“Good thing, too, if you ask me,” I said. “I got rid of all my seventies rubbish as soon as I could and never regretted it for a second.”

  There was an indignant plock from Pickwick.

  “Present company excepted.”

  “I think the seventies are underrated,” said Landen. “Admittedly, fashion wasn’t terrific, but there’s been no better decade for sitcoms.”

  “Where’s Jenny?”

  “I took her dinner up to her,” said Friday. “She said she needed to do her homework.”

  I frowned as I thought of something, but Landen clapped his hands together and said, “Oh, yes! Did you hear that the British bobsled team has been disqualified for using the banned force ‘gravity’ to enhance performance?”

  “No.”

  “Apparently so. And it transpires that the illegal use of gravity to boost speed is endemic within most downhill winter sports.”

  “I wondered why they managed to go so fast,” I replied thoughtfully.

  Much later that night, when the lights were out, I was staring at the glow of the streetlamps on the ceiling and thinking about Thursday1–4 and what I’d do to her when I caught her. It wasn’t terribly pleasant.

  “Land?” I whispered in the darkness.

  “Yes?”

  “That time we…made love today.”

  “What about it?”

  “I was just thinking—how did you rate it? Y’know, on a one-to-ten?”

  “Truthfully?”

  “Truthfully.”

  “You won’t be pissed off at me?”

  “Promise.”

  There was a pause. I held my breath.

  “We’ve had better. Much better. In fact, I thought you were pretty terrible.”

  I hugged him. At least there was one piece of good news today.

  28.

  The Discreet Charm

  of the Outland

  The real charm of the Outland was the richness of detail and the texture. In the BookWorld a pig is generally just pink and goes oink. Because of this, most fictional pigs are simply a uniform flesh color without any of the tough bristles and innumerable scabs and skin abrasions, shit and dirt that makes a pig a pig. And it’s not just pigs. A carrot is simply a rod of orange. Sometimes living in the BookWorld is like living in Legoland.

  The stupidity surplus had been beaten into second place by the news that the militant wing of the no-choice movement had been causing trouble in Manchester. Windows were broken, cars overturned, and there were at least a dozen arrests. With a nation driven by the concept of choice, a growing faction of citizens who thought life was simpler when options were limited had banded themselves together into what they called the “no-choicers” and demanded the choice to have no choice. Prime Minister Redmond van de Poste condemned the violence but explained that the choice of choice over “just better services” was something the previous administration had chosen and was thus itself a no-choice principle for the current administration. Alfredo Traficcone, MP, leader of the opposition Prevailing Wind Party, was quick to jump on the bandwagon, proclaiming that it was the inalienable right of all citizens to have the chice over whether they have choice or not. The no-choicers had suggested that there should be a referendum to settle the matter once and for all, something that the opposition “choice” faction had no option but to agree with. More sinisterly, the militant wing known only as NOPTION was keen to go further and demanded that there should be only one option on the ballot paper—the no-choice one.

  It was eight-thirty, and the girls had already gone to school.

  “Jenny didn’t eat her toast again,” I said, setting the plate with its uneaten contents next to the sink. “That girl hardly eats a thing.”

  “Leave it outside Friday’s door,” said Landen. “He can have it for lunch when he gets up—if he gets up.”

  The front doorbell had rung, and I checked on who it might be through the front-room windows before opening the door to reveal…Friday. The other Friday.

  “Hello!” I said cheerily. “Would you like to come in?”

  “I’m in a bit of a hurry,” he replied. “I just wondered whether you’d thought about my offer of replacement yesterday. Hi, Dad!”

  Landen had joined us at the door. “Hello, son.”

  “This,” I said by way of introduction, “is the Friday I was telling you about—the one we were supposed to have.”

  “At your ser vice,” said Friday politely. “And your answer? I’m sorry to push you on this, but time travel has still to be invented and we have to look very carefully at our options.”

  Landen and I glanced at each other. We’d already made up our mind.

  “The answer’s no, Sweetpea. We’re going to keep our Friday.”

  Friday’s face fell, and he glared at us. “This is so typical of you. Here I am a respected member of the ChronoGuard, and you’re still treating me like I’m a kid!”

  “Friday!”

  “How stupid can you both be? The history of the world hangs in the balance, and all you can do is worry about your lazy shitbag of a son.”

  “You talk like that to your mother and you can go to your room.”

  “He is in his room, Land.”

  “Right. Well…you know what I mean.”

  Friday snorted, glared at us both, told me that I really shouldn’t call him “Sweetpea” anymore and walked off, slamming the garden gate behind him.

  I turned to Landen. “Are we doing the right thing?”

  “Friday told us to dissuade him from joining the ChronoGuard, and that’s what we’re doing.”

  I narrowed my eyes, trying to remember.

  “He did? When?”

  “At our wedding bash? When Lavoisier turned up looking for your father?”

  “Shit,” I said, suddenly remembering. Lavoisier was my least favorite ChronoGuard operative, and on that occasion he had a partner with him—a lad of about twenty-five who’d looked vaguely familiar. We figured it out several years later. It was Friday himself, and his advice to us was unequivocal: “If you ever have a son who wants to be in the ChronoGuard, try to dissuade him.” Perhaps it wasn’t just a complaint—perhaps it had been…a warning.

  Landen placed a hand on my waist and said, “I think we should follow his best advice and see where it leaves us.”

  “And the End of Time?”

  “Didn’t your father say that the world was always five minutes from total annihilation? Besides, it’s not until Friday evening. It’ll work itself out.”

  I took the tram into work and was so deep in thought I missed my stop and had to walk back from MycroTech. Without my TravelBook I was effectively stuck in the real world, but instead of feeling a sense of profound loss as I had expected, I felt something more akin to relief. In my final day as the LBOCS, I had scotched any chance of book interactivity or the preemptive strike on Speedy Muffler and the ramshackle Racy Novel, and the only worrying loose end was dealing with slutty bitchface Thursday1–4. That was if she hadn’t been erased on sight for making an unauthorized trip to the Outland. Well, I could always hope. Jurisfiction had gotten on without me for centuries and would doubtless continue to do so. There was another big plus point, too: I wasn’t lying to Landen quite as much. Okay, I still did a bit of SpecOps work, but at least this way I could downgrade my fibs from “outrageous” to a more manageable “whopping.” All of a sudden, I felt really quite happy—and I didn’t often feel that way. If there hadn’t been a major problem with Acme’s overdraft and the potential for a devastating chronoclasm in two and a half days, everything might be just perfect.

  “You look happy,” said Bowden as I walked into the office at Acme.

  “Aren’t I always?”

  “No,” he said, “hardly at all.”

  “Well, this is the new me. Have you noticed how much the birds are singing this morning?”

  “They always sing like that.”

  “Then…the sky is always that blue, yes?”

  “Yes. May I ask what’s brought on this sudden change?”

  “The BookWorld. I’ve stopped going there. It’s over.”

  “Well,” said Bowden, “that’s excellent news!”

  “It is, isn’t it? More time for Landen and the kids.”

  “No,” said Bowden, choosing his words carefully, “I mean excellent news for Acme—we might finally get rid of the backlog.”

  “Of undercover SpecOps work?”

  “Of carpets.”

  “You mean you can make a profit selling carpets?” I asked, having never really given it a great deal of thought.

  “Have you seen the order books? They’re full. More work than we can handle. Everyone needs floor coverings, Thurs—and if you can give some of your time to get these orders filled, then we won’t need the extra cash from your illegal-cheese activities.”

  He handed me a clipboard.

  “All these customers need to be contacted and given the best deal we can.”

  “Which is?”

  “Just smile, chat, take the measurements, and I’ll do the rest.”

  “Then you go.”

  “No, the big selling point for Acme is that Thursday Next—the Z-4 celebrity Thursday Next—comes and talks to you about your floor-covering needs. That’s how we keep our heads above water. That’s how we can support all these ex-SpecOps employees.”

  “C’mon,” I said doubtfully, “ex-celebrities don’t do retail.”

  “After the disaster of the Eyre Affair movie, Lola Vavoom started a chain of builders’ merchants.”

  “She did, didn’t she?”

  I took the clipboard and stared at the list. It was long. Business was good. But Bowden’s attention was suddenly elsewhere.

  “Is that who I think it is?” he asked, looking toward the front of the store. I followed his gaze. Standing next to the cushioned-linoleum display was a man in a long dark coat. When he saw us watching him, he reached into his pocket and flashed a badge of some sort.

  “Shit,” I murmured under my breath. “Flanker.”

  “He probably wants to buy a carpet,” said Bowden with a heavy helping of misplaced optimism.

  Commander Flanker was our old nemesis from SO-1, the SpecOps department that policed other SpecOps departments. Flanker had adapted well to the disbanding of the ser vice. Before, he made life miserable for SpecOps agents he thought were corrupt, and now he made life miserable for ex-SpecOps agents he thought were corrupt. We had crossed swords many times in the past, but not since the disbandment. We regarded it as a good test of our discretion and secrecy that we had never seen him at Acme Carpets. Then again, perhaps we were kidding ourselves. He might know all about us but thought flushing out renegade operatives just wasn’t worth his effort—especially when we were actually doing a ser vice that no one else wanted to do.

  I walked quickly to the front of the shop.

  “Good morning, Ms. Next,” he said, glancing with ill-disguised mirth at my name embroidered above the company logo on my jacket. “Literary Detective at SO-27 to carpet layer? Quite a fall, don’t you think?”

  “It depends on your point of view,” I said cheerfully. “Everyone needs carpets—but not everyone needs SpecOps. Is this a social call?”

  “My wife has read all your books.”

  “They’re not my books,” I told him in an exasperated tone. “I had absolutely no say in their content—for the first four anyway.”

  “Those were the ones she liked. The violent ones full of sex and death.”

  “Did you come all this way to give me your wife’s analysis of my books?”

  “No,” he said, “that was just the friendly breaking-the-ice part.”

  “It isn’t working. Is there a floor covering I could interest you in?”

  “Axminster.”

  “We can certainly help you with that,” I replied professionally. “Living room or bedroom? We have some very hard-wearing wool/acrylic at extremely competitive prices—and we’ve a special this week on underlayment and free installation.”

  “It was Axminster Purple I was referring to,” he said slowly, staring at me intently. My heart jumped but I masked it well. Axminster Purple wasn’t a carpet at all, of course, although to be honest there probably was an Axminster in purple, if I looked. No, he was referring to the semi-exotic cheese, one that I’d been trading in only a couple of days ago. Flanker showed me his badge. He was CEA—the Cheese Enforcement Agency.

  “You’re not here for the carpets, are you?”

  “I know you have form for cheese smuggling, Next. There was a lump of Rhayder Speckled found beneath a Hispano-Suiza in ’86, and you’ve been busted twice for possession since then. The second time you were caught with six kilos of Streaky Durham. You were lucky to be fined only for possession and not trading without a license.”

  “Did you come here to talk about my past misdemeanors?”

  “No. I’ve come to you for information. While cheese smuggling is illegal, it’s considered a low priority. The CEA has always been a small department more interested in collecting duty than banging up harmless cheeseheads. That’s all changed.”

  “It has?”

  “I’m afraid so,” replied Flanker grimly. “There’s a new cheese on the block. Something powerful enough to make a user’s head vanish in a ball of fire.”

  “That’s a figure of speech for ‘really powerful,’ right?”

  “No,” said Flanker with deadly seriousness. “The victim’s head really does vanish in a ball of fire. It’s a killer, Next—and addictive. It’s apparently the finest and most powerful cheese ever designed.”

  This was worrying. I never regarded my cheese smuggling as anything more than harmless fun, cash for Acme and to supply something that should be legal anyway. If a cheese that I’d furnished had killed someone, I would face the music. Mind you, I’d tried most of what I’d flogged, and it was, after all, only cheese. Okay, so the taste of a particularly powerful cheese might render you unconscious or make your tongue numb for a week, but it never killed anyone—until now.

  “Does this cheese have a name?” I asked, wondering if there’d been a bad batch of Machynlleth Wedi Marw.

  “It only has a code name: X-14. Rumor says it’s so powerful that it has to be kept chained to the floor. We managed to procure a half ounce. A technician dropped it by mistake, and this was the result.”

  He showed me a photograph of a smoking ruin.

  “The remains of our central cheese-testing facility.”

  He put the photograph away and stared at me. Of course, I had seen some X-14. It’d been chained up in the back of Pryce’s truck the night of the cheese buy. Owen had declined to even show it to me. I’d traded with him every month for over eight years, and I never thought he was the sort of person to knowingly peddle anything dangerous. He was like me: someone who just loved cheese. I wouldn’t snitch on him, not yet—not before I had more information.

  “I don’t know anything,” I said at length, “but I can make inquiries.”

  Flanker seemed to be satisfied with this, handed me his card and said in a stony voice, “I’ll expect your call.”

  He turned and walked out of the store to a waiting Range Rover and drove off.

  “Trouble for us?” asked Bowden as soon as I returned.

  “No,” I replied thoughtfully, “trouble for me.”

  He sighed. “That’s a relief.”

  I took a deep breath and thought for a moment. Communications into the Socialist Republic of Wales were nonexistent—when I wanted to contact Pryce, I had to use a shortwave wireless transmitter at prearranged times. There was nothing I could do for at least forty-eight hours.

  “So,” continued Bowden, handing me the clipboard with the list of people wanting quotes on it, “how about some Acme Carpets stuff?”

  “What about SpecOps work?” I asked. “How’s that looking?”

  “Stig’s still on the case of the Diatrymas and has at least a half dozen outstanding chimeras to track down. Spike has a few biters on the books, and there’s talk of another SEB over in Reading.”

  It was getting desperate. I loved Acme, but only insofar as it was excellent cover and I never actually had to do anything carpet-related.

  “And us? The ex–Literary Detectives?”

  “Still nothing, Thursday.”

  “What about Mrs. Mattock over in the Old Town? She still wants us to find her first editions, surely?”

  “No,” said Bowden. “She called yesterday and said she was selling her books and replacing them with cable TV—she wanted to watch En gland’s Funniest Chain-Saw Mishaps.”

  “And I felt so good just now.”

  “Face it,” said Bowden sadly, “books are finished. No one wants to invest the time in them anymore.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I replied, an optimist to the end. “I reckon if we went over to the Booktastic! megastore, they’d tell us that books are still being sold hand over fist to hard-core story aficionados. In fact, I’ll bet you that jar of cookies you’ve got hidden under your desk that you think no one knows about.”

  “And if they’re not?”

  “I’ll spend a day installing carpets and pressing flesh as the Acme Carpets celebrity saleswoman.”

  It was a deal. Acme was on a trading estate with about twenty or so outlets, but, unusually, it was the only carpet showroom—we always suspected that Spike might have a hand in scaring off the competition, but we never saw him do it. Between us and Booktastic! there were three sporting-goods outlets all selling exactly the same goods at exactly the same price and, since they were three branches of the same store, with the same sales staff, too. The two discount electrical shops actually were competitors but still spookily managed to sell the same goods at the same price, although “sell” in this context actually meant “serve as brief custodian between outlet and landfill.”

  “Hmm,” I said as we stood inside the entrance of Booktastic! and stared at the floor display units liberally stacked with CDs, DVDs, computer games, peripherals and special-interest magazines. “I’m sure there was a book in here last time I came in. Excuse me?”