“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.