My Hero Tom Holt.

by My Hero (lit)

  This is called Dramatic Licence. If you want to be a character, you apply for one at your local Editing Station by lodging the appropriate application form in triplicate, five passport-sized photographs and the administration fee.

  Woe betide the character whose licence is revoked, because he'll never work in the business again. They don't even tell you when they do it, so that the first you know is when you jump from the speeding train, hit the deck and go SPLAT!

  The grounds for revocation are Byzantine in their complexity, but the gist of them seems to be that characters aren't allowed to cheat; in other words, they can do impossible things, but only if they're in character and appropriate to the situation and the general world-view of the book. Accordingly, James Bond can get away with things that would get Tom Sawyer struck off instantaneously, and the hero of a fantasy can do pretty well what he pleases provided that they're the sort of thing he ought to be doing anyway. This, of course, begs the question; but, since there's a fair chance that by the time a fantasy novel is past its first hundred pages only twenty per cent of the readers (not necessarily including the author) have the foggiest idea what's going on anyway, the authorities are usually prepared to be flexible.

  There's flexible, however, and there's being taken for a sucker; and if there's one thing the Editorial Department can't be doing with, it's being taken for a sucker. If you anticipate trying that, make sure you have a real parachute handy before jumping, even if only to a slightly farfetched conclusion.

  For the record, there is an appeal procedure if you disagree with the revocation of your licence, and one of these days it'll undoubtedly be tried out, just as soon as a disenfranchised character survives long enough to contact his lawyer.

  'So?' Skinner asked. 'What's the plan?'

  Regalian wiped whisky off his chin and shook his head. 'There isn't one,' he said. 'There's only a plot.' He gestured to the bartender for another, and sighed. 'And that may be something of an overstatement,' he added. 'She's absolutely bloody hopeless at plots. Usually we get to page three hundred and fifty and stop. When we're absolutely stuck, she gets all mystical, Which is a real drag, let me tell you. Millions of bloody adjectives. I try to ration her to three a sentence, but it's an uphill struggle.'

  'I see,' Skinner said. 'That's going to make things awkward, isn't it?'

  'Probably.' Regalian sipped his whisky and shuddered. 'Still, we can only give it a go, can't we? We're probably going to die in the attempt, but that's the writing business for you.'

  Skinner's head dropped. 'I don't know,' he said. 'Maybe I was hoping for too much. I thought you might know some sort of back way out or something; where the loose bricks are in the wall, if you see what I mean.'

  'There aren't any,' Regalian replied. 'Except for the Library of Congress, of course, and that's just a myth.'

  'Library of...

  The hero shrugged. 'Old character's tale,' he explained. 'According to literary tradition, there's a weak spot in the fiction/reality interface somewhere in the cellars of the Library of Congress building in Washington. You know, where they have a copy of every book ever written, or something along those lines? The theory is that the concentration of so much fiction in one place has sort of rubbed a hole, and if you can find it you can get into any book you like, and out again too, presumably. But like I said, it's just a legend.'

  'Pity.'

  'It is, rather. No, what I had in mind was something a bit more practical.'

  Skinner finished his drink and propped his elbows on the bar. 'Go on,' he said.

  'Alice in Wonderland,' Regalian said.

  'Come again?'

  'Alice,' Regalian repeated, 'in Wonderland. Now according to something I read in one of the technical journals, there's a sporting chance that there's an airlock in there somewhere, if only we could find it.'

  Skinner raised an eyebrow. 'Just a second,' he interrupted. 'Let's just get this straight. You're saying that if we could somehow get into Alice in Wonderland, there may be a way of getting home?'

  Regalian shrugged. 'Depends,' he said, 'on what you call home. If you're lucky and there is an airlock in there, you'd probably find you'd come out again somewhere in the nineteen nineties. Still, at least it'd be the real world and you wouldn't have people trying to kill you all the time.'

  Skinner thought about it for a second or so, and then nodded. 'What've I got to lose?' he said. 'All tight, how does it work?'

  'Like this.' Regalian leaned forward. 'Now, you've read the book?'

  Skinner nodded. 'A long time ago, mind,' he added. 'On a train, I think.'

  'Wherever, it doesn't matter. Now, do you remember the scene with the bottle marked DRINK ME and the cake marked EAT ME?'

  'Vaguely.'

  'Fine. That's the stuff we need. One of them, haven't the faintest which, makes you grow smaller. And it's a known fact that if you're small enough, you can get out of the system by crawling out the back of the word processor and down the electric flex. You'd have to take some of the other stuff with you so you could get back to normal size, but that's no problem.'

  'I see,' said Skinner, who knew as much about computers as, say, Orville and Wilbur Wright knew about flying a Boeing 747. 'And this is known to work, is it? This crawling down flexes stuffy I mean?'

  Regalian made a wry face. 'Not exactly,' he said. 'On account of there not being any characters small enough to fit in a cable or daft enough to try. But the theory's one hundred per cent rock solid. Well, maybe eighty per cent, say mud solid. It's the best offer you're going to get.'

  'Then we might as well try,' Skinner replied. 'Since we're going to get killed long before we get there ...

  'Quite,' Regalian said. 'Better to travel hopefully, as the saying goes. The real problem, of course, is getting out of this book and into Alice. That's,' he added with a sad smile, 'one hundred and ten per cent impossible.'

  'Is it?'

  'Yes. No question about that whatsoever.'

  'Oh.'

  'Which means we'll have to cheat.'

  'I see. Is that possible?'

  Regalian stood up and laid a dollar on the bar. The bartender picked it up without looking at it and wandered away. 'Oh yes,' he replied. 'Cheating's easy. Provided, of course, you follow the rules.'

  The sun shone. Sheep bleated respectfully in neatly hedged fields on the hillside overlooking the old stone manor house, while carriage-wheels crunched on the gravel of the drive. Mr Darcy put on his hat and set out for his morning stroll. Another fine day in the works of Jane Austen.

  BANG! Suddenly, the air in front of him grew thick, and out of it stepped a terrifying apparition. Horrified, Darcy started to back away, as the cloud of sparkling fuzz grew slowly more solid and resolved itself into two human shapes...

  One tall and lean, one shorter, fatter and older; both dressed in crude working clothes of a design that Darcy had never seen before; both uncouth and desperate looking, with a wild gleam in their eyes.

  He was just about to drop his stick and run when the taller man smiled, tipped his hat and said, 'Good morning, Mr Darcy. Exceedingly clement weather for the time of year, is it not?'

  And then, with a feeling of great foolishness and no little bewilderment, Darcy saw that the two men were in fact dressed in the latest London fashion, in long tail-coats and knee-breeches and tall black hats, and he recognised them as Mr Skinner and Sir Humphrey Regalian, the two gentlemen who had taken Ardleigh Manor for the summer.

  'Exceedingly clement,' he agreed. They all tipped their hats again, and parted; Darcy to continue his stroll, Skinner and Regalian wandering at no great pace towards the house.

  'How the fuck,' muttered Skinner, 'did you do that?'

  Regalian grinned. 'I cheated,' he said. 'It's a piece of cake, like I said. Whether it actually gets us any further forward is another matter entirely.'

  By way of explanation, he reached in the side pocket of his coat and produced a small, leather-bound book. Skinner opened it and nearly fell ove
r.

  'Dear God,' he said. 'It's my goddamn book!'

  Regalian nodded. 'More or less,' he said. 'We call it a monitor. It's like a sort of teleprompter. You'll see the pages in the second half of the book are still all blank.'

  'But it's the book I was writing when I got into this mess,' Skinner said, pointing to the first page. 'I can remember every word of it.'

  Regalian nodded. 'Quite,' he said. 'And if you read on, you'll find all your adventures over the last thirty-odd years, described in your own distinctive brand of uniquely vile prose.. Now,' he went on, 'look up the last page with any printing on.'

  Skinner did so; and read:

  As Kid Regalian sat in the noisy bar of the Lucky Strike Saloon, his hand strayed to his pocket and he found himself looking at the book he had taken from the body of his first wife, the schoolmarm, on the day all those years ago when he had come home to find the place had been raided by Ragged Bear's renegade Comanches. He glanced at the spine and made out, despite the charring and the bloodstains, the words 'Pride and Prejudice'. Almost of its own accord the book fell open in his hands, and he began to read.

  'Mr Collins was not left long to the silent contemplation of his successful love,' he read, 'for at that moment the arrival of Mr Skinner and Sir Humphrey Regalian was announced, and he rose at once to greet them ...

  'Oh for Chrissakes,' Skinner exclaimed. 'We'll never get away with this!'

  'You'd be amazed,' Regalian replied, raising his hat and nodding affably to some large woman in a big puffy dress. 'The only problem is that you can only go backwards. Logical, really; a character can't read a book that hasn't been written yet. Also, to be perfectly frank with you, it's completely arbitrary which book you end up in.'

  'Is it? But I thought ...

  Regalian smiled sheepishly. 'Depends entirely on the book the character happens to be carrying in his pocket at the time,' he said. 'And that depends on who the character is, and his motivation and stuff like that. For some reason, it was dramatically right I should be reading-' He indicated his surroundings with a broad, encircling gesture. '-this drivel while sitting in the Lucky Strike waiting for Butch Donovan to turn up for the big showdown. Just count yourself lucky. Given the circumstances, it might very easily have been the Bible, and then we'd really be in the smelly.'

  All this was a bit much for Skinner, who basically wanted a quiet life with regular meals and a radio tuned in to the baseball. Instead of making any comment, therefore, he shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

  'Fine,' he said. 'Thank you for explaining so clearly. What do we do now?'

  Regalian returned the shrug. 'I believe the phrase is, Go with the flow. Of course, it would help tremendously if we had access to a library.'

  'They've probably got a library in there,' Skinner said, pointing with his cane at the big house. 'That sort of library?'

  'It'll do for now, I expect,' Regalian answered. 'Look, how about this? We go in, you keep them talking and I'll try and sneak into the library and see if anything suggests itself. Okay?'

  Skinner was about to reply when a voice inside his coat said, 'Yeah, sounds fine. And if anybody tries anything, we'll just blast our way out. In fact, we could save time and go in there shooting to start with.'

  Skinner groaned. 'Oh for Pete's sake, you're not still here, are you?' he said. 'Why didn't you stay behind? I expect you'd have found some nice, compatible psychopath you could have teamed up with if only you'd looked hard enough.'

  'Yeah,' agreed the Scholfield. 'The thought did cross my mind. Still, stand by your man, that's what being a personal sidearm is all about.'

  Before Regalian could ask for footnotes, Skinner smiled weakly at him and said, 'Don't worry, it's only my gun. Long story. It's no bother really so long as you ignore it.'

  'Hey!'

  Regalian nodded. 'I know the feeling,' he said. 'I got lumbered with a magic sword once. Nattered away nineteen to the dozen when I was trying to sleep. As soon as the book was over I chucked it in a bush somewhere.'

  'Hey!'

  * * *

  The bounty hunter should have been played by Jack Palance; but, since Skinner's works had never attracted the interest of a producer, he just looked like Mr Palance. Rather more, in fact, than Mr Palance ever did himself.

  About twenty minutes after Regalian and Skinner left the Lucky Strike, he barged into it, accompanied by five heavies armed with rifles. He marched to the bar and attracted the bartender's attention by poking a cocked .44 Frontier in his ear.

  'Okay,' he purred. 'The two guys who came in here earlier. One tall and thin, the other short and kinda fat, not much hair. Where are they?'

  'You just missed them, Mr O'Shea,' the bartender replied. 'Say, would you mind being a bit careful with that thing?'

  'Yes,' O'Shea replied. 'Now, you gonna tell me which way they went, or do I get careless?'

  'Um,' said the bartender. 'You're asking something there, boss.'

  'Am I?'

  'Yeah.'

  O'Shea nuzzled the barrel of the gun a little further into the bartender's ear. 'You're right there,' he said. 'I'm asking where those two sons of bitches got to. I'm waiting.'

  'You ain't gonna like this.'

  'Try me.'

  Slowly, trying not to move his head at all, the bartender pointed at a small, leather-bound book lying open on the bar top.

  'They went thattaway,' he said.

  Jane switched off the screen and sat back in her chair.

  From the spare bedroom came the disturbing sound of Hamlet snoring through a nose held on with Copydex and fishing line. No point in trying to sleep, even if she'd felt in the mood.

  She had a bad feeling about all of this. All right, she had spoken blithely about bringing the boys home by Christmas, but she couldn't help worrying about all the things that could go wrong. Regalian hadn't exactly stressed these points, but he had dropped large hints; particularly about the risks involved in moving from one book to another. The theory alone was terrifying.

  The main risk, according to Regalian, was snap-back. Because, when you broke into another book, you were simultaneously still in the book you came from, there was a material danger that you could be whisked back into your own book without any warning, simply because it was artistically right. The more books you broke into, the greater the risk became, obviously; although there was apparently a break-even point you could reach if you managed to jump far enough, by which stage you were so far removed from where you'd started that you were into the avant-garde and nobody would dare to presume to say what was aesthetically correct. This was, apparently, known as the Booker Effect.

  The other nasty one was the principle whereby you could only go back, to a book written earlier than the one you were breaking out of. There was a loophole in this rule, Regalian had assured her; but it had never been tried in practice, and to make it work, it sounded as if you had to be one hell of a novelist. Jane had always been profoundly realistic about her talent, and the thought of the kind of writing she was going to be called upon to do made her feel distinctly uncomfortable.

  Although she was ashamed to admit it, the part that really got to her was the thought that she was doing all this writing with no prospect whatsoever of anybody publishing it. Not that she was mercenary or anything; but the man at the bank who wrote her the letters with the word 'unless' in them undoubtedly was, and she did of course have a book of her own to finish. Added to which, there was a danger that if something went wrong, she was going to lose her hero; which would leave her in an embarrassing position, to say the least. It wasn't that she was fond of him exactly, because he was only a character in a book - one that she'd dreamed up herself, at that - but she didn't want anything nasty to happen to him, or at least not unless it got her out of a hole with her plot.

  She glanced at her watch; half past five in the morning, that godforsaken hour of the day when you really, really want to go to bed, but you know in your heart that if you do, you'll only lie there st
aring at the ceiling and listening out for the dripping tap and the milkman playing xylophone concertos with the milk bottles.

  There was also the problem, she compelled herself to remember, of him next door. True, Regalian had mumbled something about fitting him into the plan somewhere along the line and maybe being able to do something with the Law of Conservation of Anti-Matter, whatever that was. In the meanwhile, however, she had as an indefinite house guest a tragic hero who was largely held together by blind faith and force of habit, and who smelt depressingly like the biology lab at school. And he wasn't the least bit like Laurence Olivier in the film; not the film of Hamlet, anyway.

  She made a cup of strong tea, ate four digestive biscuits and sat down in front of the screen again. By the time she'd logged in, and the machine had finished saying (c) Copyright DataZap Corporation 1995 All rights protected at her, she was fast asleep.

  The machine, however, was on, and the last page of text was sitting there on the screen, winking its cursor and looking for mischief. And there's a certain well-known author, a prolific writer under a wide variety of pseudonyms, who finds work for idle screens to do.

  The keyboard started to type.

  Having walked as far as the folly, Mr Darcy stopped for a moment to admire the view, and turned to return to the house.

  BANG! There it was again. Being a product of the Age of Reason, and knowing full well that the peculiar visual effect he had experienced only a short while before was simply a product of his imagination, he forced himself to look straight ahead and walk on by.

  The peculiar visual effect (who was, incidentally, a dead ringer for Jack Palance) coshed Mr Darcy on the back of the head with the butt of a .44 Frontier and stole his watch. Then, grinning evilly, it strolled on down the hill towards the house.