One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

5. Sprockett

There was a queue to cross into Thriller, bookpeople either being permanently transferred or on a Character Exchange Program designed to stop characters from getting bored, restless and troublesome. There were a few traveling artisans, salesmen and a dozen or so tourists, apparently on a Get Beaten Senseless by Bourne package holiday, which had just overtaken the Being Shot in the Leg by Bond break for popularity, much to the Fleming camp’s disgust.

As little as two months ago, I would have been waved across with nary a glance, but the heightened security risk due to the potentially inflammable political situation up at Racy Novel had made everyone jumpy.

I took a TransGenre Taxi as far as the Legal part of Thriller, then continued on foot. I took a left turn by The Firm and picked my way along a weed-covered path and across a plank that spanned a ditch of brackish water, the best method to get into Conspiracy without being waylaid by deluded theorists, who always wanted to explain in earnest terms that President Formby was murdered by President Redmond van de Poste, that bestselling author Colwyn Baye was far too handsome and clever and charming to be anything other than an android or a reptile or an alien or all three.

I took a left turn at the Lone Gunman pub, and walked past a hangar full of advanced flying machines that all displayed a swastika, then entered a shantytown that was home to theories that lived right on the edge of Conspiracy due to a sense of overtired outrageousness. This was where the Protocols lived, along with alien abductions, 9/11 deniers and the notion that FDR somehow knew about the attack on Pearl Harbor. I had hoped I might tread unnoticed within the genre, but I was mistaken. Despite avoiding eye contact, I was spotted by a wildlooking loon with hair that stuck out in every direction.

“There’s no such thing as time,” he confided, with an unwavering sense of belief in his own assertions. “It’s simply a construct designed by a cabal of financiers eager to sell us pensions, life insurance and watches in their pursuit of a global, timepiece-marketing agenda.”

“Really?” I asked, which is probably the only answer to anything in Conspiracy.

“Definitely. And the seal is not a mammal—it’s an insect. The truth has been suppressed by the BBC and Richard Attenborough, who want to promote a global mammalcentric agenda.”

“Don’t you mean David Attenborough?”

“So you agree?” he said, eyes opening so wide I was suddenly worried I might see his brain. “Would you like to stone a robot?”

“What?”

“Stone a robot. Just one of the first generation of mechanical men, designed to be placed amongst us in order to take over the planet and promote a clockwork, global cogcentric agenda.”

“I’m not really into stoning anyone.”

“Oh, well,” said the theorist as he picked a rock off the ground. “Suit yourself.”

And he walked off. Intrigued and somewhat concerned, I followed him to New World Order Plaza, where a small crowd had gathered. They were an odd bunch that comprised everything from small gray aliens to reptilian shape-shifters, Men in Black, Elvises, lost cosmonauts and a smattering of Jimmy Hoffa/Lord Lucan secret genetic hybrids. They were arranged in a semicircle around a tall man dressed in a perfectly starched frock coat, striped trousers and white gloves. Of his clockwork robotic origins there seemed little doubt. His porcelain face was bland and featureless, the only moving part his right eyebrow, which was made of machined steel and could point to an array of emotions painted in small words upon the side of his head. From the look of him, his mainspring was at the very last vestige of tension—he had shut down all peripheral motor functions, and if his eyes had not scanned backwards and forwards as I watched, I might have thought he had run down completely.

“They banish us here to Fiction,” said a rabble-rousing gray alien, pointing his finger in the air, “when we should be up there, in Nonfiction.”

The crowd agreed wholeheartedly with this sentiment and clacked their stones together angrily.

“And then,” continued the alien, “they have the temerity to send robots amongst us to spy on our every movement and report back to a centralized index that holds the records of everyone in the BookWorld, all as a precursor to thought-control experiments that will rob us of our minds and make us into mere drones, lackeys of the publishing world. What do we say to the council? Do we politely say, ‘No thank you,’ or do we send their messenger home in a sack?”

The crowd roared. I didn’t know much about Conspiracy, but I did know that its theorists were mostly paranoid and tended to value conviction above evidence.

I was just wondering what, if anything, could be done to stop the needless destruction of a finely crafted automaton when the mechanical man caught my eye, and with the last few ounces of spring pressure available to him, he moved his eyebrow pointer among an array of emotions in a manner that spoke of fear, loss, betrayal and hopelessness. The last plea from a condemned machine. Something shifted within me, and before I knew what I was doing, I had spoken up.

“There you are!” I said in a loud voice as I strode into the semicircle of stone-wielding conspirators. “I knew I should have given you an extra wind at lunchtime.”

The aliens and Elvises and alien Elvises looked at one another suspiciously.

“Thursday Next,” I said as I searched the automaton’s pockets for his key. The crowd looked doubtful, and the alien ringleader blinked at me oddly, his large, teardrop-shaped eyes utterly devoid of compassion.

“Thursday Next is too important to trouble herself with the fortunes of a mechanical man,” he said thinly, “and she told me personally she would rather kneel on broken glass than ever visit Conspiracy again.”

This was doubtless true, and I could see why.

“You are an impostor,” said the alien, “sent by the council as part of a plan to destabilize our genre and promote your own twisted evidence-centric agenda.”

There was a nasty murmuring among the crowd as with fumbling hand I found the large brass key and inserted it into the socket located on the back of the automaton’s neck. I gave him a quick wind to get him started, and I felt his body shift slightly as the gyros, motors, cogs and actuators started to reboot his mechanical cortex.

“You’re the written one,” said someone at the back. “The dopey one who likes to hug a lot.”

The situation had just taken a turn for the worse. But since this was Conspiracy and facts weren’t necessarily the end of an argument, I thought I’d try a bluff. I reached into my pocket and held out my JAID shield. From a distance it might be confused with a Jurisfiction badge. I had to hope that no one would look too closely.

“Read it and weep,” I said, swallowing down my nervousness. “Make a move on me and I’ll have Jurisfiction dump forty tons of Intelligently Reasoned Argument right on your butt.”

“So you say,” said the small alien. “Elvis? Check her badge.”

The two dozen Elvises looked at one another and began to squabble as they tried to figure out which Elvis the alien was talking to, and once this was established, I had half wound the mechanical man. If it came to a fight, I wouldn’t be on my own.

“Steady on, lads,” said the Elvis after looking at my badge. “She’s not bluffing—it’s her all right.”

“I am?” I said, then quickly added, “Yes, I am. Now piss off.”

The small group hurriedly made some excuse about having to view some reverse-engineered alien technology hidden in a hangar somewhere in a desert, and within a few moments the clockwork man and I were entirely alone.

“Permission to speak, madam?” said the automaton once I had wound him sufficiently to reboot his memory and thought processes. He spoke with the rich, plummy tones of the perfect gentleman’s gentleman, but with a faint buzz—a bit like a bumblebee stuck inside a cello.

“Of course.”

“I am one of the older Duplex-5 models, so if madam would only wind me as far as twenty-eight turns, I would be most grateful. My spring will take a full thirty-two, but the last four winds have an unpredictable effect upon my central reasoning gears that render me unable to offer my best.”

“I’ll remember that,” I said.

“And if I might be so bold,” added the clockwork man, “I would highly recommend that you do not let me fall below two winds, as I fear I might become somewhat languorous in my movements and may stray unforgivably into short-tempered impertinence.”

“Between two and twenty-eight it is.”

I finished winding him but, as requested, was careful not to go beyond the red mark on the mainspring tension indicator just under his chin. Once I was done, he turned to face me, and his single expressive eyebrow quivered momentarily and then pointed to “Uncomfortable.” I knew exactly what he meant: that the winding of a manservant is a mildly embarrassing undertaking, and to preserve both employer and employee’s mutual respect, should not be commented upon again.

“That’s a very useful eyebrow.”

“It’s a standard feature of the Duplex-5s. Since we have few genuine emotions, it helps to telegraph how we think we should be feeling, given the circumstances.”

“It works for me, Mr. . . . ?”

“Sprockett,” said Sprockett. “Ready and willing to enter your employ.”

“I’m not sure I need a butler.”

“In that you would be in error, ma’am. It has been long proved that everyone needs a butler. Besides, you saved my life.”

It was complex, but I knew what he meant. Because I had saved him, he was indebted to me—and to refuse him an opportunity to reciprocate my kindness would leave him burdened by a favor unpaid. And if you had a potential life of a thousand years or more, you could be a long time fretting, and fretting increases wear on cogs. Clockwork life-forms could be annoyingly steadfast, but it was their saving grace, too.

“All right,” I agreed, “but for a trial period only.”

“Very good, ma’am. Would you care for a cocktail? I do a very good Tahiti Tingle—without the umbrella if you think they are a bit passé.”

“Not now. I’m working.”

“In Conspiracy, ma’am?”

I pointed at the book traffic that was moving constantly overhead.

“One of those came down last night, and I’m here to find out why.”

“I see,” said Sprockett, his eyebrow pointer nodding toward “Worried” as he looked upwards. “I will assist in whatever capacity I can.”

We made our way toward the regional offices. Sprockett talked and thought well for an automaton, and aside from a slight limp, his empty features and a muted buzz when he moved or thought, he was reasonably lifelike. I asked him where he was from, and he told me he was from Vanity—in a pilot book for a series titled The League of Cogmen, about the many adventures that befall a series of mechanical men designed by an Edwardian inventor. Sprockett had been initially built as a butler but soon transcended his calling to become a dynamic machine of action. A mixture of The Admirable Crichton, Biggles and The 1903 Watchmaker’s Review. When unemployment beckoned, he reverted to domestic service—butlers are more sought after than are action heroes.

“What was your book like?”

“Uneven,” replied Sprockett. “A fine concept, but lacking in legs to carry it off. Sadly, I have too few emotions to be engaging as a principal character.”

“Because you were designed as a butler?”

“Not at all—because I’m only a Duplex-5. The empathy escapement was never quite perfected before we went into production. I can indicate a range of emotions through my eyebrow pointer, but that’s about it. I can recognize your sorrow and act accordingly—but I cannot feel emotions nor truly understand what ‘emotion’ or ‘feel’ actually means.”

“But surely you felt danger when you were about to be stoned and relief when rescued?”

“Yes, but only in the context that to be destroyed would deny me the opportunity to serve cocktails—and that would contravene the second law of domestic robotics.”

Sprockett told me that his books were hastily printed, had not been read once in seventeen years and now, aside from a few copies in the circulation of friends and family, were sitting unread in a cardboard box in the writer’s garage in Cirencester.

“And becoming damp, too,” he added. “Sometimes rain is blown under the garage doors. There is mold and damp seeping up the print run—look.”

He rolled up a trouser leg to reveal a green patch of patination on his otherwise shiny bronze leg. His would be a long, lingering journey to unreadfulness. He would gradually look more tarnished and increasingly lost over the years until the last copy would be destroyed and—unless picked up in another book—he’d suddenly wink out of existence.

“What’s it like living in Vanity?”

“May I be candid?”

“I’ d welcome it.”

“We tend not to use the term Vanity anymore. It sounds derogatory. We refer to it as Self-Published or Collaborative, and you’d be surprised just how much good prose is interspersed with that of an uneven nature.”

This was true. Beatrix Potter, Keats and George Eliot had all been self-published, as was the first issue of Alice in Wonderland . I looked across to where the island of Vanity lay just off the coast beyond the Cliff of Notes. Even from here the high-stacked apartment buildings could clearly be seen. The turbulent waterway between Vanity and the mainland was swept with dangerous currents, whirlpools and tidal rips. Despite this, many Vanitarians attempted to make the perilous journey to brighter prospects on the mainland. Of those who survived, most were turned back.

“I’d like to come out and see the conditions for myself,” I said, the unease in my voice setting Sprockett’s eyebrow to flicker twice before pointing at “Worried.”

“No, really,” I said, “I would. You can’t believe anything you read in The Word these days.”

Sprockett demurred politely, but his eyebrow said it all—speaking of an entire genre kept marginalized, right on the edges of Fiction. The “Vanity Question” was one of many issues that had dogged the political elite since the remaking. The problem was, no published books liked anything self-published in the neighborhood. They argued—and quite eloquently, as it turned out—that the point of having similar books clustered in neighborhoods and genres was for mutual cross-fertilization of ideas, themes and topics. Having something from Vanity close by would, they claimed, “lower the tone of the prose.” Liberal factions within the Council of Genres had attempted a cross-genre experiment and placed The Man Who Died a Lot right into the middle of McEwan on the basis that the localized erudition could only have a bettering effect on the Vanity book. It was a disaster. None of the characters within McEwan would talk to them and even claimed that some descriptive passages had been stolen. It was then that McEwan and the nearby Rushdie and Amis threatened to go on strike and lower their Literary Highbrow Index to a shockingly low 7.2 unless The Man Who Died a Lot was removed. The offending book was gone before teatime, and no one had tried anything since. Vanity’s contribution to Fiction in general was an abundance of cheap labor and the occasional blockbuster, which was accepted onto the island with an apologetic, “Gosh, don’t know how that happened.”

We continued our walk through Conspiracy, past something odd that had been dug up on the Quantock Hills, and Sprockett asked me if I conducted many accident investigations.

“My last investigation was in a book-club edition of Three Men in a Boat, which had sprung a leak,” I told him, “and lost forty thousand gallons of the river Thames as it passed across Crime Noir, where it fell quite helpfully as rain. My theory had been that it was a sticky pressure-relief valve on the comedy induction loops, probably as a result of substandard metaphor building up on the injectors. I penned an exhaustive report to Commander Herring, who congratulated me on my thoroughness but tactfully pointed out that comedy induction loops were not introduced until April 1956—long after the book was built.”

“Oh,” said Sprockett, who perhaps had been expecting a story with a happier ending. “So what had really happened?”

I sighed. “Someone had simply left the plug out of the Thames and it had drained away.”

We walked on in silence for a moment.

“Ma’am, if you would forgive the impertinence, might I place one small condition upon my employment?”

I nodded, so he continued.

“I have an overriding abhorrence for honey. No matter what happens, it always seems to end up in my insides, and it is the very devil to remove. In my last employ, my master insisted upon honey for breakfast, and a small quantity became lodged in my thought cogs. Until steam-cleaned, I became convinced I was the Raja of Sarawak.”

“No honey,” I said. “Promise.”

And so, fully introduced, we talked about the much-heralded and much-delayed introduction of the advanced Duplex-6 clockwork automaton. And, after that, the relative merits of phosphor-bronze over stainless steel for knee joints. So it was that I arrived, thoroughly versed in the Matters of the Cog, at the regional Conspiracy offices a few minutes later.