One of Our Thursdays Is Missing - Jasper Fforde [122]
“Are journeys upriver usually like this?” I asked.
“Apparently so. How do they think they’re going to stop Speedy Muffler anyway?”
“By telling him that massed armies on the borders of WomFic and Dogma are waiting to invade if he so much as hiccups.”
“What makes you think Speedy Muffler is doing anything but rattling his saber? The only people who stand to gain by a war are the neighboring genres who get to divvy up the spoils.”
“I knew Speedy Muffler in the old days,” said one of the foreigners who had joined us, “long before the BookWorld was remade—even before Herring and Barksdale and that idiot Jobsworth were about.”
“What do you know about Speedy Muffler?”
“That he wasn’t always the leader of Racy Novel. He was once a minor character in Porn with delusions of grandeur. Muffler was up here in the days before Racy Novel, when the Frowned-Upon Genres were clustered in the north beyond Comedy. His name came to prominence when he quite suddenly started sending large quantities of metaphor downriver. He wasn’t licensed to do so, but because his supplies were consistent, the rules were relaxed. Pretty soon he was taking more and more territory for himself, but he kept on sending down the metaphor, and the CofG kept on turning a blind eye until he publicly proclaimed the area as Racy Novel, which was when the CofG started to take notice.”
“By then it was too late,” added Drake. “Speedy Muffler’s power was established, his genre large enough to demand a chair at the Council of Genres.”
“I guess WomFic/Feminism were none too happy?”
“Not overawed, no. Especially when he used to turn up at high-level summits with his shirt open and declaring that feminists needed to ‘loosen up’ and should groove with his love machine.”
“Is he still shipping metaphor downriver?” I asked.
“Not as much as before,” said Drake, “but still more than WomFic and Dogma. The area is rich in metaphor, and whoever can send the most downriver is the wealthiest. Put simply: Whoever controls the Northern Genres controls the metaphor supply, and whoever controls the supply of metaphor controls Fiction. It’s not by chance that WomFic and Crime have fortythree percent of the Outland readership. If Squid Procedural had been positioned up here, everyone would be reading about Decapod Gumshoes, and loving it.”
“So why isn’t Racy Novel read more than Women’s Fiction? If he sends more metaphor downriver, I mean?”
“Because of sanctions,” said Drake, looking at me oddly, “imposed by WomFic and Dogma—and pretty much everyone else. Like it or not, Racy Novel isn’t very highly thought of.”
“Is that fair?”
“You’re asking a lot of basic questions,” said Drake. “I thought Thursday Next would be well up on all this—especially if she’s here for the peace talks.”
“I need to gauge local opinion,” I said quickly. “This is Fiction, after all—interpretation trumps fact every time.”
“Oh,” said Drake, “I see.”
I excused myself, as Sprockett had just left the bar, and I caught up with him farther down the steamer, just outside the storeroom.
“Good afternoon, ma’am,” he whispered. “How is it going?”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m the bar steward.”
“I can see that.”
“I knew you couldn’t actually let me go,” he said. “I’m too good a butler for that. So I simply assumed you were being compassionate and thought this trip too dangerous for you to take staff. So I came anyway. What do you want me to do?”
I took a deep breath. It seemed as though butlers were like flat feet, dimples and troublesome aunts—you’ve got them for life.
“There’s a mysterious passenger in Cabin Twelve. I want you to find out what he’s doing here.”
“He doesn’t do anything—he’s simply the MP-C12. Have you figured out who the fodder is yet?”
“It’s Drake.”
“Ooh. Will he be eaten by a crocodile? A poison dart in the eye?”
“Just find out what you can about the mysterious passenger, would you? I overheard him say, ‘I won’t take