Great were the wonders of that submarine metropolis. The walls of its buildings were so white they glowed, for they were plastered (so explained the king) with powdered pearls. While the streets were not paved with gemstones, many a fresco set into the exterior walls was made of nothing else, and the scenes they depicted were not of warfare but of children at play and lovers chastely courting. The architecture was a happy blend of Moorish and Asian influences, with minarets and pagodas existing in easy harmony, and entrances on all the upper floors as well as the bottommost. Nor did it escape Jack’s attention that there were neither locks on the doors nor guards at the entrances to the palace—and this was far from the least of the wonders that he saw.
But the greatest wonder of all, so far as Jack was concerned, was the sylph maiden Poseidonia, the king’s daughter, who came out to greet her father on his return to the city. The instant he clapped eyes on her slim and perfect form, Jack was determined to win her. Nor was that a difficult task, as he was a well-made man with a soldier’s straight bearing, and his frank admiration drew from her a happy blush and no protests whatsoever. Further, the mer-people being a Heathen folk and not bound by Christian standards of propriety, their mutual infatuation quickly found physical expression.
Time went by. It may have been days or it may have been months.
Late one afternoon, lying in the princess’s bed, with the sheets and pillows all in sensuous disarray and a greenish-blue noontide light flowing through her bedroom windows, Jack cleared his throat and hesitantly said, “Tell me something, oh my best and belovedest.”
“Anything!” replied that passionate young sylph.
“One thing continues to bother me—a small thing, perhaps, but it nitters and natters at the back of my mind, and I cannot rid myself of it, however I try. When first I arrived in this rich and splendid land, your father told me he had been reading of my adventures. By what magic? In what unimaginable book?”
“Why, in this one, dearest of scoundrels.” (It was the sylph’s single most endearing quality that she loved Jack for exactly what he was and not one whit through any misapprehension of his character.) “What other book could it possibly be?”
Jack looked from one end of the room to the other, and replied, “I see no book.”
“Well, of course not, silly. If it were here, how could you be in it?”
“I cannot say, oh delight of my eyes, for your answer makes absolutely no sense to me.”
“Trust me, he read of you in this book, nor have you ever left it.”
Now Jack began to feel the stirrings of anger. “This one you say—which one? The devil take me if I can make heads or tales of your answers!”
Then the laughter died in Poseidonia’s throat, and she exclaimed, “You poor thing! You truly do not understand, do you?”
“If I understood, would I be at this very instant begging you like a fool for a simple and straightforward answer?”
She regarded him with a sad little smile. “I think it is time you talked with my father,” she said at last.
“IS MY LISSOME YOUNG daughter not energetic enough to please you?” asked the king of the Mummelsee.
“That and more,” said Jack, who had long grown used to the sylphs’ shockingly direct manner of speaking.
“Then be content with her and this carefree existence you lead, and do not seek to go questing out beyond the confines of these ever-so-pleasant pages.”
“Again you speak in riddles! Majesty, this business is driving me mad.
I beg of you, for this once, speak to me plain and simply, even as if I were but a child.”
The king sighed. “You know what books are?”
“Yes, of course.”
“When was the last time you read one?”
“Why, I—”
“Exactly. Or that anybody you know read one?”
“I have been in the company of rough-and-tumble soldiers, whose response to coming upon a library might typically be to use its contents to start their campfires, so this is not terribly surprising.”
“You must have read books in your youth. Can you tell me the plot of any of them?”
Jack fell silent.
“You see? Characters in books do not read books. Oh, they snap them shut when somebody enters the room, or fling them aside in disgust at what they fancy is said within, or hide their faces in one which they pretend to peruse while somebody else lectures them on matters they’d rather not confront. But they do not read them. Twould be recursive, rendering each book effectively infinite, so that no single one might be finished without reading them all. This is the infallible method of discovering on which side of the page you lie—have you read a book this year?” The king arched an eyebrow and waited.
After a very long silence, Jack said, “No. I have not.”
“Then there you are.”
“But…how can this be? How can we possibly…?”
“It is the simplest thing imaginable,” replied the king. “I, for example, dwell within chapters eleven through seventeen of book five of something called Simplicissimus. It is, I assure you, a good life. So what if the walls of my palace are as thin as paper, the windows simply drawn on by pen, and my actions circumscribed by the whimsy of the artist? I neither age nor die, and when you, taking a brief rest from your romantic gymnastics with my daughter, care to visit me, I always find our little conversations diverting.”
Glumly, Jack stared out through a window paned with nacre polished so smooth as to be transparent. “It is a hard thing,” he said, “to realize that one is not actually real.” Then, after a long moment’s thought, “But this makes no sense. Granted that my current surroundings and condition are hardly to be improved upon. Yet I have seen things in the war that…Well, it doesn’t bears thinking upon. Who on earth would create such a world as ours? Who could possibly find amusement in such cruelties as, I grant you, I have sometimes been a part of?”
“Sir,” said the king, “I am not the artist, and he, I suspect, is nobody of any great esteem in his unimaginably larger world. He might pass you on the street unnoticed. In conversation, it is entirely possible, he would not impress you favorably. Why, then, should you expect more from him than he—or, as it may be, she—might reasonably expect from his or her vastly more potent creator?”
“Are you saying that our author’s world is no better than our own?”