Jasper Fforde_Thursday Next_05 (23 page)

reappeared and, after the briefest of altercations, they shook hands. There was a pause and then a few raised voices until finally, incredibly, and with Thursday1–4 as stiff as a poker, she allowed herself to be hugged. I smiled to myself, got up and walked back to where the pair of them were standing, Thursday5

looking optimistically positive and Thursday1–4 brooding stonily.

“Have you two sorted yourselves out?”

They both nodded.

“Good,” I said, consulting my watch. “We’ve got a few hours before we attend the Council of Genres’

policy-directive meeting, but before that—”

“
We
are attending the CofG meeting?” asked Thursday5 with eyes like saucers.

“Yes, but only in the sort of ‘we’ that means you stand at the back and say nothing.”

“Wow! What will they be discussing?”

“BookWorld policy. Such as whether we should be supplying characters to video games to give them added depth. It’s particularly relevant, as publishing these days doesn’t necessarily restrict books to being just books. It’s said that Harry Potter will make a rare appearance. Now, we’ve got to—”

“Will we really meet Harry Potter?” she asked in a soft whisper, her eyes going all dewy at the mention of the young wizard. Thursday1–4 looked to heaven and stood, arms crossed, waiting for us to get on with the day’s work.

“It depends,” I sighed. “If you pay attention or not. Now for this afternoon’s assignment: relieving the staff who are dealing with the BookWorld’s ongoing piano problem. And for that we need to go to Text Grand Central.”

23.
The Piano Problem
The piano was thought to have been invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori in the early eighteenth century and was originally called the
gravicembalo col piano e forte,
which was fortunately reduced to
pianoforte,
then more simply to
piano
. Composed of 550 pounds of iron, wood, strings and felt, the eighty-eight-key instrument is capable of the subtlest of melodies, yet stored up in the tensioned strings is the destructive power of a subcompact moving at twenty miles per hour.
I
f Jurisfiction was the policing agency inside books and the Council of Genres was the political arm, Text Grand Central was the bureaucracy that bridged the two. Right up until the Ultra-word™ debacle, TGC

had remained unimpeachably honest, but after that, the Council of Genres—on my advice—took the harsh but only possible course of action to ensure that Text Grand Central would be too inefficient and unimaginative to pose a threat. They appointed a committee to run it. As we walked onto one of the main Storycode Engine floors, I heard Thursday5 gasp. The proportions of the room were more in keeping with a factory that made Very Large Things, and the stone walls, vaulted ceiling and flickering gas lamps betrayed the room’s provenance as something borrowed from an unpublished Gothic Horror novel. Laid in serried ranks across the echoing vastness of the space were hundreds of Storycode Engines, each one the size of a bus and built of shiny brass, mahogany and cast iron. A convoluted mass of pipes, valves and gauges, they looked like a cross between an espresso machine, a ship’s engine and a euphonium on acid. They were so large there was a catwalk running around the upper section for easy maintenance, with a cast-iron spiral staircase at one end for access.

“These are Imaginotransference Storycode Engines. The most important piece of technology we possess. Remember the pipe leading out of core containment in
Pinocchio
?”

Thursday5 nodded.

“The throughput is radiated across the intragenre Nothing and ends up here, where they are then transmitted into the reader’s imagination.”

I knew why it worked but not
how
. Indeed, I was suspicious that perhaps there wasn’t an explanation at all—or indeed any need for one. It was something we called an “abstract narrative imperative”: They work solely because it’s expedient that they do. The BookWorld is like that. Full of wholly improbable plot devices that are there to help grease the storytelling cogs. I paused so they could both watch the proceedings for a moment. Thursday5 made no secret of her fascination, but Thursday1–4 stifled a faux yawn. Despite this, she still looked around. It was hard not to be impressed—the machines stretched off into the hazy distance almost as far as you could see. Technicians scurried like ants over the whirring machinery checking dials, oiling, venting off steam and filling out reports on clipboards. Others moved between machines with trolleys full of papers to be filed, and the air was full of the smell of hot oil and steam. Above our heads a series of clanking shafts and flapping leather belts brought power to the engines, and the combined clatter and hum in the vast chamber sounded like a cascading waterfall.

“Five hundred machines on each floor!” I shouted above the tumult. “With each one capable of handling up to fifty thousand concurrent readings. The ones in the blue overalls are the storycode technicians, known affectionately as ‘word monkeys.’ They keep the engines running smoothly, clean out the dialogue injectors and make sure there isn’t a buildup of irony on the compressors. The man dressed in the white lab coat is the ‘text collector.’ There is a reader echo that pings back to the engine to throughput the next word, so we can use that to check if the book is running true to the author’s original wishes. Any variance is termed a ‘textual anomaly’ and is caught in the waste gate of the echo skimmers, which are those large copper things on the top.”

“This is all
really
fascinating technological stuff,” observed Thursday1–4 drily, “but I’m waiting to see how it relates to pianos.”

“It doesn’t, O sarcastic one. It’s called education.”

“Pointless exposition, if you ask me.”

“She’s not asking you,” retorted Thursday5.

“Exactly,” I replied, “and some people enjoy the techie stuff. Follow me.”

I opened an arched oak door that led off the engine floor and into the administrative section of Text Grand Central, a labyrinth of stone corridors lit by flaming torches affixed to the walls. It was insufferably gloomy but economical—part of the unfinished Gothic Horror novel from which all of TGC was fashioned. As soon as the door closed, the noise from the main engine floor ceased abruptly.

“I was just trying to explain,” I said, “how we find out about narrative flexations. Most of the time, the anomalies are just misreads and lazy readers getting the wrong end of the stick, but we have to check everything, just in case.”

“I can get this on the Text Grand Central tour for twenty shillings and with better company,” said Thursday1–4, looking pointedly at Thursday5.

“
I’m
interested, ma’am.”

“Creep.”

“Slut.”

“What did you call me?”

“Hey!” I shouted. “
Cut it out!
”

“She started it,” said Thursday1–4.

“I don’t care who started it. You’ll
both
be fired if you carry on like this.”

They fell silent, and we walked along the echoing corridors, past endless oak doors, all relating to some textual activity such as word meanings, idea licensing and grammasite control.

“The problem with pianos,” I began, “is that there aren’t enough to go around. Lots of people in the BookWorld play them, they frequently appear in the narrative, and they’re often used as plot devices. Yet for an unfathomable reason that no one can fully explain, there are only fifteen to cover the entire BookWorld.”

“Fifteen?” snorted Thursday1–4, who was lagging behind in a petulant manner. “How do they manage that, then?”

“With a lot of difficulty. Have a look.”

I opened a door off the corridor. The room was much like a psychiatrist’s office, full of bookshelves and with diplomas on the wall. There were two chairs, a desk and a couch. Two men were sitting in the chairs: A beard and pipe identified the first man immediately as a psychiatrist, and the second, who seemed desperately nervous, was obviously the patient.

“So, Mr. Patient,” began the psychiatrist, “what can I do for you?”

“Well, Doc,” muttered the patient unhappily, “I keep on thinking I’m a dog.”

“I see. And how long has this been going on?”

“Since I was a puppy.”

“Excuse me,” I interrupted, “I’m looking for the Piano Squad.”

“This is Very Old Jokes,” explained the psychiatrist apologetically. “Pianos are down the corridor, first on the left.”

“Sorry,” I muttered somewhat sheepishly, and quietly closed the door. “I keep on doing that,” I murmured. “They should really label these doors better.”

We walked along the corridor, found the correct door and opened it to reveal a room about fifty feet square. The walls were roughly plastered, and the vaulted stone ceiling was supported in the center of the room by a sturdy pillar. Set into the wall to our right was an aperture the size of a single garage, painted bright white and illuminated from within by several hundred lightbulbs. As we watched, there was a faint buzz, a flicker, and an ornate cabinet piano suddenly appeared in the aperture. Almost instantly a workman dressed in brown overalls and with a flat cap moved forward to wheel it out on well-oiled castors. Facing the bright white opening was a control desk that looked like a recording studio’s mixing console, and behind this were two men of youthful countenance, dressed in linen suits. They were wearing headsets and had the harried look of people under great pressure.

“Upright rosewood returned from
Sons and Lovers,
” whispered the one who was standing. “Stand by to send the Goetzmann into
Villette.
”

“Check!” shouted the other man as he adjusted the knobs and sliders on the console. The workman pushed a Goetzmann grand into the empty aperture, stepped back, called “Clear,” and with another buzz, the piano vanished. They looked at us as soon as we entered, and I nodded a greeting. They nodded one back and returned to their work.

“Observe,” I said to the Thursdays, pointing to a large indicator panel on the wall behind the men. The fifteen pianos were listed down the left-hand side, and in columns next to them were indicator lights and illuminated panels that explained what was happening to each. The uppermost piano on the list we noted was a “generic” grand and was currently inside
Bleak House.
It would be available in a few minutes and was next due to appear in
Mill on the Floss,
where it would stay for a number of scenes until departing for
Heart of Darkness.
While we watched, the indicator boards clicked the various changes as the two operators expertly moved the pianos back and forth across fiction. Below the indicator boards were several other desks, a watercooler and a kitchenette and coffee bar. There were a few desultory potted plants kicking around, but aside from several rusty filing cabinets, there was not much else in the room.

“Fifteen pianos is usually ample,” I explained, “and when all pianos are available for use, the Piano Squad just trots along merrily to a set timetable. There are a few changes here and there when a new book requires a piano, but it generally works—eightysix percent of pianos appear in nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century literature.”

I pointed to the indicator board.

“But if you notice, eight pianos are ‘status unavailable,’ which means that they have been pulled out of frontline ser vice for maintenance.” I waved the report Bradshaw had handed me. “There was an administrative mix-up; we usually have one piano offline at a time, but some clot had them all refitted at once to save costs.”

The Thursdays looked at the two operators again, and as we watched, the upright piano made of rosewood and with inlaid brass was moved from
Sons and Lovers
to
The Mayor of Casterbridge
and then on to
The Turn of the Screw.

“That’s right,” I said, “Charles and Roger are having to spread seven pianos around the entire canon of English fiction. Hang on, it looks as though we’re coming to a break.”

They did indeed seem to be about to stop work for a few minutes. The two operators relaxed, stopped what they were doing, removed their headsets and stretched.

“Hello, Thursday,” said the younger of the two in a quiet whisper. “Brought your family in to work?”

“Not a chance,” I laughed. “Jurisfiction Cadets Thursday5 and Thursday1–4, meet Charles and Roger of the Piano Squad.”

“Hello!” yelled Roger, who appeared not to be able to converse at anything less than a shout. “Come up and have a look-see!”

The Thursdays went to join Roger at the console, Thursday5 because she was genuinely interested and Thursday1–4 because Roger was actually quite attractive.

“Just how many piano mentions are there in fiction?” asked Thursday5.

“Thousands,” he replied, “but in varying degrees. Much of nineteenth-century literature—the Brontës, Hardy and Dickens in particular—is literally
awash
with pianos, but they’re rarely played. Those are the easy ones to deal with. Our pianos one to seven are nonfunctioning and are for description only. They are simply on an automatic circuit of the BookWorld, appearing momentarily in the text before flashing off to appear elsewhere.” He turned to the indicator board. “If you look at the panel, our trusty old P-6

Broadwood upright is currently on page three hundred and thirty-nine of
The Lost World,
where it occupies a space near the standard lamp in the Pottses’ villa in Streatham. In a few moments, it will jump automatically to the subbasement on page ninety-one of
Howards End,
where it will sit beneath a Maud Goodman painting. A moment later it will jump off to page one hundred and sixty-one of
Huckleberry
Finn
and the Grangerford parlor.”

“However,” added Charles in a whisper, “Eliot, Austen and Thackeray are not only knee-deep in pianos, but working ones which in many instances are the linchpin of a scene. And
those
are the ones we have to be most careful about regarding supply and demand. Amelia Sedley’s piano in
Vanity Fair
is sold at auction and repurchased by Dobbin to be given to her as a gift, and the singing and accompaniment within Austen do much to add to the general atmosphere.”