My Hero (10 page)

The tall man narrowed his eyes and stared; and just when he thought he could make out a small green blob, someone standing behind him fetched him a terrific crack
with a pickaxe handle, and he fell unconscious on to his nose beside his two similarly concussed associates.

Regalian sighed, holstered his gun, and wiped a little oil ostentatiously off his hands. Then he nodded to the man with the pickaxe handle.

‘Not bad,' the pickaxe-handle user said. ‘Against the rules, but who cares a damn, anyway?'

Regalian nodded, and then extended his hand.

‘Mr Skinner, I presume?' he said.

 

Everybody knows that characters in books can do things that ordinary people can't.

They can jump off tall buildings and survive. They can remember, word for word, conversations they had sixteen years ago. They can fire ten shots from a six-shot revolver without reloading. They can encounter historical figures who haven't actually been born at the time the book is set. They can get from Paris to Marseilles faster than it would take a mortal just to get to the front of the checking-in queue, and still arrive cool, refreshed and without a splitting headache. They can even fade out at the end of Chapter Five hanging by their fingernails from a precipice and stroll on at the beginning of Chapter Seven in immaculate evening dress without a word of explanation.

This is called Dramatic Licence. If you want to be a character, you apply for one at your local Editing Station by lodging the appropriate application form in triplicate, five passport-sized photographs and the administration fee.

Woe betide the character whose licence is revoked, because he'll never work in the business again. They don't even tell you when they do it, so that the first you know is when you jump from the speeding train, hit the deck and go SPLAT!

The grounds for revocation are Byzantine in their complexity, but the gist of them seems to be that characters aren't allowed to cheat; in other words, they can do impossible things, but only if they're in character and appropriate to the situation and the general world-view of the book. Accordingly, James Bond can get away with things that would get Tom Sawyer struck off instantaneously, and the hero of a fantasy can do pretty well what he pleases provided that they're the sort of thing he ought to be doing anyway. This, of course, begs the question; but, since there's a fair chance that by the time a fantasy novel is past its first hundred pages only twenty per cent of the readers (not necessarily including the author) have the foggiest idea what's going on anyway, the authorities are usually prepared to be flexible.

There's flexible, however, and there's being taken for a sucker; and if there's one thing the Editorial Department can't be doing with, it's being taken for a sucker. If you anticipate trying that, make sure you have a real parachute handy before jumping, even if only to a slightly far-fetched conclusion.

For the record, there is an appeal procedure if you disagree with the revocation of your licence, and one of these days it'll undoubtedly be tried out, just as soon as a disenfranchised character survives long enough to contact his lawyer.

 

‘So?' Skinner asked. ‘What's the plan?'

Regalian wiped whisky off his chin and shook his head. ‘There isn't one,' he said. ‘There's only a plot.' He gestured to the bartender for another, and sighed. ‘And that may be something of an overstatement,' he added. ‘She's absolutely bloody hopeless at plots. Usually we get to page three hundred and fifty and stop. When we're absolutely stuck, she gets all mystical, which is a real
drag, let me tell you. Millions of bloody adjectives. I try to ration her to three a sentence, but it's an uphill struggle. '

‘I see,' Skinner said. ‘That's going to make things awkward, isn't it?'

‘Probably.' Regalian sipped his whisky and shuddered. ‘Still, we can only give it a go, can't we? We're probably going to die in the attempt, but that's the writing business for you.'

Skinner's head dropped. ‘I don't know,' he said. ‘Maybe I was hoping for too much. I thought you might know some sort of back way out or something; where the loose bricks are in the wall, if you see what I mean.'

‘There aren't any,' Regalian replied. ‘Except for the Library of Congress, of course, and that's just a myth.'

‘Library of . . . ?'

The hero shrugged. ‘Old character's tale,' he explained. ‘According to literary tradition, there's a weak spot in the fiction/reality interface somewhere in the cellars of the Library of Congress building in Washington. You know, where they have a copy of every book ever written, or something along those lines? The theory is that the concentration of so much fiction in one place has sort of rubbed a hole, and if you can find it you can get into any book you like, and out again too, presumably. But like I said, it's just a legend.'

‘Pity.'

‘It is, rather. No, what I had in mind was something a bit more practical.'

Skinner finished his drink and propped his elbows on the bar. ‘Go on,' he said.

‘
Alice in Wonderland
,' Regalian said.

‘Come again?'

‘
Alice
,' Regalian repeated, ‘
in Wonderland
. Now according to something I read in one of the technical journals,
there's a sporting chance that there's an airlock in there somewhere, if only we could find it.'

Skinner raised an eyebrow. ‘Just a second,' he interrupted. ‘Let's just get this straight. You're saying that if we could somehow get into
Alice in Wonderland
, there may be a way of getting home?'

Regalian shrugged. ‘Depends,' he said, ‘on what you call home. If you're lucky and there is an airlock in there, you'd probably find you'd come out again somewhere in the nineteen nineties. Still, at least it'd be the real world and you wouldn't have people trying to kill you all the time.'

Skinner thought about it for a second or so, and then nodded. ‘What've I got to lose?' he said. ‘All right, how does it work?'

‘Like this.' Regalian leaned forward. ‘Now, you've read the book?'

Skinner nodded. ‘A long time ago, mind,' he added. ‘On a train, I think.'

‘Wherever, it doesn't matter. Now, do you remember the scene with the bottle marked DRINK ME and the cake marked EAT ME?'

‘Vaguely.'

‘Fine. That's the stuff we need. One of them, haven't the faintest which, makes you grow smaller. And it's a known fact that if you're small enough, you can get out of the system by crawling out the back of the word processor and down the electric flex. You'd have to take some of the other stuff with you so you could get back to normal size, but that's no problem.'

‘I see,' said Skinner, who knew as much about computers as, say, Orville and Wilbur Wright knew about flying a Boeing 747. ‘And this is known to work, is it? This crawling down flexes stuff, I mean?'

Regalian made a wry face. ‘Not exactly,' he said. ‘On account of there not being any characters small enough
to fit in a cable or daft enough to try. But the theory's one hundred per cent rock solid. Well, maybe eighty per cent, say mud solid. It's the best offer you're going to get.'

‘Then we might as well try,' Skinner replied. ‘Since we're going to get killed long before we get there . . .'

‘Quite,' Regalian said. ‘Better to travel hopefully, as the saying goes. The real problem, of course, is getting out of this book and into
Alice
. That's,' he added with a sad smile, ‘one hundred and ten per cent impossible.'

‘Is it?'

‘Yes. No question about that whatsoever.'

‘Oh.'

‘Which means we'll have to cheat.'

‘I see. Is that possible?'

Regalian stood up and laid a dollar on the bar. The bartender picked it up without looking at it and wandered away. ‘Oh yes,' he replied. ‘Cheating's easy. Provided, of course, you follow the rules.'

 

The sun shone. Sheep bleated respectfully in neatly hedged fields on the hillside overlooking the old stone manor house, while carriage-wheels crunched on the gravel of the drive. Mr Darcy put on his hat and set out for his morning stroll. Another fine day in the works of Jane Austen.

BANG! Suddenly, the air in front of him grew thick, and out of it stepped a terrifying apparition. Horrified, Darcy started to back away, as the cloud of sparkling fuzz grew slowly more solid and resolved itself into two human shapes . . .

One tall and lean, one shorter, fatter and older; both dressed in crude working clothes of a design that Darcy had never seen before; both uncouth and desperate looking, with a wild gleam in their eyes.

He was just about to drop his stick and run when the taller man smiled, tipped his hat and said, ‘Good morning, Mr Darcy. Exceedingly clement weather for the time of year, is it not?'

And then, with a feeling of great foolishness and no little bewilderment, Darcy saw that the two men were in fact dressed in the latest London fashion, in long tail-coats and knee-breeches and tall black hats, and he recognised them as Mr Skinner and Sir Humphrey Regalian, the two gentlemen who had taken Ardleigh Manor for the summer.

‘Exceedingly clement,' he agreed. They all tipped their hats again, and parted; Darcy to continue his stroll, Skinner and Regalian wandering at no great pace towards the house.

‘How the fuck,' muttered Skinner, ‘did you do that?'

Regalian grinned. ‘I cheated,' he said. ‘It's a piece of cake, like I said. Whether it actually gets us any further forward is another matter entirely.'

By way of explanation, he reached in the side pocket of his coat and produced a small, leather-bound book. Skinner opened it and nearly fell over.

‘Dear God,' he said. ‘It's my goddamn book!'

Regalian nodded. ‘More or less,' he said. ‘We call it a monitor. It's like a sort of teleprompter. You'll see the pages in the second half of the book are still all blank.'

‘But it's the book I was writing when I got into this mess,' Skinner said, pointing to the first page. ‘I can remember every word of it.'

Regalian nodded. ‘Quite,' he said. ‘And if you read on, you'll find all your adventures over the last thirty-odd years, described in your own distinctive brand of uniquely vile prose. Now,' he went on, ‘look up the last page with any printing on.'

Skinner did so; and read:

‘Oh for Chrissakes,' Skinner exclaimed. ‘We'll never get away with this!'

‘You'd be amazed,' Regalian replied, raising his hat and nodding affably to some large woman in a big puffy dress. ‘The only problem is that you can only go backwards. Logical, really; a character can't read a book that hasn't been written yet. Also, to be perfectly frank with you, it's completely arbitrary which book you end up in.'

‘Is it? But I thought . . .'

Regalian smiled sheepishly. ‘Depends entirely on the book the character happens to be carrying in his pocket at the time,' he said. ‘And that depends on who the character is, and his motivation and stuff like that. For some reason, it was dramatically right I should be reading—' He indicated his surroundings with a broad, encircling gesture. ‘—this drivel while sitting in the Lucky Strike waiting for Butch Donovan to turn up for the big show-down. Just count yourself lucky. Given the circumstances, it might very easily have been the Bible, and then we'd really be in the smelly.'

All this was a bit much for Skinner, who basically wanted a quiet life with regular meals and a radio tuned
in to the baseball. Instead of making any comment, therefore, he shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

‘Fine,' he said. ‘Thank you for explaining so clearly. What do we do now?'

Regalian returned the shrug. ‘I believe the phrase is, Go with the flow. Of course, it would help tremendously if we had access to a library.'

‘They've probably got a library in there,' Skinner said, pointing with his cane at the big house. ‘That sort of library?'

‘It'll do for now, I expect,' Regalian answered. ‘Look, how about this? We go in, you keep them talking and I'll try and sneak into the library and see if anything suggests itself. Okay?'

Skinner was about to reply when a voice inside his coat said, ‘Yeah, sounds fine. And if anybody tries anything, we'll just blast our way out. In fact, we could save time and go in there shooting to start with.'

Skinner groaned. ‘Oh for Pete's sake, you're not still here, are you?' he said. ‘Why didn't you stay behind? I expect you'd have found some nice, compatible psychopath you could have teamed up with if only you'd looked hard enough.'

‘Yeah,' agreed the Scholfield. ‘The thought did cross my mind. Still, stand by your man, that's what being a personal sidearm is all about.'

Before Regalian could ask for footnotes, Skinner smiled weakly at him and said, ‘Don't worry, it's only my gun. Long story. It's no bother really so long as you ignore it.'