Free One of Our Thursdays Is Missing by Jasper Fforde Page B

position where you have to divide your loyalties between your duties as a butler and your duties to the truth.”
    “Most thoughtful, ma’am. Conflicting loyalties do little but strip teeth off my cogs. Shall I shut down immediately?”
    “Not yet.”
    We hailed a cab at the corner of Heller and Vonnegut. The cabbie had issues with clockwork people—“all that infernal ticking”—but since Sprockett was, legally speaking, nothing more nor less than a carriage clock, he was consigned to the trunk.
    “I don’t mind being treated as baggage,” he said agreeably.
    “In fact, I prefer it. Promise you’ll restart me?”
    “I promise.”
    And after he had settled back against the spare tire, I pressed the emergency spring-release button located under his inspection cover. There was a loud whirring noise, and Sprockett went limp.
    I shut the trunk, settled into the cab and closed the door.
    “Where to?”
    “Poetry.”

7.
    The Lady of Shalott
    Here in the BookWorld, the protagonists and antagonists, gatekeepers, shape-shifters, heroes, villains, bit parts, knaves, comedians and goblins were united in that they possessed a clearly defined motive for what they were doing: entertainment and enlightenment. As far as any of us could see, no such luxury existed in the unpredictable world of the readers. The Outland was extraordinarily well named.
    Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (4th edition)
    T he taxi was the usual yellow-and-check variety and could either run on wheels in the conventional manner or fly using advanced Technobabble™ vectored gravitational inversion thrusters. This had been demanded by the Sci-Fi fraternity, who had been whingeing on about hover cars and jet packs for decades and needed appeasing before they went and did something stupid, like allow someone to make a movie based on the title of the book known as I, Robot.
    The driver was an elderly woman with white hair who grumbled about how she had just given a fare to three Triffids and how they hadn’t bothered to tip and left soil in the foot wells and were horribly drunk on paraquat.
    “Poetry?” she repeated. “No worries, pet. High Road or Low Road?”
    She meant either up high, dodging amongst the planetoid-size books that were constantly moving across the sky, or down low on the ground, within the streets and byways. Taking the High Road was a skillful endeavor that meant either slipstreaming behind a particularly large book or latching onto a novel going in roughly the same direction and being carried to one’s destination in a series of piggyback rides. It was faster if things went well, but more dangerous and prone to delays.
    “Low Road,” I said, since the traffic between Poetry and Fiction was limited and one could orbit for hours over the coast, waiting for a novel heading in the right direction.
    “Jolly good,” she said, clicking the FARE ON BOARD sign. “Cash, credit, goats, chickens, salt, pebbles, ants or barter?”
    “Barter. I’ll swap you two hours of my butler.”
    “Can he mix cocktails?”
    “He can do a Tahiti Tingle—with or without umbrella.”
    “Deal.”
    We took the Dickens Freeway through HumDram, avoided the afternoon jam at the Brontë-Austen interchange and took a shortcut through Shreve Plaza to rejoin the expressway at Picoult Junction, and from there to the Carnegie Underpass, part of the network of tunnels that connected the various islands that made up the observable BookWorld.
    “How are you enjoying the new BookWorld?” I asked by way of conversation.
    “Too many baobabs and not enough smells,” she said, “but otherwise enjoyable.”
    The baobabs were a problem, but it was hardly at the top of my list of complaints. After a few minutes with the cabbie telling me in a cheerful voice how she’d had Bagheera in the back of her cab once, we emerged blinking at the tunnel exit and the island of Poetry, where we were waved through by a border guard who was too busy checking the paperwork on a