“Where would you like me to start?” I asked.
“At the beginning,” said Jobsworth, “and don’t stop until you get to the end.”
I took a deep breath and showed them the map Lyell had drawn.
“We won’t find out exactly how she knew until we find her, but the real Thursday Next became aware that there might exist a huge quantity of raw metaphor under the Northern Genres. Such a state of affairs would throw the entire power balance of Fiction on its head, so she needed to make sure. She took leading geologist Sir Charles Lyell up-country to conduct some test drilling, and it seems she was right. Buried beneath Racy Novel are the largest reserves of untapped metaphor the BookWorld has ever seen.”
I had everyone’s attention by now—you could have heard a pin drop.
“It was potentially explosive news, and Thursday knew that she would be in severe danger if this got out—so she hid among the flat Thursdays out in Fan Fiction. Despite her precautions, her activities were being scrutinized without her knowledge, and Thursday—reliably touted as ‘the second-hardest person to kill in the BookWorld’—had to be gotten rid of. A cabbie named the Mediocre Gatsby was bribed to hang around Fan Fiction on the off chance she would want picking up. A previously scrapped book called The Murders on the Hareng Rouge was being kept in Vanity and as soon as she was in the cab, the book was dispatched to the Council of Genres. Mediocre piggybacked the book for the trip as instructed, and a second later a rhetorical device was detonated, leaving the book, the cabbie and, it was hoped, Thursday herself little more then textual confetti—a million graphemes littered all over Fiction.”
There was silence, so I carried on. “That might have been the end of it. Most of the book was just small, tattered remnants not dissimilar to the usual detritus that flutters occasionally from the heavens and is absorbed into the ground, except that for some reason, Adrian Dorset described a bed-sitting room so well that it survived the sabotage intact and came to rest in Conspiracy, and JAID had to be alerted. This was tricky, because a diligent investigator might start to ask awkward questions, so Lockheed was ordered to employ his most useless investigator to look into it. Me. And that’s not a coincidence. Why would that be, Sprockett?”
“There are no coincidences in the BookWorld—so long as you don’t count the last chapters in some of Charles Dickens’s books.”
“Exactly. But we do find problems—the fact that someone scrubbed off the ISBN to avoid discovery, and the epizeuxis device. And as we look, we find ourselves one step behind the Men in Plaid, who are silencing anyone who had anything to do with the attempted hit on Thursday Next.”
“Rogue Men in Plaid?” said Emperor Zhark in an accusatory tone, staring at Jobsworth and Herring—the two who were responsible for them.
“Scrubbed ISBN?” demanded Jobsworth. “Dead geologists? Epizeuxis devices? Who is responsible for this outrage?”
“One of us present here.”
They all looked at one another.
“It was little things to begin with—things that didn’t click until later. I learned from Adrian Dorset that he destroyed The Murders on the Hareng Rouge a month back, yet it was still floating around Vanity waiting to intercept Thursday. The rules state that it has to be scrapped immediately—on Red Herring’s signature.”
They all looked at Herring, who had started to go pale.
“He controls the Book Transit Authority, and also the Men in Plaid. He’s the second-in-command to the BookWorld, but he wanted more. He was after the top job and, what’s more, control of the vast stores of metaphor that are lying under Racy Novel. He knew that whoever controlled the metaphor would control Fiction.”
“But how could he control Speedy Muffler and Racy Novel?” asked Zhark.
“That’s the clever bit. He planned to invade—using an army mustered from one of the most powerful genres on the island.”
“Women’s Fiction?” said Colonel Barksdale with a smirk. “Not possible. They have neither the manpower nor the inclination.”
Emperor Zhark and Jobsworth nodded their heads vigorously; WomFic was wholly against any sort of warfare and had agreed to sanctions only as a last resort.
“Not WomFic,” I said. “A smaller subgenre with enough shock troops to take on the Fourteenth Clown and win. A genre that has for many years been the buffer zone between WomFic and Racy Novel. A genre that has successfully blended raciness and euphemism to create an empire that sells books by the billion—Daphne Farquitt. More readers than almost any other writer, and eighteen percent of total global readership.”
“They don’t have any troops,” scoffed Barksdale. “You’re mistaken.”
I chose my words carefully. Despite recent events, I’d be pushing my luck if I admitted I’d been in the RealWorld.
“Today is Daphne Farquitt Day in the Outland. As we speak, a massive readathon is in progress. At even conservative estimates, there must be upwards of two hundred million readers making their way through Farquitt’s three hundred seventy-two novels. There will be speed-reading events, trivia quizzes and read-ins. The power of the Feedback Loop will be astronomical—and easy enough to create an unstoppable army of ditzy romantic heroines and their lantern-jawed potential husband/lovers.”
“The nurses, secretaries and medical equipment you saw at Middle Station?”
“ Exactly,” I replied. “Not civilians at all—but the romantically involved honored dead. The Farquitt Army was working against Racy Novel by taking a preemptive strike and eradicating any possible threat from Speedy Muffler’s allies in Comedy. With members of the peace envoy all assassinated in an apparent Muffler attack, there would be no opposition to the total and complete invasion of Racy Novel by the Farquitt Army and, with it, control of the vast stocks of metaphor beneath our feet.”
There was silence in the room. They all looked stunned. Barksdale was the first to speak.
“That explanation,” he said in admiration, “was of a complexity that would gather plaudits from even the most intractable of political thrillers. With all of us dead in an attack that could be blamed on Speedy Muffler, Red Herring would step into the top slot, direct his allies to annex Racy Novel, secure the metaphor and set himself up as supreme dictator of Fiction.”
“It’s a brilliant scheme,” murmured Zhark in admiration.
“I’ll definitely be using it on the Rambosians next week. The little devils. They love a good subjugation. Senator?”
“A plan of titanic proportions. If he weren’t going to be erased for treason, I’d offer him a job.”
Red Herring was starting to shake when he heard this. He tried to speak, but only a strangled squeak came out.
“Might I make an observation?” asked Sprockett.
“Go ahead,” replied Jobsworth, who was now in a generous mood.
“Mr. Herring is here with us now—how could he seize power if he was assassinated along with the rest of us?”
Barksdale’s and Zhark’s faces fell, and even Jobsworth’s smile dropped from his face. They looked at me.
“Simple,” I said, placing my hand on Herring’s shoulder. “This isn’t Red Herring. Figuring that out was the key to the whole thing.”
“That’s absurd,” remarked Jobsworth. “We were discussing the minutiae of the peace talks on the way in. He can’t be anything but.”
“I assure you,” said Faux Herring, who had finally managed to find his voice. “I’m not Red Herring.”
“He’s right,” I said. “This is Herring’s stunt double, Fallon Hairbag. He took Herring’s place when Red Herring made his escape in the boat’s tender.”
“You’re the mysterious passenger?” asked Zhark, and the Herring-that-wasn’t nodded unhappily.
“Mr. Herring promised me the pick of all the stunt work in the BookWorld if I did this for him. He said it was for a prank. That it would be funny.”