Jasper Fforde - First Among Sequels

The Danverclone seemed to hang in the air for a moment before a large wave caught her and she was left behind the rapidly moving taxi.

Illustrations by Bill Mudron and Dylan Meconis

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Agatha Christie Limited (A Chorion Company) for reference to They Do It with Mirrors Agatha Christie (A Chorion Company). All rights reserved.

Publishers Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For Cressida,

the bestest sister in the world

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The year is 2002. It is fourteen years since Thursday almost pegged out at the 1988 Croquet SuperHoop, and life is beginning to get back to normal

The dangerously high level of the stupidity surplus was once again the lead story in The Owl that morning. The reason for the crisis was clear: Prime Minister Redmond van de Poste and his ruling Commonsense Party had been discharging their duties with a reckless degree of responsibility that bordered on inspired sagacity. Instead of drifting from one crisis to the next and appeasing the nation with a steady stream of knee-jerk legislation and headline-grabbing but arguably pointless initiatives, they had been resolutely building a raft of considered long-term plans that concentrated on unity, fairness and tolerance. It was a state of affairs deplored by Mr. Alfredo Traficcone, leader of the opposition Prevailing Wind Party, who wanted to lead the nation back onto the safer grounds of uninformed stupidity.

How could they let it get this bad? asked Landen as he walked into the kitchen, having just dispatched our daughters off to school. They walked themselves, naturally; Tuesday was twelve and took great pride in looking after Jenny, who was now ten.

Sorry? I said, my mind full of other matters, foremost among them the worrying possibility that Pickwicks plumage might never grow back, and that she would have to spend the rest of her life looking like a supermarket oven-ready chicken.

The stupidity surplus, repeated Landen as he sat down at the kitchen table, Im all for responsible government, but storing it up like this is bound to cause problems sooner or later-even by acting sensibly, the government has shown itself to be a bunch of idiots.

There are a lot of idiots in this country, I replied absently, and they deserve representation as much as the next man.

But he was right. Unlike previous governments that had skillfully managed to eke out our collective stupidity all year round, the current administration had decided to store it all up and then blow it on something unbelievably dopey, arguing that one major balls-up every ten years or so was less damaging than a weekly helping of mild political asininity. The problem was, the surplus had reached absurdly high levels, where it had even surpassed the monumentally dumb mark. Only a blunder of staggering proportions would remove the surplus, and the nature of this mind-numbing act of idiocy was a matter of considerable media speculation.

It says here, he said, getting into full rant mode by adjusting his glasses and tapping at the newspaper with his index finger, that even the government is having to admit that the stupidity surplus is a far, far bigger problem than they had first imagined.

I held the striped dodo cozy I was knitting for Pickwick against her pink and blotchy body to check the size, and she puffed herself up to look more alluring, but to no avail. She then made an indignant plocking noise, which was the only sound she ever uttered.

Do you think I should knit her a party one as well? Yknow, black, off the shoulder and with sparkly bits in it?

But, Landen went on in a lather of outrage, the prime minister has poured scorn on Traficcones suggestion to offload our unwanted stupidity to Third World nations, who would be only too happy to have it in exchange for several sacks of cash and a Mercedes or two.

Hes right, I replied with a sigh. Idiocy offsets are bullshit; stupidity is our own problem and has to be dealt with on an individual stupidity footprint basis-and landfill certainly doesnt work.

I was thinking of the debacle in Cornwall, where twenty thousand tons of half-wittedness was buried in the sixties, only to percolate to the surface two decades later when the residents started to do inexplicably dumb things, such as using an electric mixer in the bath and parting their hair in the center.

What if, Landen continued thoughtfully, the thirty million or so inhabitants of the British Archipelago were to all simultaneously fall for one of those e-mail tell us all your bank details phishing scams or-I dont know-fall down a manhole or something?

They tried the mass walking-into-lamppost experiment in France to see if they could alleviate la dette idiote, I pointed out, but the seriousness under which the plan was undertaken made it de facto sensible, and all that was damaged was the proud Gallic forehead.

Landen took a sip of coffee, unfolded the paper and scanned the rest of the front page before remarking absently, I took up your idea and sent my publisher a few outlines for self-help books last week.

Who do they think you should be helping?

Wellmeand them, I suppose-isnt that how its meant to work? It looks really easy. How about this for a title: Men Are from Earth, Women Are from Earth-Just Deal with It.

He looked at me and smiled, and I smiled back. I didnt love him just because he had a nice knee, was tall and made me laugh, but because we were two parts of one, and neither of us could imagine life without the other. I wish I had a better way to describe it, but Im not a poet. Privately he was a husband and father to our three mostly wonderful kids, but professionally he was a writer. Unfortunately, despite winning the 1988 Armitage Shanks Fiction Award for Bad Sofa, a string of flops had left the relationship with his publisher a bit strained. So strained, in fact, that he was reduced to penning point-of-sale nonfiction classics such as The Little Book of Cute Pets That You Really Like to Hug and The Darndest Things Kids Say. When he wasnt working on these, he was looking after our children and attempting to rekindle his career with a seriously good blockbuster-his magnum opus. It wasnt easy, but it was what he loved, and I loved him, so we lived off my salary, which was about the size of Pickwicks brain-not that big, and unlikely to become so.