“Commander Bradshaw,” I interrupted, desperate to stop him from recounting one of his highly unlikely and overtly jingoistic adventures, “have you seen Miss Havisham this morning?”

  “Quite right to interrupt me,” he said cheerfully, “appreciate a woman who knows when to subtly tell a boring old fart to button his lip. You and Mrs. Bradshaw have a lot in common. You must meet up someday.”

  We walked down the busy corridor.2

  I tapped my ears.

  “Problems?” inquired Bradshaw.

  “Yes, I’ve got two gossiping Russians inside my head again.”

  “Crossed line? Infernal contraptions. Have a word with Plum at JurisTech if it persists. I say,” he went on, lowering his voice and looking round furtively, “you won’t tell anyone about that lion-attack sale, will you? If the story gets around that old Bradshaw is cashing in his Action Sequences, I’ll never hear the last of it.”

  “I won’t say a word,” I assured him as we avoided a trader trying to sell us surplus B-3 Darcy clones, “but do many people try and sell off parts of their own books?”

  “Oh, yes. But only if they are out of print and can spare it. Trouble is, I’m a bit strapped for the old moola. What with the BookWorld Awards coming up and Mrs. Bradshaw a bit shy in public, I thought a new dress might be just the ticket—and the cost of clothes are pretty steep down here, y’know.”

  “It’s the same in the Outland.”

  “Is it, by George?” he guffawed. “The Well always reminds me of the market in Nairobi; how about you?”

  “There seems to be an awful lot of bureaucracy. I would have thought a fiction factory would be, by definition, a lot more free and relaxed.”

  “If you think this is bad, you ought to visit nonfiction. Over there, the rules governing the correct use of a semicolon alone run to several volumes. Anything devised by man has bureaucracy, corruption and error hardwired at inception, m’girl. I’m surprised you hadn’t figured that out yet. What do you think of the Well?”

  “I’m still a bit new to it.”

  “Really? Let me help you out.”

  He stopped and looked around for a moment, then pointed out a man in his early twenties who was walking towards us. He was dressed in a long riding jacket and carried a battered leather suitcase emblazoned with the names of books and plays he had visited in his trade.

  “Yes?”

  “He’s an artisan—a holesmith.”

  “He’s a plasterer?”

  “No; he fills narrative holes—plot and expositional anomalies—bloopholes. If a writer said something like ‘The daffodils bloomed in summer’ or ‘They checked the ballistics report on the shotgun,’ then artisans like him are there to sort it out. It’s one of the final stages of construction just before the grammatacists, echolocators and spellcheckers move in to smooth everything over.”

  The young man had drawn level with us by this time.

  “Hello, Mr. Starboard,” said Bradshaw to the holesmith, who gave a wan smile of recognition.

  “Commander Bradshaw,” he muttered slightly hesitantly, “what a truly delightful honor it is to meet you again, sir. Mrs. Bradshaw quite well?”

  “Quite well, thank you. This is Miss Next—new at the department. I’m showing her the ropes.”

  The holesmith shook my hand and made welcoming noises.

  “I closed a hole in Great Expectations the other day,” I told him. “Was that one of your books?”

  “Goodness me, no!” exclaimed the young man, smiling for the first time. “Holestitching has come a long way since Dickens. You won’t find a holesmith worth his thread trying the old ‘door opens and in comes the missing aunt/father/business associate/friend, et cetera,’ all ready to explain where they’ve been since mysteriously dropping out of the narrative two hundred pages previously. The methodology we choose these days is to just go back and patch the hole, or more simply, to camouflage it.”

  “I see.”

  “Indeed,” carried on the young man, becoming more flamboyant in the light of my perceived interest, “I’m working on a system that hides holes by highlighting them to the reader, that just says, ‘Ho! I’m a hole, don’t think about it!’ but it’s a little cutting-edge. I think,” added the young man airily, “that you will not find a more experienced holesmith anywhere in the Well; I’ve been doing it for more than forty years.”

  “When did you start?” I asked, looking at the youth curiously. “As a baby?”

  The young man aged, grayed and sagged before my eyes until he was in his seventies and then announced, arms outstretched and with a flourish:

  “Da-daaaa!”

  “No one likes a show-off, Llyster,” said Bradshaw, looking at his watch. “I don’t want to hurry you, Tuesday, old girl, but we should be getting over to Norland Park for the roll call.”

  He gallantly offered me an elbow to hold and I hooked my arm in his.

  “Thank you, Commander.”

  “Stouter than stout!” Bradshaw said, laughing, and read us both into Sense and Sensibility.

  10.

  Jurisfiction Session No. 40319

  JurisTech: Popular contraction of Jurisfiction Technological Division. This R&D company works exclusively for Jurisfiction and is financed by the Council of Genres through Text Grand Central. Due to the often rigorous and specialized tasks undertaken by Prose Resource Operatives, Juris Tech is permitted to build gadgets deemed outside the usual laws of physics—the only department (aside from the SF genre) licensed to do so. The standard item in a PRO’s manifest is the TravelBook (qv), which itself contains other JurisTech designs like the Martin-Bacon Eject-O-Hat, Punctuation Repair Kit and textual sieves of various porosity, to name but a few.

  CAT FORMERLY KNOWN AS CHESHIRE,

  Guide to the Great Library

  THE OFFICES OF Jurisfiction were situated at Norland Park, the house of the Dashwoods in Sense and Sensibility. The family kindly lent the ballroom to Jurisfiction on the unspoken condition that Jane Austen books would be an area of special protection.

  Norland Park was located within a broad expanse of softly undulating grassland set about with ancient oaks. The evening was drawing on, as it generally did, when we arrived, and wood pigeons cooed from the dovecote. The grass felt warm and comfortable like a heavily underlaid carpet, and the delicate scent of pine needles filled the air.

  But all was not perfect in this garden of nineteenth-century prose; as we approached the house, there seemed to be some sort of commotion. A demonstration, in fact—the sort of thing I was used to seeing at home. But this wasn’t a rally about the price of cheese or whether the Whig party were dangerously right-wing and anti-Welsh, nor of whether Goliath had the right to force legislation compelling everyone to eat SmileyBurger at least twice a week. No, this demonstration was one you would expect to find only in the world of fiction.

  The Bellman, elected head of Jurisfiction and dressed in his usual garb of a town crier, was angrily tingling his bell to try to persuade the crowd to calm down.

  “Not again,” muttered Bradshaw as we walked up. “I wonder what the Orals want this time?”

  I was unfamiliar with the term Orals, and since I didn’t want to appear foolish, I tried to make sense of the crowd on my own. The person nearest to me was a shepherdess, although that was only a guess on my part as she didn’t have any sheep—only a large crook. A boy dressed in blue with a horn was standing next to her discussing the falling price of lamb, and next to them was a very old woman with a small dog who whined, pretended to be dead, smoked a pipe and performed various other tricks in quick succession. Standing next to her was a small man in a long nightdress and bed hat who yawned loudly. Perhaps I was being slow, but it was only when I saw a large egg with arms and legs that I realized who they were.

  “They’re all nursery rhyme characters!” I exclaimed.

  “They’re a pain in the whatsit, that’s what they are,” murmured Bradshaw as a small boy jumped from the crowd, grabbed a pig and made a dash for it. Bo-peep hooked his ankle with her crook, and the boy sprawled headlong on the grass. The pig rolled into a flower bed with a startled oink and then beat a hurried escape as a large man started to give the boy six of the best.

  “. . . all we want is the same rights as any other character in the BookWorld,” said Humpty-Dumpty, his ovoid face a deep crimson. “Just because we have a duty to children and the oral tradition doesn’t mean we can be taken advantage of.”

  The crowd murmured and grunted their agreement. Humpty-Dumpty continued as I stared at him, wondering whether his belt was actually a cravat, as it was impossible to tell which was his neck and which was his waist.

  “. . . we have a petition signed by over a thousand Orals who couldn’t make it today,” said the large egg, waving a wad of papers amidst shouts from the crowd.

  “We’re not joking this time, Mr. Bellman,” added a baker who was standing in a wooden tub with a butcher and a candlestick maker. “We are quite willing to withdraw our rhymes if our terms are not met.”

  There was a chorus of approval from the assembled characters.

  “It was fine before they were unionized,” Bradshaw whispered in my ear. “Come on, let’s take the back door.”

  We walked around to the side of the house, our feet crunching on the gravel chippings.

  “Why can’t characters from the oral tradition be a part of the Character Exchange Program?” I asked.

  “Who’d cover for them?” snorted Bradshaw. “You?”

  “Couldn’t we train up Generics as sort of, well, ‘character locums’?”

  “Best to leave industrial relations to the people with the facts at their fingertips. We can barely keep pace with the volume of new material as it is. I shouldn’t worry about Mr. Dumpty; he’s been agitating for centuries. It’s not our fault he and his badly rhyming friends are still looked after by the old OralTradPlus agreement—Good heavens, Miss Dashwood! Does your mother know that you smoke?”

  It was Marianne Dashwood and she had been puffing away at a small cigarette as we rounded the corner. She quickly threw the butt away and held her breath for as long as possible before coughing and letting out a large cloud of smoke.

  “Commander!” she wheezed, eyes watering. “Promise you won’t tell!”

  “My lips are sealed,” replied Bradshaw sternly, “just this once.”

  Marianne breathed a sigh of relief and turned to me. “Miss Next!” she enthused. “Welcome back to our little book. I trust you are well?”

  “Quite well,” I assured her, passing her the Marmite, Mintolas and AA batteries I had promised her from my last visit. “Will you make sure these get to your sister and mother?”

  She clapped her hands with joy and took the gifts excitedly. “You are a darling!” she said happily. “What can I do to repay you?”

  “Don’t let Lola Vavoom play you in the movie.”

  “Out of my hands,” she replied unhappily, “but if you need a favor, I’m here!”

  We made our way up the servants’ staircase and into the hall above where a much bedraggled Bellman was walking towards us, shaking his head and holding the employment demands that Humpty-Dumpty had thrust into his hands.

  “Those Orals get more and more militant every day,” he gasped. “They are planning a forty-eight-hour walkout tomorrow.”

  “What effect will that have?” I asked.

  “I should have thought that would be obvious,” chided the Bellman. “Nursery rhymes will be unavailable for recall. In the Outland there will be a lot of people thinking they have bad memories. It won’t do the slightest bit of good—a storybook is usually in reach wherever a nursery rhyme is told.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “The biggest problem,” added the Bellman, mopping his brow, “is that if we give in to the nursery rhymsters, everyone else will want to renegotiate their agreements—from the poeticals all the way through to nursery stories and even characters in jokes. Sometimes I’m glad I’m up for retirement—then someone like you can take over, Commander Bradshaw!”

  “Not me!” he said grimly. “I wouldn’t be the Bellman again for all the T’s in Little Tim Tottle’s twin sisters take time tittle-tattling in a tuttle-tuttle tree—twice.”

  The Bellman laughed and we entered the ballroom of Norland Park.

  “Have you heard?” said a young man who approached us with no small measure of urgency in his voice. “The Red Queen had to have her leg amputated. Arterial thrombosis, the doctor told me.”

  “Really?” I said. “When?”

  “Last week. And that’s not all.” He lowered his voice. “The Bellman has gassed himself!”

  “But we were just talking to him,” I replied.

  “Oh,” said the young man, thinking hard. “I meant Perkins has gassed himself.”

  Miss Havisham joined us.

  “Billy!” she said in a scolding tone. “That’s quite enough of that. Buzz off before I box your ears!”

  The young man looked deflated for a moment, then pulled himself up, announced haughtily that he had been asked to write additional dialogue for John Steinbeck and strode off. Miss Havisham shook her head sadly.

  “If he ever says ‘good morning,’ ” she said, “don’t believe him. All well, Trafford?”

  “Top-notch, Estella, old girl, top-notch. I bumped into Tuesday here in the Well.”

  “Not selling parts of your book, were you?” she asked mischievously.

  “Good heavens, no!” replied Bradshaw, feigning shock and surprise. “Goodness me,” he added, staring into the room for some form of escape, “I must just speak to the Warrington Unitary—I mean the authority of Cat—wait—I mean, the Cat formerly known as Cheshire. Good day!”

  And tipping his pith helmet politely, he was gone.

  “Bradshaw, Bradshaw,” sighed Miss Havisham, shaking her head sadly. “If he flogs one more inciting incident from Bradshaw Defies the Kaiser, it will have so many holes we could use it as a colander.”

  “He needed the money to buy a dress for Mrs. Bradshaw,” I explained.

  “Have you met her yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “When you do, don’t stare, will you? It’s very rude.”

  “Why would I—”

  “Come along! Almost time for roll call!”

  The ballroom of Norland Park had long since been used for nothing but Jurisfiction business. The floor space was covered with tables and filing cabinets, and the many desks were piled high with files tied up with ribbon. There was a table to one side with food upon it, and waiting for us—or the Bellman, at least—were the staff at Jurisfiction. About thirty operatives were on the active list, and since up to ten of them were busy on assignment and five or so active in their own books, there were never more than fifteen people in the office at any one time. Vernham Deane gave me a cheery wave as we entered. He was the resident cad and philanderer in a Daphne Farquitt novel entitled The Squire of High Potternews, but you would never know to talk to him—he had always been polite and courteous to me. Next to him was Harris Tweed, who had intervened back at the Slaughtered Lamb only the day before.

  “Miss Havisham!” he exclaimed, walking over and handing us both a plain envelope. “I’ve got your bounty for those grammasites you killed; I split it equally, yes?”

  He winked at me, then left before Havisham could say anything.

  “Thursday!” said Akrid Snell, who had approached from another quarter. “Sorry to dash off like that yesterday—hello, Miss Havisham—I heard you got swarmed by a few grammasites; no one’s ever shot six Verbisoids at one go before!”

  “Piece of cake,” I replied. “And, Akrid, I’ve still got that, er, thing you bought.”

  “Thing? What thing?”

  “You remember,” I urged, knowing that trying to influence his own narrative was strictly forbidden, “the thing. In a bag. You know.”

  “Oh! Ah . . . ah, yes,” he said, finally realizing what I was talking about. “The thing thing. I’ll pick it up after work, yes?”

  “Snell insider-trading again?” asked Havisham quietly as soon as he had left.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I’d do the same if my book was as bad as his.”

  I looked around to see who else had turned up. Sir John Falstaff was there, as was King Pellinore, Deane, Lady Cavendish, Mrs. Tiggy-winkle with Emperor Zhark in attendance, Gully Foyle, and Perkins.

  “Who are they?” I asked Havisham, pointing to two agents I didn’t recognize.

  “The one on the left holding the pumpkin is Ichabod Crane. Beatrice is the other. A bit loud for my liking, but good at her job.”

  I thanked her and looked around for the Red Queen, whose open hostility to Havisham was Jurisfiction’s least-well-kept secret; she was nowhere to be seen.

  “Hail, Miss Next!” rumbled Falstaff, waddling up and staring at me unsteadily from within a cloud of alcohol fumes. He had drunk, stolen and womanized throughout Henry IV parts I and II, then inveigled himself into Merry Wives of Windsor. Some saw him as a likable rogue; I saw him as just plain revolting—although he was the blueprint of likable debauchers in fiction everywhere, so I thought I should try to cut him a bit of slack.

  “Good morning, Sir John,” I said, trying to be polite.

  “Good morning to you, sweet maid,” he exclaimed happily. “Do you ride?”

  “A little.”

  “Then perhaps you might like to take a ride up and down the length of my merry England? I could take you places and show you things—”

  “I must politely decline, Sir John.”

  He laughed noisily in my face. I felt a flush of anger rise within me, but luckily the Bellman, unwilling to waste any more time, had stepped up to his small dais and tingled his bell.

  “Sorry to keep you all waiting,” he muttered. “As you have seen, things are a little fraught outside. But I am delighted to see so many of you here. Is there anyone still to come?”

  “Shall we wait for Godot?” inquired Deane.

  “Anyone know where he is?” asked the Bellman. “Beatrice, weren’t you working with him?”