First Among Sequels

10. The Well of Lost Plots

As soon as we were back at the Jurisfiction offices in Norland Park, I gave Thursday5 an hour off for lunch so I could get some work done. I pulled all the files on potential transfictional probe appearances and discovered I had the only solid piece of evidence-all the rest had merely been sightings. It seemed that whenever a Goliath probe appeared, it was gone again in under a minute. The phenomenon had begun seven years ago, reached a peak eight months before and now seemed to be ebbing. Mind you, this was based on only thirty-six sightings and so couldn’t be considered conclusive.

I took the information to Bradshaw, who listened carefully to my report and to what I knew about Goliath, which was quite a lot and none of it good. He nodded soberly as I spoke and, when I had finished, paused for a moment before observing, “Goliath is Outlander and well beyond our jurisdiction. I’m loath to take it to Senator Jobsworth, as he’ll instigate some daft ‘initiative’ or something with resources that we just don’t have. Is there any evidence that these probes do anything other than observe? Throwing a metal ball into fiction is one thing; moving a person between the two is quite another.”

“None at all,” I replied. “But it must be their intention, even if they haven’t managed it yet.”

“Do you think they will?”

“My uncle could do it. And if he could, then it’s possible.”

Bradshaw thought for a moment. “We’ll keep this to ourselves for now. With our plunging ReadRates, I don’t want to needlessly panic the CofG into some insane knee-jerk response. Is there a chance you could find out something from the real world?”

“I could try,” I replied reflectively, “but don’t hold your breath-I’m not exactly on Goliath’s Christmas-card list.”

“On the contrary,” said Bradshaw, passing me the probe, “I’m sure they’d be overjoyed to meet someone who can travel into fiction. Can you check up on the Jane Austen refits this afternoon? Isambard was keen to show us something.”

I told him I’d go down there straightaway, and he thanked me, wished me good luck and departed. I had a few minutes to spare before Thursday5 got back, so I checked the card-index databases for anything about Superreaders, of which there was frustratingly little. Most Superreader legends had their base in the Text Sea, usually from word fishermen home on leave from scrawltrawlers. The issue was complicated by the fact that one Superread is technically identical to a large quantity of simultaneous reads, so only an examination of a book’s maintenance log would identify whether it had been a victim or not.

Thursday5 returned exactly on time, having spent the lunch hour in a mud bath, the details of which she felt compelled to tell me-at length. Mind you, she was a lot more relaxed than I was, so something was working. We stepped outside, and after I argued with TransGenre Taxis’ dispatch for five minutes, we read our-selves to the Great Library, then took the elevator and descended in silence to the subbasements, which had been known colloquially as the Well of Lost Plots for so long that no one could remember their proper name-if they’d ever had one. It was here that books were actually constructed. The “laying of the spine” was the first act in the process, and after that a continuous series of work gangs would toil tirelessly on the novel, embedding plot and subtext within the fabric of the narrative. They carefully lowered in the settings and atmosphere before the characters, fresh from dialogue training and in the presence of a skilled imaginator, would record the book onto an ImaginoTransferoRecordingDevice ready for reading in the Outland. It was slow, manpower-intensive and costly-any Supervising Book Engineer who could construct a complex novel in the minimum of time and on bud get was much in demand.

“I was thinking,” said Thursday5 as the elevator plunged downward, “about being a bit more proactive. I would have been eaten by that tiger, and it was, I must confess, the seventh time you’ve rescued me over the past day and a half.”

“Eighth,” I pointed out. “Remember you were attacked by that adjectivore?”

“Oh, yes. It didn’t really take to my suggestion of a discussion group to reappraise the passive role of grammasites within the BookWorld, now, did it?”

“No. All it wanted was to tear the adjectives from your still-breathing body.”

“Well, my point is that I think I need to be more aggressive.”

“Sounds like a good plan,” I replied. “If a situation arises, we’ll see how you do.”

The elevator stopped, and we stepped out. Down here in the Well, the subbasements looked more like narrow Elizabethan streets than corridors. It was here that purveyors of book-construction-related merchandise could be found displaying their wares in a multitude of specialty shops that would appeal to any genre, style or setting. The corridors were alive with the bustling activity of artisans moving hither and thither in the gainful pursuit of book building. Plot traders, backstoryists, hole stitchers, journeymen and generics trotted purposefully in every direction, and cartloads of prefabricated sections for protobooks were being slowly pulled down the center of the street by Pitman ponies, which are a sort of shorthand horse that doesn’t take up so much room.

Most of it was salvage. In the very lowest subbasement was the Text Sea, and it was on the shores of this ocean that scrapped books were pulled apart by work gangs using nothing more re-fined than hammers, chains and muscle. The chunks of battered narrative were then dismantled by cutters, who would remove and package any salvageable items to be resold. Any idea, setting or character that was too damaged or too dull to be reused was unceremoniously dumped in the Text Sea, where the bonds within the sentences were loosened until they were nothing but words, and then these, too, were reduced to letters and punctuation, the meaning burning off into a bluish mist that lingered near the foreshore before evaporating.

“Who are we going to see?” asked Thursday5 as we made our way through the crowded throng.

“Bradshaw wanted me to cast an eye over the Jane Austen refit,” I replied. “The engineer in charge is Isambard Kingdom Buñuel, the finest and most surreal book engineer in the WOLP. When he constructed War and Peace, no one thought that anything of such scale and grandeur could be built, let alone launched. It was so large an entire subbasement had to be constructed to take it. Even now a permanent crew of twenty is needed to keep it going.”

Thursday5 looked curiously around as a gang of riveters walked past, laughing loudly and talking about a spine they’d been working on.

“So once the book is built, it’s moved to the Great Library?” she asked.

“If only,” I replied. “Once completed and the spark has been ignited, it undergoes a rigorous twelve-point narrative safety-and-compliance regime before being studiously and penetratively test-read on a special rig. After that, the book is taken on a trial reading by the Council of Genres Book Inspectorate before being passed-or not-for publication.”

We walked on and presently saw the Book Maintenance Facility hangars in the distance, rising above the low roofs of the street like the airship hangars I knew so well back home. They were always full; book maintenance carried on 24/7. After another five minutes’ walk and with the street expanding dramatically to be able to encompass the vast size of the complex, we arrived outside the Book Maintenance Facility.