Drake thought for a moment. “He could have been trying to eat his way through me to get to you.”
“Sure,” I said with a smile, “and while we’re on the subject: If I were the fodder, why didn’t you warn me? I warned you.”
“Because I . . . didn’t want to ruin your day?”
“How very generous of you.”
We found the coal heap amidst a few more civilians—this time pretty secretaries who had died in the arms of their bosses. We filled a couple of wheelbarrows with coal before returning to the steamer. As soon as we were aboard, the crew slipped the moorings and the captain ordered, “Astern slow,” and swung the bows into the limpid river. We took the left branch up the tributary known as the Innuendo, and pretty soon the steamer was at full speed once more. Despite others’ misgivings, Jobsworth seemed adamant that the peace talks should go ahead.
It seemed as though an entire company had been wiped out.
37.
Revision
Amongst all the genres on Fiction Island, Comedy is the only one that still demands compulsory military service and a bucket of water down the trousers for every citizen. Conscripts are trained in the clown martial art of slapstick and do not graduate from military academy until they can kill silently with a frying pan and achieve fatal accuracy with a custard pie at forty yards. It’s a bit like Sparta, only with jokes.
Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (7th edition)
We convened in the bar soon afterwards and related everything we had seen at the Middle Station. Colonel Barksdale, Herring, Zhark and Senator Jobsworth listened carefully to all we had to say but didn’t seem to have any better idea of what was going on than we did.
“There is no reason for the Fourteenth Motorized Clown to be this far north,” declared Colonel Barksdale angrily. “It is a flagrant breach of numerous peace agreements and specifically the 1996 Clown Army Proliferation Treaty.”
“Shouldn’t you have known about it?” asked Emperor Zhark, who knew better than most the value of intelligence.
“The Textual Sieve network is patchy up here,” replied Barksdale in a sulky tone. “We can’t know everything. I can only think the Fourteenth Clown must have been massing in the demilitarized zone as the potential allies of Racy Novel.”
“Then who killed them and all the civilians?” asked the adventurer, to which question there didn’t seem to be much of an answer. They all fell silent for a moment.
“When do we meet with the other delegates?” asked Jobsworth.
“In an hour,” replied Herring. “Aunt Augusta of WomFic and Cardinal Fang of Outdated Religious Dogma are meeting us at Fanny Hill. Would you excuse me? We’re out of footnoterphone range, and I’m going to have to send a message to the council via the shortwave colophone.”
Drake and I were dismissed, as Jobsworth, Barksdale and Zhark had decided to discuss the finer points of the peace talks, something to which we could not be privy.
“I’m going to freshen up before we get there,” said Drake, “and maybe rub on some crocodile repellent.”
I laughed, saw he was serious, turned the laugh into a cough and said, “Good idea.”
We were now well within Racy Novel, and the rustling of bushes, the groans and squeaks of delight echoed in from the riverbanks, where large privet hedges were grown to afford some sort of privacy for the residents. Every now and then, a slip in the riverbank allowed us a brief glimpse of what went on, which was generally several scantily dressed people running around in a gleeful manner—usually in a bedroom somewhere, but occasionally in the outdoors and once on the top deck of a London bus.
I made my way forward, where I was met by Sprockett, who beckoned me into a laundry cupboard.
“I took the opportunity to go through the mysterious passenger’s belongings, ma’am.”
“And?”
“I came across some shoulder pads, knee pads, a chest protector and a gallon of fire retardant.”
“What?”
“Shoulder pads—”
“I heard. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
“What doesn’t?”
“All of it. From beginning to end. We reach Fanny Hill in half an hour, and the peace talks begin as soon as we are escorted to Pornucopia. It’s time to go over what we’ve found. I feel the answer is staring me in the face.”
“Shouldn’t we gather all the suspects in the bar?” asked Sprockett, who was fast becoming infected by the Metaphoric Queen’s capacity for narrative formulaicism.
“No. And another thing—”
I was interrupted by a cry from outside, and the engine went to slow ahead. We stepped out of the laundry cupboard to see several crewmen run past, and we followed them to the upper rear deck, from where we could see across the top of the sternwheel. Behind us in midstream was a figure in one of the riverboat’s four-man tenders. The man was rowing in a measured pace away from the boat, and given our forward speed, the distance between the two craft was rapidly increasing.
“Who is it?” asked Herring.
“It looks like the mysterious passenger from Cabin Twelve,” replied Drake, who had a small telescope, as befits an adventurer. “He’s even taken his luggage with him.”
“What’s the meaning of this?” asked Jobsworth, who had just arrived.
Herring explained, and Jobsworth looked at us all in turn. “Let me see.”
He peered through the telescope for a moment. “He’s taken his luggage with him.”
“That’s what I said,” remarked Drake.
“Mr. Herring,” said Jobsworth, “what’s going on here?”
“I’ve no idea, Senator.”
“Advice?”
“Um . . . carry on?”
“Sounds good to me. Captain?”
“Sir?”
“Carry on.”
But the captain, long a riverman, knew more of the perils that can be found on the Metaphoric.
“We can’t leave him out here, sir. The forests are full of Sirens eager to . . . well, how can I put it? He’ll be captured and made to . . . Listen, he’ll be killed.”
“Will it be quick?”
“No—it will be long and very drawn out. He might enjoy it to begin with, but he will eventually be discarded, a shriveled husk of a man devoid of any clothes, humanity or moisture.”
But the senator was made of sterner stuff.
“This mission is too important to delay, Captain. The mysterious passenger formerly of Cabin Twelve will have to remain exactly that. In every campaign there are always casualties. Full ahead.”
“Yes, sir.”
And they all walked away. The engines ran up to full speed again, and after a few more minutes the small boat was lost to view behind an overhanging tree on a bend in the river.
“I guess that’s what mysterious passengers do,” said Drake with a shrug. “Be mysterious. Drink?”
“I’ll see you down there,” I replied. “I must admonish this bar steward for the lamentable lack of quality in his Tahiti Tingle.”
Drake nodded and moved off, and Sprockett and I sat on the curved bench on the upper rear deck to discuss recent events. From the epizeuxis to the mimefield to the Men in Plaid to Sir Charles Lyell and the bed-sitting room.
“What had Thursday discovered that was so devastating to the peace process?” asked Sprockett.
“I don’t know. I wish to Panjandrum I were more like her.”
I took the sketch I had found in Sir Charles’s office out of my pocket. It was a map of Racy Novel with WomFic to one side and Dogma on the other. There was a shaded patch the shape of a tailless salmon that was mostly beneath Racy Novel.
As I stared at the picture, I felt a sudden flush of new intelligence, as though a jigsaw had been thrown into the air and landed fully completed. Everything that had happened to me over the past few days had been inexorably pointing me in one direction. But up until now I’d been too slow or stupid to be able to sift the relevant facts from the herrings.
/>
“By all the spell checkers of Isugfsf,” I said, pointing at Lyell’s sketch. “It’s metaphor. A trillion tons of the stuff waiting to be mined, lying beneath our feet!”
“Yes?” said Sprockett, his eyebrow pointing at “Doubtful.”
“That’s what Lyell and Thursday had discovered,” I said excitedly. “It’s as Drake said: ‘Whoever controls the supply of metaphor controls Fiction.’”
“If so,” said Sprockett carefully, “Racy Novel would be sending more metaphor downriver than anyone else. And they’re not.”
I thought about this for a moment. “Maybe Speedy Muffler isn’t bad at all. Perhaps he’s defending the metaphor against greedy genres intent on mining it to exhaustion. Metaphor should be controlled—a glut on the market would make Fiction overtly highbrow, painfully ambiguous and potentially unreadable. The new star on the horizon would be the elephant in the room that might lead the BookWorld into a long winter’s night.”
“That would be frightful,” replied Sprockett, recoiling in terror as the overmetaphorication hit him like a hammer. “But how does that explain the Fourteenth Clown’s destruction? Or even who’s responsible for all this?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “but Senator Jobsworth needs to hear about it.”
I jumped up and ran down the companionway to the captain’s cabin, nearly colliding with Red Herring on the way.
“Sorry,” he said, “I’m just going to find a doughnut—do you want one?”
“No thank you, sir.”
I found Senator Jobsworth discussing the talks with Emperor Zhark and Colonel Barksdale.
“Have you seen Herring?” asked Jobsworth. “He should really be going through the final details with us.”
“He went to get a doughnut.”
“He did? Leave us now. We’re very busy.”
“I have important information. I think I know why Thursday was assassinated.”
Jobsworth stared at me. “Thursday’s dead?”
“Well, no, because her imagination is still alive. It was an assassination attempt—in a crummy book written by Adrian Dorset.”
“Adrian Dorset?”
“Jack Schitt, if you must. It was the epizeuxis that got her. And Mediocre.”
“Who’s Mediocre?”
“Gatsby.”
“He’s anything but mediocre, my girl.”
And both he and Zhark laughed in a patronizing sort of way.
“Seriously,” I said hotly, “Thursday was attacked, and the reason—”
“Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s fascinating,” said Jobsworth, “but it’s going to have to wait. We enter the subgenre Racy Classics in five minutes and meet with the other delegates in forty-five. We have much work to do. If you really want to be helpful, make me a cup of tea or go find Herring.”
“But—”
“GO!”
I mumbled an apology and backed out the door, cursing my own weakness.
“That could have gone better,” said Sprockett. “I’ll try to find Herring for you.”
And with a mild buzz, he disappeared. I walked down to the lower deck feeling hot and frustrated. I didn’t like to be talked to that way, but this could indeed wait. I’d leave it until Jobsworth had a quieter moment and then tell him—or perhaps speak to Speedy Muffler’s people in private and see if my suspicions were correct. Perhaps it was better not to talk to Jobsworth.
I went down to my cabin to wash my face but stopped at Cabin 12, next door to mine. The mysterious passenger’s escape from the steamer still made no sense, so I pushed open the door and went in.
The bed was made up, as I might have suspected—we weren’t due to return until tomorrow. I searched through the missing passenger’s baggage and found none of the shoulder or knee pads that Sprockett had described, although the fire retardant was still there, unopened. There was a change of clothes and nothing else. I was about to close the door when I remembered—the mysterious passenger had his luggage with him when we saw him rowing away.
A flurry of unpleasant thoughts went through my head, and I suddenly realized not only why the mysterious passenger would have knee pads, but who had attacked the Fourteenth Clown and what was going on in the Outland that made the whole thing possible. This was a complex plot of considerable dimension, and I was now certain who was behind it all. My first thought was to go and tell Jobsworth exactly what was happening, but I stopped as a far worse realization dawned upon me. The plan would work only if everyone on board the Metaphoric Queen were to be assassinated.
I grabbed a fire ax and ran up the companionway to the deck.
38.
Answers
Off the coast lies Vanity Island, and off Vanity lies Fan Fiction. Beyond Fan Fiction is School Essays and beyond that Excuses for Not Doing School Essays. The latter is often the most eloquent, constructed as it is in the white-hot heat of panic, necessity and the desire not to get a detention.
Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (2nd edition)
One of Jobsworth’s D-3 minions had been given the task of keeping an eye on the riveted box that contained the valuable plot-line gifts for Speedy Muffler, and he noticed me only when I was halfway across the foredeck, my intention already clear to those present. He dropped his copy of The Word and took a pace towards me. I caught him on the solar plexus with the ball of my hand, and he reeled over backwards. The foredeck would have been in plain view from the wheelhouse, and the captain pulled on the steam whistle and sent a deafening blast echoing across Racy Novel, temporarily quenching the sounds of the enthusiastic moans that echoed over the water.
The whistle also drowned out the sound of the padlock being smashed off, and I had the lid open and was looking at the contents when Zhark and Jobsworth arrived beside me. They stopped, too, and stared inside the box.
“Those aren’t plot lines,” said Jobsworth.
“No,” I replied, looking up the river to where I could just see Lady Chatterley’s Lover appear around the next bend, less than five hundred yards away, “and you need to stop the boat before we get to Racy Classics.”
“Captain!” yelled Jobsworth, who knew how to act properly when evidence presented itself. The captain opened the wheelhouse window and leaned out, cupping a hand to his ear.
“Turn the Queen about and get us downstream. If we go up, I want to be taking only Racy Pulp with us!”
The captain needed no further bidding, and he ordered the helm hard over to turn midriver.
I leaned in and examined the contents of the box. It was a classy job. There was a single glass jar that contained, as far as I could see, a lot of foam. This was attached to a funnel and a time switch, and wrapped around all this was a series of embarrassingly bad descriptions of sexual congress. Emperor Zhark moved closer and put on his glasses.
“By the seven-headed Zook of Zargon,” he breathed. “It’s full of antikern.”
“It’s full of what?”
“Kerning is the adjustment of the white spaces between the letters,” he explained, “in order to make the letters seem proportionally spaced. What this does is remove the white spaces entirely—within an instant this entire boat and everyone in it will implode into nothing more than an oily puddle of ink floating on the river.”
I pointed to the poorly written descriptions of sexual congress wrapped around the device.
“With a few telltale descriptions of a sexual nature to point the finger toward Speedy Muffler.”
“So it would appear. Blast!”
Emperor Zhark had been examining the device carefully.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“No blue wire. There’s usually a choice of wires to cut, and by long convention it’s always the blue one. Without that there’s no way we can know how to defuse it.”
I glanced at the timing device, which also by long convention was prominently featured—and had two and a half minutes to go.
“Can we throw it overboard?” asked Jobsworth.
??
?Not unless you want to see the entire Metaphoric River vanish in under a second.”
“We could abandon the steamer.”
“It’ll be a tight fit in the one tender remaining—and those high privet hedges along the riverbank won’t make for an easy escape.”
“I’ll take it in a boat with me.”
It was Drake Foden, adventurer.
“I don’t want any arguments,” he said. “This is my function. I’m the fodder.”
“I told you he was,” said Barksdale, jabbing Jobsworth on the shoulder with his index finger.
There was no time to do anything else, and at a single word from the captain the second tender was lowered over the side and the riveted box placed inside. Drake turned to me and took my hands in his.
“Good-bye, Thursday. I’m sorry we didn’t get to sleep together and perhaps have a few jokes and get into a couple of scrapes and thus make this farewell more poignant and mournful, which it isn’t.”
“Yes,” I replied. “I’ll always regret not knowing you at all or even liking you very much. Perhaps next time.”
“There won’t be a next time.”
“I know that. Drake?”
“Yes?”
“You have something stuck in your teeth.”
“Here?”
“Other side.”
“Thanks.”
And without another word, Drake clambered aboard, cast off the mooring and began to row quickly away from the steamer.
“Hey!” I yelled across the water. “Aren’t you glad it wasn’t a poison dart in your—”
But I didn’t get a chance to say any more. Drake, the tender and the iron box suddenly imploded with a sound like a cough going backwards, accompanied by a swift rush of air that sucked in to fill the void and made our ears pop. I’d never seen text destroyed so rapidly—even an eraserhead takes a half second to work.
“Slow ahead,” ordered Jobsworth, “and wire the delegation that we have been ‘unavoidably delayed.’”
He turned to me.
“Just what in Wheatley’s name is going on here, Next?”
My mind was still racing. There was the fate of the Fourteenth Clown to think of, and the broader implications of regional stability, pretty nurses, handsome doctors and fire retardant.