“That’s true,” replied Buñuel. “I’ve done enough rebuildificances to know when something’s a bit squiddly. It’s the Council of Genres. They’ve been slicedicing budgets for years, and now they ask us to topgrade the imaginotransference conduits.”
He pointed at a large pipe that looked like a water main. A conduit that size would take a lot of readers—far more than we had at present. Although in itself a good move, with falling Read-Rates it seemed a little…well, odd.
“Did they give a reason?”
“They said Pride and Prejudice has been added to twenty-eight more teachcrammer syllabuses this year, and there’s another silverflick out soon.”
“Sounds fair to me.”
“Posstruthful, but it makes nonsense. It’s potentious new books we should be cashsquandering on, not the stalnovelwarts who will be read no matter what. Besides, the costcash of the extra conduits is verlittle compared to the amount of custard needed to fillup all.”
“I’ll make some inquiries,” I told him.
We watched as the overhead crane gently lowered Darcy’s stately home of Pemberley back into its position in the book, where it was then securely bolted by a group of men in overalls wielding wrenches as big as they were.
“Spot-on-time-tastic,” murmured Isambard, consulting a large gold pocketwatch. “We might make the deadule after all.”
“Mr. Buñuel?” murmured a disembodied voice that sounded as though it came from everywhere at once.
“Yes, Horace?”
“Sorry to trouble you, sir,” came the voice again, “but Mrs. Bennet and Lady Catherine de Bourgh have locked antlers in the living room and are threatening to kill each other. What do you want to do?”
“No time to lose!” exclaimed Buñuel, reaching into his pocket. “I’ll have five guineas on Mrs. Bennet.”
Thursday5 and I walked out of the maintenance facility and back to the busy corridors of the Well of Lost Plots. I called TransGenre Taxis and was told that my cab was “stuck in a traffic jam in Mrs. Beeton’s” but would “be with you shortly,” so we walked toward the elevators. Buñuel had a point about the extra conduiting—but equally it could be just another of the bizarre accounting anomalies that abound at the council—they once refused to allocate funds for maintenance on Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, despite an almost unprecedented burst of popularity. By the time they agreed to some remedial construction work, it was too late—the first few chapters suffered permanent damage. On the other side of the coin, they had no problem issuing the Danvers with new black uniforms and designer dark glasses so they “looked nice on parade.”
“Is it true you have a chair at the Council of Genres?” asked Thursday5 with a sense of wholly unwarranted awe in her voice.
“And a table, too. As an Outlander I don’t have the strictures of the narrative to dictate my actions, so I’m quite good at forward planning and—Hang on a moment.”
Recalling Landen’s writer’s block, I ducked into a bric-a-brac store full of plot devices, props, backstories and handy snatches of verbal banter for that oh-so-important exchange. I made my way past packing cases full of plot twists and false resolutions and walked up to the counter.
“Hello, Murray.”
“Thursday!” replied the owner of the store, a retired gag-and-groan man who had worked the Comedy genre for years before giving it all up to run a used-plot shop. “What can I do you for?”
“A plot device,” I said somewhat vaguely. “Something exciting that will change a story from the mundane to the fantastic in a paragraph.”
“Budget?”
“Depends on what you’ve got.”
“Hmm,” said the shopkeeper, thinking hard and staring at the wall of small drawers behind him, which made it look a little like an apothecary’s shop. On each drawer there was a painted label denoting some exciting and improbable plot-turning device. “Tincture of breathlessness,” said one, and “Paternal root,” read another.
“How about a Suddenly a shot rang out? That’s always a safe bet for mysteries or to get you out of a scrape when you don’t know what to do next.”
“I think I can afford something better than that. Got anything a bit more…complex?”
Murray looked at the labels on the drawers again. “I’ve got a And that, said Mr. Wimple, was when we discovered…the truth.”
“Too vague.”
“Perhaps, but it’s cheap. Okay. How about a Mysterious stranger arriving during a thunderstorm? We’ve got a special on this week. Take the stranger and you can have a corrupt local chief of police and an escaped homicidal lunatic at no extra charge.”
But I was still undecided.
“I was thinking of something more character-than plot-led.”