The well of lost plots (46 page)

“Men are like that. I’m just glad you’re both happy.”

“I’ll miss being the main protagonist,” she said wistfully. “
Girls Make All the Moves
was a good role but in a crap book. Do you think I’ll ever be the heroine again?”

“Well, Lola, some would say that the hero of any story is the one who changes the most. If we take the moment when we first met as the beginning of the story and right now as the end, I think that makes you and Randolph the heroes by a long straw.”

“It does, doesn’t it?”

She smiled and we sat in silence for a moment.

“Thursday?”

“Yes?”

“So who did kill Godot?”

BookWorld Meteorology:
Aside from the rain, snow and wind that often feature within the pages of novels for dramatic effect, another weather system works within the BookWorld; a sort of transgenre wind that is not a moving mass of air but one of text, sense distortion and snippets of ideas. It is usually only a mild zephyr whose welcome breeze brings with it a useful cross-fertilization of ideas within the genres and usually has no greater vice than the spread of the mispeling vyrus. On occasion, however, the wind has been known to whip itself up into a WordStorm that can dislodge whole sentences and plot devices and deposit them several genres away. It’s not a common phenomenon, but it’s wise to keep an eye on it. In my second week as Bellman, a WordStorm of unprecedented ferocity hit the library. It was the first real test of my Bellmanship. I think I did okay.

THURSDAY NEXT,
Private Diaries

I WAS ASLEEP IN my room in the Sunderland not long after my inauguration as Bellman. Everything had been pretty quiet that week. A few PageRunners and a sighting of the Minotaur, but nothing too serious. Text Grand Central was still coming to grips with the new management regime, and all the storycode engines had been shut down and rebooted to rid them of the UltraWord
^TM
Operating System. So a lull was not only welcome, but necessary.

I was awoken from my slumber by a loud purring and was shocked to find the Cat formerly known as Cheshire about an inch from my nose.

“Hullo!” he purred, grinning fit to burst. “Were you dreaming about oysters?”

“No,” I confessed. “In fact,” I added, rubbing my eyes and attempting to sit up, “I don’t think I’ve
ever
dreamt about oysters.”

“Really? I dream about them all the time. Sometimes on the half shell and other times in an oyster bed. Sometimes I dream about them playing the piano.”

“How can an oyster play the piano?”

“No,
I
dream about them when
I’m
playing the piano.”

I looked at the clock. It was three in the morning.

“Did you wake me up to tell me about your oyster dreams?”

“Not at all. I can’t think for a moment why you are interested. Something has come up over at Text Grand Central and we thought you should be informed.”

I was suddenly a great deal wider awake. I moved to get up and the Cat politely faded from view as I stepped from the bed.

“So what’s up?” I asked, slipping on a T-shirt.

“It’s the TextWind,” said the Cat from the corridor. “We’ve been monitoring it all day and there is a possibility it could whip itself up into a WordStorm.”

Weather inside fiction is much like weather at home, only usually more extreme. Book rain generally comes down in stair rods, and book snow always has flakes the size of farthings. But these all exist
within
books for narrative purposes. The BookWorld itself has less easily recognized weather patterns but has them, just the same — a particularly bad storm in ’34 swept through Horror and rained detritus on Drama for weeks, the most notable result being the grisly spontaneous-combustion sequence in Dickens’s
Bleak House
.

I pulled on my trousers and shoes and walked out of the door, leaving Pickwick and her chick asleep in an untidy snoring mass on the rug. The Cat was waiting for me and together we jumped to Text Grand Central.

TGC was the technical nerve center of the BookWorld. Modified from an unpublished Gothic horror novel, the one hundred floors of TGC were lit by flickering gas mantles that only faintly illuminated the vaulted ceilings high above the polished marble floors. We entered near the corner of floor sixty-nine and I followed the Cat as we walked past the humming storycode engines, each one a colossi of cast iron, shiny brass and polished mahogany. Just one of five hundred on this floor alone, the bus-sized machine could cope with up to fifty thousand simultaneous readings of the same book — or one reading apiece of fifty thousand different books, as demand saw fit. I had only visited TGC once before as part of my induction to the Bellman’s job and was amazed not only on how impossible the concept was to my flat Outlander mind, but the supreme scale of it all. The technicians scurried like tireless ants over the clanking machinery, checking dials, oiling moving parts and venting steam while keeping a close lookout for any narrative anomalies to report to the collators upstairs. It was from these collators that reports of Fiction Infractions, PageRunners and all the other BookWorld misdemeanors filtered through to us at the Jurisfiction offices. The whole system was hopelessly antiquated and manpower intensive — but it worked.

We left the engine floor and walked into a large anteroom where the BookWorld Meteorological Department worked. It was here the ten-strong team spent their days busily searching for patterns in the seemingly random textual anomalies that occur throughout fiction. The department was run by Dr. Howard. I had met him briefly once before and knew that a century or two ago he had been real, like me. TGC had commissioned a biography of the original Luke Howard solely so a Generic could be trained and then employed part-time in this office.

“Ah!” he said as we walked in. “Glad you’re here, Bellman. Heavy weather moving in from the Western genre. This is Senator Jobsworth from the Council of Genres, here as part of the C of G committee for observation of anomalies.”

Jobsworth, a small and weedy-looking man, didn’t look comfortable nor regal in his senatorial robes. As part of the regime change after the Ultra Word
^TM
debacle, it was deemed that a senator should be present at any unusual event. He looked shifty and I took an instant dislike to him.

“Senator,” I said, bowing slightly as protocol dictated.

“Miss Next,” he said dryly, “I must tell you right now that I didn’t vote for you. I will be keeping a close eye on your behavior.”

“Good,” I replied noncommittally, then added, “What’s up, Dr. Howard?”

He motioned us towards the center of the room where beneath us in a recessed pit there was a large map of the BookWorld.

“We plot everything,” he explained as the staff below moved marker tags with long sticks to the orders of the controllers above, “from the largest unconstrained narrative flexation to the smallest tense distortion. Then, by plotting the size of the changes and their positions, a rough map of the BookWorld’s weather can be constructed.”

I looked down at the sea of small markers, which seemed, indeed, to have a sort of swirling pattern to them. He pointed to a mass of reports.

“About two hours ago an outbreak of anomalous plot flexations began in
Riders of the Purple Sage
.”

“The Minotaur was reported in Zane Grey last week,” I commented.

“That’s what we thought at first,” replied Dr. Howard, “but the slight flexations were moving too fast to be a PageRunner. Within twenty minutes a cloud of grammatical oddities had joined the weather front, and together they left the Western genre. The front brushed the southeast corner of Erotica and vanished ten minutes later into Stream of Consciousness.”

“Vanished?”

“Difficult to spot, perhaps. It’s been quiet in SOC ever since. But that’s not all. At pretty much the same time a cloud of mispunctuation arose in Horror, circled twice and then developed into a pretty stiff breeze of split infinitives and jumbled words before traveling through Fantasy into Romance. Unchallenged, it hit the Farquitt series and split in two. One storm front headed north into Steel, the other along the Collins ridge just east of Krantz. We expect the two fronts to merge just past Cooper in a few minutes.”

“So we can safely say it’s over then?” asked the senator, staring at the plotting table with more than a little confusion.

“Up to a point, Senator,” replied Dr. Howard diplomatically. “As you so expertly point out, it just
might
dissipate into the Taylor Bradford canon harmlessly.”

“Oh, good!” said the senator with relief.

“However,” continued Dr. Howard, “and far be it from me to contradict Your Grace, it’s equally probable they will strengthen and then careen off on a destructive course towards Drama.”

“Boss!” said a technician who had been staring at a list of recent anomalies. “I think you better see this.”

Below us on the plotting table we could see a small bulge emerge on the western flanks of Stream of Consciousness.

“How fast?” asked Dr. Howard.

“About three pages a second.”

“Give me a projected route.”

The technician picked up a slide rule and scribbled some notes on a pad of paper. Unluckily for us, the front that had begun in Western had traversed Stream of Consciousness and emerged four times as strong.

“I knew we hadn’t seen the last of it,” muttered Howard. “Damn and blast!”

But that wasn’t all. In the next two minutes we watched nervously as the split storm fronts coursing through Romance rejoined, grew stronger and diverted off towards Drama, as feared.

“And that’s why we called you,” said Dr. Howard, gazing at me intently. “In under ten minutes the Romance and Stream of Consciousness frontal systems will merge and strengthen. We’ve got a WordStorm brewing of magnitude five-point-four or more heading straight for Drama.”

“Five-point-four?” echoed the senator. “That’s good, right?”

“In storm terms, it’s very good,” replied Dr. Howard grimly, “make no mistake about that. A two-point-three might only scramble text and change tenses; a three-point-five can muddle chapters and remove entire words. Anything above a five has enough power to tear whole ideas and paragraphs out of a book and dump them several shelves away.”

“O-kay,” I said slowly as Commander Bradshaw appeared, looking a bit bleary-eyed.

“Glad you could make it, Trafford. We’ve got a potential WordStorm brewing.”

“WordStorm, eh?” he mused. “Reminds me of a typhoon that struck
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
ten years back. By gad, we were picking superfluous adjectives out of the book for a month!”

“And that had been a small one,” added Dr. Howard, “barely a two-point-one.”

“Cat,” I said, “issue a storm warning to the residents of all books on the storm’s path. Trafford, we need every single Danver-Clone we have on thirty-second readiness. I want textual sieves ready and standing by.”

“Well,” said Senator Jobsworth, “this is all quite exciting, isn’t it? And what is a textual sieve, anyway?”

We all ignored him and moved to a table in Dr. Howard’s office where one of his team had unrolled a more detailed map of the threatened area of Drama. It was essentially one of Bradshaw’s booksploring charts overlaid with the footnoterphone conduits in red ink. The map looked like a giant spiderweb of interconnections, the books that remained unexplored standing alone and unprotected. If we couldn’t get in to warn them, they certainly wouldn’t be able to see it coming.

We waited patiently as the minutes ticked by, the plotters updating the course of the two storm fronts on the chart as they merged, gathered speed and hurtled across the emptiness of intergenre space, directly towards Drama. Bradshaw had relayed my orders to the DanverClones; all we needed was the title of the books most likely to be hit by the coming storm.

“Why don’t we set up those textual sieves across this area here?” suggested Senator Jobsworth, waving a hand at the chart.

“We mustn’t spread our sieves too thin,” I explained. “We need them concentrated at the place the storm hits to do any good at all.”

As if to confirm its waywardness, the storm changed direction. It had been heading almost straight for the Satire end of Drama when it veered away and headed instead for Novel.

“Which one do you think, old girl?” asked Bradshaw, footnoterphone in hand. It was one of those moments where leadership has a lonely, hollow emptiness to it. The wrong decision now and we could be mopping up the mess for years. Give my order too early and the storm might veer again and cut an ugly swath through Trollope; give the order too late and the textual sieves might not be up in time to stop the storm in its tracks. A half-unfurled sieve would be broken like matchwood and carried with the storm to who knows where.

“What shall we do, Bellman?” asked the Cat. He wasn’t smiling.

A technician updated the plot. The storm had moved slightly to the west and was now four minutes from hitting Drama. Would it hold that course or veer off again?

“Dr. Howard,” I said, “I need your best estimate.”

“It’s almost impossible to say — !”

“I know that!” I snapped. “Like it or not, you are the best guesser and I’m going to go with your hunch — that’s my decision. Now, where do you think it will hit?”

He sighed resignedly and stabbed a finger on the map. “I think about here. Page two hundred fourteen of
The Scarlet Letter
, give or take a chapter or two.”

“Hawthorne,” I murmured, “not good.”

No one had ever traveled into any of his books before, so the DanverClones would be working on the books closest to it — never a satisfactory alternative.

“Right,” I said, drawing a deep breath, “do we have an updated report on the size of this WordStorm?”

“It’s now a five-point-seven,” replied the technician in a voice tinged with fear, “and it’s heavy with ideas and plot devices picked up on its journey so far.”