“Yes, sir.”
And they all walked away. The engines ran up to full speed again, and after a few more minutes the small boat was lost to view behind an overhanging tree on a bend in the river.
“I guess that’s what mysterious passengers do,” said Drake with a shrug. “Be mysterious. Drink?”
“I’ll see you down there,” I replied. “I must admonish this bar steward for the lamentable lack of quality in his Tahiti Tingle.”
Drake nodded and moved off, and Sprockett and I sat on the curved bench on the upper rear deck to discuss recent events. From the epizeuxis to the mimefield to the Men in Plaid to Sir Charles Lyell and the bed-sitting room.
“What had Thursday discovered that was so devastating to the peace process?” asked Sprockett.
“I don’t know. I wish to Panjandrum I were more like her.”
I took the sketch I had found in Sir Charles’s office out of my pocket. It was a map of Racy Novel with WomFic to one side and Dogma on the other. There was a shaded patch the shape of a tailless salmon that was mostly beneath Racy Novel.
As I stared at the picture, I felt a sudden flush of new intelligence, as though a jigsaw had been thrown into the air and landed fully completed. Everything that had happened to me over the past few days had been inexorably pointing me in one direction. But up until now I’d been too slow or stupid to be able to sift the relevant facts from the herrings.
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“By all the spell checkers of Isugfsf,” I said, pointing at Lyell’s sketch. “It’s metaphor. A trillion tons of the stuff waiting to be mined, lying beneath our feet!”
“Yes?” said Sprockett, his eyebrow pointing at “Doubtful.”
“That’s what Lyell and Thursday had discovered,” I said excitedly. “It’s as Drake said: ‘Whoever controls the supply of metaphor controls Fiction.’”
“If so,” said Sprockett carefully, “Racy Novel would be sending more metaphor downriver than anyone else. And they’re not.”
I thought about this for a moment. “Maybe Speedy Muffler isn’t bad at all. Perhaps he’s defending the metaphor against greedy genres intent on mining it to exhaustion. Metaphor should be controlled—a glut on the market would make Fiction overtly highbrow, painfully ambiguous and potentially unreadable. The new star on the horizon would be the elephant in the room that might lead the BookWorld into a long winter’s night.”
“That would be frightful,” replied Sprockett, recoiling in terror as the overmetaphorication hit him like a hammer. “But how does that explain the Fourteenth Clown’s destruction? Or even who’s responsible for all this?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “but Senator Jobsworth needs to hear about it.”
I jumped up and ran down the companionway to the captain’s cabin, nearly colliding with Red Herring on the way.
“Sorry,” he said, “I’m just going to find a doughnut—do you want one?”
“No thank you, sir.”
I found Senator Jobsworth discussing the talks with Emperor Zhark and Colonel Barksdale.
“Have you seen Herring?” asked Jobsworth. “He should really be going through the final details with us.”
“He went to get a doughnut.”
“He did? Leave us now. We’re very busy.”
“I have important information. I think I know why Thursday was assassinated.”
Jobsworth stared at me. “Thursday’s dead?”
“Well, no, because her imagination is still alive. It was an assassination attempt—in a crummy book written by Adrian Dorset.”
“Adrian Dorset?”
“Jack Schitt, if you must. It was the epizeuxis that got her. And Mediocre.”
“Who’s Mediocre?”