“And that plan is…?”
“To own…everything.”
“In a world with a Short Now?”
“Of course! With a compliant population only interested in the self and instant gratification, we can flog all manner of worthless crap as the ‘latest thing to have.’ There’ll be big profits, Next-and by subtly choosing from whom the Now is mined, the Long Now Überclass can sit back and enjoy the benefits that will be theirs and theirs alone.”
I stared at Wirthlass, wondering if I could rush her. It seemed doubtful, since I was at least ten feet away, and the two technicians still on board the Rover also looked as if they had weapons.
“Okay,” said the doctor, “we’re all about done here. Enjoy your imprisonment. You’ll know what it was like for my husband. Two years in “The Raven,” Next-two years. He still has nightmares, even today.”
“You’re Jack Schitt’s wife?”
She smiled again. “Now you’re getting it. My full name is Dr. Anne Wirthlass-Schitt, but if you’d known, it might have been a bit of a giveaway, hmm? Bye-bye now.”
The door swung shut, the bell rang twice, there was a low hiss and the Austen Rover lifted off. They hovered for a moment and then slowly rotated, expertly missed the crane derrick, rose above the height of the funnel and then became long and drawn out like a piece of elastic before vanishing with a faint pop. I was left standing on the deck, biting my lip in frustration and anger. I took a deep breath and calmed myself. The reality book show of The Bennets wasn’t due to start until tomorrow morning, so there was always hope. I looked around. The steamer rolled gently in the swell, the smoke drifted across the stern past the fluttering red ensign, and the beat of the engine echoed up through the steel deck. I knew I wasn’t in Dark and Stormy Night, because the ship wasn’t a rusty old tub held together by paint, but I was certainly somewhere, and somewhere was better than nowhere. It was only when I arrived there and was out of ideas, time and essential metabolic functions that I was going to give up.
I trotted up the companionway, ducked into the galley and made my way up the ladder to the bridge, where a boy not much older than Friday was holding the ship’s wheel.
“Who’s in command?” I asked, a bit breathless.
“Why, you, of course,” replied the lad.
“I’m not.”
“Then why are you a-wearin’ the cap?”
I put up my hands to check, and strangely enough, I was wearing the captain’s cap. I took it off and stared at it stupidly.
“What book is this?”
“No book I knows of, Cap’n. What be your orders?”
I looked out of the wheel house ahead but could see nothing except a gray sea meeting a gray sky. The light was soft and directionless, and for the first time I felt a shiver of dread. Something about this place was undeniably creepy, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I went to the navigation desk and looked at the chart. There was nothing on it but the pale blueness of open ocean, and a cursory look in the drawers of the desk told me that every chart was the same. What ever this place was, this was all there was of it. I had to assume I was somewhere in the Maritime genre, but a quick glance at my mobilefootnoterphone and the absence of any signal told me that I was several thousand volumes beyond our repeater station in the Hornblower series, and if that was the case, I was right on the periphery of the genre-as good as lost. I tapped my finger on the desk and thought hard. Panic was the mind killer, and I still had several hours to figure this out. If I was no further on in ten hours’ time-then I could panic.
“What are your orders, Cap’n?” asked the lad at the wheel again.
“What’s your name?”
“Baldwin.”
“I’m Thursday. Thursday Next.”
“Good to know you, Cap’n Next.”
“Have you heard my name? Or of Jurisfiction?”
He shook his head.
“Right. Tell me, Baldwin, do you know this ship well?”
“As well as I know meself,” he replied proudly.
“Is there a core-containment room?”
“Not that I knows of.”
So we weren’t in a published work.
“How about a Storycode Engine anywhere on board?”
He frowned and looked confused. “There’s an ordinary engine room. I don’t know nuffin’ ’bout no Storycode.”
I scratched my head. Without a Storycode Engine, we were either nonfiction or something in the oral tradition. Those were the upbeat possibilities: I might also be in a forgotten story, a dead writer’s unrealized idea or even a handwritten short story stuck in a desk drawer somewhere-the dark reading matter.
“What year is this?”
“Spring of 1932, Cap’n.”
“And the purpose of this voyage?”
“Not for the likes of me to know, Cap’n.”
“But something must happen!”
“Oh, aye,” he said more confidently, “things most definite happen!”
“What sort of things?”
“Difficult things, Cap’n.”
As if in answer to his enigmatic comment, someone shouted my name. I walked out onto the port wing, where a man in a first officer’s uniform was on the deck below. He was in his mid-fifties and looked vaguely cultured, but somehow out of place, as though his ser vice in the merchant navy had been to remove him from problems at home.
“Captain Next?” he said.
“Yes, sort of.”
“First Officer William Fitzwilliam at your ser vice, ma’am. We’ve got a problem with the passengers!”
“Can’t you deal with it?”
“No, ma’am-you’re the captain.”
I descended and met Fitzwilliam at the foot of the ladder. He led me into the paneled wardroom, where there were three people waiting for us. The first man was standing stiffly with his arms folded and looked aggrieved. He was well dressed in a black morning coat and wore a small pince-nez perched on the end of his nose. The other two were obviously man and wife. The woman was of an unhealthy pallor, had recently been crying and was being comforted by her husband, who every now and then shot an angry glance at the first man.
“I’m very busy,” I told them. “What’s the problem here?”
“My name is Mr. Langdon,” said the married man, wringing his hands. “My wife, Louise, here suffers from Zachary’s syndrome, and without the necessary medicine she will die.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” I said, “but what can I do?”
“That man has the medicine!” cried Langdon, pointing an accusatory finger at the man in the pince-nez. “Yet he refuses to sell it to me!”
“Is this true?”
“My name is Dr. Glister,” said the man, nodding politely. “I have the medicine, it is true, but the price is two thousand guineas, and Mr. and Mrs. Langdon have only a thousand guineas and not the capacity to borrow more!”
“Well,” I said to the doctor, “I think it would be a kindly gesture to lower the price, don’t you?”
“I wish that I could,” replied Dr. Glister, “but this medicine cost me everything I possessed to develop. It destroyed my health and damaged my reputation. If I do not recoup my losses, I will be forced into ruin, my property will be repossessed, and my six children will become destitute. I am sympathetic to Mrs. Langdon’s trouble, but this is a fiscal issue.”
“Listen,” I said to the Langdons, “it’s not up to me. The medicine is Dr. Glister’s property for him to dispose of as he wishes.”
“But she needs the medicine now,” pleaded Mr. Langdon. “If she doesn’t get it, she will die. You are the captain on this ship and so have the ultimate authority. You must make the decision.”
I sighed. I had a lot more important things to deal with right now.
“Dr. Glister, give him the medicine for a thousand guineas. Mr. Langdon, you will work to repay Dr. Glister no matter what. Understand?”
“But my livelihood!” wailed Glister.
; “I place Mrs. Langdon’s definite death above the possibility of your penury, Dr. Glister.”
“But this is nothing short of theft!” he replied, outraged at my words. “And I have done nothing wrong-only discovered a cure for a fatal illness. I deserve better treatment than this!”
“You do, you’re right. But I know nothing of you, nor the Langdons. My decision is based only on the saving of a life. Will you excuse me?”
Baldwin had called from the wheel house, and I quickly scooted up the stairs.
“What is it?”
He pointed to something about a mile off the starboard bow. I picked up a pair of binoculars and trained it on the distant object. Finally some good luck. It looked like a “turmoil,” the name we gave to a small, localized disruption in the fabric of the written word. This was how heavy weather in the BookWorld got started: A turmoil would soon progress into a powerful WordStorm able to uproot words, ideas and even people, then carry them with it across the empty darkness of the Nothing, eventually dumping them on distant books several genres distant. It was my way out. I’d never hitched a ride on a WordStorm before, but it didn’t look too difficult. Dorothy, after all, had no real problems with the tornado.
“Alter course to starboard thirty degrees,” I said. “We’re going to intercept the WordStorm. How long do you think it will take for us to get there, Baldwin?”
“Twenty minutes, Cap’n.”
It would be a close thing. Turmoils increase their pace until a rotating tube rises up into the heavens, filled with small sections of plot and anything else it can suck up. Then, with a flurry of distorted sense, it lifts off and vanishes. I wouldn’t get this chance again.
“Is that wise, Captain?” asked First Officer Fitzwilliam, who had joined us on the bridge. “I’ve seen storms like that. They can do serious damage-and we have forty passengers, many of them women and children.”
“Then you can lower me in a lifeboat ahead of the storm.”
“And leave us without a lifeboat?”
“Yes…no…I don’t know. Fitzwilliam?”
“Yes, Captain?”
“What is this place?”
“I don’t know what you mean, Captain.”
“I mean-”
“Cap’n,” said Baldwin, pointing off of the port side of the ship, “isn’t that a lifeboat?”
I turned my attention to the area in which he pointed. It was a lifeboat, with what looked like several people, all slumped and apparently unconscious. Damn. I looked again, hoping for confirmation that they might already be dead, but saw nothing to tell me either way. I frowned to myself. Had I just hoped for them to be dead?
“You can pick them up after you’ve dropped me off,” I said. “It’ll only mean an extra forty minutes for them, and I really need to get out of here.”
I saw Fitzwilliam and Baldwin exchange glances. But as we watched, the lifeboat was caught by a wave and capsized, casting the occupants into the sea. We could see now that they were alive, and as they scrabbled weakly to cling to the upturned boat, I gave the order.
“Turn about. Reduce power and stand by to pick up survivors.”
“Aye-aye, Cap’n,” said Baldwin, spinning the wheel as Fitzwilliam rung up “slow ahead” on the engine-room telegraph. I walked out onto the starboard wing and watched despondently as the turmoil developed into a WordStorm. Within the twenty minutes it took to intercept the lifeboat, the whirling mass of narrative distortion lifted off, taking part of the description of the ocean with it. There was a ragged dark hole for an instant, and then the sea washed in to fill the anomaly, and in a few moments everything was back to normal. Perhaps I should have left the lifeboat. After all, the Long Now and the classics were more important than several fictional castaways. Mind you, if I’d been on that lifeboat, I know what I would have wanted.
“Captain!”
It was Dr. Glister.
“I don’t want to know about your arguments with the Langdons,” I told him.
“No, no,” he replied in something of a panic, “you cannot pick up these castaways!”
“Why not?”
“They have Squurd’s disease.”
“They have what?”
We walked into the wheel house and out again onto the port wing, where Fitzwilliam was directing the rescue operation. The lifeboat was still ahead of us at least a hundred yards. The ship was moving forward slowly, a cling net had been thrown over the side, and several burly sailors were making ready to pick up the castaways.
“Look carefully at the survivors,” urged Dr. Glister, and I trained my binoculars on the small group. Now that they were closer, I could see that their faces were covered with unsightly green pustules.
I lowered the binoculars and looked at Dr. Glister. “What’s the prognosis?”
“A hundred percent fatal, and highly contagious. Bring them on board and we’ll be looking at a minimum of twenty percent casualties. We don’t reach port for six months, and these poor wretches will already have died in agony long before we could get any help to them.”
I rubbed my temples. “You’re completely sure of this?”
He nodded. I took a deep breath.
“Fitzwilliam?”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Break off the rescue.”
“What?”
“You heard me. These people have a contagious fatal illness, and I won’t risk my passengers’ lives saving castaways who will die no matter what we do.”
“But, Captain!” he protested. “We never leave a man in the water!”
“We’re doing it today, Fitzwilliam. Do you understand?”
He glared at me menacingly, then leaned over the rail and repeated my order, making sure the men knew who had made it. After that, he went into the wheel house, rang up “full ahead,” and the vessel shuddered as we made extra speed and steamed on.
“Come inside,” said Dr. Glister.
“No,” I said. “I’m staying here. I won’t hide from the men I’ve condemned to death.”
And I stood there and watched as the lifeboat and the men drifted astern of the ship and were soon lost to view in the seas.
It was with a heavy heart that I walked back into the wheel-house and sat in the captain’s chair. Baldwin was silent, gazing straight ahead.
“It was the right thing to do,” I muttered, to no one in particular. “And what’s more, I could have used the WordStorm to escape after all.”
“Things happen here,” muttered Baldwin. “Difficult things.”
I suddenly had a thought, but hoped upon hope I was wrong. “What’s the name of this ship?”
“The ship?” replied Baldwin cheerily. “It’s the steamship Moral Dilemma, Cap’n.”
I covered my face with my hands and groaned. Anne Wirthlass-Schitt and her obnoxious husband had not been kidding when they said they’d chosen this place especially for me. My nerves were already badly frayed, and I felt the heavy hand of guilt pressing upon me. I’d only been here an hour-what would I be like in a week, or a month? Truly, I was trapped in an unenviable place: adrift on the Hypothetical Ocean, in command of the Moral Dilemma.
“Captain?”
It was the cook this time. He was unshaven and wearing a white uniform that had so many food stains on it that it was hard to say where stain ended and uniform began.
“Yes?” I said, somewhat wearily.
“Begging your pardon, but there’s been a gross underestimation on the provisions.”
“And?”
“We don’t get into port for another six months,” the cook continued, referring to a grubby sheet of calculations he had on him, “and we only have enough to feed the crew and passengers on strict rations for two-thirds of that time.”
“What are you saying?”
“That all forty of us will starve long before we reach port.”
I beckoned Fitzwilliam over. “There wouldn’t be another port closer than that, would there?”
“No, Captain,�
�� he answered. “Port Conjecture is the only port there is.”
“I thought so. And no fish either?”
“Not in these waters.”
“Other ships?”
“None.”
I got it now. These were the “difficult things” Baldwin had spoken of, and they were mine and mine alone to deal with. The ship, the sea and the people on it might be hypothetical-but they could suffer and die the same as anyone.
“Thank you, Cook,” I said. “I’ll let you know of my decision.”
He gave a lazy salute and was gone.
“Well, Fitzwilliam,” I said, doing some simple math on a piece of paper, “there’s enough food for twenty-six people to survive until we reach port. Do you think we could find fourteen volunteers to throw themselves over the side to ensure the survival of the rest?”
“I doubt it.”
“Then I have something of a problem. Is my primary sense of duty as captain to see to it that as many people as possible survive on my ship, or is it my moral obligation not to conduct or condone murder?”
“The men in the lifeboat just now wouldn’t see you as anything but a murderer.”
“Perhaps so, but this one’s harder; it’s not a case of inaction to bring about a circumstance, but action. This is what I’m going to do. Anyone under eighteen is excluded, as are six essential crew to keep the ship going. All the rest will choose straws-thirteen will go over the side.”
“If they don’t want to go?”
“Then I will throw them over.”
“You’ll hang for it.”
“I won’t. I’ll be the fourteenth.”
“Very…selfless,” murmured Fitzwilliam, “but even after your crew and age exclusions, thirty-one passengers are still under eighteen. You will still have to select seven of them. Will you be able to throw them overboard, the children, the innocents?”
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