I looked away as I said it and began to rearrange the objects on my desk. I suddenly felt hot and a bit peculiar and didn’t want to look Sprockett in the eye.
“As madam wishes.”
Sprockett bowed and withdrew, and I spent the next hour writing up a report for Herring. It wasn’t easy to write. Try as I might, I couldn’t make the report longer than forty words, and it deserved more than that. I managed at one point to write a hundred words, but after I’d taken out the bit about the epizeuxis worm and the scrubbed ISBN, it was down to only thirty-seven again. I decided to ask Whitby his hypothetical opinion and finish the report after lunch.
I called the Jurisfiction offices again to see if Thursday was available to talk.
“She’s still unavailable,” I reported as I trotted into the kitchen. “I might try to speak to her when I go over to deliver the report to Commander Herring this afternoon. Do you think I’m dressed okay for Whitby or should I . . .”
My voice had trailed off because something was wrong. Sprockett and Mrs. Malaprop were looking at me in the sort of way I imagine disgruntled parents might.
“You tell her,” said Mrs. Malaprop.
“It’s Whitby,” said Sprockett.
I suddenly had a terrible thought. This being fiction, long-unrequited romances often end in tragedy just before they finally begin, inevitably leading to a lifetime’s conjecture of what might have happened and all manner of tedious and ultimately overwritten soul-searching. The scenario was almost as hideous as actually losing Whitby.
“He’s dead?”
“No, ma’am, he’s not dead. At least he was still alive two minutes ago.”
“He was here? Why isn’t he here now?”
Sprockett coughed politely. “I am sorry to say, ma’am, that I had to send Mr. Jett away.”
I stared at him, scarcely believing what I was hearing. “Why would you do something like that?”
“I feel, ma’am, that he is unsuitable.”
“What?”
He showed me a newspaper clipping that was about two years old. “I exhort you to read it, ma’am, no matter how painful.”
So I did.
“It is the painful duty of this journalist,” went the article, “to report an act of such base depravity that it causes the worst excesses of Horror to pale into insignificance. Last Tuesday an unnamed man, for reasons known only to himself, set fire to a busload of nuns who were taking their orphaned puppies to a ‘How cute is your puppy?’ competition. Unfortunately, the perpetrator of this vile and heartless act is still at liberty, and . . .”
I stopped reading as a sense of confusion and disappointment welled up inside me. There was a picture accompanying the article, and even though the piece did not mention Whitby by name, there was a photograph of a man whom “Jurisfiction wanted to question.” It was Jett, without a doubt—holding a two-gallon gasoline can and chuckling. I didn’t really know what was worse—Whitby killing the busload of nuns or me having finally plucked up the courage to have lunch at the Elbow Rooms, only for the rug to be pulled from under my feet.
“Is this true?”
“I’m afraid so. I’m sorry, ma’am. Was I wrong to send him away?”
“No, you were right.”
I sighed and stared at the report I was carrying. “Better call a cab. I’m going to tell Herring what he wants to hear. At least that way someone gets to be happy today. You can come, too.”
It took me twenty minutes to coax Carmine out of her bedroom. I assured her it wasn’t so bad, because Sprockett had caught the goblin and recovered the swag, so he wasn’t technically a thief. I had to tell her that he wasn’t that unhandsome—for a goblin—and that no, I was sure he wasn’t just saying nice things to her so he could be invited across the threshold. I told her she was now on book duty, as I would be out for a while, and she replied, “Yes, okay, fine,” but wouldn’t look at me, so I left her staring angrily at the patterned wallpaper in the front room.
12.
Jurisfiction
Budgetary overruns almost buried the remaking before the planning stage, until relief came from an unexpected quarter. A spate of dodgy accounting practices in the Outland necessitated a new genre in Fiction: Creative Accountancy. Shunned by many as “not a proper genre at all,” the members’ skills at turning thin air into billion-dollar profits were suddenly of huge use, and the remaking went ahead as planned. Enron may have been a pit of vipers in the Outland, but they quite literally saved the BookWorld.
I took the bus to Le Guin Central and then the first train to HumDram/Classics. As the train slowly steamed from the station, I sat back and stared out the window. I was mildly interested to learn that Heathcliff was on the same train, although we didn’t see him—just a lot of screaming and fainting girls on the platform whenever we stopped. We halted briefly at Gaiman Junction before steaming on a wide arc to Shakespeare Terminus. There was a delay leaving the platform, as security was being taken a little more seriously than usual. A group of heavily armed Men in Plaid were scrutinizing everyone’s IDs.
“Do you think this is about the Racy Novel peace talks?” I asked a French Wilkins Micawber who was there on an exchange trip.
“ Mais oui. But I think ze CofG is being a leetle jittery ’bout Racy Novel,” he explained in a pointlessly overblown French accent. “Zey think zat zere may be fizz columnists eager to cause—’ow you say?—mischief. I’d not like to be without shirt and medallion while Barry White plays in ze background right now, I can tells you.”
“Reason for visit?” asked the Plaid on guard duty.
“I have to report to Mr. Lockheed regarding a crashed-book investigation.”
“Very well,” said the Plaid. “And what’s with the mechanical butler?”
“To lend tone to the proceedings.”
This was enough for the Man in Plaid, and with a gruff “Welcome to the Classics, have an eloquent day,” I was allowed to pass. On our way out of the station, I noticed a small group of characters who had been pulled aside. Some of the women wore miniskirts, tube tops and stilettos, and the men had shirts open to the navel. It seemed as though anyone even remotely resembling someone from Racy Novel was immediately under suspicion. They were protesting their innocence and complaining bitterly about the unfair character profiling, but to little avail.
We took a tram along Austen Boulevard and got out just outside the gates to Sense and Sensibility. This was a large compound, and a high wall topped with barbed wire surrounded the many settings that made up the book. On each corner were watchtowers, from which armed Plaids kept a constant lookout. Such tight security wasn’t just to protect the Dashwoods—the residence of Norland Park within Sense and Sensibility was also the headquarters of Jurisfiction, Fiction’s policing agency.
Waiting at the gates was a group of characters with day passes, ready for the tour. For some reason those in Sci-Fi had a thing about the classics, so of the twenty or thirty characters waiting, at least two-thirds were aliens. Since most of them hailed from the poor end of the genre, they had a lot of tentacles and left sticky trails after themselves, which caused no end of cleaning up.
“No clockwork automatons,” said one of the guards on duty. “You should know better than that, Miss Next.”
I had to explain that I wasn’t that Miss Next, and the guard peered closer at me, grunted and then explained that a Duplex-4 had suffered a mainspring failure several months before and killed eight bystanders, so all cog-based life-forms below the Duplex-6 had been banned.