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“Friday may have tricked his parents, the SHE and half the ChronoGuard, but there’s one person no teenage boy ever managed to fool.”

“And that is?”

“His younger sister.”

Rescue seemed a very remote possibility, and that was at the nub of the whole ethical-dilemma argument. You never come out on top, no matter what. The only way to win the game is not to play.

“It’s highly disorderly,” he explained, “not like here. There is no easily definable plot, and you can run yourself ragged wondering what the significance can be of a chance encounter. You’ll also find that for the most part there is no shorthand to the narrative, so everything happens in a long and painfully drawn out sequence. Apparently the talk can be confusing—for the most part, people just say the first thing that comes into their heads.”

“Is it as bad as they say it is?”

“I’ve heard it’s worse. Here in the BookWorld, we say what needs to be said for the story to proceed. Out there? Well, you can discount at least eighty percent of chat as just meaningless drivel.”

“I never thought the percentage was that high.”

“In some individuals it can be as high as ninety-two percent. The people to listen to are the ones who don’t say very much.”

“Do I have to talk to insane people?”

“You’re a librarian now. I’m afraid it’s mandatory.”

I didn’t know much about Conspiracy, but I did know that its theorists were mostly paranoid and tended to value conviction above evidence.

Humans are more or less identical except for a few peculiar habits generally delineated by geographic circumstances and historical precedent. But essentially, they’re all the same and reading from the same rule book. To get along you have to appreciate the rules, but also know that other people know the rules—and that they know that you know the rules. Get it?

Everything comes to an end. A good bottle of wine, a summer’s day, a long-running sitcom, one’s life, and eventually our species. The question for many of us is not that everything will come to an end but when. And can we do anything vaguely useful until it does?

“I need to get home and have a long, hot bath and then a martini.”

Thursday5 thought for a moment. “After you’ve drunk the long, hot bath,” she observed, “you’ll never have room for the martini.”

To fail spectacularly is a loser’s paradise.

“You’ll forgive me for saying this,” said Webastow, looking over his glasses, “but this is the most harebrained piece of unadulterated stupidity that any government has ever undertaken anywhere.”

“Thank you very much,” replied Ms. Yogert courteously. “I’ll make sure your compliments are forwarded to Prime Minister van de Post.”

Sprockett buzzed briefly to himself. “Does that sort of thing happen out there in the RealWorld, or is it just in books?”

I thought for a moment. Of the untidy chaos I had seen in the RealWorld; of not knowing what was going to happen; of not knowing what, if anything, head relevance. The RealWorld was a sprawling mess of a book in need of a good editor. I thought then of the narrative order here in the BookWorld, our resolved plot lines and the observance of natural justice we took for granted.

“Literature is claimed to be a mirror of the world,” I said, “but the Outlanders are fooling themselves. The BookWorld is as orderly as people in the RealWorld hope their own world to be—it isn’t a mirror, it’s an aspiration.”

“Bipedal movement is the skill of controlled falling,” said Square. “If it weren’t so commonplace, it would seem miraculous—like much out here, to be truthful.”