'Friends!' began the Bellman. 'Miss Next is entirely mistaken …'
I turned to Libris and he smiled triumphantly. I reached into my bag for my gun but it had been changed to marmalade.
'Tch, tch,' said Libris in a whisper. 'That's a BookWorld gun and now under our control. What a shame you lost your Outlander Browning in the struggle with Tweed!'
I had only one card left. I pulled out my TravelBook and opened it, flicking past the TextMarker and Eject-O-Hat and on towards the glass panel covering a red-painted handle. A note painted on the glass read: IN UNPRECEDENTED EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS. If this wasn't an unprecedented emergency, I didn't know what was. I smashed the glass, grabbed the handle and pulled it down with all my strength.
34
Loose ends
* * *
'Contrary to Text Grand Central's claims, there were no new plots using UltraWord. Ex-WordMaster Libris had become so obsessed with the perfection of his operating system that nothing else had mattered to him and he lied repeatedly to cover up its failings. BOOK V8.3 remained the operating system for many years to come, although one of the UltraWord copies of The Little Prince can be viewed in the Jurisfiction museum. To avoid a repeat of this near-disaster, the Council of Genres took the only course of action open to them to ensure TGC would be too inefficient and unimaginative to pose a threat. They appointed a committee to run it.'
MILTON DE FLOSS – UltraWord – the Aftermath
It was nearly morning when the BookWorld Awards party finished. Heathcliff was furious that in all the excitement the final award of the night had been forgotten; I saw him talking angrily to his personal imaginator an hour after the appearance of the Great Panjandrum. There would be next year, of course, but his seventy-seven-year record had been broken an
d he didn't like it. I thought he might take it out on Linton and Catherine when he got home, and he did.
No one had been more surprised than me by the arrival of the Great Panjandrum when I pulled the emergency handle. For the non-believers it was something of a shock, and no less so for the faithful. She had been so long a figure of speech that seeing her in the flesh was startling. I thought she had seemed quite plain and in her mid-thirties, but Humpty Dumpty told me later he had been shaped like an egg. In any event, the marble statue that now stands in the lobby of the Council of Genres depicts the Great Panjandrum as Mr Price the stonemason saw him – with a leather apron and carrying a mallet and stone chisel.
When she arrived the Great Panjandrum read the situation perfectly. She froze all the text within the room, locked the doors and decreed that a vote be taken there and then. She summoned the head of the Council of Genres and the vote against UltraWord was carried unanimously. She spoke to me three times: once to tell me I had The Write Stuff, second to ask me whether I would take on the job of the Bellman, and lastly to ask whether disco mirror balls in the Outland had a motor to make them go round or whether they did so by virtue of the light. I answered 'Thank you", "Yes" and "I don't know", in that order.
After the party was over I walked back through the slowly stirring Well of Lost Plots to the shelf that held Caversham Heights and read myself back inside, tired but happy. The Bellman's job would keep me busy but purely in administration. I wouldn't have to go jumping around in books – just the thing to allow my ankles to swell in peace and quiet, and to plan my return to the Outland when the infant Next and its mother were strong enough. Together we would face the tribulations of Landen's return, because the little one would have a father, I had promised it that much already. I opened the door to Mary's Sunderland and felt the old flying boat rock slightly as I entered. When I first came here it had unnerved me, but now I wouldn't have had it any other way. Small wavelets slapped against the hull and somewhere an owl hooted as it returned to roost. It felt as much like home as home had ever done. I kicked off my shoes and flopped on the sofa next to Gran, who had fallen asleep over a sock she was knitting. It was already a good twelve feet long, because, she said, 'she had yet to build up enough courage to turn the heel'.
I closed my eyes for a moment and fell fast asleep without the nagging fear of Aornis, and it was nearly ten when I awoke. But I didn't wake naturally – Pickwick was tugging at the corner of my dress.
'Not now, Pickers,' I mumbled sleepily, trying to turn over and nearly impaling myself on a knitting needle. She carried on tugging until I sat up, rubbed the sleep from my eyes and stretched noisily. She seemed insistent so I followed her upstairs to my bedroom. Sitting on the bed and surrounded by broken eggshell was something that I could only describe as a ball of a fluff with two eyes and a beak.
'Plock-plock,' said Pickwick.
'You're right,' I told her, 'she's very beautiful. Congratulations.'
The small dodo blinked at us both, opened its beak wide and said, in a shrill voice:
'Plunk!'
Pickwick started and looked at me anxiously.
'Well!' I told her. 'A rebellious teenager already?'
Pickwick nudged the chick with her beak and it plunked indignantly before settling down.
I thought for a moment and said: 'You aren't going to feed her doing that disgusting regurgitation seabird thing, are you?'
The door burst open downstairs.
'Thursday!' yelled Randolph anxiously. 'Are you in here?'
'I'm here,' I shouted, leaving Pickwick with her offspring and coming downstairs to find a highly agitated Randolph, pacing up and down the living room.
'What's up?'
'It's Lola.'
'Some unsuitable young man again? Really, Randolph, you've got to learn not to be so jealous—'