t take up so much room.

  Most of it was salvage. In the very lowest subbasement was the Text Sea, and it was on the shores of this ocean that scrapped books were pulled apart by work gangs using nothing more re-fined than hammers, chains and muscle. The chunks of battered narrative were then dismantled by cutters, who would remove and package any salvageable items to be resold. Any idea, setting or character that was too damaged or too dull to be reused was unceremoniously dumped in the Text Sea, where the bonds within the sentences were loosened until they were nothing but words, and then these, too, were reduced to letters and punctuation, the meaning burning off into a bluish mist that lingered near the foreshore before evaporating.

  “Who are we going to see?” asked Thursday5 as we made our way through the crowded throng.

  “Bradshaw wanted me to cast an eye over the Jane Austen refit,” I replied. “The engineer in charge is Isambard Kingdom Buñuel, the finest and most surreal book engineer in the WOLP. When he constructed War and Peace, no one thought that anything of such scale and grandeur could be built, let alone launched. It was so large an entire subbasement had to be constructed to take it. Even now a permanent crew of twenty is needed to keep it going.”

  Thursday5 looked curiously around as a gang of riveters walked past, laughing loudly and talking about a spine they’d been working on.

  “So once the book is built, it’s moved to the Great Library?” she asked.

  “If only,” I replied. “Once completed and the spark has been ignited, it undergoes a rigorous twelve-point narrative safety-and-compliance regime before being studiously and penetratively test-read on a special rig. After that, the book is taken on a trial reading by the Council of Genres Book Inspectorate before being passed—or not—for publication.”

  We walked on and presently saw the Book Maintenance Facility hangars in the distance, rising above the low roofs of the street like the airship hangars I knew so well back home. They were always full; book maintenance carried on 24/7. After another five minutes’ walk and with the street expanding dramatically to be able to encompass the vast size of the complex, we arrived outside the Book Maintenance Facility.

  11.

  The Refit

  Books suffer wear and tear, just the same as hip joints, cars and reputations. For this reason all books have to go into the maintenance bay for a periodic refit, either every thirty years or every million readings, whichever comes first. For those books that suffer a high initial readership but then lose it through boredom or insufficient reader intellect, a partial refit may be in order. Salmon Thrusty’s intractable masterpiece The Demonic Couplets has had its first two chapters rebuilt six times, but the rest is relatively unscathed.

  Ever since the ProCaths had mounted a guerrilla-style attack on Wuthering Heights during routine maintenance, security had been increased, and tall cast-iron railings now separated the Book Maintenance Facility from the rest of the Well. Heathcliff—possibly the most hated man inside fiction—had not been harmed, partly due to the vigilance of the Jurisfiction agents who were on Heathcliff Protection Duty that day but also due to a misunderstanding of the word “guerrilla,” a woeful lexicological lapse that had left five confused apes dead and the facility littered with bananas. There was now a guard house, too, and it was impossible to get in unless on official business.

  “Now, here’s an opportunity,” I whispered to Thursday5, “to test your aggressiveness. These guys can be tricky, so you need to be firm.”

  “Firm?”

  “Firm.”

  She took a deep breath, steeled herself and marched up to the guard house in a meaningful manner.

  “Next and Next,” she announced, passing our IDs to a guard who was sitting in a small wooden shed at the gates of the facility. “And if you cause us any trouble, we’ll…not be happy. And then you’ll not be happy, because we can do unhappy things…to people…sometimes.”

  “I’m sorry?” said the guard, who had a large white mustache and seemed to be a little deaf.

  “I said…ah, how are you?”

  “Oh, we’re fine, thank you, missy,” replied the guard amiably. Thursday5 turned to me and gave me the thumbs-up sign, and I smiled. I actually quite liked her, but there was a huge quantity of work to be done before she might be considered Jurisfiction material. At present I was planning on assessing her “potential with retraining” and sending her back to cadet school.

  I looked around as the guard stared at our identification and then at us. Above the hangars I could see tall chimneys belching forth clouds of smoke, while in the distance we could hear the ring of hammers and the rumble of machinery.

  “Which one is Thursday Next?” asked the guard, staring closely at the almost identical IDs.

  “Both of us,” said Thursday5. “I’m Thursday5, and she’s the Outlander.”

  “An Outlander?” repeated the guard with great interest. I glared at Thursday5. My Outlander status wasn’t something I liked to bandy about.