“. . . but I won’t take your place at the talks,” came the voice. I leaned closer, but the conversation was muted and indistinct from then on, and I hurried off towards the captain’s quarters, which were situated just behind the wheelhouse, two decks up.
The senator was already there and had ensconced himself in a large and very worn wicker chair, from which spot he contemplated the river traffic that floated past as we made our way out of the Ungenred Zone and into Comedy. The captain and the helmsman were also present, and they expertly steered a path around the many underwater obstructions, islands and sandbars. I decided to try to act as much like the real Thursday as I could.
“Do you expect a clear run up the river, Captain?” I asked.
The captain chuckled.
“It’s always eventful, Miss Next. Someone will doubtless be murdered, there will be romantic intrigue, and after that we’ll pass a deserted village with a lone survivor who will ramble incoherently about something that we don’t understand but has relevance later on. Did you meet the adventurer? Youngish chap. Handsome. He’s probably met you before.”
I said that I had, and both he and the senator laughed.
“What’s the joke?”
“He’s the fodder. There’s always at least one on a trip like this. Someone for you to get attached to, probably sleep with, but who then dies on the journey, probably saving your life. You won’t tell him, will you? It’ll ruin his day.”
“I’ll try to keep it under my hat.”
“Do you have the route all planned, Captain?” asked Jobsworth, who was sipping on a pink gin handed to him by a steward dressed in starched whites.
“We’ll stay on the Metaphoric until we’ve entered Comedy and moved past Sitcoms,” replied the captain, pointing to a map of the river, “and after that we follow a tributary past Mother-in-Law Jokes and then to Edgy Rapids before cruising the flat plain of Bob Hope and Vaudeville. At the foothills of the Scatological Mountains, we’ll enter the subgenres of Bedroom Farce and Bawdy Romp. Twenty minutes after that, we stop at Middle Station, which marks the border into Racy Novel.”
“Emissaries from Speedy Muffler will meet us at Fanny Hill,” added Senator Jobsworth, “and they will accompany us to Pornucopia, the capital.”
The conversation fell off after that, and once I’d mustered some courage, I spoke.
“Did you want to speak to me, Senator?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “I want you to understand that you are here simply as a face—nothing more. As already explained, we have been putting around the story that you have irritablevowel syndrome and are mute. You will not be party to talks, or to preparations for talks. You will not express an opinion by gesticulating or written notes unless we decide and are fully briefed. You’ll be told where to appear and when. Is that clear?”
“As a bell, sir.”
“Good. Off you toddle, then. Ah!” he added, much relieved, “Come in, gentlemen.”
Red Herring, Colonel Barksdale and Zhark had just appeared at the doorway. I was no longer needed. I thought for a moment of voicing my concerns over what Thursday might have been up to, but I didn’t know for certain what she had been up to, so I said nothing, bowed and withdrew politely from the cabin.
I walked down the companionway to the main deck and found my way to the bar. I wasn’t particularly bothered by the senator’s attitude. It was what I was expecting—a friendly welcome, then being put firmly in my place.
The bar was elegantly paneled in light wood with inlaid etched mirrors to give the the illusion of greater space. The furniture was of leather but had worn badly, and the horsehair stuffing was beginning to sprout at the seams. One of the madlooking foreigners was asleep in an armchair, and at the bar was the adventurer. He looked handsomer than he had earlier, and his hat was placed on the bar next to him.
“Enjoying the trip?” I asked as I sat down.
“I thought it would be funnier steaming through Comedy.”
“It’s less funny the closer you get.”
“Hmm. Would you permit me to buy you a drink?”
“I buy my own drinks,” I told him, doing as Thursday would. It wasn’t like it was a real drink anyway. Alcohol doesn’t do anything in the BookWorld, except act as narrative furniture in scenes such as these. If you wanted to get off your head, you’d hit the hyphens, but I needed my wits about me.
“A beer for me,” I said. “Drake?”
“Scotch.”
The barman placed our drinks on the counter, and I took a sip. The beer was a light, amber-colored liquid, but it tasted like warm tea. This wasn’t unusual, since everything in the BookWorld tasted like warm tea—except warm tea itself, which tasted of dishwater. But since dishwater tasted of warm tea, warm tea actually might have tasted like warm tea after all.
“Are you part of the diplomatic mission?” asked Drake.
I told him that I was, and he grunted noncommittally. Since the senator said he was fodder and unlikely to last the next few hours, I though it a safe bet to trust him.
“I overheard something odd outside the mysterious passenger’s cabin.”
“That’s entirely normal. You’ll probably hear odd noises in the night, too, and if we’ve got time, someone will be found shot dead with a cryptic note close by.”
“Do you want to know what I overheard?”
“Not really. There’ll be an impostor on the boat, too—and a shape-changer.”
“What, of the alien variety?” I asked, looking nervously about.
“No,” he replied, smiling at my naïveté. “Someone or something who is not what it seems.”
“Isn’t that the impostor?”
“There’s a subtle difference.” Drake mused for a moment, staring at the ceiling. “But I’m not sure precisely what it is. I was born yesterday, you know.”
“My name is Florent,” announced a new bar steward who had just come on duty. “May I mix you a Tahiti Tingle?”
I frowned, then turned. It was Sprockett, dressed as a bar steward and sporting a ridiculous false mustache on his porcelain features. Since he didn’t greet me, I assumed he wanted to remain incognito, so I merely said I already had a drink and resumed my conversation with Drake.
“Are journeys upriver usually like this?” I asked.
“Apparently so. How do they think they’re going to stop Speedy Muffler anyway?”
“By telling him that massed armies on the borders of WomFic and Dogma are waiting to invade if he so much as hiccups.”
“What makes you think Speedy Muffler is doing anything but rattling his saber? The only people who stand to gain by a war are the neighboring genres who get to divvy up the spoils.”
“I knew Speedy Muffler in the old days,” said one of the foreigners who had joined us, “long before the BookWorld was remade—even before Herring and Barksdale and that idiot Jobsworth were about.”
“What do you know about Speedy Muffler?”
“That he wasn’t always the leader of Racy Novel. He was once a minor character in Porn with delusions of grandeur. Muffler was up here in the days before Racy Novel, when the Frowned-Upon Genres were clustered in the north beyond Comedy. His name came to prominence when he quite suddenly started sending large quantities of metaphor downriver. He wasn’t licensed to do so, but because his supplies were consistent, the rules were relaxed. Pretty soon he was taking more and more territory for himself, but he kept on sending down the metaphor, and the CofG kept on turning a blind eye until he publicly proclaimed the area as Racy Novel, which was when the CofG started to take notice.”
“By then it was too late,” added Drake. “Speedy Muffler’s power was established, his genre large enough to demand a chair at the Council of Genres.”
“I guess WomFic/Feminism were none too happy?”
“Not overawed, no. Especially when he used to turn up at high-level summits with his shirt open and declaring that feminists needed to ‘loosen up’ and should groove with his
love machine.”
“Is he still shipping metaphor downriver?” I asked.
“Not as much as before,” said Drake, “but still more than WomFic and Dogma. The area is rich in metaphor, and whoever can send the most downriver is the wealthiest. Put simply: Whoever controls the Northern Genres controls the metaphor supply, and whoever controls the supply of metaphor controls Fiction. It’s not by chance that WomFic and Crime have fortythree percent of the Outland readership. If Squid Procedural had been positioned up here, everyone would be reading about Decapod Gumshoes, and loving it.”
“So why isn’t Racy Novel read more than Women’s Fiction? If he sends more metaphor downriver, I mean?”
“Because of sanctions,” said Drake, looking at me oddly, “imposed by WomFic and Dogma—and pretty much everyone else. Like it or not, Racy Novel isn’t very highly thought of.”
“Is that fair?”
“You’re asking a lot of basic questions,” said Drake. “I thought Thursday Next would be well up on all this—especially if she’s here for the peace talks.”
“I need to gauge local opinion,” I said quickly. “This is Fiction, after all—interpretation trumps fact every time.”
“Oh,” said Drake, “I see.”
I excused myself, as Sprockett had just left the bar, and I caught up with him farther down the steamer, just outside the storeroom.
“Good afternoon, ma’am,” he whispered. “How is it going?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m the bar steward.”
“I can see that.”
“I knew you couldn’t actually let me go,” he said. “I’m too good a butler for that. So I simply assumed you were being compassionate and thought this trip too dangerous for you to take staff. So I came anyway. What do you want me to do?”
I took a deep breath. It seemed as though butlers were like flat feet, dimples and troublesome aunts—you’ve got them for life.
“There’s a mysterious passenger in Cabin Twelve. I want you to find out what he’s doing here.”
“He doesn’t do anything—he’s simply the MP-C12. Have you figured out who the fodder is yet?”
“It’s Drake.”
“Ooh. Will he be eaten by a crocodile? A poison dart in the eye?”
“Just find out what you can about the mysterious passenger, would you? I overheard him say, ‘I won’t take your place at the talks,’ and it might be significant.”
“Very good, ma’am. I’ll make inquiries.”
36.
Middle Station
For those of you who have tired of the glitzy world of shopping and inappropriate boyfriends in Chick Lit, a trip to Dubious Lifestyle Advice might be the next step. An hour in the hallowed halls of invented ills will leave you with at least ten problems you never knew you had, or even knew existed.
Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (7th edition)
It took us an hour to steam through Comedy, and whilst mostly light and airy and heard-it-beforeish, the atmosphere became more strained and intimidating as we chugged slowly through Mother-in-Law Jokes and Sexist Banter. Despite being advised to remain out of sight, I elected to stay on deck and brazen out the worst abuses that came shouted unseen from the thick trees that covered the riverbank. The two ladies of negotiable affection had no difficulty with the comments, having heard much worse before, and simply retorted with aplomb—delicately countering the more vulgar insinuations with amusing attacks on the male psyche and various aspersions on their manhood or ability.
We came across the Middle Station at noon. The small trading town was right on the point where the Double Entendre River becomes the Innuendo, and although we had been traveling through the buffer genre of Bawdy Romp, replete with amusing sketches of people running in and out of each other’s bedrooms in a retro-amusing manner, we were now very much within the influence of Racy Novel, and we all knew it. The first part of the journey had been a pleasing chug up the river, but now we were here for business, and a sense of brooding introspection had fallen upon the boat.
The arrival of the paddle steamer at the Middle Station was welcomed not by sound but by silence. The constant tramp-tramp-tramp of the engines, for five hours a constant background chorus, made things seem deafeningly quiet when the engines were stopped. I stood on the foredeck as the steamer drifted towards the jetty. The Middle Station, usually a throbbing hub of activity, seemed deserted. Drake stood next to me, his hand on the butt of his revolver.
“I’m going ashore to check this out,” I said, “and I think it would be better if you stayed here.”
“Au contraire, Miss Next. It is you who will be staying here.” There seemed no easy way to say this, so I came right out with it.
“Drake,” I said in a quiet voice, “you’re the fodder, due for a tragic yet potentially heroic end.”
He looked at me for a moment. “It’s very good of you to warn me, but that’s not how I see it.”
“You think it’s someone else?”
“I think the fodder is you, Thursday.”
“No it’s not.”
“What are you if you’re not the fodder?”
“I’m the impostor.”
“You . . . could be the impostor and the fodder.”
“The unions would never allow it.”
“They might.”
“Look,” I said, “we could argue this all day, but here’s the thing: You graduated only this morning with a minimal backstory. I’ve been working the BookWorld for over three years—who’s most likely to cop it in the next few hours?”
“You might just think you’ve been working the BookWorld for three years. It could be your backstory.”
“Okay,” I said, beginning to get angry, “we’ll both go out there and see who gets eaten by a crocodile or gets a poison dart in the eye. Then we’ll know.”
“Deal.”
The rest of the peace delegation had joined us on deck, and they were staring silently towards the Middle Station. As we drew closer, we could see that the houses had been recently burned, for wisps of smoke hung in the air with the faint smell of scorched custard. We waited for the steamer to drift towards the jetty, until it touched with a faint bump. The crew made the steamer fast before jumping back onto the boat, and we watched and waited as the steamer slowly swung around in the current. There was not a single sign of life anywhere in the station.
“Well,” said Colonel Barksdale after a few minutes, “I’ve seen enough—doubtless skirmishers from Racy Novel causing trouble. Let’s steam on deeper into the genre and start getting some face time with this lunatic.”
“We’re not going anywhere until we load some coal,” said the captain.
I stepped off the steamer and onto the rickety old jetty, Drake at my side. We walked slowly into the town. Drake looked about anxiously, but not, I realized, about the deserted Middle Station.
“You’ll keep an eye out for crocodiles, won’t you?” I asked.
“As long as you watch my back for poison darts.”
We came across the first body near the mailbox on the corner. There was an ugly wound in the middle of his chest, and the small letters and words that made up his existence had been caught by the breeze and blown into the fishing nets set up to dry. We looked around and noticed more bodies and the detritus of conflict: discarded rubber chickens, feather dusters, strings of silk flags, spinning bow ties and custard-pie shrapnel that somehow seemed sadder and less funny than usual.
“Is this a garrison town?” I asked.
“No,” replied the adventurer.
“Then what’s a lance corporal of the Fourteenth Motorized Clown doing up here?”
The corpse was indeed a member of Comedy’s frontline troops. He had orange hair, a bulbous red nose, and he was wearing camouflage battle dress, along with a pair of size-twenty-eight shoes. Not much good for marching and a hangover from their days as an Alpine regiment.
Drake placed his hand on the clown’s bright re
d nose.
“Still warm,” he said, “probably been dead less than an hour. Any thoughts?”
“I don’t know,” I said, picking up a nurse’s hat from the ground. A little farther on, a stethoscope was lying broken in the dust. “But it wasn’t just clowns who died here today.”
We walked some more and came across a dozen or so other bodies. All clowns, all dead and none meant to be here. Bawdy Romp was within Racy Novel’s control and officially a demilitarized zone.
“This doesn’t make sense,” said Drake. “Comedy never had any beef with Racy Novel. Quite the reverse—they actually got on very well. Without Racy Novel, Comedy would be very poor indeed—especially for the stand-ups.”
“Let’s not hang around. Where did the captain say the coal was?”
We walked deeper into the station and saw more evidence of a pitched battle having taken place not long before. We found the remains of several burned-out clown cars; despite their being able to drive in either direction and having a device for shedding all the body work in order to lighten the vehicle for a speedy getaway, it hadn’t done any good. There was evidence of atrocities, too. Medical staff had been killed. I noted several pretty nurses and a handsome doctor lying in a doorway, and several crash carts were strewn about. There were a few dead rustic serving wenches, too, a ripped bodice and a couple of horses with ruggedly handsome and now very dead riders lying in the road amidst scorched brickwork and smoking rubble. We came across more dead clowns; it seemed as though an entire company had been wiped out.
“Looks like someone was making sure Comedy couldn’t come to Racy Novel’s aid,” observed Drake.
“It makes me wonder why we’re bothering with peace talks. Crocodile.”
“What?”
“Behind you.”
Drake jumped out of the way as the crocodile’s jaws snapped shut. “Thank you.”
“Now do you believe you might be the fodder?” I asked.