One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (39 page)

“Is this a garrison town?” I asked.

“No,” replied the adventurer.

“Then what’s a lance corporal of the Fourteenth Motorized Clown doing up here?”

The corpse was indeed a member of Comedy’s frontline troops. He had orange hair, a bulbous red nose, and he was wearing camouflage battle dress, along with a pair of size-twenty-eight shoes. Not much good for marching and a hangover from their days as an Alpine regiment.

Drake placed his hand on the clown’s bright red nose.

“Still warm,” he said, “probably been dead less than an hour. Any thoughts?”

“I don’t know,” I said, picking up a nurse’s hat from the ground. A little farther on, a stethoscope was lying broken in the dust. “But it wasn’t just clowns who died here today.”

We walked some more and came across a dozen or so other bodies. All clowns, all dead and none meant to be here. Bawdy Romp was within Racy Novel’s control and officially a demilitarized zone.

“This doesn’t make sense,” said Drake. “Comedy never had any beef with Racy Novel. Quite the reverse—they actually got on very well. Without Racy Novel, Comedy would be very poor indeed—especially for the stand-ups.”

“Let’s not hang around. Where did the captain say the coal was?”

We walked deeper into the station and saw more evidence of a pitched battle having taken place not long before. We found the remains of several burned-out clown cars; despite their being able to drive in either direction and having a device for shedding all the body work in order to lighten the vehicle for a speedy getaway, it hadn’t done any good. There was evidence of atrocities, too. Medical staff had been killed. I noted several pretty nurses and a handsome doctor lying in a doorway, and several crash carts were strewn about. There were a few dead rustic serving wenches, too, a ripped bodice and a couple of horses with ruggedly handsome and now very dead riders lying in the road amidst scorched brickwork and smoking rubble. We came across more dead clowns; it seemed as though an entire company had been wiped out.

“Looks like someone was making sure Comedy couldn’t come to Racy Novel’s aid,” observed Drake.

“It makes me wonder why we’re bothering with peace talks. Crocodile.”

“What?”

“Behind you.”

Drake jumped out of the way as the crocodile’s jaws snapped shut. “Thank you.”

“Now do you believe you might be the fodder?” I asked.

Drake thought for a moment. “He could have been trying to eat his way through me to get to you.”

“Sure,” I said with a smile, “and while we’re on the subject: If I were the fodder, why didn’t you warn me? I warned you.”

“Because I . . . didn’t want to ruin your day?”

“How very generous of you.”

We found the coal heap amidst a few more civilians—this time pretty secretaries who had died in the arms of their bosses. We filled a couple of wheelbarrows with coal before returning to the steamer. As soon as we were aboard, the crew slipped the moorings and the captain ordered, “Astern slow,” and swung the bows into the limpid river. We took the left branch up the tributary known as the Innuendo, and pretty soon the steamer was at full speed once more. Despite others’ misgivings, Jobsworth seemed adamant that the peace talks should go ahead.

37
.

W
e convened in the bar soon afterwards and related everything we had seen at the Middle Station. Colonel Barksdale, Herring, Zhark and Senator Jobsworth listened carefully to all we had to say but didn’t seem to have any better idea of what was going on than we did.

“There is no reason for the Fourteenth Motorized Clown to be this far north,” declared Colonel Barksdale angrily. “It is a flagrant breach of numerous peace agreements and specifically the 1996 Clown Army Proliferation Treaty.”

“Shouldn’t you have known about it?” asked Emperor Zhark, who knew better than most the value of intelligence.

“The Textual Sieve network is patchy up here,” replied Barksdale in a sulky tone. “We can’t know everything. I can only think the Fourteenth Clown must have been massing in the demilitarized zone as the potential allies of Racy Novel.”

“Then who killed them and all the civilians?” asked the adventurer, to which question there didn’t seem to be much of an answer. They all fell silent for a moment.

“When do we meet with the other delegates?” asked Jobsworth.

“In an hour,” replied Herring. “Aunt Augusta of WomFic and Cardinal Fang of Outdated Religious Dogma are meeting us at Fanny Hill. Would you excuse me? We’re out of footnoterphone range, and I’m going to have to send a message to the council via the shortwave colophone.”

Drake and I were dismissed, as Jobsworth, Barksdale and Zhark had decided to discuss the finer points of the peace talks, something to which we could not be privy.

“I’m going to freshen up before we get there,” said Drake, “and maybe rub on some crocodile repellent.”

I laughed, saw he was serious, turned the laugh into a cough and said, “Good idea.”

We were now well within Racy Novel, and the rustling of bushes, the groans and squeaks of delight echoed in from the riverbanks, where large privet hedges were grown to afford some sort of privacy for the residents. Every now and then, a slip in the riverbank allowed us a brief glimpse of what went on, which was generally several scantily dressed people running around in a gleeful manner—usually in a bedroom somewhere, but occasionally in the outdoors and once on the top deck of a London bus.

I made my way forward, where I was met by Sprockett, who beckoned me into a laundry cupboard.

“I took the opportunity to go through the mysterious passenger’s belongings, ma’am.”

“And?”

“I came across some shoulder pads, knee pads, a chest protector and a gallon of fire retardant.”

“
What?
”

“Shoulder pads—”

“I heard. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

“What doesn’t?”

“All of it. From beginning to end. We reach Fanny Hill in half an hour, and the peace talks begin as soon as we are escorted to Pornucopia. It’s time to go over what we’ve found. I feel the answer is staring me in the face.”

“Shouldn’t we gather all the suspects in the bar?” asked Sprockett, who was fast becoming infected by the
Metaphoric Queen
’s capacity for narrative formulaicism.

“No. And another thing—”

I was interrupted by a cry from outside, and the engine went to slow ahead. We stepped out of the laundry cupboard to see several crewmen run past, and we followed them to the upper rear deck, from where we could see across the top of the sternwheel. Behind us in midstream was a figure in one of the riverboat’s four-man tenders. The man was rowing in a measured pace away from the boat, and given our forward speed, the distance between the two craft was rapidly increasing.

“Who is it?” asked Herring.

“It looks like the mysterious passenger from Cabin Twelve,” replied Drake, who had a small telescope, as befits an adventurer. “He’s even taken his luggage with him.”

“What’s the meaning of this?” asked Jobsworth, who had just arrived.

Herring explained, and Jobsworth looked at us all in turn. “Let me see.”

He peered through the telescope for a moment. “He’s taken his luggage with him.”

“That’s what I said,” remarked Drake.

“Mr. Herring,” said Jobsworth, “what’s going on here?”

“I’ve no idea, Senator.”

“Advice?”

“Um . . . carry on?”

“Sounds good to me. Captain?”

“Sir?”

“Carry on.”

But the captain, long a riverman, knew more of the perils that can be found on the Metaphoric.

“We can’t leave him out here, sir. The forests are full of Sirens eager to . . . well, how can I put it? He’ll be captured and made to . . . Listen, he’ll be killed.”

“Will it be quick?”

“No—it will be long and very drawn out. He might enjoy it to begin with, but he will eventually be discarded, a shriveled husk of a man devoid of any clothes, humanity or moisture.”

But the senator was made of sterner stuff.

“This mission is too important to delay, Captain. The mysterious passenger formerly of Cabin Twelve will have to remain exactly that. In every campaign there are always casualties. Full ahead.”

“Yes, sir.”

And they all walked away. The engines ran up to full speed again, and after a few more minutes the small boat was lost to view behind an overhanging tree on a bend in the river.

“I guess that’s what mysterious passengers do,” said Drake with a shrug. “Be mysterious. Drink?”

“I’ll see you down there,” I replied. “I must admonish this bar steward for the lamentable lack of quality in his Tahiti Tingle.”

Drake nodded and moved off, and Sprockett and I sat on the curved bench on the upper rear deck to discuss recent events. From the epizeuxis to the mimefield to the Men in Plaid to Sir Charles Lyell and the bed-sitting room.

“What had Thursday discovered that was so devastating to the peace process?” asked Sprockett.

“I don’t know. I wish to Panjandrum I were more like her.”

I took the sketch I had found in Sir Charles’s office out of my pocket. It was a map of Racy Novel with WomFic to one side and Dogma on the other. There was a shaded patch the shape of a tailless salmon that was mostly beneath Racy Novel.

As I stared at the picture, I felt a sudden flush of new intelligence, as though a jigsaw had been thrown into the air and landed fully completed. Everything that had happened to me over the past few days had been inexorably pointing me in one direction. But up until now I’d been too slow or stupid to be able to sift the relevant facts from the herrings.

“By all the spell checkers of Isugfsf,” I said, pointing at Lyell’s sketch. “It’s
metaphor.
A trillion tons of the stuff waiting to be mined, lying beneath our feet!”

“Yes?” said Sprockett, his eyebrow pointing at “Doubtful.”

“That’s what Lyell and Thursday had discovered,” I said excitedly. “It’s as Drake said: ‘Whoever controls the supply of metaphor controls Fiction.’”

“If so,” said Sprockett carefully, “Racy Novel would be sending more metaphor downriver than anyone else. And they’re not.”

I thought about this for a moment. “Maybe Speedy Muffler isn’t bad at all. Perhaps he’s defending the metaphor against greedy genres intent on mining it to exhaustion. Metaphor should be controlled—a glut on the market would make Fiction overtly highbrow, painfully ambiguous and potentially unreadable. The new star on the horizon would be the elephant in the room that might lead the BookWorld into a long winter’s night.”

“That would be frightful,” replied Sprockett, recoiling in terror as the overmetaphorication hit him like a hammer. “But how does that explain the Fourteenth Clown’s destruction? Or even who’s responsible for all this?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “but Senator Jobsworth needs to hear about it.”

I jumped up and ran down the companionway to the captain’s cabin, nearly colliding with Red Herring on the way.

“Sorry,” he said, “I’m just going to find a doughnut—do you want one?”

“No thank you, sir.”

I found Senator Jobsworth discussing the talks with Emperor Zhark and Colonel Barksdale.

“Have you seen Herring?” asked Jobsworth. “He should really be going through the final details with us.”

“He went to get a doughnut.”

“He did? Leave us now. We’re very busy.”

“I have important information. I think I know why Thursday was assassinated.”

Jobsworth stared at me. “Thursday’s dead?”

“Well, no, because her imagination is still alive. It was an assassination
attempt
—in a crummy book written by Adrian Dorset.”

“Adrian Dorset?”

“Jack Schitt, if you must. It was the epizeuxis that got her. And Mediocre.”

“Who’s Mediocre?”

“Gatsby.”

“He’s anything but mediocre, my girl.”

And both he and Zhark laughed in a patronizing sort of way.

“Seriously,” I said hotly, “Thursday was attacked, and the reason—”

“Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s
fascinating,
” said Jobsworth, “but it’s going to have to wait. We enter the subgenre Racy Classics in five minutes and meet with the other delegates in forty-five. We have much work to do. If you really want to be helpful, make me a cup of tea or go find Herring.”