“Come on,” I said to Sprockett. “Work to be done.”
The debris field extended across four genres, and we spent the next three hours listening to residents who claimed that falling book junk had “completely ruined their entrance,” and on one rare occasion it actually had. There was a reasonable quantity of wreckage, but nothing quite as large as the bed-sitting room. We found a yellow-painted back axle, the remains of at least nine tigers, a few playing cards, some lengths of silk, a hat stand, sections of a box-girder bridge, nine apples, parts of a raccoon and a quantity of slate. There was a lot of unrecognizable scrap, too, much of it desyntaxed sentences that made no sense at all. We found only one piece of human remains—a thumb—except it might not have been a thumb at all but simply reformed graphemes.
“Graphemes?” asked Sprockett when I mentioned it.
“Everything in the BookWorld is constructed of them,” I explained. “Letters and punctuation—the building blocks of the textual world.”
“So why might that thumb not actually be a thumb?”
“Because once broken down below the ‘word’ unit, a grapheme might come from anywhere. The same s can serve equally well in a sword, a sausage, a ship, a sailor or even the sun. It doesn’t help that under extreme pressure and heat, graphemes often separate out and then fuse back together into something else entirely. At Jurisfiction basic training, we were shown how a ‘sheet of card,’ once heated up white-hot and then struck with a blacksmith’s hammer, could be made into ‘cod feathers’ and then back again.”
“Ah,” said Sprockett, “I see.”
“Because of this, anything under a few words long found at an accident site can be disregarded as evidence—it might once have been something else entirely.” Oddly enough, the process of graphusion and graphission, while occurring naturally in the Text Sea, was hard to do synthetically in the BookWorld but simplicity itself in the Outland. The long and short of it was that victims of extreme trauma in the BookWorld were rarely found. A sprinkling of graphemes was soon absorbed into the fabric of the book it fell upon and left no trace.
Once Sprockett and I had logged everything we’d found and dispatched it via Pickford’s to my double garage, I called Mrs. Malaprop to check that all was well. It was, generally speaking. Pickwick was suspicious that there really might be goblins around, and Carmine was spending her time rehearsing with the various members of the cast. Whitby Jett had called to say that now that Carmine was there, he would be taking me out to Bar Humbug for a drink and nibbles at nine—and no arguments.
I’d known him for nearly two years, and I think I’d just come to the end of a very long trail of excuses and reasons that I couldn’t go out on a date. I sighed. There was still one. Perhaps the only one I’d ever had. I told Mrs. Malaprop I would be home in half an hour, thought for a moment and then turned to Sprockett.
“Can I shut you down for a while?”
“Madam, that is a most improper suggestion.”
“I’m about to do something illegal, and since you are incapable of lying, I don’t want you in a position where you have to divide your loyalties between your duties as a butler and your duties to the truth.”
“Most thoughtful, ma’am. Conflicting loyalties do little but strip teeth off my cogs. Shall I shut down immediately?”
“Not yet.”
We hailed a cab at the corner of Heller and Vonnegut. The cabbie had issues with clockwork people—“all that infernal ticking”—but since Sprockett was, legally speaking, nothing more nor less than a carriage clock, he was consigned to the trunk.
“I don’t mind being treated as baggage,” he said agreeably.
“In fact, I prefer it. Promise you’ll restart me?”
“I promise.”
And after he had settled back against the spare tire, I pressed the emergency spring-release button located under his inspection cover. There was a loud whirring noise, and Sprockett went limp.
I shut the trunk, settled into the cab and closed the door.
“Where to?”
“Poetry.”
7.
The Lady of Shalott
Here in the BookWorld, the protagonists and antagonists, gatekeepers, shape-shifters, heroes, villains, bit parts, knaves, comedians and goblins were united in that they possessed a clearly defined motive for what they were doing: entertainment and enlightenment. As far as any of us could see, no such luxury existed in the unpredictable world of the readers. The Outland was extraordinarily well named.
The taxi was the usual yellow-and-check variety and could either run on wheels in the conventional manner or fly using advanced Technobabble™ vectored gravitational inversion thrusters. This had been demanded by the Sci-Fi fraternity, who had been whingeing on about hover cars and jet packs for decades and needed appeasing before they went and did something stupid, like allow someone to make a movie based on the title of the book known as I, Robot.
The driver was an elderly woman with white hair who grumbled about how she had just given a fare to three Triffids and how they hadn’t bothered to tip and left soil in the foot wells and were horribly drunk on paraquat.
“Poetry?” she repeated. “No worries, pet. High Road or Low Road?”
She meant either up high, dodging amongst the planetoid-size books that were constantly moving across the sky, or down low on the ground, within the streets and byways. Taking the High Road was a skillful endeavor that meant either slipstreaming behind a particularly large book or latching onto a novel going in roughly the same direction and being carried to one’s destination in a series of piggyback rides. It was faster if things went well, but more dangerous and prone to delays.
“Low Road,” I said, since the traffic between Poetry and Fiction was limited and one could orbit for hours over the coast, waiting for a novel heading in the right direction.
“Jolly good,” she said, clicking the FARE ON BOARD sign. “Cash, credit, goats, chickens, salt, pebbles, ants or barter?”
“Barter. I’ll swap you two hours of my butler.”
“Can he mix cocktails?”
“He can do a Tahiti Tingle—with or without umbrella.”
“Deal.”
We took the Dickens Freeway through HumDram, avoided the afternoon jam at the Brontë-Austen interchange and took a shortcut through Shreve Plaza to rejoin the expressway at Picoult Junction, and from there to the Carnegie Underpass, part of the network of tunnels that connected the various islands that made up the observable BookWorld.
“How are you enjoying the new BookWorld?” I asked by way of conversation.
“Too many baobabs and not enough smells,” she said, “but otherwise enjoyable.”
The baobabs were a problem, but it was hardly at the top of my list of complaints. After a few minutes with the cabbie telling me in a cheerful voice how she’d had Bagheera in the back of her cab once, we emerged blinking at the tunnel exit and the island of Poetry, where we were waved through by a border guard who was too busy checking the paperwork on a consignment of iambic pentameters to worry much about us.
We made our way slowly down Keats Avenue until we came to Tennyson Boulevard, and I ordered her to stop outside “Locksley Hall” and wait for me around the corner. I got out, waited until she had gone, then walked past “The Lotos-Eaters” and “The Charge of the Light Brigade” to a small gate entwined with brambles and from there into a glorious English summer’s day. I walked up the river, past long fields of barley and rye that seemed to clothe the wold and meet the sky, then through the field where a road ran by, which led to many-towered Camelot. I walked along the river, turned a corner and found the island in the river. I looked around as aspens quivered and a breeze and shiver ran up and down my spine. I really wasn’t meant to be here and could get into serious trouble if I was discovered. I took a deep breath, crossed a small bridge and found myself facing a square gray building with towers at each corner. I didn’t knock, as I knew the Lady of Shalott quite well, and entered unbidden to walk the two flights of stairs to the tower room.