Free Jasper Fforde_Thursday Next_05 by First Among Sequels Page B

influence warm me like a hot radiator. But it wasn’t heat I was feeling; it was the warmth of a good story, well told. A potpourri of jumbled narrative, hovering just above of the books like morning mist on a lake. I could actually feel the emotions, hear the whispered snatches of conversation and see the images that momentarily broke free of the gravity that bound them to the story.
    “Can you feel that?” I whispered.
    “Feel what?”
    I sighed. Fictional people were less attuned to story; it was rare indeed that anyone in the BookWorld actually read a book—unless the narrative called for it.
    “Place your hands gently against the spines.”
    She did as I asked, and after a moment’s puzzlement she smiled.
    “I can hear voices,” she whispered back, trying not to break the moment, “and a waterfall. And joy, betrayal, laughter—and a young man who has lost his hat.”
    “What you’re feeling is the raw imaginotransference energy, the method by which all books are dispersed into the reader’s imagination. The books we have in the Outland are no more similar to these than a photograph is to the subject—these books are alive, each one a small universe unto itself—and by throughputting some of that energy from here to their counterparts in the real world, we can transmit the story direct to the reader.”
    Thursday took her hand from the books and experimented to see how far out she had to go before losing the energy. It was barely a few inches.
    “Throughputting? Is that where Textual Sieves come into it?”
    “No. I’ve got to go and look at something for Bradshaw, so we’ll check out core containment—it’s at the heart of the imaginotransference technology.”
    We walked a few yards up the corridor, and after carefully consulting the note Bradshaw had given me, I selected a book from the bewildering array of the same title in all its various incarnations. I opened the volume and looked at the stats page, which blinked up a real-time Outland ReadRate, a total of the editions still in existence and much else besides.
    “The 1929 book-club deluxe leatherbound edition with nine copies still in circulation from a total of twenty-five hundred,” I explained, “and with no readers actually making their way through it. An ideal choice for a bit of training.”
    I rummaged in my bag and brought out what looked like a large-caliber flare pistol. Thursday5 regarded me nervously.
    “Are you expecting trouble?”
    “I always expect trouble.”
    “Isn’t that a TextMarker?” she asked, her confusion understandable, because this wasn’t officially a weapon at all. These were generally used to mark the text of a book from within so an agent could be extracted in an emergency. Once an essential piece of equiment, they were carried less and less as the mobilefootnoterphone had made such devices redundant.
    “It was,” I replied, breaking open the stubby weapon and taking a single brass cartridge from a small leather pouch. “But I’ve modified it to take an eraserhead.”
    I slipped the cartridge in, snapped the pistol shut and put it back in my bag. The eraserhead was just one of the many abstract technologies that JurisTech built for us. Designed to sever the bonds between letters in a word, it was a devastating weapon to anyone of textual origin—a single blast from one of these and the unlucky recipient would be nothing but a jumbled heap of letters and a bluish haze. Its use was strictly controlled—Jurisfiction agents only.
    “Gosh,” said Thursday after I’d explained it to her. “I don’t carry any weapons at all.”
    “I’d so love not to have to,” I told her, and with the taxi still nowhere in sight, I passed the volume across to her. “Here,” I said, “let’s see how good you are at taking a passenger into a book.”
    She accepted the novel without demur, opened it and started to read. She had a good speaking voice, fruity and expressive, and she quickly began to fade from