“All right, you bunch of disloyal ingrates,” I said, taking the Snooze Button’s access codes and the key to the core containment from around my neck, “have the job. Who cajoled you all when you thought you were rubbish? Who made sure we rehearsed the whole way through the six weeks we were unread last winter?”
Victor looked at the ceiling, and Pickwick stared at her foot. They all knew I’d been holding things together for a while. The previous written Thursday had left the series in a terrible state. Everyone arguing with everyone else, and with a humor deficit that I had only just managed to plug.
“And a fat lot of good it did us,” replied Carmine angrily. “We’re the laughingstock of Speculative Fantasy.”
“We’re still being read. Do you know what to do if there is a flameout on the e-book throughput intensifiers?”
Carmine’s blank look told me she didn’t.
“Or if the metaphor depletes midscene? What about the irony injectors? How often should they be cleaned? Do you even know what an adjectivore looks like or what happens if you get Martha Stewarts behind the wainscoting?”
“Hey,” said Horace, who had been sitting unnoticed on the top of the bureau, “why don’t you go do a Plot 9 on yourself? We can muddle through. With less than twenty active readers, we’ve certainly got enough time.”
“We?” I demanded. “Since when were you anything to do with this series?”
“Since Carmine asked me.”
“He has some very good ideas,” said Carmine. “Even Pickwick thinks they’re quite good. Isn’t that so, Pickers?”
“Sort of,” said Pickwick, looking the other way huffily.
“We’d better get on,” said Hades in a pointed fashion. “We’ve got some readings to attend to.”
“Right,” I said, lips pursed as I tried to control my temper, “I’ll let you get on with it.”
And without another word, I strode out of the house with as much dignity as I could muster. As soon as I was outside, I sat on the garden wall, my heart beating fast, taking short gasps of air. I looked back at the series. It was a jagged collection of settings—the towers of Thornfield Hall set among the floodlights of the Swindon croquet field and the Penderyn Hotel. There were a few airships, too, but only one-tenth scale. It was all I’d ever known. It had seemed like home.
“You should look on the bright side, ma’am,” said Sprockett, handing me a Chicago Fizz he had conjured up seemingly from nowhere.
“There is a bright side? No book, no home, no one to believe in me and no real idea what became of Thursday—or what the hell’s going on. And in addition I’d really like to punch Horace.”
“Punching goblins,” replied Sprockett soothingly, “while offering short-term relief, has no long-term beneficial value.”
I sighed. “You’re right.”
“By referring to the ‘bright side,’ ma’am, I merely meant that the recent upset simply frees your schedule for more pressing matters. You have larger fish to fry over the next couple of days.”
I stood up. Sprockett was right. To hell with the series—for the moment at least.
“So where do you suggest we go now?”
“Back to Vanity.”
33.
The League of Cogmen
There are two languages peculiar to the BookWorld of which a vague understanding will help the enthusiastic tourist. Courier Bold is the traditional language of those in the support industries, such as within the Well of Lost Plots, and Lorem Ipsum is the gutter slang of the underworld—useful to have a few phrases in case you get into trouble in Horror or Noir.
Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (1st edition)
Sprockett, I learned, lived in the Fantasy section of Vanity, not far from Parody Valley. I was more at leisure to look about upon this, my second visit, and I noticed that whereas in Fiction the landscape was well maintained, relatively open and with good infrastructure, years of self-publishing into the same geographic area meant that Vanity was untidy, chaotic and overcrowded.
The resident novels with their settings, props and characters now occupied every spare corner of the island and had accreted on top of one another like alluvial deposits. Grand towers of imaginative speculation had arisen from the bare rock, and the island was honeycombed with passageways, tunnels and shafts to provide access to the scenes and settings now buried far below the surface. In some places the books were so close that boundaries became blurred—a tiger hunt in 1920s Bengal merged seamlessly with the TT races on the Isle of Man, a western with the 1983 Tour de France. Space in Vanity was limited.
“Don’t let on you’re published,” remarked Sprockett as we arrived at his book, a badly worn tome cemented into a cliff face of similar books and supported on slender stilts that were anchored to the rock below. He needn’t have—I knew the score. Vanity’s beef with the rest of Fiction was long-lived and not without some degree of justification.
I wiped my feet on the doormat as we entered and noted that the novel was set mostly in the manor house that belonged to Professor Winterhope, Sprockett’s creator, and was populated by a large and mildly eccentric family of mechanical men, none of whom looked as though they had been serviced for years.