The well of lost plots (47 page)

“Compact?”

“I’d say,” replied the technician, reading the latest weather report, “barely three paragraphs wide but with a density over six-point-four. It’s currently moving at eight pages a second.”

“It could tear a hole straight through
The Scarlet Letter
at that rate,” exploded Bradshaw, “and litter the whole book with dramatic events!”

The consequence of this was terrible to consider — a new version of
The Scarlet Letter
where things actually happen.

“Impact time?”

“Three minutes.”

I had an idea. “How many people are reading
Scarlet Letter
at present?”

“Six hundred and twenty-two,” replied the Cat, who as librarian had these figures at his paws twenty-four hours a day.

“Pleasure readers?”

“Mostly,” replied the Cat, thinking hard, “except for a class of thirty-two English students at Frobisher High School in Michigan who are studying it.”

“Good. Bradshaw? I want you to set up textual sieves in every book ever written by Hemingway — even the bad ones. Sieves are to be set to
coarse
in all short stories, letters,
Winner Take Nothing
and
In Our Time
,
medium
in
The Sun Also Rises
and
The Green Hills of Africa
. I want to channel the storm, slowing it down as it passes. By
A Farewell to Arms
and
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, sieves should be set to
fine
. The storm will bounce between all the works, moving west towards the void between Hemingway and Fitzgerald. If it makes it that far, we’ll reset the sieves and attack it again.”

There was a pause.

“But, Thursday,” said Bradshaw slowly, “the storm isn’t going to hit Hemingway.”

“It will if we shut
The Scarlet Letter
down.”

“Out of the question!” exploded Senator Jobsworth, spontaneously and automatically rejecting any possible infringements of his sacred regulations. “The rules do not permit any book to be shut down without a vote at the Council of Genres — I can quote the rule number if you wish!”

Technically, he was right. Even with a vote, nobody had tried anything so audacious before. It usually took an hour to shut down a book, more to bring it up to full readability again.

“Is that wise?” asked Dr. Howard.

“Not in the least,” I replied, “but I’m out of time and ideas right now.”

“Isn’t anyone listening to me?” continued the senator, more outraged at our lack of respect than at losing
The Scarlet Letter
.

“Oh, we’re listening all right,” purred the Cat, “we just don’t agree with you.”

“Rules are there for a good reason, Miss Next. We have ordered the demolition of bigger books than
The Scarlet Letter
. I personally—”

“Listen,” I said, “classics have been lost before but never during my tenure as Bellman. Tomorrow morning you can have my badge if I’m wrong and send me packing. Right now you can sit down and shut up. Cat and Bradshaw, are you with me on this?”

“Appreciate a woman who can make bold decisions!” muttered Bradshaw, repeating my orders to the DanverClones. Senator Jobsworth had gone red with impotent fury, and his mouth was twitching as he sought to find words to adequately express his anger at my insubordination.

“Two minutes to impact.”

I picked up the footnoterphone and asked to be put through to the storycode engine floor.

“Bradshaw, I want you to take a trip to the Outland and set the fire alarm off at Frobisher High in exactly seventy-eight seconds. That will give us a few minutes breathing space. The pleasure readers will just think they’ve got bored and lost concentration when the book shuts down. Hello, storycode floor? This is the Bellman. I want you to divert Hawthorne’s
Scarlet Letter
to an empty storycode engine and shut it down. . . . Yes, that’s quite correct. Shut it down. I don’t have time to issue a written order so you’re going to have to take my word for it. You are to do it in exactly sixty-three seconds.”

“Sieves are going up as requested, Thursday,” reported Bradshaw. “Think they’ll hold?”

I shrugged. There was nothing else we could do. The storm plot ran towards
The Scarlet Letter
and struck it just as the storycode engine shut down. The book closed. The characters stopped in their tracks as an all-pervading darkness swept over every descriptive passage, every line of dialogue, every nuance, every concept. Where a moment ago there had been a fascinating treatise on morality, there was now only a lifeless hulk of dark reading matter. It was as if
The Scarlet Letter
had never been written. The storm bounced off, then attracted to the brighter lights of the Hemingway canon next door, struck off on a new course. I breathed a sigh of relief but then held my breath once more as the storm struck
In Our Time
— and glanced off. The sieve had held. Over the next few minutes the WordStorm ran between the books as planned, the textual sieves slowing it down as it brushed past the collected works of Hemingway.

“Damage report?”

“Slight grammatical warpage in
A Farewell to Arms
, but nothing serious,” said the Cat. “
The Sun Also Rises
is reporting isolated bursts of narrative flexations, but nothing we can’t handle. All other books report no damage.”

“Good. Bring
The Scarlet Letter
back on-line.”

We watched nervously as the storm slowly subsided. It had littered the Hemingway canon with words and ideas, but nothing violent enough to embed them and change the narrative. As likely as not the residents of the novels would just pick them up and sell them to traveling scrap merchants. But the WordStorm wasn’t quite finished with us yet. After brushing past the preface to
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, the storm suddenly sped up and, in its last dying throes, embedded a Bride Shot at the Altar plot device right at the end of Blackmore’s
Lorna Doone
, where it remains to this day. Aside from that minor flexation, no real harm was done by the WordStorm. The senator berated me for a good ten minutes and filed a report on my behavior the following day, which was summarily rejected by the other members of the Jurisfiction oversight committee.

I left the Cat and Bradshaw to log the damage reports and thanked Dr. Howard and his staff for their slavish attention. I decided to walk back home, across the storycode engine floor and down the empty corridors of the Great Library to the Well of Lost Plots and back to bed. I was feeling quite good about myself. I had run a team of highly skilled technicians and saved
The Scarlet Letter
from almost certain devastation. It would be one of my easier tasks as Bellman, but I didn’t know that yet. The evening had gone well. Landen would have been proud of me.

Falstaff, the three witches, Banquo’s ghost, Beatrice and Benedict — all kindly supplied by Shakespeare (William) Inc.

Our thanks to Mr. Heathcliff for graciously agreeing to appear in this novel.

Uriah Heep kindly loaned by Wickfield & Heep, attorneys-at-law.

My thanks to ScarletBea, Yan, Ben, Carla, Jon, Magda, AllAmericanCutie and Dave at the Fforde Fforum for their nominations in the Bookie Awards.

Hedgepig research,
Anna Karenina
footnoterphone gossip and “dodo egg” sarcasm furnished by Mari Roberts.

Solomon’s Judgments © The Council of Genres, 1986.

“Chocolate orange” joke used with the kind permission of John Birmingham.

UltraWord — the Ultimate Reading Experience™ remains a trademark of Text Grand Central.

Bookie category Best Dead Person in Fiction courtesy of C. J. Avery.

Fictionaut
wordsmithed by Jon Brierley.

Evilness consultant: Ernst Blofeld.

Mrs. Bradshaw’s gowns by Coco Chanel.

Aornis little-sister idea courtesy of Rosie Fforde.

Our grateful thanks to the Great Panjandrum for help and guidance in the making of this novel.

No unicorns were written expressly for this book, and no animals or Yahoos (other than grammasites) were harmed in its construction.

This novel was written in BOOK V8.3 and was sequenced using an Mk XXIV ImaginoTransferenceDevice. Peggy Malone was the imaginator. Plot Devices and Inciting Incidents supplied by Billy Budd’s Bargain Basement and the WOLP Plot Salvage and Recycling Corporation. Generics supplied and trained by St. Tabularasa’s. Holes were filled by apprentices at the Holesmiths’ Guild, and echolocation and grammatization were undertaken by Outland contractors at Hodder and Viking.

The “galactic cleansing” policy undertaken by Emperor Zhark is a personal vision of the emperor’s, and its inclusion in this work does not constitute tacit approval by the author or the publisher for any such projects, howsoever undertaken. Warning: The author may have eaten nuts while writing this book.

Extract from
Brideshead Revisited
by Evelyn Waugh (copyright © Evelyn Waugh, 1945) by permission of Peters, Fraser and Dunlop on behalf of the Evelyn Waugh Trust and the Estate of Laura Waugh.

Reference to the
Just So Stories
by Rudyard Kipling (copyright © The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty) by kind permission of A. P. Watt Ltd.

References to
Shadow the Sheepdog
by Enid Blyton by kind permission of Enid Blyton Limited and with thanks to Chorion plc.

Frederick Warne & Co. is the owner of all rights, copyrights, and trademarks in the Beatrix Potter character names and illustrations.

Extract from
Tiger Tiger
(copyright © Alfred Bester, 1955) by kind permission of the Estate of Alfred Bester and the Sayle Literary Agency.

1. “. . . This is WOLP-12 on the Well of Lost Plots’ own footnoterphone station, transmitting live on the hour every hour to keep you up-to-date with news in the Fiction Factory . . .”

2. “. . . After the headlines you can hear our weekly documentary show
WellSpeak
, where today we will discuss hiding exposition; following that there will be a
WellNews
special on the launch of the new Book Operating System, UltraWord™, featuring a live studio debate with WordMaster Xavier Libris of Text Grand Central . . .”

3. “. . . here are the main points of the news. Prices of semicolons, plot devices, prologues and inciting incidents continued to fall yesterday, lopping twenty-eight points off the TomJones Index. The Council of Genres has announced the nominations for the 923rd annual BookWorld Awards; Heathcliff is once again to head the Most Troubled Romantic Lead category, for the seventy-eighth year running . . .”

4. “. . . A new epic poem is to be constructed for the first time in eighty-seven years. Title and subject to be announced, but pundits reckon that it’s a pointless exercise: skills have all but died out. Next week will also see the launch of a new shopping chain offering off-the-peg narrative requisites. It will be called
Prêt-à-Écrire
 . . .”

1. “. . . Visit Aaron’s Assorted Alliteration Annex, the superior sellers of stressed-syllable or similar-sounding speech sequences since the sixteenth century. Stop soon and see us situated on floor sixteen, shelf six seventy-six . . .”

2. “. . . Visit Bill’s Dictionorium for every word you’ll ever need! From
be
to
antidisestablishmentarianism
, we have words to suit all your plotting needs — floor twelve, shelf seventy-eight . . .”

3. “. . . Soon to be launched: Ultra Word™ — the ultimate reading experience. For
free
information on the very latest Book Operating System and how its new and improved features will enhance your new book, call Text Grand Central on freefootnoterphone/ultraword
. . 
.”

4. “. . . Honest John’s Prefeatured Character salesroom for all your character needs! Honest John has Generics grade A-6 to D-9. Top bargains this week: Mrs. Danvers, choice of three, unused. +++Lady of Shallot cloned for unfinished remake; healthy A-6 in good condition. +++Group of unruly C-5s suitable for any crowd scene — call for details. Listen to our full listings by polling on footnoterphone/honestjohn . . .”

1. “Vera Tushkevitch! Can you hear me?”

“Yes, I’m here. No need to shout. You will deafen me, I’m sure!”

“I don’t trust these strange footnoterphone devices. I’m sure I’ll catch some nasty proletarian disease. Where did we last meet? At that party with the Schuetzburgs? The one where they served Apples Benedict?”

“No, Sofya, my husband and I were not invited. He voted against Count Schuetzburg at the last election.”

“Then it must have been at Bolshaia Marskaia with Princess Betsys. Whatever did happen to that Karenin girl, have you any idea?”

“Anna? Yes, indeed — but you must not tell a soul! Alexey Vronsky was smitten by her from the moment he saw her at the station.”

“The station? Which station?”

“St. Petersburg; you remember when a guard fell beneath the train and was crushed?”

“Anna and Vronsky met
there
? How terribly unsophisticated!”

“There is more, my dear Sofya. Wait — the doorbell! I must leave you; not a word to anyone and I will call again soon!”

1. “. . . Special on at St. Tabularasa’s Generic College — superior-quality Blocking Characters available now for instant location to your novel. From forbidding fathers to ‘by the book’ superior police officers, our high-quality Blockers will guarantee conflict from the simplest protagonist! Call freefoot-noterphone/St. Tabularasa’s for more details . . .”

2. “Vera? Is that you? What a day! All noise and rain. Do please carry on about Anna!”

“Well, Anna danced with Vronsky at the ball that night; he became her shadow and very much more!”