I’d known him for nearly two years, and I think I’d just come to the end of a very long trail of excuses and reasons that I couldn’t go out on a date. I sighed. There was still one. Perhaps the only one I’d ever had. I told Mrs. Malaprop I would be home in half an hour, thought for a moment and then turned to Sprockett.
“Can I shut you down for a while?”
“Madam, that is a most improper suggestion.”
“I’m about to do something illegal, and since you are incapable of lying, I don’t want you in a position where you have to divide your loyalties between your duties as a butler and your duties to the truth.”
“Most thoughtful, ma’am. Conflicting loyalties do little but strip teeth off my cogs. Shall I shut down immediately?”
“Not yet.”
We hailed a cab at the corner of Heller and Vonnegut. The cabbie had issues with clockwork people—“all that infernal ticking”—but since Sprockett was, legally speaking, nothing more nor less than a carriage clock, he was consigned to the trunk.
“I don’t mind being treated as baggage,” he said agreeably.
“In fact, I prefer it. Promise you’ll restart me?”
“I promise.”
And after he had settled back against the spare tire, I pressed the emergency spring-release button located under his inspection cover. There was a loud whirring noise, and Sprockett went limp.
I shut the trunk, settled into the cab and closed the door.
“Where to?”
“Poetry.”
7.
The Lady of Shalott
Here in the BookWorld, the protagonists and antagonists, gatekeepers, shape-shifters, heroes, villains, bit parts, knaves, comedians and goblins were united in that they possessed a clearly defined motive for what they were doing: entertainment and enlightenment. As far as any of us could see, no such luxury existed in the unpredictable world of the readers. The Outland was extraordinarily well named.
Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (4th edition)
The taxi was the usual yellow-and-check variety and could either run on wheels in the conventional manner or fly using advanced Technobabble™ vectored gravitational inversion thrusters. This had been demanded by the Sci-Fi fraternity, who had been whingeing on about hover cars and jet packs for decades and needed appeasing before they went and did something stupid, like allow someone to make a movie based on the title of the book known as I, Robot.
The driver was an elderly woman with white hair who grumbled about how she had just given a fare to three Triffids and how they hadn’t bothered to tip and left soil in the foot wells and were horribly drunk on paraquat.
“Poetry?” she repeated. “No worries, pet. High Road or Low Road?”
She meant either up high, dodging amongst the planetoid-size books that were constantly moving across the sky, or down low on the ground, within the streets and byways. Taking the High Road was a skillful endeavor that meant either slipstreaming behind a particularly large book or latching onto a novel going in roughly the same direction and being carried to one’s destination in a series of piggyback rides. It was faster if things went well, but more dangerous and prone to delays.
“Low Road,” I said, since the traffic between Poetry and Fiction was limited and one could orbit for hours over the coast, waiting for a novel heading in the right direction.
“Jolly good,” she said, clicking the FARE ON BOARD sign. “Cash, credit, goats, chickens, salt, pebbles, ants or barter?”
“Barter. I’ll swap you two hours of my butler.”
“Can he mix cocktails?”
“He can do a Tahiti Tingle—with or without umbrella.”
“Deal.”
We took the Dickens Freeway through HumDram, avoided the afternoon jam at the Brontë-Austen interchange and took a shortcut through Shreve Plaza to rejoin the expressway at Picoult Junction, and from there to the Carnegie Underpass, part of the network of tunnels that connected the various islands that made up the observable BookWorld.
“How are you enjoying the new BookWorld?” I asked by way of conversation.
“Too many baobabs and not enough smells,” she said, “but otherwise enjoyable.”
The baobabs were a problem, but it was hardly at the top of my list of complaints. After a few minutes with the cabbie telling me in a cheerful voice how she’d had Bagheera in the back of her cab once, we emerged blinking at the tunnel exit and the island of Poetry, where we were waved through by a border guard who was too busy checking the paperwork on a consignment of iambic pentameters to worry much about us.
We made our way slowly down Keats Avenue until we came to Tennyson Boulevard, and I ordered her to stop outside “Locksley Hall” and wait for me around the corner. I got out, waited until she had gone, then walked past “The Lotos-Eaters” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade” to a small gate entwined with brambles and from there into a glorious English summer’s day. I walked up the river, past long fields of barley and rye that seemed to clothe the wold and meet the sky, then through the field where a road ran by, which led to many-towered Camelot. I walked along the river, turned a corner and found the island in the river. I looked around as aspens quivered and a breeze and shiver ran up and down my spine. I really wasn’t meant to be here and could get into serious trouble if I was discovered. I took a deep breath, crossed a small bridge and found myself facing a square gray building with towers at each corner. I didn’t knock, as I knew the Lady of Shalott quite well, and entered unbidden to walk the two flights of stairs to the tower room.
“Hullo!” said the lady, pausing from the tapestry upon which she was engaged. “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”
The Lady of Shalott was of an indeterminate age and might once have been plain before the rigors of artistic interpretation got working on her. This was the annoying side of the Feedback Loop; irrespective of how she had once looked or even wanted to look, she was now a Pre-Raphaelite beauty with long flaxen tresses, flowing white gowns and a silver forehead band. She wasn’t the only one to be physically morphed by reader expectation. Miss Havisham was now elderly whether she liked it or not, and Sherlock Holmes wore a deerstalker and smoked a ridiculously large pipe. The problem wasn’t just confined to the classics. Harry Potter was seriously pissed off that he’d have to spend the rest of his life looking like Daniel Radcliffe.
“Good afternoon, my lady,” I said, curtsying. “I would like to conduct more research.”
“Such adherence to duty is much to be admired,” replied the lady. “How are your readings going?”
“Over a thousand,” I returned, lying spectacularly. If I didn’t pretend to be popular, she’d never have granted me access.
“That’s wonderful news. Make good use of the time. I could get into a lot of trouble for this.”
Satisfied, she left her tapestry and summoned me to the window that faced Camelot. The Lady of Shalott took great care not to look out of the window but instead gently stroked a mirror that was held in a large bronze hanger and angled it towards the windows, as if to see the view outside. But this mirror wasn’t like other mirrors; the surface grew misty, turned the color of slate, then displayed an image quite unlike the reflection one might expect.
“Usual place?” she asked.
“Usual place.”
The image coalesced into a suburban street in the Old Town of Swindon, and the Lady of Shalott touched me on the shoulder.
“I’ll leave you to it,” she told me, and quietly returned to her tapestry, which seemed to depict David Hasselhoff in various episodes from Baywatch, Series 2.
I stared into the mirror. The image flickered occasionally and was mildly desaturated in color, but it was otherwise clear and sharp.
“Left forty-five degrees.”
The mirror shifted to look up the suburban road to the house where Thursday and Landen lived. But this wasn’t a book somewhere, or a memory. This was the RealWorld, the Outland. The Lady of Shalott uniquely possessed a window into re
ality and could see whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted to. Great lives, great events—even Baywatch. The images she saw were woven into a tapestry, and she couldn’t look outside her own window on pain of death. It was all a bit weird, but that’s Tennyson for you.
The view was live, and aside from the fact that it was mute, was almost as good as being there.
“Move forward six yards.”
The viewpoint moved forward to a front door that was very familiar to me. I had a similar front door in my own book, but my version didn’t have peeling paint or the random fine crackle that natural weathering brings. I sensed my heart beat faster.
“Go inside.”
The viewpoint drifted through the door, where the hall was less familiar. Thursday and Landen’s real house was only ever described briefly to the ghostwriter who wrote my series, so the interior was different. I jumped as someone moved past the mirror. It was a young girl aged no more than twelve, and she looked very serious for her years. This would have been Thursday and Landen’s daughter, Tuesday, as brilliant as Uncle Mycroft but in the “confusing petulant” state of pubescence. Nothing was right and everything was wrong. If it wasn’t problems over the revectoring of electrogravitational field theory, it was her brother, Friday, whom she regarded as a total loser and layabout.
“Advance two yards.”
The viewpoint moved forward to the hall table. I could see that Thursday was not in, as her bag, keys, cell phone and battered leather jacket were absent. It didn’t say she was missing; only that she wasn’t at home right now.
“Advance six yards, rotate left twenty degrees.”
The viewpoint moved into the kitchen, where a man was sitting at the table attempting to help Tuesday with her GSD uni-Scripture homework. He was graying at the temples and had a kindly face that was very familiar. This was Landen Parke-Laine, Thursday’s husband. I blinked as my eyes moistened. They were talking, and he laughed. I couldn’t hear him, but imagined as best I could how he might have sounded. Sort of like . . . music.
“One-twenty degrees to the right, pull out a yard.”
The mirror did as I asked so I could see the family scene. I didn’t have this. None of this. No husband, no children. Despite the real Thursday’s wishes that Landen would be included in the series after I took over, he wasn’t—and neither were any of the children. Thursday was overridden by a senator named Jobsworth over at the Council of Genres. So they reverted to the previous plan and had Landen continue to die in a house fire in the first chapter of The Eyre Affair, a clumsy attempt to give purpose to the written Thursday’s fictitious crime fighting. The plot device might have been clunky, but the loss had been exceptionally well written; I felt it every minute of every day. Being fictional is a double-edged sword. You get to savor the really good times over and over, but the same is true of the bad. For every defeat of the Goliath Corporation, there is the loss of Miss Havisham, and for every moment in Mycroft’s company there is a day in the Crimea. The delight at returning Jane Eyre to her book and thwarting Acheron is forever tempered by the inevitable loss of Landen, again and again forever.
So I stood there, staring at what should have been mine. I wanted to be with the children I should have been allowed to have and to spend my life expending time and energy in the glorious hope that I would one day become parentally redundant. In my bleaker moments, Pickwick and Mrs. Malaprop attempted to console me by explaining I had loss only to give relevance to what drove my character through the narrative, but it was meager consolation. I should have had a written Landen and written children to keep me company.
I watched Landen for several more minutes. Every movement, every nuance. I watched how he spoke to Tuesday with humor and infinite patience. I watched how he scratched his ear, how he laughed, how he smiled.
Friday joined them. My would-be son was a fine fellow—handsome like his father. Perhaps a bit rudderless at that age, but thought and function would eventually arrive in the fullness of time. I wanted to give him some guidance, but he had his mother for that. The real me. The real her. Besides, the mirror saw only in one direction. They had no idea that I was there, no idea that I felt as I did. I watched for a few more minutes, until Landen got up and walked to the sink, drew himself a glass of water and stared out the window.
“Pull out into the garden three yards, right ninety degrees.”
My viewpoint drifted through the kitchen wall, and after a brief glimpse of central-heating pipes and a bored-looking mouse, I was now outside looking at Landen, who was just on the other side of the window. Although he couldn’t see me, we were staring into each other’s eyes.
“Whitby has asked me out to the Bar Humbug,” I whispered. “I wanted you to know that I’m going.”
Landen couldn’t hear me, but I knew I had to tell him. It was by way of apology. I blinked away tears but then frowned. Landen was blinking away tears, too. Something had happened. Thursday wasn’t here, but for how long? An argument? Had she died in the Outland? I looked at the children, who were busy with homework. They seemed unconcerned.
Whatever it was, it was a burden shouldered by Landen alone.
“When did you last see Thursday?” I whispered.
Landen took a deep breath, wiped his eyes and returned to the children. I put out my hand to touch the mirror, but it simply rippled, like water in a pool.
“Left thirty degrees, three yards forward.”
The mirror complied, and I found myself close enough to the memo board above the telephone to read the notes. I peered amongst the receipts, pictures and old theater tickets before finding what I was looking for. A telephone message in Thursday’s hand telling Landen that his sister wanted to talk to him. It was dated seven days ago. If Thursday was missing, it was for the maximum of a week.
“Did you see what you wanted?”
I jumped. The Lady of Shalott had returned and was standing just behind me.
“I think so,” I replied hastily. “It was the . . . ah . . . state of her memo board I was looking at. You know what they say: ‘A view into a woman’s ephemera is a window to her soul.’”
“Do they say that?” asked the Lady of Shalott doubtfully.
“Frequently.”
I made ready to leave. The visits to Shalott were as frequent as I could make them without arousing suspicion, the views they offered all too fleeting. I wanted to know where Thursday was, sure, but I had to see Landen and the kids, too. Had to.
I thanked her, and she walked me to the door. But this wasn’t a favor, and she and I both knew it. I wasn’t allowed to be in Poetry without just cause, and I certainly wasn’t allowed to sneak-peek the Outland. She handed me a wooden box.
“You will look after them, won’t you?”
“Of course,” I replied, and placed the box in my shoulder bag. I walked outside the castle and returned to where the taxi was waiting to take me home. I was none the wiser as to where Thursday was, but I could reasonably surmise she was missing in the Outland, too. I took a deep breath. It had been, as always, difficult. I loved and hated seeing him, all at the same time. But it helped when it came to finally going on a date with Whitby. It lessened the sense of betrayal.
8.
The Shield
The evidence for the existence of Dark Reading Matter remains obscure at best. Supposedly the vast amount of unread material either forgotten or deleted, DRM is also said to be home to the Unread: zombielike husks of former characters, their humanity sucked from their heads by continued unreadfulness. It is generally agreed that these stories belong to metamyth—stories within stories—and are used by drill sergeants at character college to frighten recruits into compliance.
Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (8th edition)
The queue to get out of Poetry was long, as always. The smuggling of metaphor out of the genre was a serious problem, and one that made the border guards extremely vigilant. The increased scarcity of raw metaphor in Fiction had driven prices sky-high, and people would tak
e unbelievably foolish risks to smuggle it across. I’d heard stories of metaphor being hidden in baggage, swallowed, even dressed up to look like ordinary objects whose meanings were then disguised to cloak the metaphor. The problem at that point was trying to explain why you had a “brooding thunderstorm” or “broad sunlit uplands” in your luggage.
“Can we take the High Road?” I asked.
She turned around to look at me. Taking the High Road out of Poetry meant only one thing—that I wanted to avoid any entanglements with the border guards.
“My friend Jake was carrying a mule without realizing it last week,” said the cabbie in a meaningful tone. “The mule had two kilos of raw metonym on him—hidden in the saddlebags.”
Metonym wasn’t as dangerous as smuggling raw metaphor, but the underworld would try anything to turn a buck and had set up labs to enrich variable forms of metaphor into the real McCoy. Extracting the “like” from simile was the easiest method, but the resulting metaphor was as weak as wet paper. Synecdoche was used in much the same way; the best minds in Jurisfiction were constantly trying to outwit them, and raided met labs on an almost daily basis.
“Did he get to keep his cab?” I asked. “Your friend Jake, I mean.”
“His entire car was reduced to text with the metonym still in it.”
“Reduced to text?” I echoed. “Sounds like a hammer to break a nut.”
“Poeticals are like that,” said the cabbie with a disrespectful snort. “Prone to fits of violent passion. I think it’s all that absinthe. The point is this: I can get you out of Poetry, but it will cost.”
“I’ll lend you my butler for an afternoon.”
“One afternoon and a garden party.”
“A garden party.”
“Done.”
The cabbie flipped the vectored thrust nozzles, and in an instant we were climbing almost vertically upwards. It took less than a minute to reach the low-lying book traffic, and within a few seconds we had latched onto an academic paper moving from Physics to Biology. We stayed there for a few minutes and then detached, hovered for a moment and then reattached to the keel of an oil tanker that was part of a Bermuda Triangle book on its way to Fiction. We were under the massive rudder at the back, with one of the vast propellers looming over us.