“When was this?” I asked.

  “In 1996. We fared better after that and by a system of trial and error have managed to figure out that individual books seem to be clumped together in groups. We’ve started plotting a map—I’ll show you if you like.”

  We walked into a room next door that seemed to be filled to capacity with computers and their operators.

  “How many probe missions have you sent?”

  “About seventy thousand,” said John Henry, who had followed us. “Most come back without recording anything, and over eight thousand never return at all. In total we have had four hundred and twenty successful missions. As you can see, getting into fiction for us is at present a somewhat haphazard affair. The Austen Rover is ready for its first trip—but by simple extrapolation of the probe figures, every journey has a one-in-eight chance of not returning, and only a one-in-one-hundred-and-sixty possibility of hitting something.”

  I could see what they were up against—and why. They were hurling probes into a BookWorld that was 80 percent Nothing. The thing was, I could pretty much draw from memory a genre map of the BookWorld. With my help they might actually make it.

  “This is the BookWorld as we think it exists,” explained John Henry, laying out a large sheet of paper on a desk. It was patchy in the extreme and full of errors. It was a bit like throwing Ping-Pong balls into a dark furniture store and then trying to list the contents by the noises they made.

  “This will take you a long time to figure out,” I murmured.

  “Time that we don’t really have, Ms. Next. Despite my position as president, even I have to concede that the amount spent will never be recouped. All funding for this project will be withdrawn in a week.”

  It was the first time I’d felt any sort of relief since I arrived. The idea of Goliath’s even setting so much as a toe inside fiction filled me with utter dread. But one question still niggled at me.

  “Why?”

  “I’m sorry?” said John Henry.

  “Why are you trying to get into fiction at all?”

  “Book tourism,” he replied simply. “The Austen Rover was designed to take twelve people around the high points of Jane Austen’s work. At five hundred pounds for a twenty-minute hop around the most-loved works, we thought at the time it would be quite profitable. Mind you, that was nine years ago, when people were still reading books.”

  “We thought it might reinvigorate the classics,” added Wirthlass.

  “And your interest in the classics?”

  It was John Henry who answered. “We feel that publishing in general and books in par tic ular are well worth hanging on to.”

  “You’ll excuse me if I’m not convinced by your supposed altruism.”

  “No altruism, Ms. Next. The fall in revenue of our publishing arm has been dramatic, and since we own little in the way of computer games or consoles, the low ReadRate is something that affects us financially. I think you’ll find that we’re together on this one. What we want is what you want. Even though our past associations have not been happy and I understand your distrust, Goliath in its reborn shape is not quite the all-devouring corporation that you think it is.”

  “I haven’t been in the BookWorld since the days of The Eyre Affair.”

  John Henry coughed politely. “You knew about the probes, Ms. Next.”

  Damn.

  “I have…contacts over there.”

  I could tell they didn’t believe me, but that was tough. I’d seen enough.

  “Looks like you’ve wasted a lot of money,” I said.

  “With or without you, we’re going to test it on Friday evening,” announced Wirthlass. “I and two others have decided to risk all and take her out for a spin. We may not return, but if we do, then the data gained would be priceless!”

  I admired her courage, but it didn’t matter—I wasn’t going to tell them what I knew.

  “Just explain one thing,” said Wirthlass. “Is the force of gravity entirely normal in the BookWorld?”

  “What about the universality of physical laws?” piped up a second technician, who’d been watching us.

  “And communication between books—is such a thing possible?”

  Before long there were eight people, all asking questions about the BookWorld that I could have answered with ease—had I any inclination to do so.

  “I’m sorry,” I said as the questions reached a crescendo. “I can’t help you!”

  They were all quiet and stared at me. To them this project was everything, and to see its cancellation without fruition was clearly a matter of supreme frustration—especially as they suspected I had the answers.

  I made my way toward the exit and was joined by John Henry, who had not yet given up trying to charm me.

  “Will you stay for lunch? We have the finest chefs available to make what ever you want.”

  “I run a carpet shop, Mr. Goliath, and I’m late for work.”

  “A carpet shop?” he echoed with incredulity. “That sells carpets?”

  “All sorts of floor coverings, actually.”

  “I would offer you discounted carpets for life in order for you to help us,” he said, “but from what I know of you, such a course would be unthinkable. My private Dakota is at Douglas Graviport if you want to use it to fly straight home. I ask for nothing but say only this: We are doing this for the preservation and promotion of books and reading. Try to find it in your heart to consider what we are doing here in an objective light.”

  We had by now walked outside the building, and John Henry’s Bentley pulled up in front of us.

  “My car is yours. Good day, Ms. Next.”

  “Good day, Mr. Goliath.”

  He shook my hand and then departed. I looked at the Bentley and then at the ranks of cabs a little way down the road. I shrugged and climbed in the back of the Bentley.

  “Where to, madam?” asked the driver.

  I thought quickly. I had my TravelBook on me and could jump to the Great Library from here—as long as I could find a quiet spot conducive to bookjumping.

  “The nearest library,” I told him. “I’m late for work.”

  “You’re a librarian?” he inquired politely.

  “Let’s just say I’m really into books.”

  21.

  Holmes

  I don’t know what it was about traveling to and from the BookWorld that dehydrated me so much. It had gotten progressively worse, almost without my noticing, a bit like a mildly increased girth and skin that isn’t as elastic as it used to be. On the upside, however, the textual environment kept all the aches and pains at bay. I hardly noticed my bad back in the BookWorld and was never troubled by headaches.

  A few minutes and several pints of rehydrating water later, I walked into the Jurisfiction offices at Norland Park. Thursday5 was waiting for me by my desk, looking decidedly pleased with herself.

  “Guess what!” she enthused.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Go on, guess!”

  “I don’t want to guess,” I told her, hoping the tedium in my voice would send out a few warning bells. It didn’t.

  “No, you must guess!”

  “Okay,” I sighed. “You’ve got some new beads or something.”

  “Wrong,” she said, producing a paper bag with a flourish. “I got you the bacon roll you wanted!”

  “I never would have guessed that,” I replied, sitting before a desk that seemed to be flooded with new memos and reports, adding, in an unthinking moment, “How are things with you?”

  “I didn’t sleep very well last night.”

  I rubbed my forehead as she sat down and stared at me intently, hands clasped nervously in front of her. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that my inquiry over her health was merely politeness. I didn’t actually want to know. Quite the reverse, in fact.

  “Really?” I said, trying to find a memo that might be vaguely relevant to something.

  “No. I was thinking about the Minotaur incident yesterday, and I want to apologize—again.”

  “It’s past history. Any messages?”

  “So I’m sorry.”

  “Apology accepted. Now: Any messages?”

  “I wrote you a letter outlining my apology.”

  “I won’t read it. The matter is closed.”

  “Yes…well…right,” she began, flustered that we weren’t going to analyze the previous day at length and trying to remember everything she’d been told that morning. “Mr. Buñuel called to say that he’d completed the refit of Pride and Prejudice and it was online again this morning. He’s got Northanger Abbey in the maintenance bay at the moment, and it should be ready on time as long as Catherine stops attempting to have the book ‘Gothicized.’”

  “Good. What else?”

  “The Council of Genres,” she announced, barely able to control her excitement. “Senator Jobsworth’s secretary herself called to ask you to appear in the debating chamber for a policy-directive meeting at three this afternoon!”

  “I wonder what the old bore wants now? Anything else?”

  “No,” replied Thursday5, disappointed that I didn’t share her unbridled enthusiasm over an appearance at the CofG. I couldn’t. I’d been there so many times I just saw it as part of my duties, nothing more.

  I opened my desk drawer to take out a sheet of letterhead and noticed Thursday5’s assessment letter where I’d put it the night before. I thought for a moment and decided to give her one more chance. I left it where it was, pulled out a sheet of paper and wrote a letter to Wing Commander Scampton-Tappett, telling him to get out of Bananas for Edward, since Landen wasn’t currently working on it, and move instead to The Mews of Doom, which he was. I folded up the letter, placed it in an envelope and told Thursday5 to deliver it to Scampton-Tappett in person. I could have asked her to send it by courier, but twenty minutes’ peace and quiet had a great deal of appeal to it. Thursday5 nodded happily and vanished.

  I had just leaned back in my chair and was thinking about Felix8, the possible End of Time and the Austen Rover when a hearty bellow of “Stand to!” indicated the imminence of Bradshaw’s daily Jurisfiction briefing. I dutifully stood up and joined the other agents who had gathered in the center of the room.

  After the usual apologies for absence, Bradshaw climbed on to a table, tinkled a small bell and said, “Jurisfiction meeting number 43370 is now in session. But before all that we are to welcome a new agent to the fold: Colonel William Dobbin!”

  We all applauded as Colonel Dobbin gave a polite bow and remarked in a shy yet resolute manner that he would do his utmost to further the good work of Jurisfiction.

  “Jolly good,” intoned Bradshaw, eager to get on. “Item One: An active cell of bowdlerizers has been at work again, this time in Philip Larkin and ‘This Be the Verse.’ We’ve found several editions with the first line altered to read ‘They tuck you up, your mum and dad,’ which is a gross distortion of the original intent. Who wants to have a go at this?”

  “I will,” I said.

  “No. What about you, King Pellinore?”

  “Yes-yes what-what hey-hey?” said the white-whiskered knight in grubby armor.

  “You’ve had experience dealing with bowdlerizers in Larkin before—cracking the group that altered the first line of ‘Love Again’ to read: ‘Love again: thanking her at ten past three’ was great stuff—fancy tackling them again?”

  “What-what to go a mollocking for the bowlders?” replied Pellinore happily. “’Twill be achieved happily and in half the time.”

  “Anyone want to go with him?”

  “I’ll go.” I said.

  “Anyone else?”

  The Red Queen put up her hand.

  “Item Two: The Two Hundred Eighty-seventh Annual Book-World Conference is due in six months’ time, and the Council of Genres has insisted we need to have a security review after last year’s…problems.”

  There was a muttering from the assembled agents. BookCon was the sort of event that was too large and too varied to keep all factions happy, and the previous year’s decision to lift the restriction on Abstract Concepts attending as delegates opened the floodgates to a multitude of Literary Theories and Grammatical Conventions who spent most of the time pontificating loftily and causing trouble in the bar, where fights broke out at the drop of a participle. When Poststructuralism got into a fight with Classicism, they were all banned, something that upset the Subjunctives no end, who complained bitterly that if they had been fighting, they would have won.

  “Are the Abstracts allowed to attend this year?” asked Lady Cavendish.

  “I’m afraid so,” replied Bradshaw. “Not to invite them would be seen as discriminatory. Volunteers?”

  Six of us put up our hands, and Bradshaw diligently scribbled down our names.

  “Top-notch,” he said at last. “The first meeting will be next week. Now, Item Three, and this one is something of a corker: We’ve got a Major Narrative Flexation brewing in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.”

  “Is it the Watson bullet-wound problem again?” asked Mr. Fainset.

  “No, it’s more serious than that. Sherlock Holmes…has been murdered!”

  There was a spontaneous cry of shock and outrage from the assembled agents. The Holmes series was a perennial favorite and thus of par tic ular concern—textual anomalies in unread or unpopular books were always lower priority, or ignored altogether. Bradshaw handed a stack of papers to Lady Cavendish, who distributed them.

  “It’s in ‘The Final Problem.’ You can read it yourself, but essentially Sherlock travels to Switzerland to deal with Professor Moriarty. After the usual Holmesian escapades, Watson follows Sherlock to the Reichenbach Falls, where he discovers that Holmes has apparently fallen to his death—and the book ends twenty-nine pages before it was meant to.”

  There was a shocked silence as everyone took this in. We hadn’t had a textual anomaly of this size since Lucy Pevensie refused to get into the wardrobe at the beginning of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

  “But The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes was the fourth volume,” observed Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, looking up from her ironing. “With Sherlock dead at the Reichenbach, it would render the remaining five volumes of stories narratively unsustainable.”

  “Partly right,” replied Bradshaw. “The Hound of the Baskervilles was written after Memoirs but is set earlier—I think we can keep hold of that one. But yes, the remaining four in the series will start to spontaneously unravel unless we do something about it. And we will, I assure you—erasure is not an option.”

  This was not as easy as it sounded despite Bradshaw’s rhetoric, and we all knew it. The entire Sherlock Holmes series was closed books, unavailable to enter until someone had actually booksplored his or her way in—and the Holmes canon had continuously resisted exploration. Gomez was the first Jurisfiction booksplorer to try by way of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, but he mistakenly became involved in the narrative and was shot dead by Lord Roxton. Harris Tweed tried it next and was nearly trampled by a herd of angry Stegosauri.

  “I want everyone in on this problem. The Cat Formerly Known as Cheshire will be keeping a careful eye on the narrative corruption of the series up at Text Grand Central, and I want Beatrice, Benedict, Zhark and Tiggy-Winkle to try to find a way of using the other books in the Conan Doyle oeuvre—I suggest the Professor Challenger stories. Fainset and Foyle, I want you to explore the possibility of communication with anyone inside the Holmes series—they may not even know they have a problem.”

  “They’re well outside the footnoterphone network,” said Mr. Fainset. “Any suggestions?”

  “I’m relying on Foyle’s ingenuity. If anyone sees Hamlet or Peter and Jane before I do, send them immediately to me. Any questions?”

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked, wondering why I had been left out of everything important so far.

  “I’ll speak to you later. Okay, that’s it. Good luck, and…let’s be careful out there.”

  The collected agents instantly started chattering. We hadn’t had anything like this for years, which made it seem even more stupid that Bradshaw wasn’t including me on the assignment. I caught up with him as he sat at his desk.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “You need me on this.”

  “Hello, my dear! Not like you to nearly miss a session—problems in the Outland?”

  “I was up at Goliath.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “How do things look?”

  I explained at length what I had seen, ending with the observation that it wasn’t likely they’d perfect a transfictional machine anytime soon, if at all—but we needed to keep our eyes on them.

  Bradshaw nodded sagely, and I reiterated my feeling that I was being somehow “left out” of the Holmes inquiry.

  “How’s Friday? Still a bed slug?”

  “Yes—but nothing I can’t handle.”

  “Have you told Landen about us yet?”

  “I’m building up to it. Bradshaw, you’re flanneling—why aren’t I on the Holmes case?”

  He gestured for me to sit and lowered his voice. “I had a call from Senator Jobsworth this morning. He’s keen to reinstate a certain cadet that we recently…had to let go.”

  I knew the cadet he was referring to. There was a sound reason for her rejection—she’d been euphemistically entitled “unsuitable.” Not in the way that my nice-but-a-bit-dopey cadet was unsuitable, but unsuitable as in obnoxious. She’d gone through five tutors in as many days. Even Emperor Zhark said that he’d preferred to be eaten alive by the Snurgg of Epsilon-7 than spend another five minutes in her company.

  “Why has Jobsworth requested her? There are at least ten we rejected that are six times better.”