8.
The Shield
The evidence for the existence of Dark Reading
Matter remains obscure at best. Supposedly the vast amount of
unread material either forgotten or deleted, DRM is also said to be
home to the Unread: zombielike husks of former characters, their
humanity sucked from their heads by continued unreadfulness. It is
generally agreed that these stories belong to metamyth—stories
within stories—and are used by drill sergeants at character college
to frighten recruits into compliance.
Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (8th
edition)
The queue to get out of Poetry was
long, as always. The smuggling of metaphor out of the genre was a
serious problem, and one that made the border guards extremely
vigilant. The increased scarcity of raw metaphor in Fiction had
driven prices sky-high, and people would take unbelievably foolish
risks to smuggle it across. I’d heard stories of metaphor being
hidden in baggage, swallowed, even dressed up to look like ordinary
objects whose meanings were then disguised to cloak the
metaphor. The problem at that point was trying to explain why you
had a “brooding thunderstorm” or “broad sunlit uplands” in your
luggage.
“Can we take the High Road?” I asked.
She turned around to look at me. Taking the High
Road out of Poetry meant only one thing—that I wanted to avoid any
entanglements with the border guards.
“My friend Jake was carrying a mule without
realizing it last week,” said the cabbie in a meaningful tone. “The
mule had two kilos of raw metonym on him—hidden in the
saddlebags.”
Metonym wasn’t as dangerous as smuggling raw
metaphor, but the underworld would try anything to turn a buck and
had set up labs to enrich variable forms of metaphor into the real
McCoy. Extracting the “like” from simile was the easiest method,
but the resulting metaphor was as weak as wet paper. Synecdoche was
used in much the same way; the best minds in Jurisfiction were
constantly trying to outwit them, and raided met labs on an almost
daily basis.
“Did he get to keep his cab?” I asked. “Your friend
Jake, I mean.”
“His entire car was reduced to text with the
metonym still in it.”
“Reduced to text?” I echoed. “Sounds like a hammer
to break a nut.”
“Poeticals are like that,” said the cabbie with a
disrespectful snort. “Prone to fits of violent passion. I think
it’s all that absinthe. The point is this: I can get you out of
Poetry, but it will cost.”
“I’ll lend you my butler for an afternoon.”
“One afternoon and a garden party.”
“A garden party.”
“Done.”
The cabbie flipped the vectored thrust nozzles, and
in an instant we were climbing almost vertically upwards. It took
less than a minute to reach the low-lying book traffic, and within
a few seconds we had latched onto an academic paper moving from
Physics to Biology. We stayed there for a few minutes and then
detached, hovered for a moment and then reattached to the keel of
an oil tanker that was part of a Bermuda Triangle book on its way
to Fiction. We were under the massive rudder at the back, with one
of the vast propellers looming over us.
“We’ll ride this baby all the way into Fiction,”
said the cabbie as she took out some knitting, “about twenty
minutes. We could fly the whole way, but we’d probably be picked up
by the book-traffic controllers and get busted.”
“Don’t look now, but I think we just have.”
The flashing red lights of a Jurispoetry squad car
close by had alerted me to the fact that the cabbie wasn’t quite as
good as I thought she was. We could have detached there and then
and dropped the mile towards the Text Sea before leveling out and
making a run for the coast, but it was a risky undertaking. Cutting
and running meant only one thing: guilty.
“Oh, crap,” said the cabbie, dropping a stitch in
surprise. “I hope you’ve got some friends in high places.”
“Hullo,” I said to the officer who was now standing
outside the car. He was dressed in a baggy white shirt and smelled
strongly of rhyming couplets. He stared at me with the supercilious
look of someone who knew he had the upper hand and was certainly
going to milk it.
“Oh, to sneak across the border, when it’s plain
you should not oughta?”
I had to think quickly. Unlike the Poetry
government officials who conversed in rhyme royal, this was a lowly
traffic cop who spoke only the gutter doggerel of the streets. He
was using a soft-rhyming AA and so was probably not that bright. I
hit him with some AABCCB.
“Au contraire, my friend, we did not intend
to break any poetical code. We were waved through by others of your
crew and simply took the upper road.”
But he didn’t go for it.
“I can see your little plan, but your stanzas
barely scan. You, madam, I must nab, so get your butt from out the
cab.”
I climbed out and succumbed to a search. He soon
found the box the Lady of Shalott had given me.
“Well, lookee here, what have we got? Is this
metaphor or is it not?”
“Not one but other, I must confess, the situation’s
now a mess.”
He opened the box and stared. It wasn’t metaphor,
but contraband nonetheless.
“You’re in big trouble smuggling this junk. What
else you got? Let’s pop the trunk.”
We did, and there was Sprockett. The officer stared
at him for a moment.
“I’m sure you can explain away why a dead butler’s
in your trunk today?”
“He’s a clockwork butler, Duplex-5, and even
paused he’s still alive.”
The officer had seen enough and brought out a
report sheet to take down some details.
“Name?”
“Thursday Next.”
The officer looked at me, then at my New Agey
clothes, then at Sprockett.
“Now, which one could that be? The heroine or the
one who likes to hug a tree?”
In for a penny, in for a pound. I had to hope that
this guard could be fooled as easily as the Elvis back in
Conspiracy.
“I am she, the Thursday proper. Those that cross me
come a cropper.”
“That seems likely, but before I yield, let me
check your Jurisfiction shield.”
I passed it across. The officer took one look at
it, put away his report sheet and told his partner that they were
leaving. He smiled and handed me back my badge.
“It’s an honor, I’ll be reckoned. Sorry to have
kept you for even a second.”
I signed my name in his autograph book and with
growing confusion climbed back into the cab as the Jurispoetry car
detached from the hull and fell away from the tanker, leaving us to
continue our trip unmolested.
“You’re Thursday Next?” said the cabbie, her
attitude suddenly changed. “This ride is for free, kiddo. But
listen, the next time you’re in the RealWorld, can you find out why
there have to be over a hundred different brands of soap? I’d
really like to know.”
“Okay,” I muttered, “no problem.”
The remainder of the journey was unremarkable,
except for one thing: I spent the entire trip staring at the
Jurisfiction shield that had allowed me not once but twice to
squeak out of trouble. It wasn’t my shield at all. It was
Thursday’s. The real Thursday’s. Someone had slipped it
into my pocket that morning. And the more I thought about the
morning’s events, the more I realized that I might have become
involved—quite against my will—with a matter of some considerable
consequence.