The well of lost plots (13 page)

“Thursday Next?” said the hedgehog.

“Yes. What can I do for you?”

“You can stop poking your nose in where it’s not wanted,” said the hedgehog haughtily, “that’s what you can do.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Painted Jaguar?” suggested the tortoise. “
Can’t curl, can swim
. Ring any bells, smart aleck?”

“Oh! You must be Stickly-Prickly and Slow-Solid.”

“The same. And that little mnemonic you so
kindly
gave to the Painted Jaguar is going to cause us a few problems — the dopey feline will never forget
that
in a month of Sundays.”

I sighed. Living in the BookWorld was a great deal more complicated than I had imagined.

“Well, why don’t you learn to swim or something?”

“Who, me?” said Stickly-Prickly. “Don’t be absurd; whoever heard of a hedgehog swimming?”

“And you could learn to curl,” I added to Slow-Solid.

“Curl?” replied the tortoise indignantly. “I don’t think so, thank you very much.”

“Give it a go,” I persisted. “Unlace your backplates a little and try and touch your toes.”

There was a pause. The hedgehog and the tortoise looked at one another and giggled.

“Won’t Painted Jaguar be surprised!” they chortled, thanked me and left.

I closed the door, sat down and looked in the fridge, shrugged and ate a large portion of Apples Benedict before having a long and relaxing shower.

The corridors of the Well were as busy as the day before. Traders bustled with buyers, deals were done, orders taken, bargains struck. Every now and then I saw characters fading in and out as their trade took them from book to book. I looked at the shop-fronts as I walked past, trying to guess how they did what they did. There were holesmiths, grammatacists, pacesetters, mood-mongers, paginators — you name it.
¹

It was the junkfootnoterphones starting up again. I tried to shut it out but only succeeded in lowering the volume. As I walked along, I noticed a familiar figure amongst the traders and plot speculators. He was dressed in his usual African-explorer garb: safari jacket, pith helmet, shorts, stout boots and a revolver in a leather holster. It was Commander Bradshaw, star of thirty-four thrilling adventure stories for boys available in hardback at 7/6 each. Out of print since the thirties, Bradshaw entertained himself in his retirement by being something of an éminence grise at Jurisfiction. He had seen and done it all — or claimed he had.

“A hundred!” he exclaimed bitterly as I drew closer. “Is that the best you can offer?”

The Action Sequence trader he was talking to shrugged. “We don’t get much call for lion attacks these days.”

“But it’s terrifying, man, terrifying!” exclaimed Bradshaw. “Real hot-breath-down-the-back-of-your-neck stuff. Brighten up contemporary romantic fiction no end, I should wager — make a change from parties and frocks, what?”

“A hundred and twenty, then. Take it or leave it.”

“Bloodsucker!” mumbled Bradshaw, taking the money and handing over a small glass globe with the lion attack, I presumed, safely freeze-dried within. He turned away from the trader and caught me looking at him. He quickly hid the cash and raised his pith helmet politely.

“Good morning!”

“Good morning,” I replied.

He waved a finger at me. “It’s Havisham’s apprentice, isn’t it? What was your name again?”

“Thursday Next.”

“Is it, by gum! Well, I never.”

He was, I noticed, a good foot taller than the last time we had met. He now almost came up to my shoulder.

“You’re much—” I began, then checked myself.

“Taller?” he guessed. “Quite correct, girlie. Appreciate a woman who isn’t trammeled by the conventions of good manners. Melanie — that’s the wife, you know — she’s pretty rude, too. ‘Trafford,’ she says — that’s my name, Trafford — ‘Trafford,’ she said, ‘you are a worthless heap of elephant dung.’ Well, this was from out the blue — I had just returned home after a harrowing adventure in Central Africa where I was captured and nearly roasted on a spit. The sacred emerald of the Umpopo had been stolen by two Swedish prospectors and—”

“Commander Bradshaw,” I interrupted, desperate to stop him from recounting one of his highly unlikely and overtly jingoistic adventures, “have you seen Miss Havisham this morning?”

“Quite right to interrupt me,” he said cheerfully, “appreciate a woman who knows when to subtly tell a boring old fart to button his lip. You and Mrs. Bradshaw have a lot in common. You must meet up someday.”

We walked down the busy corridor.
²

I tapped my ears.

“Problems?” inquired Bradshaw.

“Yes, I’ve got two gossiping Russians inside my head again.”

“Crossed line? Infernal contraptions. Have a word with Plum at JurisTech if it persists. I say,” he went on, lowering his voice and looking round furtively, “you won’t tell anyone about that lion-attack sale, will you? If the story gets around that old Bradshaw is cashing in his Action Sequences, I’ll never hear the last of it.”

“I won’t say a word,” I assured him as we avoided a trader trying to sell us surplus B-3 Darcy clones, “but do many people try and sell off parts of their own books?”

“Oh, yes. But only if they are out of print and can spare it. Trouble is, I’m a bit strapped for the old moola. What with the BookWorld Awards coming up and Mrs. Bradshaw a bit shy in public, I thought a new dress might be just the ticket — and the cost of clothes are pretty steep down here, y’know.”

“It’s the same in the Outland.”

“Is it, by George?” he guffawed. “The Well always reminds me of the market in Nairobi; how about you?”

“There seems to be an awful lot of bureaucracy. I would have thought a fiction factory would be, by definition, a lot more free and relaxed.”

“If you think this is bad, you ought to visit nonfiction. Over there, the rules governing the correct use of a semicolon alone run to several volumes.
Anything
devised by man has bureaucracy, corruption and error hardwired at inception, m’girl. I’m surprised you hadn’t figured that out yet. What do you think of the Well?”

“I’m still a bit new to it.”

“Really? Let me help you out.”

He stopped and looked around for a moment, then pointed out a man in his early twenties who was walking towards us. He was dressed in a long riding jacket and carried a battered leather suitcase emblazoned with the names of books and plays he had visited in his trade.

“Yes?”

“He’s an artisan — a
holesmith
.”

“He’s a plasterer?”

“No; he fills
narrative
holes — plot and expositional anomalies — bloopholes. If a writer said something like ‘The daffodils bloomed in summer’ or ‘They checked the ballistics report on the shotgun,’ then artisans like him are there to sort it out. It’s one of the final stages of construction just before the grammatacists, echolocators and spellcheckers move in to smooth everything over.”

The young man had drawn level with us by this time.

“Hello, Mr. Starboard,” said Bradshaw to the holesmith, who gave a wan smile of recognition.

“Commander Bradshaw,” he muttered slightly hesitantly, “what a truly delightful honor it is to meet you again, sir. Mrs. Bradshaw quite well?”

“Quite well, thank you. This is Miss Next — new at the department. I’m showing her the ropes.”

The holesmith shook my hand and made welcoming noises.

“I closed a hole in
Great Expectations
the other day,” I told him. “Was that one of your books?”

“Goodness me, no!” exclaimed the young man, smiling for the first time. “Holestitching has come a long way since Dickens. You won’t find a holesmith worth his thread trying the old ‘door opens and in comes the missing aunt/father/business associate/friend, et cetera,’ all ready to explain where they’ve been since mysteriously dropping out of the narrative two hundred pages previously. The methodology we choose these days is to just go back and patch the hole, or more simply, to
camouflage
it.”

“I see.”

“Indeed,” carried on the young man, becoming more flamboyant in the light of my perceived interest, “I’m working on a system that hides holes by
highlighting
them to the reader, that just says, ‘Ho! I’m a hole, don’t think about it!’ but it’s a little cutting-edge. I think,” added the young man airily, “that you will not find a more experienced holesmith anywhere in the Well; I’ve been doing it for more than forty years.”

“When did you start?” I asked, looking at the youth curiously. “As a baby?”

The young man aged, grayed and sagged before my eyes until he was in his seventies and then announced, arms outstretched and with a flourish:

“Da-daaaa!”

“No one likes a show-off, Llyster,” said Bradshaw, looking at his watch. “I don’t want to hurry you, Tuesday, old girl, but we should be getting over to Norland Park for the roll call.”

He gallantly offered me an elbow to hold and I hooked my arm in his.

“Thank you, Commander.”

“Stouter than stout!” Bradshaw said, laughing, and read us both into
Sense and Sensibility
.

JurisTech:
Popular contraction of Jurisfiction Technological Division. This R&D company works exclusively for Jurisfiction and is financed by the Council of Genres through Text Grand Central. Due to the often rigorous and specialized tasks undertaken by Prose Resource Operatives, Juris Tech is permitted to build gadgets deemed outside the usual laws of physics — the only department (aside from the SF genre) licensed to do so. The standard item in a PRO’s manifest is the TravelBook (qv), which itself contains other JurisTech designs like the Martin-Bacon Eject-O-Hat, Punctuation Repair Kit and textual sieves of various porosity, to name but a few.

CAT FORMERLY KNOWN AS CHESHIRE,
Guide to the Great Library

THE OFFICES OF Jurisfiction were situated at Norland Park, the house of the Dashwoods in
Sense and Sensibility
. The family kindly lent the ballroom to Jurisfiction on the unspoken condition that Jane Austen books would be an area of special protection.

Norland Park was located within a broad expanse of softly undulating grassland set about with ancient oaks. The evening was drawing on, as it generally did, when we arrived, and wood pigeons cooed from the dovecote. The grass felt warm and comfortable like a heavily underlaid carpet, and the delicate scent of pine needles filled the air.

But all was not perfect in this garden of nineteenth-century prose; as we approached the house, there seemed to be some sort of commotion. A demonstration, in fact — the sort of thing I was used to seeing at home. But this wasn’t a rally about the price of cheese or whether the Whig party were dangerously right-wing and anti-Welsh, nor of whether Goliath had the right to force legislation compelling everyone to eat SmileyBurger at least twice a week. No, this demonstration was one you would expect to find only in the world of fiction.

The Bellman, elected head of Jurisfiction and dressed in his usual garb of a town crier, was angrily tingling his bell to try to persuade the crowd to calm down.

“Not
again
,” muttered Bradshaw as we walked up. “I wonder what the Orals want this time?”

I was unfamiliar with the term
Orals
, and since I didn’t want to appear foolish, I tried to make sense of the crowd on my own. The person nearest to me was a shepherdess, although that was only a guess on my part as she didn’t have any sheep — only a large crook. A boy dressed in blue with a horn was standing next to her discussing the falling price of lamb, and next to them was a very old woman with a small dog who whined, pretended to be dead, smoked a pipe and performed various other tricks in quick succession. Standing next to her was a small man in a long nightdress and bed hat who yawned loudly. Perhaps I was being slow, but it was only when I saw a large egg with arms and legs that I realized who they were.

“They’re all nursery rhyme characters!” I exclaimed.

“They’re a pain in the whatsit, that’s what they are,” murmured Bradshaw as a small boy jumped from the crowd, grabbed a pig and made a dash for it. Bo-peep hooked his ankle with her crook, and the boy sprawled headlong on the grass. The pig rolled into a flower bed with a startled oink and then beat a hurried escape as a large man started to give the boy six of the best.

“. . . all we want is the same rights as any other character in the BookWorld,” said Humpty-Dumpty, his ovoid face a deep crimson. “Just because we have a duty to children and the oral tradition doesn’t mean we can be taken advantage of.”

The crowd murmured and grunted their agreement. Humpty-Dumpty continued as I stared at him, wondering whether his belt was actually a cravat, as it was impossible to tell which was his neck and which was his waist.

“. . . we have a petition signed by over a thousand Orals who couldn’t make it today,” said the large egg, waving a wad of papers amidst shouts from the crowd.

“We’re not joking this time, Mr. Bellman,” added a baker who was standing in a wooden tub with a butcher and a candlestick maker. “We are quite willing to withdraw our rhymes if our terms are not met.”

There was a chorus of approval from the assembled characters.

“It was fine before they were unionized,” Bradshaw whispered in my ear. “Come on, let’s take the back door.”

We walked around to the side of the house, our feet crunching on the gravel chippings.

“Why can’t characters from the oral tradition be a part of the Character Exchange Program?” I asked.

“Who’d cover for them?” snorted Bradshaw. “You?”

“Couldn’t we train up Generics as sort of, well, ‘character locums’?”

“Best to leave industrial relations to the people with the facts at their fingertips. We can barely keep pace with the volume of new material as it is. I shouldn’t worry about Mr. Dumpty; he’s been agitating for centuries. It’s not our fault he and his badly rhyming friends are still looked after by the old OralTradPlus agreement — Good heavens, Miss Dashwood! Does your mother know that you smoke?”