The well of lost plots (44 page)

“Yes, you might,” I conceded. “All I want is for the characters to have their say with
all
the facts, not just yours.”

I looked at Libris on the stage. “Point ten,” he went on as Heathcliff looked at his watch impatiently, “all characters wherever they reside will be given four weeks’ holiday a year in whichever book they choose.”

There was a roar of applause. He was offering everything they wanted to hear, buying the inhabitants of the BookWorld with hollow promises.

Tweed spoke into his mobilefootnoterphone. “Miss Next wants to have her say.”

I saw Libris touch his ear and turn round to stare at me contemptuously.

“But before the vote,” he added, “before you say the word and we move upwards into broad, sunlit pastures, I understand we have a Jurisfiction agent who wants to offer a counterpoint to my statement. This is her right. It is
your
right to ask for proof if you wish — and I most strongly request that you do so. Ladies and gentlemen — things — Miss Thursday Next!”

I murmured into my mobilefootnoterphone, “Go, Mimi, go!”
²

Everyone in the Starlight Room reacted slightly to the distant explosion.

Tweed steadied himself and spun round to glare at me. “What was that?”

I patted him patronizingly on the shoulder. “It’s called leveling the playing field, Harris.”

Storycode Engine:
The name given to the imaginotransference machines used by Text Grand Central to throughput the books in the Great Library to the readers in the Outland. On a single machine floor at TGC there are five hundred of these complex, cast-iron colossi. A single engine can cope with up to fifty thousand simultaneous readings of the same book at up to six words per second per reader. With a hundred similar floors, TGC is able to handle two and a half billion different readings, although the lowest ten floors are generally used only when a long-awaited bestseller is published. Using the UltraWord
^TM
system, only twelve engines would be needed to handle the same number of readings — but at speeds of up to twenty words per second.

XAVIER LIBRIS,
Ultra Word™ — the Ultimate Reading Experience

HAMLET AND JUDE Fawley exchanged glances and shrugged their shoulders as I walked up the steps and looked out at the crowd. Heathcliff, to whom all of this was merely delaying his moment of honor, glowered at me angrily. Oddly, I didn’t feel at all nervous — only a sort of numb elation. I would do some serious throwing up in the loo later, but for now, I was fine.

“Good evening,” I began to the utterly silent audience. “No one would deny that we need more plots, but there are one or two things about Ultra Word™ that you should know.”

“Grand Central?!” barked Tweed uselessly into his mobilefootnoterphone. “Tweed to Text Grand Central, come in please!”

I didn’t have long. As soon as TGC knew what had happened, they could write themselves another footnoterphone link.

“Firstly, there are no new plots. In all the testing that has been done, not one has been described or hinted at. Libris, would you care to outline a ‘new’ plot now?”

“They won’t be available until Ultra Word™ is on-line,” he said, glaring at Tweed, who was still trying to contact Text Grand Central.

“Then they are untested. Secondly,” I went on, “Ultra Word™ carries a thrice-read-only feature.”

There was a gasp from the audience.

“This means no more book lending. Libraries will close down overnight, secondhand bookshops will be a thing of the past. Words can educate and liberate — but TGC want to make them a salable commodity and nothing more.”

The crowd started to murmur to one another. Not one of those murmurs, which is just a descriptive term, you usually get in the BookWorld, but a
real
murmur — seven million people all discussing what I had just said.

“Orlick!” I heard Tweed shout. “Get to TGC — run if you have to — and get the footnoterphone repaired!”

“This is preposterous!” yelled Libris, almost apoplectic with rage. “Lies, damnable lies!”

“Here,” I said, tossing Deane’s copy of
The Little Prince
onto the table right at the front. The displacement-field technology worked perfectly — a single book landed on each of the hundred thousand tables.

“This is an UltraWord™ book,” I explained. “Read the first page and pass it on. See how long it takes before you can’t open it.”

“Tweed!?” yelled Libris, who was still next to me on the stage and becoming more agitated by the second. “Do something!”

I pointed at Xavier. “WordMaster Libris could refute my arguments with ease, simply by rewriting the facts. He could have unblocked the book already but for one thing — all the lines are down to Text Grand Central. As soon as they are up again, each of these books will be unblocked. Perkins was murdered when he found out what they were up to. He told Snell and he was killed, too. Miss Havisham didn’t know, but TGC
suspected
that she did, so she had to be silenced.”

The Bellman had risen to his feet and was walking to the front of the stage. “Is this true?” he asked, eyes blazing.

“No, Your Bellship,” replied Libris, “on my honor. As soon as we get back on-line, we will refute every single claim the misinformed Miss Next has made!”

The Bellman looked at me. “Better get a move on, young lady. You have the crowd, but for how long, I have no idea.”

“Thirdly and more importantly, all books written using the UltraWord™ system can be fixed direct using the source storycode from Text Grand Central — there will be no need for Jurisfiction. Everything we do can be achieved by low-skilled technicians at TGC.”

“Ah!” said Libris, interrupting. “Now we get to your
real
point — fearful of your job, perhaps?”

“Not my job, Libris — my real home is in the Outland. I would applaud a BookWorld in which we had no need of a policing agency — but not one where we lose the Well of Lost Plots!”

There was a gasp from the crowd, seven million people all drawing breath at the same time.

“Under UltraWord™ there will be no need for plotsmiths, echolocators, imaginators, holesmiths, grammatacists and spellcheckers. No need for Generics to be trained because characters will be constructed with the minimum of description necessary to do the job. I’m talking about the wholesale destruction of everything that is intuitive in writing — to be replaced by the formulaic. The Well would be dismantled and run instead by a few technicians at TGC who will construct books with no input from any of you.”

“Then what will happen to us?” said a voice from the front.

“Replaced,” I said simply, “replaced by a string of nouns and verbs. No hopes, no dreams, no future. No more holidays because you won’t need or want one — you will all be reduced to nothing more than words on a page, lifeless as ink and paper.”

There was silence.

“Proof!” cried Libris. “All you have demonstrated so far is that you can spin a yarn as good as any plotsmith! Where is your proof?”

“Very well,” I said slowly. “Mrs. Bradshaw? The skylark, if you please.”

Mrs. Bradshaw produced the small cage from beneath the table and handed it up to me.

“I have seen an UltraWord™ character with my own eyes, and they are empty husks. If an old book is read in Ultra Word™, it is very good — but if it is
written
in Ultra Word™, it will be flat and trite, devoid of feeling — the SmileyBurger of the storytelling world. The Well may be wasteful and long-winded, but every book read in the Outland was built there — even the greats.”

I took the skylark from the cage. “This was the proof that Perkins died for.”

I placed the small songbird beneath the Imagino TransferenceDevice and the skylark’s description was transmitted into the audience.

O Lark so quick of wing,

Dive down from up on high,

Perch proud upon the post,

Melt darkness with thy cry.

 

Come make my spirits soar,

Dance here and hover long,

Tempt summer with your trill,

Sweet stream of endless song.

The audience reacted favorably to the words and there was a smattering of applause, despite their nervousness.

“What’s wrong with that?” insisted Libris. “UltraWord™ takes language and uses it in ways more wonderful than you can imagine!”

The Bellman looked at me. “Miss Next,” he demanded, “explain yourself.”

“Well,” I said slowly, “that
wasn’t
an UltraWord™ skylark. I picked it up from the library this morning.”

There was an expectant hush as Mrs. Bradshaw produced a
second
bird seemingly identical to the first and handed it up to me.

“This is the Ultra Word™ version. Shall we compare?”

“That’s not necessary!” said Libris quickly. “We get the point.” He turned to the Bellman. “Sir, we need a few more weeks to sort out a few minor kinks—”

“Go ahead, Thursday,” said the Bellman, “let’s see how UltraWord™ compares.”

I placed the bird in the ITD, and it transmitted the cold and clinical description into the audience.

With a short tail and large wings, a skylark is easily recognized in flight. There is a distinctive streaking pattern to the brown plumage on the breast, and a black-and-white pattern beneath the tail. Nests in hollow on ground. Can sing a bit.

“I call a vote right now!” exclaimed the Bellman, climbing onto the stage.
¹

I looked across at Tweed, who was tapping his mobilefootnoterphone and smiling.

“What’s the problem?” I asked.
²

“Eh?” asked the Bellman.

“The vote!” I urged. “Hurry!”

“Of course,” he replied, knowing full well that Text Grand Central were not defeated until the vote had been taken. The Council of Genres weren’t involved — but would be if TGC tried to go against a BookWorld referendum. That was something they could
never
rewrite.

“Good!” said Tweed into his mobilefootnoterphone. “Communications have been restored.”

He smiled at me and signaled to Libris, who calmed dramatically as only the supremely confident can do.

“Very well,” said Libris slowly, “the Bellman has called for a vote, and as the rules state, I am allowed to answer any criticism laid before me.”

“A rebuttal of a rebuttal?” I cried. “The rules don’t state that!”

“But they do!” said Libris kindly. “Perhaps you’d like to look at the BookWorld constitution?”

He pulled the slim volume from his coat and I could smell the cantaloupes from where I stood. It would say whatever they wanted it to say.

Libris walked over to us and said to the Bellman in a quiet voice, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. We make the rules, we can change the rules, we can modify the rules. We can do anything we want. You are due to step down. Go with me on this one and you can have an easy retirement. Go against me and I’ll crush you.”

Libris turned to me. “What do you care? No one in the Outland will notice the difference. You’ll have a week to pack up and move out — you have my word on that.”

The Bellman glared at Libris. “How much did they pay you?”

“They didn’t need to. Money doesn’t mean anything down here. No, it’s the technology that I really love. It’s too perfect to be sidelined by people like you. I get one hundred percent control. Everything will go through TGC. No more Well of Lost Plots, no more Generics, no more Council, no more strikes by disgruntled nursery rhyme workers. But do you know the best bit? No more authors. No more missed deadlines. No more variable-quality second books — each one in the series will be the same as the last. When a publisher needs a bestseller, all they need do is contact our sole representative in the Outland!”

“Yorrick Kaine,” I murmured.

“Indeed. It’s all for the best, my dear.”

Incredibly, it was
worse
than I thought. It was as if the paint factories had decided to deal direct with the art galleries.

“But the books!” I cried. “They’ll be terrible!”

“Within a few years no one will notice,” replied Libris. “Mr. Bellman, do you go with us on this or not?”

“I would sooner die!” he exclaimed, trembling with rage.

“As you wish,” replied Libris.

There was a short crackling noise and I saw the Bellman stiffen slightly.

“Now,” said Libris, “let’s finish this all up. Bellman, would you refute Miss Next’s points one by one?”

“I should be delighted,” he said slowly and without emotion. I turned to him in shock and could see how his features were less defined than before — sort of like a wire-framed, three-dimensional model clothed in realistic skintone. I could see it easily but I was up close — the audience hadn’t noticed anything at all. The smell of melons once more drifted across the stage.

“Friends!” began the Bellman. “Miss Next is entirely mistaken . . .”

I turned to Libris and he smiled triumphantly. I reached into my bag for my gun, but it had been changed to marmalade.

“Tch, tch,” said Libris in a whisper, “that’s a BookWorld gun and under
our
control. What a shame you lost your Outlander Browning in the struggle with Tweed!”

I had only one card left. I pulled out my TravelBook and opened it, flicking past the TextMarker and Eject-O-Hat and on towards the glass panel covering a red-painted handle. A note painted on the glass read, IN UNPRECEDENTED EMERGENCY, BREAK GLASS. If this wasn’t an unprecedented emergency, I didn’t know what was. I smashed the glass, grabbed the handle and pulled it down with all my strength.

Contrary to Text Grand Central’s claims, there were no new plots using UltraWord
^TM
. Ex-WordMaster Libris had become so obsessed with the perfection of his Operating System that nothing else had mattered to him and he lied repeatedly to cover up its failings. BOOK V8.3 remained the Operating System for many years to come, although one of the UltraWord
^TM
copies of
The Little Prince
can be viewed in the Jurisfiction museum. To avoid a repeat of this near disaster, the Council of Genres took the only course of action open to them to ensure TGC would be too inefficient and unimaginative to pose a threat. They appointed a committee to run it.

MILLON DE FLOSS,
Ultra Word™ — the Aftermath