“Technobore and lawyer, then.”

  She marked me down on the seating plan and then announced: “There will be slight delay in receiving the excuse for the lateness of the DeepDrop to Sydney, Miss Next. The reason for the delay in the excuse has yet to be established.”

  Another check-in girl whispered something in her ear.

  “I’ve just been informed that the reason for the excuse for the delay has been delayed itself. As soon as we find out why the reason for the excuse has been delayed we will tell you—in line with government guidelines. If you are at all unhappy with the speed at which the excuse has been delivered, you might be eligible for a 1% refund. Have a nice drop.”

  I was handed my boarding card and told to go to the gate when the drop was announced. I thanked her, bought some coffee and biscuits and sat down to wait. The Gravitube seemed to be plagued with delays. There were a lot of travelers sitting around looking bored as they waited for their trip. In theory every drop took under an hour irrespective of destination; but even if they developed a twenty-minute accelerated DeepDrop to the other side of the planet, you’d still spend four hours at either end waiting for baggage or customs or something.

  The PA barked into life again.

  “Attention, please. Passengers for the 11:04 DeepDrop to Sydney will be glad to know that the delay was due to too many excuses being created by the Gravitube’s Excuse Manufacturing Facility. Consequently we are happy to announce that since the excess excuses have now been used, the 11:04 DeepDrop to Sydney is ready for boarding at gate six.”

  I finished my coffee and made my way with the throng to where the shuttle was waiting to receive us. I had ridden on the Gravitube several times before, but never the DeepDrop. My recent tour of the world had all been by overmantles, which are more like trains. I carried on through passport control, boarded the shuttle and was shown to my seat by a stewardess whose fixed smile reminded me of a synchronized swimmer’s. I sat next to a man with a shock of untidy black hair who was reading a copy of Astounding Tales.

  “Hello,” he said in a subdued monotone. “Ever Deep-Dropped before?”

  “Never,” I replied.

  “Better than any roller coaster,” he announced with finality and returned to his magazine.

  I strapped myself in as a tall man in a large check suit sat down next to me. He was about forty, had a luxuriant red mustache and wore a carnation in his buttonhole.

  “Hello, Thursday!” he said in a friendly voice as he proffered his hand. “Allow me to introduce myself—Akrid Snell.”

  I stared at him in surprise, and he laughed.

  “We needed some time to talk, and I’ve never been on one of these before. How does it work?”

  “The Gravitube? It’s a tunnel running through the center of the earth. We freefall all the way to Sydney. But . . . but . . . how on earth did you find me?”

  “Jurisfiction has eyes and ears everywhere, Miss Next.”

  “Plain English, Snell—or I could turn out to be the most difficult client you’ve ever had.”

  Snell looked at me with interest for a few moments as a stewardess gave a monotonous safety announcement, culminating with the warning that there were no toilet facilities until gravity returned to 40%.

  “You work in SpecOps, don’t you?” asked Snell as soon as we were comfortable and all loose possessions had been placed in zippered bags.

  I nodded.

  “Jurisfiction is the service we run inside novels to maintain the integrity of popular fiction. The printed word might look solid to you, but where I come from, ‘movable type’ has a much deeper meaning.”

  “The ending of Jane Eyre,” I murmured, suddenly realizing what all the fuss was about. “I changed it, didn’t I?”

  “I’m afraid so,” agreed Snell, “but don’t admit that to anyone but me. It was the biggest Fiction Infraction to a major work since someone futzed so badly with Thackeray’s Giant Despair we had to delete it completely.”

  “Drop is D minus two minutes,” said the announcer. “Would all passengers please take their seats, check their straps and make sure all infants are secured.”

  “So what’s happening now?” asked Snell.

  “Do you really not know anything about the Gravitube?”

  Snell looked around and lowered his voice.

  “All of your world is a bit strange to me, Next. I come from a land of trench coats and deep shadows, complex plot lines, frightened witnesses, underground bosses, gangster’s molls, seedy bars and startling six-pages-from-the-end denouements.”

  I must have looked confused, for he lowered his voice further and hissed: “I’m fictional, Miss Next. Co-lead in the Perkins & Snell series of crime books. I expect you’ve read me?”

  “I’m afraid not,” I admitted.

  “Limited print run,” sighed Snell, “but we had a good review in CrimeBooks Digest. I was described as ‘a well rounded and amusing character . . . with quite a few memorable lines.’ The Mole placed us on their ‘Read of the Week’ list but The Toad were less enthusiastic—but listen, who takes any notice of the critics?”

  “You’re fictional?” I said at last.

  “Keep it to yourself though, won’t you?” he urged. “Now, about the Gravitube?”

  “Well,” I replied, gathering my thoughts, “in a few minutes the shuttle will have entered the airlock and depressurization will commence—”

  “Depressurization? Why?”

  “For a frictionless drop. No air resistance—and we are kept from touching the sides by a powerful magnetic field. We then simply free-fall the eight thousand miles to Sydney.”

  “So all cities have a DeepDrop to every other city, then?”

  “Only London and New York connecting to Sydney and Tokyo. If you wanted to get from Buenos Aires to Auckland, you’d first take the overmantle to Miami, then to New York, DeepDrop to Tokyo, and finally another overmantle to Auckland.”

  “How fast does it go?” asked Snell, slightly nervously.

  “Peaks at fourteen thousand miles per hour,” said my neighbor from behind his magazine, “give or take. We’ll fall with increasing velocity but decreasing acceleration until we reach the center of the earth, at which point we will have attained our maximum velocity. Once past the center our velocity will decrease until we reach Sydney, when our velocity will have decreased to zero.”

  “Is it safe?”

  “Of course!” I assured him.

  “What if there’s another shuttle coming the other way?”

  “There can’t be,” I assured him. “There’s only one shuttle per tube.”

  “What you say is true,” said my boring neighbor. “The only thing we have to worry about is a failure of the magnetic containment system that keeps the ceramic tube and us from melting in the liquid core of the earth.”

  “Don’t listen to this, Snell.”

  “Is that likely?” he asked.

  “Never happened before,” replied the man somberly, “but then if it had, they wouldn’t tell us about it, now would they?”

  Snell thought about this for a few moments.

  “Drop is D minus ten seconds,” said the announcer.

  The cabin went quiet and everyone tensed, subconsciously counting down. The drop, when it came, was a bit like going over a very large humpback bridge at a great deal of speed, but the initial unpleasantness—which was accompanied by grunts from the passengers—gave way to the strange and curiously enjoyable feeling of weightlessness. Many people do the drop for this reason only. I turned to Snell.

  “You okay?”

  He nodded and managed a wan smile.

  “It’s a bit . . . strange,” he said at last, watching as his tie floated in front of him.

  “So I’m charged with a Fiction Infraction, yes?”

  “Fiction Infraction Class II,” corrected Snell, swallowing hard. “It’s not as though you did it on purpose. Even though we could argue convincingly that you improved the narrative of Jane Eyre, we still have to prosecute; after all, we can’t have people blundering around in Little Women trying to stop Beth from dying, can we?”

  “Can’t you?”

  “Of course not. Not that people don’t try. When you get before the magistrate, just deny everything and play dumb. I’m trying to get the case postponed on the grounds of strong reader approval.”

  “Will that work?”

  “It worked when Falstaff made his illegal jump to The Merry Wives of Windsor and proceeded to dominate and alter the story. We thought he’d be sent packing back to Henry IV, Part 2. But no, his move was approved. The judge was an opera fan, so maybe that had something to do with it. You haven’t had any operas written about you by Verdi or Vaughan Williams, have you?”

  “No.”

  “Pity.”

  The feeling of weightlessness didn’t last long. The increasing deceleration once more gently returned weight to us all. At 40% normal gravity the cabin warning lights went out and we could move around if we wanted.

  The technobore on my right started up again.

  “—but the real beauty of the Gravitube is its simplicity,” he continued. “Since the force of gravity is the same irrespective of the declination of the tunnel, the trip to Tokyo will take exactly the same time as the trip to New York—and it would be the same again to Carlisle if it didn’t make more sense to use a conventional railway. Mind you,” he went on, “if you could use a wave induction system to keep us accelerating all the way to the surface at the other end, the speed could be well in excess of the seven miles per second needed to achieve escape velocity.”

  “You’ll be telling me that we’ll fly to the moon next,” I said.

  “We already have,” returned my technobore neighbor in a conspiratorial whisper. “Secret government experiments have already constructed a base on the far side of the moon where transmitters control our thoughts and actions from atop the Empire State Building using interstellar communications from extraterrestrial life forms intent on world domination with the express agreement of the Goliath Corporation and a secret cabal of world leaders known as SPORK.”

  “And don’t tell me,” I added, “there’s a Diatryma living in the New Forest.”

  “How did you know?”

  I ignored him, and only thirty-eight minutes after leaving London we came in for a delicate dock in Sydney, the faintest click being heard as the magnetic locks held on to the shuttle to stop it falling back down again. After the safety light had extinguished and the airlock had been pressurized we made our way to the exit, avoiding the technobore, who was trying to tell anyone who would listen that the Goliath Corporation were responsible for smallpox.

  Snell, who genuinely seemed to enjoy the DeepDrop, walked with me until baggage retrieval, looked at his watch and announced: “Well, that’s me. Thanks for the chat. I’ve got to go and defend Tess for the umpteenth time. As Hardy originally wrote it she gets off. Listen, try and figure some extenuating circumstances as to your actions. If you can’t, then try and think up some stonking great lies. The bigger the better.”

  “That’s your best advice? Perjure myself?”

  Snell coughed politely.

  “The astute lawyer has many strings to his bow, Miss Next. They’ve got Mrs. Fairfax and Grace Poole to testify against you. It doesn’t look great, but no case is lost until it’s lost. They said I couldn’t get Henry V off the war crimes rap when he ordered the French POWs murdered, but I managed it—the same as Max de Winter’s murder charge. No one figured he’d get off that in a million years. By the by, can you give this letter to that gorgeous Flakky girl? I’d be eternally grateful.”

  He handed me a crumpled letter from his pocket and made to move off.

  “Wait!” I said. “Where and when is the hearing?”

  “Didn’t I say? Sorry. The prosecution has chosen the Examining Magistrate from Kafka’s The Trial. Not my choice, believe me. Tomorrow at 9:25. Do you speak German?”

  “No.”

  “Then we’ll make sure it’s an English translation—drop in at the end of Chapter Two; we’re on after Herr K. Remember what I said. So long!”

  And before I could ask him how I might even begin to enter Kafka’s masterpiece of frustrating circuitous bureaucracy, he was gone.

  I caught the overmantle to Tokyo a half hour later. It was almost deserted, and I hopped on board a Skyrail to Osaka and alighted in the business district at one in the morning, four hours after leaving Saknussum. I took a hotel room and sat up all night, staring out at the blinking lights and thinking about Landen.

  15.

  Curiouser & Curiouser in Osaka

  I first learned of my strange bookjumping skills as a little girl in the English school where my father taught in Osaka. I had been instructed to stand up and read to the class a passage from Winnie-the-Pooh. I began with Chapter Nine—“It rained and it rained and it rained . . . ”—but then had to stop abruptly as I felt the hundred-acre wood move rapidly in all around me. I snapped the book shut and returned, damp and bewildered, to my classroom. Later on I visited the hundred-acre wood from the safety of my own bedroom and enjoyed wonderful adventures there. But I was always careful, even at that tender age, never to alter the visible story lines. Except, that is, to teach Christopher Robin how to read and write.

  O. NAKAJIMA,

  Adventures in the Book Trade

  OSAKA WAS LESS FLASHY than Tokyo but no less industrious. In the morning I took breakfast at the hotel, bought a copy of the Far Eastern Toad and read the home news but from a Far Eastern viewpoint—which makes for a good take on the whole Russian thing. During breakfast I pondered just how I might find one woman in a city of a million. Apart from her surname and perfect English, there was little to go on. As a first step I asked the concierge to photocopy all the Nakajima entries from the telephone directory. I was dismayed to discover that Nakajima was quite a common name—there were 2,729 of them. I called one at random and a very pleasant Mrs. Nakajima spoke to me for about ten minutes. I thanked her profusely and put the phone down, having not understood a single word. I sighed, ordered a large jug of coffee from room service, and began.

  It was 351 non-bookjumper Nakajimas later that, tired and annoyed, I started telling myself that what I was doing was useless—if Mrs. Nakajima had retired to the distant backstory of Jane Eyre, was she really going to be anywhere near a telephone?

  I sighed, stretched one of those groany-clicky stretches, drank the rest of my cold coffee and decided to go for a brief stroll to loosen up. I was staring at the photocopied pages as I strolled along, trying to think of something to narrow the search, when a young man’s jacket caught my eye.

  As is popular in the Far East, many T-shirts and jackets have English writing upon them—some of them making sense, but others just collections of words that must appear as fashionable to the Japanese youth as kanji appear elegant to us. I had seen jackets with the strange legend 100% Chevrolet OK Fly-boy and later one with Pratt & Whitney squadron movie, so I should have been ready for anything. But this one was different. It was a smart leather jacket with the following message embroidered on the back:

  Follow me, Next Girl!

  So I did. I followed the young man for two blocks before I noticed a second jacket much like the first. By the time I had crossed the canal I had seen another jacket with SpecOps this way emblazoned on the back, then Jane Eyre forever! followed quickly by Bad Boy Goliath. But that wasn’t all—like some bizarre homing call, all the people wearing these jackets, hats and T-shirts seemed to be heading in the same direction. Thoughts of falling Hispano-Suizas and ambushed Skyrails suddenly filled my head, so I dug the entroposcope from my bag, shook it and noticed a slight separation between the rice and lentils. Entropy was decreasing. I rapidly turned and started walking in the opposite direction. I took three paces and stopped as a daring notion filled my head. Of course—why not make the entropic failure do the work for me? I followed the logos to a nearby market square, where I noticed the rice and lentils in the entroposcope had settled—despite repeated shakings—into curved bands. Coincidence had increased to the point where everyone I saw was wearing something with a relevant logo. MycroTech Developments, Charlotte Brontë, Hispano-Suiza, Goliath and Skyrail were all sewn or stuck to hats, jackets, umbrellas, shirts, bags. I looked around, desperately trying to find the coincidental epicenter. Then I found it. In an inexplicably vacant gap within the busy market, an old man was seated in front of a small table. He was as brown as a nut and quite bald, and opposite him the other chair had just been vacated by a young woman. A piece of battered card leaning against his small valise declared, in eight languages, the fortune-teller’s trade and pledge. The English part of the sign read: “I have the answer you seek!” And I was in no doubt that whatever he said would be so—but, given the unlikely modes of death already meted out by my unseen assailant, probably, yet very improbably in its undertaking, would result in my demise. I took two paces closer to the fortune-teller and shook the entroposcope again. The patterns were more defined but not the clean half-and-half separation I needed. The little man had seen me dither and beckoned me closer.

  “Please!” he said. “Please come. Tell you everything!”

  I paused and looked around for any sign of jeopardy. There was nothing. I was in a perfectly peaceful square in a prosperous area of a large city in Japan. Whatever my anonymous foe had in store for me, it was something that I would least expect.

  I stayed back, unsure of the wisdom of what I was doing. It was the appearance of a T-shirt that had nothing to do with me that clinched it. If I let this opportunity slide I would never find Mrs. Nakajima this side of a month. I took out my ballpoint, clicked it open and marched purposefully towards the small man, who grinned at me.

  “You come!” he said in poor English. “You learn everything. Good buy, from me!”

  But I didn’t stop. As I walked towards the fortune-teller I thrust my hand in my bag and pulled out a sheet of the Nakajima pages at random, then, just as I passed the little nut-brown man, I stabbed arbitrarily on the page with my pen and broke into a run. There was a horrified gasp from the onlookers as a bolt of lightning came to earth in the small square and struck the clearly not very talented fortune-teller with a bright flash. I didn’t stop until I was away from that place, back to plain polo shirts, ordinary designer labels and my entroposcope to random clumping. I sat on a bench to get my breath back, felt nauseous again and almost threw up in a nearby trash can, much to the consternation of a little old lady who was sitting next to me. I recovered slightly and looked at the Nakajima that the fall of my ballpoint had decreed. If coincidences were running as high as I had hoped, then this Nakajima had to be the one I sought. I turned to ask the little old lady next to me the way, but she had gone. I stopped a passerby and asked for directions. It seemed that a small amount of negative entropy still lingered—I was barely two minutes’ walk from my quarry.