The well of lost plots (27 page)

“Hello, Ibb,” I said, placing the sketch aside, “how are you?”

Ibb replied by unzipping and opening the top of its overalls.

“Look!” she said excitedly, showing me her breasts.

“Congratulations,” I said slowly, still feeling a bit groggy, “you’re a
her
.”

“I know!” said Ibb, hardly able to contain her excitement. “Do you want to see the rest?”

“No, thanks, I believe you.”

“Can I borrow a bra?” she asked, moving her shoulders up and down. “These things aren’t terribly comfortable.”

“I don’t think mine would fit you,” I said hurriedly, “you’re a lot bigger than I am.”

“Oh,” she answered, slightly crestfallen, then added, “How about a hair tie and a brush? I can’t do a thing with this hair. Up, down — perhaps I should have it cut — and I
so
wish it were curly!”

“Ibb, it’s fine, really.”

“
Lola
,” she corrected me, “I want you to call me Lola from now on.”

“Very well, Lola, sit on the bed.”

So Lola sat while I brushed her hair and she nattered on about a weight-loss idea she had had, which seemed to revolve around weighing yourself with one foot on the scale and one on the floor. Using this idea, she told me, she could lose as much weight as she wanted and not give up cakes. Then she started talking about this great new thing that she had discovered that was so much fun she thought she’d be doing it quite a lot — and she reckoned she’d have no trouble getting men to assist.

“Just be careful,” I told her. “Think before you do what you do with whom.” It was advice my mother had given me. I expected Lola would ignore it as much as I had.

“Oh, yes,” Lola assured me, “I’ll be very careful — I’ll always ask them their name first.”

When I had finished, she stared at herself in the mirror for a moment, gave me a big hug and skipped out the door. I dressed slowly and walked into the kitchen.

Obb was sitting at the table painting a Napoleonic cavalry officer the height of a pen top. He was gazing intently at the miniature horseman and glowering with concentration. He had developed into a dark-haired and handsome man of at least six foot three over the past few days, with a deep voice and measured speech; he also looked about fifty. I suspected
it
was now a
he
but hoped he wouldn’t try to demonstrate it in the same way that Lola had.

“Morning, Obb,” I said, “breakfast?”

He dropped the horseman on the floor.

“Now look what you’ve made me do!” he growled, adding, “Toast, please, and coffee — and it’s
Randolph
, not Obb.”

“Congratulations,” I told him, but he only grunted in reply, found the cavalry officer and carried on with his painting.

Lola bounced into the living room, saw Randolph and stopped for a moment to stare at her nails demurely, hoping he would turn to look at her. He didn’t. So she stood closer and said:

“Good morning, Randolph.”

“Morning,” he grunted without looking up, “how did you sleep?”

“Heavily.”

“Well, you would, wouldn’t you?”

She missed the insult and carried on jabbering. “Wouldn’t yellow be prettier?”

Randolph stopped and stared at her. “
Blue
is the color of a Napoleonic cavalry officer, Lola. Yellow is the color of custard — and bananas.”

She turned to me and pulled a face, mouthed
square
and then helped herself to coffee.

“Can we go shopping, then?” she asked me. “If we are buying underwear, we might as well get some makeup and some scent; we could try on clothes and generally do girl sort of things together — I could take you out to lunch and gossip a lot, have our hair done and then shop some more, talk about boyfriends and perhaps after that go to the gym.”

“It’s not
exactly
my sort of thing,” I said slowly, trying to figure out what sort of book St. Tabularasa’s had thought Lola might be most suitable for. I couldn’t remember the last time I had a girls’ day out — certainly not this decade. Most of my clothes came mail order — when did I ever have time for shopping?

“Oh, go
on
!” said Lola. “You could do with a day off. What were you doing yesterday?”

“Attending a course on bookjumping using the ISBN positioning system.”

“And the day before?”

“Practical lessons in using textual sieves as PageRunner capturing devices.”

“And before that?”

“Searching in vain for the Minotaur.”

“
Exactly
why you need a break. We don’t even have to leave the Well — the latest Grattan catalog is still under construction. We can get in because I know someone who’s got a part-time job as a text-justifying engineer. Please say yes. It means so much to me!”

I sighed. “Well, all right — but after lunch. I’ve got to do my Mary Jones thing in
Caversham Heights
all morning.”

Lola jumped up and down and clapped her hands with joy. I had to smile at her childish exuberance.

“You might move up a size, too,” said Randolph.

She narrowed her eyes and turned to face him. “And
what
do you mean by that?” she asked angrily.

“Exactly what I said.”

“That I’m fat?”

“You said it, not me,” replied Randolph, concentrating on his metal soldier.

She picked up a glass of water and poured it into his lap.

“
What the hell did you do that for
!” he spluttered, getting up and grabbing a tea towel.

“To teach you,” yelled Lola, wagging a finger at him, “that you can’t say
whatever
you want, to
whoever
you want!”

And she walked out.

“What did I say?” said Randolph in an exasperated tone. “Did you see that? She did that for no reason at all!”

“I think you got off lightly,” I told him. “I’d go and apologize if I were you.”

He thought about this for a few seconds, lowered his shoulders and went off to find Lola, whom I could hear sobbing somewhere near the stern of the flying boat.

“Young love!” said a voice behind me. “Eighteen years of emotions packed into a single week — it can’t be easy, now can it?”

“Gran!” I said, whirling round. “When did you get back?”

“Just now.” She removed her gingham hat and gloves and passed me some cash.

“What’s this?”

“D-3 Generics are annoyingly literal, but it can pay dividends — I asked the cabbie to drive backwards all the way here, and by the end of the trip he owed
me
money. How are things?”

“Well,” I sighed, “it’s like having a couple of teenagers in the house.”

“Look upon it as training for having your own children.” Gran sat down on a chair and sipped at my coffee.

“Gran?”

“Yes?”

“How did you get here? I mean, you are here, aren’t you? You’re not just a memory, or something?”

“Oh, I’m real all right.” She laughed. “You just need a bit of looking after until we sort out Aornis.”

“Aornis?”

“Yes,” sighed Gran. “Think carefully for a moment.”

I mulled the name around in my mind, and sure enough, Aornis came out of the murk like a ship in fog. But the fog was deep, and other things were hidden within — I could feel it.

“Oh, yes,” I murmured, “
her
. What else was I meant to remember?”

“Landen.”

He came out of the fog, too. The man in the sketch. I sat down and put my head in my hands. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten him.

“I’d regard it a bit like measles,” said Gran, patting my back. “We’ll cure you of her, never fear.”

“But then I have to go and battle with her again, in the real world?”

“Mnemonomorphs are always easier to contain on the physical plane. Once you have beaten her in your mind, the rest should be easy.”

I looked up at her. “Tell me again about Landen.”

And she did, for the next hour — until it was time for me to stand in for Mary Jones again.

I drove into Reading in Mary’s car, past red minis, blue Morris Marinas and the ubiquitous Spongg Footcare trucks. I had visited the real Reading on many occasions in my life, and although the
Heights
Reading was a fair
impression
, the town was lacking in detail. A lot of roads were missing, the library was a supermarket, the Caversham district was a lot more like Beverly Hills than I remember and the very grotty downtown was more like New York in the seventies. I think I could guess where the author got his inspiration; I suppose it was artistic license — something to increase the drama.

I stopped in a traffic jam and drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. Our investigation of Perkins’s death had not made much progress. Bradshaw had found the partially molten padlock and key in the remnants of the castle keep, but it didn’t tell us any more. Havisham and I were not having much better luck ourselves: after three days of discreet investigation, only two pieces of information had come to light: Firstly, that only eight members of Jurisfiction had access to
The Sword of the Zenobians
, and that one of them was Vernham Deane. I mention this because he was posted as missing following an excursion into
Ulysses
to try to figure out what had happened to the stolen punctuation in the final chapter, and no one had seen him since. Successive sweeps of
Ulysses
had failed to show that he had been there at all. In the absence of any more information, Havisham and I had started to discuss the possibility that Perkins might have removed the padlock himself — to clean out the cage or something, although this seemed doubtful. And what about my sabotaged Eject-O-Hat? Neither Havisham nor I had any more idea why I should be considered a threat; as Havisham delighted in pointing out, I was “completely unimportant.”

But the big news that had emerged in the past few days was that the time of the UltraWord™ upgrade had been set. Text Grand Central had brought the date forwards a fortnight to coincide with the 923rd Annual BookWorld Awards. During the ceremony Libris would inaugurate the new system before an audience of seven million invited characters. The Bellman told us he had been up to Text Grand Central and seen the new UltraWord™ engines for himself. Sparkling new, each engine could process about a thousand simultaneous readings of each book — the old V8.3 engines were lucky to top a hundred.

I wound down the window and looked out. Traffic jams in Reading weren’t uncommon, but they usually moved a
little
bit, and this one had been solid for twenty minutes. Exasperated, I got out of the car and went to have a look. Strangely, there appeared to have been an accident. I say strangely because all the drivers and pedestrians inside
Caversham Heights
were only Generic D-2s to D-9s, and anything as dramatic as an accident was quite outside their brief. As I walked past the eight blue Morris Marinas in front of me, I noticed that each one had an identically damaged front wing and shattered windscreen. By the time I reached the head of the queue, I could see that the incident involved one of the white Spongg Footcare trucks. But this truck was different from the others. Usually, they were unwashed Luton-bodied Fords with petrol streaks near the filler cap and a scratched rollershutter at the rear. This truck had none of these — it was pure white, very boxy and without a streak of dirt on it anywhere. The wheels, I noticed, weren’t strictly round, either — they were more like a fifty-sided polygon, which gave an impression of a circle. I looked closer. The tires had no surface detail or texture. They were just flat black, without depth. The driver was no more detailed than the truck; he — or she or it — was pink and cubist with simple features and a pale blue boilersuit. The truck had been turning left and had hit one of the blue Morris Marinas, damaging all of them identically. The driver, a gray-haired man wearing herringbone tweed, was trying to remonstrate with the cubist driver but without much luck. The truck driver turned to face him, tried to speak but then gave up and looked straight ahead, going through the motions of driving the truck even though he was stationary.

“What’s going on?” I asked the small crowd that had gathered.

“This idiot turned left when he shouldn’t have,” explained the gray-haired Morris Marina driver while his identical gray-haired Generic D-4 clones nodded their heads vigorously. “We could all have been killed!”

“Are you okay?” I said to the cubist driver, who looked blankly at me and attempted to change gear.

“I’ve been driving in
Caversham Heights
since the book was written and never had an accident,” carried on the Morris Marina driver indignantly. “This will play hell with my no-claims bonus — and what’s more, I can’t get any sense out of
him
at all!”

“I saw it all,” said another Spongg truck driver — a proper one this time. “Whoever he is he needs to go back to driving school and take a few lessons.”

“Well, the show’s over,” I told them. “Mr. Morris Marina Driver, is your car drivable?”

“I think so,” replied the eight identical middle-aged drivers in unison.

“Then get it out of here. Generic Truck Driver?”

“Yes?”

“Find a towrope and get this heap of junk off the road.”

He left to do my bidding as the eight Morris Marina drivers drove off in their identically spluttering cars.

I was waving the cars around the stranded truck when there was a crackle in the air. The cubist truck vanished from the roadside, leaving nothing but the faint smell of cantaloupes. I stared at the space left by the truck. The drivers were more than happy that this obstacle to their ordered lives had been removed, and they sounded their horns at me to get out of the way. I examined the area of the road carefully but found nothing except a single bolt made in the same style as the truck — no texture, just the same cubic shape. I walked back to my car, placed it in my bag and drove on.

Jack was waiting for me outside Mickey Finn’s Gym, situated above a couple of shops in Coley Avenue. We were there to question a boxing promoter about allegations of fight fixing. It was the best scene in
Caversham Heights
— gritty, realistic — and with good characterization and dialogue. I met Jack slightly earlier while the story was off on a subplot regarding a missing consignment of ketamine, so there was time for a brief word together.
Caversham Heights
wasn’t first person — which was just as well, really, as I didn’t think Jack had the depth of character to support it.