One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

35. We Go Upriver

Within a few minutes, the captain ordered the mooring ropes cast off, and with a blast of the whistle, a shudder from the deck and the venting of steam from the pistons, the sternwheel began to rotate and the boat pulled slowly away from the dock.

For a moment I watched the Great Library recede, and I suddenly realized that I was very much here on false pretenses. I wasn’t Thursday, and I was here on the coattails of a mystery that I had singularly failed to uncover. It was frustrating because, this being Fiction, most of the relevant facts would already have been demonstrated to me but safely peppered with enough red herrings to ensure I couldn’t see the true picture. Thursday would have spotted it all and indeed, given her “absent” status, had done so long ago. I still had no clear idea as to what was going on, but I was fortified by the simple fact that I was here, not cowering in a cupboard back home being bullied by Pickwick. Luckily, my thoughts were interrupted by the adventurer, who asked me to meet him in the bar in an hour, and after that I went to find my cabin—a cozy wood-lined cubbyhole with the sink bolted to the ceiling to save room. There was no electricity, but a single porthole gave ample light. I unpacked the small case I had brought with me, and after freshening up I stepped outside, then stopped. I was next door to Cabin 12, where the mysterious passenger was staying. I heard raised voices from within.

“. . . but I won’t take your place at the talks,” came the voice. I leaned closer, but the conversation was muted and indistinct from then on, and I hurried off towards the captain’s quarters, which were situated just behind the wheelhouse, two decks up.

The senator was already there and had ensconced himself in a large and very worn wicker chair, from which spot he contemplated the river traffic that floated past as we made our way out of the Ungenred Zone and into Comedy. The captain and the helmsman were also present, and they expertly steered a path around the many underwater obstructions, islands and sandbars. I decided to try to act as much like the real Thursday as I could.

“Do you expect a clear run up the river, Captain?” I asked.

The captain chuckled.

“It’s always eventful, Miss Next. Someone will doubtless be murdered, there will be romantic intrigue, and after that we’ll pass a deserted village with a lone survivor who will ramble incoherently about something that we don’t understand but has relevance later on. Did you meet the adventurer? Youngish chap. Handsome. He’s probably met you before.”

I said that I had, and both he and the senator laughed.

“What’s the joke?”

“He’s the fodder. There’s always at least one on a trip like this. Someone for you to get attached to, probably sleep with, but who then dies on the journey, probably saving your life. You won’t tell him, will you? It’ll ruin his day.”

“I’ll try to keep it under my hat.”

“Do you have the route all planned, Captain?” asked Jobsworth, who was sipping on a pink gin handed to him by a steward dressed in starched whites.

“We’ll stay on the Metaphoric until we’ve entered Comedy and moved past Sitcoms,” replied the captain, pointing to a map of the river, “and after that we follow a tributary past Mother-in-Law Jokes and then to Edgy Rapids before cruising the flat plain of Bob Hope and Vaudeville. At the foothills of the Scatological Mountains, we’ll enter the subgenres of Bedroom Farce and Bawdy Romp. Twenty minutes after that, we stop at Middle Station, which marks the border into Racy Novel.”

“Emissaries from Speedy Muffler will meet us at Fanny Hill,” added Senator Jobsworth, “and they will accompany us to Pornucopia, the capital.”

The conversation fell off after that, and once I’d mustered some courage, I spoke.

“Did you want to speak to me, Senator?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied. “I want you to understand that you are here simply as a face—nothing more. As already explained, we have been putting around the story that you have irritablevowel syndrome and are mute. You will not be party to talks, or to preparations for talks. You will not express an opinion by gesticulating or written notes unless we decide and are fully briefed. You’ll be told where to appear and when. Is that clear?”

“As a bell, sir.”

“Good. Off you toddle, then. Ah!” he added, much relieved, “Come in, gentlemen.”

Red Herring, Colonel Barksdale and Zhark had just appeared at the doorway. I was no longer needed. I thought for a moment of voicing my concerns over what Thursday might have been up to, but I didn’t know for certain what she had been up to, so I said nothing, bowed and withdrew politely from the cabin.

I walked down the companionway to the main deck and found my way to the bar. I wasn’t particularly bothered by the senator’s attitude. It was what I was expecting—a friendly welcome, then being put firmly in my place.

The bar was elegantly paneled in light wood with inlaid etched mirrors to give the the illusion of greater space. The furniture was of leather but had worn badly, and the horsehair stuffing was beginning to sprout at the seams. One of the madlooking foreigners was asleep in an armchair, and at the bar was the adventurer. He looked handsomer than he had earlier, and his hat was placed on the bar next to him.

“Enjoying the trip?” I asked as I sat down.

“I thought it would be funnier steaming through Comedy.”

“It’s less funny the closer you get.”

“Hmm. Would you permit me to buy you a drink?”

“I buy my own drinks,” I told him, doing as Thursday would. It wasn’t like it was a real drink anyway. Alcohol doesn’t do anything in the BookWorld, except act as narrative furniture in scenes such as these. If you wanted to get off your head, you’d hit the hyphens, but I needed my wits about me.

“A beer for me,” I said. “Drake?”

“Scotch.”

The barman placed our drinks on the counter, and I took a sip. The beer was a light, amber-colored liquid, but it tasted like warm tea. This wasn’t unusual, since everything in the BookWorld tasted like warm tea—except warm tea itself, which tasted of dishwater. But since dishwater tasted of warm tea, warm tea actually might have tasted like warm tea after all.

“Are you part of the diplomatic mission?” asked Drake.

I told him that I was, and he grunted noncommittally. Since the senator said he was fodder and unlikely to last the next few hours, I though it a safe bet to trust him.

“I overheard something odd outside the mysterious passenger’s cabin.”

“That’s entirely normal. You’ll probably hear odd noises in the night, too, and if we’ve got time, someone will be found shot dead with a cryptic note close by.”

“Do you want to know what I overheard?”

“Not really. There’ll be an impostor on the boat, too—and a shape-changer.”

“What, of the alien variety?” I asked, looking nervously about.

“No,” he replied, smiling at my naïveté. “Someone or something who is not what it seems.”

“Isn’t that the impostor?”

“There’s a subtle difference.” Drake mused for a moment, staring at the ceiling. “But I’m not sure precisely what it is. I was born yesterday, you know.”

“My name is Florent,” announced a new bar steward who had just come on duty. “May I mix you a Tahiti Tingle?”

I frowned, then turned. It was Sprockett, dressed as a bar steward and sporting a ridiculous false mustache on his porcelain features. Since he didn’t greet me, I assumed he wanted to remain incognito, so I merely said I already had a drink and resumed my conversation with Drake.

“Are journeys upriver usually like this?” I asked.

“Apparently so. How do they think they’re going to stop Speedy Muffler anyway?”

“By telling him that massed armies on the borders of WomFic and Dogma are waiting to invade if he so much as hiccups.”

“What makes you think Speedy Muffler is doing anything but rattling his saber? The only people who stand to gain by a war are the neighboring genres who get to divvy up the spoils.”

“I knew Speedy Muffler in the old days,” said one of the foreigners who had joined us, “long before the BookWorld was remade—even before Herring and Barksdale and that idiot Jobsworth were about.”

“What do you know about Speedy Muffler?”

“That he wasn’t always the leader of Racy Novel. He was once a minor character in Porn with delusions of grandeur. Muffler was up here in the days before Racy Novel, when the Frowned-Upon Genres were clustered in the north beyond Comedy. His name came to prominence when he quite suddenly started sending large quantities of metaphor downriver. He wasn’t licensed to do so, but because his supplies were consistent, the rules were relaxed. Pretty soon he was taking more and more territory for himself, but he kept on sending down the metaphor, and the CofG kept on turning a blind eye until he publicly proclaimed the area as Racy Novel, which was when the CofG started to take notice.”

“By then it was too late,” added Drake. “Speedy Muffler’s power was established, his genre large enough to demand a chair at the Council of Genres.”

“I guess WomFic/Feminism were none too happy?”

“Not overawed, no. Especially when he used to turn up at high-level summits with his shirt open and declaring that feminists needed to ‘loosen up’ and should groove with his love machine.”

“Is he still shipping metaphor downriver?” I asked.

“Not as much as before,” said Drake, “but still more than WomFic and Dogma. The area is rich in metaphor, and whoever can send the most downriver is the wealthiest. Put simply: Whoever controls the Northern Genres controls the metaphor supply, and whoever controls the supply of metaphor controls Fiction. It’s not by chance that WomFic and Crime have fortythree percent of the Outland readership. If Squid Procedural had been positioned up here, everyone would be reading about Decapod Gumshoes, and loving it.”

“So why isn’t Racy Novel read more than Women’s Fiction? If he sends more metaphor downriver, I mean?”

“Because of sanctions,” said Drake, looking at me oddly, “imposed by WomFic and Dogma—and pretty much everyone else. Like it or not, Racy Novel isn’t very highly thought of.”

“Is that fair?”

“You’re asking a lot of basic questions,” said Drake. “I thought Thursday Next would be well up on all this—especially if she’s here for the peace talks.”

“I need to gauge local opinion,” I said quickly. “This is Fiction, after all—interpretation trumps fact every time.”

“Oh,” said Drake, “I see.”

I excused myself, as Sprockett had just left the bar, and I caught up with him farther down the steamer, just outside the storeroom.

“Good afternoon, ma’am,” he whispered. “How is it going?”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m the bar steward.”

“I can see that.”

“I knew you couldn’t actually let me go,” he said. “I’m too good a butler for that. So I simply assumed you were being compassionate and thought this trip too dangerous for you to take staff. So I came anyway. What do you want me to do?”

I took a deep breath. It seemed as though butlers were like flat feet, dimples and troublesome aunts—you’ve got them for life.

“There’s a mysterious passenger in Cabin Twelve. I want you to find out what he’s doing here.”

“He doesn’t do anything—he’s simply the MP-C12. Have you figured out who the fodder is yet?”

“It’s Drake.”

“Ooh. Will he be eaten by a crocodile? A poison dart in the eye?”

“Just find out what you can about the mysterious passenger, would you? I overheard him say, ‘I won’t take your place at the talks,’ and it might be significant.”

“Very good, ma’am. I’ll make inquiries.”