First Among Sequels

by Jasper Fforde

  The waitress bobbed politely, ignored his manner entirely and said, “If you killed me, Your Imperial Mightiness, I wouldn’t have any descendants, now would I?”

  “Yes, well, obviously I meant the ones yet living, girl.”

  “Oh!” she said. “Just so we’re clear on the matter,” and with a cute bob she was gone.

  “I keep on having trouble with that waitress,” muttered Zhark after she had departed. “Do you think she was…mocking me?”

  “Oh, no,” said Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, hiding a smile, “I think she was terrified of you.”

  “Has anyone thought of redirecting the Sherlock Holmes throughput feeds from the Outland?” I asked. “With a well-positioned Textual Sieve, we could bounce the series to a Storycode Engine at TGC and rewrite the ending with the Holmes and Watson from The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. It will hold things together long enough to give us time to effect a permanent answer.”

  “But where exactly to put the sieve?” inquired Zhark, not unreasonably.

  “What exactly is a Textual Sieve?” asked Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle.

  “It’s never fully explained,” I replied.

  The waitress returned with the sugar.

  “Thank you,” said Zhark kindly. “I have decided to…spare your family.”

  “Your Highness is overly generous,” replied the waitress, humoring him. “Perhaps you could just torture one of us—my younger brother, for instance?”

  “No, my mind is made up. You’re to be spared. Now begone or I will—Oh, no. You don’t trick me that way. Begone or I will never torture your family.”

  The waitress bobbed again, thanked him and was gone.

  “Perky, that one, isn’t she?” said Zhark, staring after her. “Do you think I should make her my wife?”

  “You’re considering getting married?” asked Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle, almost scorching a collar in her surprise.

  “I think it’s high time that I did,” he said. “Slaughtering peaceful civilizations on a whim is a lot more fun when you’ve got someone to do it with.”

  “Does your mother know about this?” I asked, fully aware of the power that the Dowager Empress Zharkina IV wielded in his books. Emperor Zhark might have been the embodiment of terror across innumerable star systems, but he lived with his mum—and if the rumors were correct, she still insisted on bathing him.

  “Well, she doesn’t know yet,” he replied defensively. “But I’m big enough to make my own decisions, you know.”

  Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and I exchanged knowing looks. Nothing happened in the imperial palace without the empress’s agreement.

  Zhark chewed for a moment, winced and then swallowed with a look of utter disgust on his face. He turned to Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle.

  “I think you’ve got my pie.”

  “Have I?” she replied offhandedly. “Now you come to mention it, I thought these slugs tasted sort of funny.”

  They swapped pies and continued eating.

  “Ms. Next?”

  I looked up. A confident middle-aged woman was standing next to the table. She had starburst wrinkles around the eyes and graying brown hair, a chicken-pox scar above her left brow, and asymmetric dimples. She was a well-realized character but I didn’t recognize her—at least not at first.

  “Can I help?” I asked.

  “I’m looking for the Jurisfiction agent named Thursday Next.”

  “That’s me.”

  Our visitor seemed relieved at this and allowed herself a smile. “Pleased to meet you. My name’s Dr. Temperance Brennan.”

  I knew who she was, of course: the heroine of her own genre—that of the forensic anthropologist.

  “Very pleased to meet you,” I said, rising to shake her hand. “Perhaps you’d care to join us?”

  “Thank you, I shall.”

  “This is Emperor Zhark,” I said, “and the one with the spines is Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle.”

  “Hello,” said Zhark, sizing her up for matrimony as he shook her hand. “How would you like the power of life or death over a billion godless heathens?”

  She paused for a moment and raised an eyebrow. “Montreal suits me just fine.”

  She shook Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle’s claw, and they exchanged a few pleasantries over the correct method to wash linens. I ordered her some coffee, and after I’d asked about her Outlander book sales, which were impressively large compared to mine, she admitted to me that this wasn’t a social call.

  “I’ve got an understudy covering for me, so I’ll come straight to the point,” she said, looking with apparent professional interest at Zhark’s high cheekbones. “Someone’s trying to kill me.”

  “You and I have much in common, Dr. Brennan,” I replied. “When did this happen?”

  “Call me Tempe. Have you read my latest adventure?”

  “Grave Secrets? Of course.”

  “Near the end I’m captured after being slipped a Mickey Finn. I talk my way out of it, and the bad guy kills himself.”

  “So?”

  “Thirty-two readings ago, I was drugged for real and nearly didn’t make it. It was all I could do to stay conscious long enough to keep the book on its tracks. I’m first-person narrative so everything’s up to me.”

  “Yeah,” I murmured, “that first-person thing can be a drag. Did you report it to Text Grand Central?”

  She pushed the hair away from her face and said, “Naturally. But since I kept the show going, it was never logged as a textual anomaly, so according to TGC there’s no crime. You know what they told me? ‘Come back when you’re dead, and then we can do something.’”

  “Hmm,” I said, drumming my fingers on the desk. “Who do you think is behind it?”

  She shrugged. “No one in the book. We’re all on very good terms.”

  “Any skeletons in the closet? If you’ll excuse the expression.”

  “Plenty. In Crime there’s always at least one seriously bad guy to deal with per book—sometimes more.”

  “Narratively speaking, that’s how it appears,” I pointed out. “But with you dead, everyone else in your books would become redundant overnight—and with the possibility of erasure looming over them, your former enemies actually have some of the best reasons to keep you alive.”

  “Hmm,” said Dr. Brenann thoughtfully, “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  “The most likely person to want to kill you is someone outside your book—any thoughts?”

  “I don’t know anyone outside my books—except Kathy and Kerry, of course.”

  “It won’t be them. Leave it with me,” I said after a moment’s pause, “and I’ll see what I can do. Just keep your eyes and ears open, yes?”

  Dr. Brennan smiled and thanked me, shook my hand again, said good-bye to Zhark and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle and was gone, muttering that she had to relieve the substandard and decidedly bone-idle understudy who was standing in for her.

  “What was that all about?” asked Zhark.

  “No idea,” I replied. “It’s kind of flattering that people bring their problems to me. I just wish there were another Thursday to deal with it.”

  “I thought there was.”

  “Don’t even joke about it, Emperor.”

  There was a crackle in the air, and Commander Bradshaw suddenly appeared just next to us. Zhark and Tiggy-Winkle looked guilty all of a sudden, and the hedgepig washerwoman made a vain attempt to hide the ironing she was doing.

  “I thought I would find you here,” he said, mustache all atwitch, as it was when he was a bit peeved. “That wouldn’t be moonlighting, would it, Agent Tiggy-Winkle?”

  “Not at all,” she replied. “I spend so much time at Jurisfiction I can hardly get through the ironing I need to do for my own book!”

  “Very well,” said Bradshaw slowly, turning to me. “I thought I’d find you here, too. I have a job that only you can handle.”

  “I thought I was suspended?”

  He passed me my badge. “The suspension was purely for the CofG’s benefit.
The disciplinary paperwork was accidentally eaten by snails. Most perplexing.”

  I smiled. “What’s up?”

  “A matter of great delicacy. There were a few minor textual irregularities in…the Thursday books.”

  “Which ones?” I asked, suddenly worried that Thursday5 might have taken her failure to heart.

  “The first four. Since you know them quite well and no one else wants to touch them or her with a barge pole, I thought you might want to check it out.”

  “What sorts of irregularities?”

  “Small ones,” said Bradshaw, handing me a sheet of paper. “Nothing you’d notice from the Outland unless you were a committed fan. I’m thinking it might be the early stage of a breakdown.”

  He didn’t mean a breakdown in the Outlander sense. In the BookWorld a breakdown meant an internal collapse of the character’s pattern of reason—the rules that made one predictable and understandable. Some, like Lucy Deane, collapsed spontaneously and with an annoying regularity; others just crumbled slowly from within, usually as a result of irreconcilable conflicts within their character. In either case, replacement by a fully trained-up generic was the only option. Of course, it might be nothing and very possible that Thursday1–4 was just angry about being fired and venting her spleen on the co-characters in the series.

  “I’ll check her out.”

  “Good,” said Bradshaw, turning to Zhark and Tiggy-Winkle. “And you two—I want you all geared up and ready to try to get into ‘The Speckled Band’ by way of ‘The Disintegrator Ray’ by fourteen hundred hours.”

  Bradshaw looked at his clipboard and then vanished. We all stood up.

  “Do you want us to come with you?” asked Zhark. “Strictly speaking, your checking up on Thursday1–4 is a conflict-of-interest transgression.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said, and the pair of them wished me well and vanished, like Bradshaw, into thin air.

  26.

  Thursday Next

  I was only vaguely consulted when the first four of the Thursday Next books were constructed. I was asked about my car, my house, and I even lent them a photo album (which I never got back). I was also introduced to the bland and faceless generic who would eventually become Thursday1–4. The rest was created from newspaper reports and just plucked from the air. If I’d cared more about how it all was going to turn out, perhaps I would have given them more time.

  A fter another fruitless argument with the dispatcher at TransGenre Taxis, who told me they had two drivers off sick and it wasn’t their fault but they would “see what could be done,” I took the elevator down to the sixth floor of the Great Library and walked to the section of shelving that carried all five of the Thursday books, from The Eyre Affair all the way through to The Great Samuel Pepys Fiasco. There was every edition, too—from publisher’s proof to hardback, large print and mass-market paperback. I picked up a copy of The Eyre Affair and looked carefully for a way in. I knew that the book was first-person narrative, and having a second me clearly visible to readers would be wildly confusing—if the book wasn’t confusing enough already. I soon found what I was looking for: a time lapse of six weeks after Landen’s death near the beginning of the book. I scanned the page for the correct place, and, using an oblique, nonappearing-entry method taught to me by Miss Havisham, I slipped unseen into the end of chapter one.

  I arrived in the written Swindon just as the sun was dipping below the horizon, and I was standing opposite our house in the Old Town. Or at least it was the remains of our house. The fire had just been put out, and the building was now a blackened ruin, the still-hot timbers steaming as they were doused with water. Through the twinkling of blue and red emergency lights, I could see a small figure sitting in the back of an ambulance, a blanket draped across her shoulders. The legal necessity of removing Landen from the series was actually a blessing in disguise for the publishers. It freed up their Thursday romantically and also gave a reason for her psychotic personality. Boy, was this book ever crap.

  I waited in the crowd for a moment until I could sense that the chapter was over, then approached Thursday1–4, who had her back to me and was talking to a badly realized version of Bowden, who in this book was known by the legally unactionable “Crowden Babel.”

  “Good evening,” I said, and Thursday jumped as though stuck with a cattle prod.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked without turning around.

  “Text Grand Central saw a few wrinkles in the narrative, and you’re too unpleasant for anyone other than me to come and have a look.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, “everything’s fine. It’s probably a Storycode Engine on the fritz. A buildup of irony on the dialogue injectors or something.”

  She seemed jittery but still didn’t want to turn and look at me straight on.

  “You sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure—do you think I don’t know my own book? I’m afraid I must go. I’ve got to run through some lines with the replacement Hades.”

  “Wait,” I said, and grabbed her arm. I pulled her around to face…someone else entirely. It wasn’t Thursday1–4. It was a woman with the same coloring and build, clothes and general appearance, but it wasn’t her.

  “Who the hell are you?” I demanded.

  She sighed heavily and shrugged. “I’m…I’m…a character understudy.”

  “I can see that. Do you have a name?”

  “Alice-PON-24330,” she replied resignedly.

  “This series isn’t up for maintenance for years. What are you doing here?”

  She bit her lip, looked away and shifted her weight uneasily. “If she finds I’ve talked…well, she has a temper.”

  “And I don’t?”

  She said nothing. I turned to Crowden Babel. “Where is she?”

  He rubbed his face but said nothing. It seemed I was the only person not frightened by Thursday1–4.

  “Listen,” I said to Babel, pointing at Alice-PON-24330, “she’s just an understudy and is like a phone number—replaceable. You’re in every book and have a lot more to lose. Now, either you talk to me right this minute and it goes no further or we turn you over to Jurisfiction and thirty tons of prime-quality shit is going to descend on you from a very great height.”

  Babel scratched the back of his head. “She does this every now and then. She thinks the series is too small for her.”

  Babel and the ersatz Thursday glanced nervously at each other. There was something else going on. This wasn’t just a simple substitution so Thursday1–4 could have a break.

  “Somebody better start talking, or you’ll discover where she gets her temper from. Now, where has she gone?”

  Babel looked nervously around. “She came back furious. Said you’d fired her on false pretenses and she wanted to get some…serious payback.”

  “What sort of payback?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If you’re lying to me!”

  “I swear on the life of the Great Panjan—”

  “I know where she is,” said the ersatz Thursday in a quiet voice. “What the hell. When she discovers I’ve talked to you, I’ll be dead anyway. She’s out…in the real world!”

  This was serious. Substitution and illegal pagerunning were one thing, but crossing over to the real world was quite another. I could legally erase her on sight, and the way I felt right now, I—

  My thoughts were interrupted because both Crowden and the understudy had looked anxiously toward the burned-out shell of the house. I suddenly had a very nasty thought, and my insides changed to lead. I could barely say the word, but I did:

  “Landen?”

  “Yes,” said the understudy in a soft voice. “She wanted to know what it was…to love.”

  I felt anger well up inside me. I pulled out my TravelBook and read as I walked toward the house. As I did so, the evening light brightened, the emergency vehicles faded back into fiction, and the house, which burned to a husk in The Eyre Affair, was suddenly perfe
ct again as I moved back into the real world. My mouth felt dry after the jump, and I could feel a headache coming on. I broke into a panicky sweat and dumped my jacket and bag in the front garden but kept my pistol and slipped a spare eraserhead into my back pocket. I very quietly stepped up to the front door and silently slipped the key into the lock.

  The house was silent aside from the thumping of my heart, which in my heightened state of anxiety was almost deafening. I had planned to lie in wait for her, but a glance down at the hall table made me reappraise the situation. My house keys and distinctive grammasite key ring were already lying where I left them—but I still had mine in my hand. I felt powerfully thirsty, too, and was badly dehydrated—the most annoying side effect of my return to the Outland. I looked through to the kitchen and could see a pitcher of half-finished juice on the kitchen drainer. If I didn’t drink something soon, I’d pass out. On the other hand, Thursday1–4 was somewhere in the house, waiting for Landen or rummaging in our sock drawer or something. I silently crept along the downstairs hallway, checked the front room, then went through to the dining room beyond and from there to the kitchen. The only thing I noticed out of place was a book of family holiday snapshots open on the coffee table. I moved into the kitchen and was about to take a swig of juice straight from the pitcher when I heard a noise that turned my blood to ice. I dropped the pitcher, which shattered on the kitchen floor with a concussion that echoed around the house.

  Pickwick woke up in her basket and started plocking at everything in sight until she saw who it was and went back to sleep. I heard voices upstairs and the sound of footsteps padding across the bedroom floor. I held my pistol at arm’s length and walked slowly down the hall to the stairs. The sound that had made me drop the pitcher was Landen, but it was the sort of sound that only I ever heard him make—something that was for me and me alone.

  I rounded the newel post and looked up. Almost immediately Thursday1–4 stepped onto the landing, completely naked and holding her automatic. Fictional she might have been, but out here she was as deadly as any real person. We stared at each other for a moment, and she fired. I felt her shot whine past me and embed itself in the doorframe. At almost exactly the same time, I fired my pistol. There was a low thud, and the air wobbled as though momentarily seen through a milk bottle. She jumped back into the bedroom as the wide spread of the eraserhead hit harmlessly on the walls and stairs—the charge only affected anything textual. She’d know my weapon was a single shot, so I turned on my heels and ran back through the front room, breaking the pistol open to reload. The cartridge ejected with a soft thwup, and I yanked the spare out of my back pocket and pushed it into the breech. There was a detonation and another whine of a near miss as I jumped across the breakfast table and snapped the pistol shut with a flick of my wrist. I pulled the heavy oak kitchen table to shield me, and three shots smashed into the wood. I heard the sound of footsteps running away and rose to fire at her retreating form. The dull thud of the eraserhead echoed around the room, and there was a mild hiss as it struck its mark. I heard the front door open, I got up—slightly too quickly—and the room went squiffy. I staggered to the sink and drank from the running tap and then, still feeling light-headed but tolerably alert, stumbled up the hall to the open front door. There was a small scattering of fine text on the doorstep and more leading out into the front garden, where I saw her automatic lying on the garden path. I turned and yelled upstairs, “Stay where you are, Land!” and then followed the trail of text to the front gate, where there was a random sprinkling of letters. I cursed. There wasn’t enough here to be fatal—I’d probably just clipped her and caused a small part of her to unravel. It was no big deal. She could have another body part written exclusively for her down in the Well.