twenty-five
Nick deserted me halfway through the morning, the rat, but not before we had done quite a bit of exploring together. We were trying to disentangle Mallory Universe from Home Universe and the other ones. Couldn’t be done. The Hotel Babylon, true to its name, wants everything as mad as the man who ate grass or mixed up like the Tower of Babel – particularly the last, particularly Russians and Germans. There was a huge crowd from both countries in a room upstairs called Ops, shouting one another down in both languages, with squirts of bad English in between. Ops is supposed to deal with crises. This was clearly a crisis, but no one in Ops knew if it was one combined crisis or two separate ones.
People kept explaining things like this to us. Or if there wasn’t a crisis, people chatted or gave us friendly smiles. They all seemed to know who we were without looking at our badges (nobody looks at badges anyway). The three long-haired people with the baby kept grinning at us as we went up and down the corridors, even the baby. Nick remarked that it was the most unpunishmently punishment his parents could have devised, and I kept saying how nice everybody was. But that was before we found a room labelled Press Office, where people in more than usually wordy T-shirts were just running off this morning’s news sheet. Apparently they do several each day of the Con. They gave us one each and we went and sat in the Grand Lobby to read them.
Everyone sits in the Grand Lobby. It is pretty big, but it looks enormous, because there are mirrors in one wall reflecting large windows in the wall opposite. It is full of armchairs and tables and small children running about in little cloaks or small-scale Batman gear, and all the adults sitting around in bundles. At that moment it was pretty full because a whole lot of new people had just turned up. Most of them were rather smartly dressed and had a sort of urgent, I’m-working look, which some of them clearly felt placed them in a class above the rest of us.
“Don’t despise them,” fat Wendy said, flopping down next to us. Nick had to look away from her again. “Those are the publishers. They’ll all be giving parties this evening.”
So I didn’t despise them and looked at the news sheet instead. But Nick really can’t take someone the size and shape of Wendy. He sprang up. “I’ve got to go. Games Universe is just starting,” he said. “I’ll look for you here or in your room at lunchtime.” This was a blatant lie. I knew the Games didn’t start yet, and I could see him hovering over by the far door, but the fact was that he had deserted me – deserted me just as I hit the para in the news sheet that said: “Fans please take note of Ted Mallory’s niece, Maree. This small, orphaned-looking lady is going about with a broken heart. Any fan happening upon Maree needs to be nice to her.”
I was so angry and so embarrassed that tears came into my eyes. My face felt sort of blue-hot. Wendy said something to me, but I couldn’t hear or answer or look at her. She was probably only talking to me because the news sheet told her to. I made a kind of low howling noise.
“I said,” said Wendy, “was there anything interesting in the news sheet? I haven’t read it yet.”
Then I hated myself for being hypersensitive. I looked up and pushed my sliding glasses up on my nose. And behold. Lo! WONDERS! The tall Nordic type I had seen the night before was walking through the Grand Lobby. He was every bit as beautiful as I remembered – better, if possible. Such wonderful slender hips, and such a walk! And – shame! – he just went striding through, past armchairs, past tables loaded with cups, past kiddies swirling little cloaks, past people sitting on the floor, past huddles of publishers, and went out the other end without looking at anyone, followed every inch of the way by my eyes.
I wasn’t the only one. A well-dressed publisher lady got her legs in a corkscrew trying to watch him and almost fell over. Beside me, Wendy said, “Oh my God! Look at that! Look at him! Have you ever seen anything quite so beautiful?” When I managed to tear my eyes away from the archway where the man had vanished, I saw she was staring after him too. Her hands were clasped under her enormous bosom and her face was all funny colours.
“Fabulous,” I agreed. My lower half felt weak.
Then I saw Tansy-Ann bearing down on me waving a news sheet. I gave a sharp cry and managed to get up and run, weak legs and all. People were going into the big hall by then for Uncle Ted’s panel and I went in with them, where I flopped down on a chair near the door and began thinking that I seriously might be getting over Robbie. I’d never felt like that over him.
After that, a certain amount of sanity came to my rescue, and it occurred to me that you feel like this about pop stars and other
people you never expect really to meet, and the fever went off enough for me to start wondering who the man was. Then I started wondering angrily about the news sheet and who might have done that to me. I was disposed to blame Uncle Ted. He might not have meant to punish me, but it would be very like him to have dropped a jovial word about me over supper last night. But it was even more like Janine. Or it could even have been Dutch Case or Rick Corrie, thinking they were doing me a kindness. And I still haven’t found out whose fault it was. Whoever it is is going to get themselves bitten, savagely, in the fleshy part of the calf.
When I came-to a bit, a good-looking woman in publisher clothes was introducing herself as Master of Ceremonies – I think she’s called Gianetti and runs a chat show on TV – and then telling us that Uncle Ted was Master of Black Comedy, and that some woman beside him wrote funny stuff too, and Mervin Thurless, who was sitting up there with them, was renowned for his wit (well, you could have fooled me) and they were all going to discuss “A Sense of Humour in Fantasy”.
I have to hand it to Uncle Ted. You’d not have known he hadn’t a notion what he was supposed to be talking about. He just took hold of the microphone and talked about it. “Writing a book is just a job, like any other job,” he said. I hoped he wouldn’t go on that way, but he did. Shortly he was saying, “Consider the job as if I were building a bicycle instead. I’d have to plan the frame – call that the plot – and put on the wheels – call that characters and their motivation – and then I’d put in the gears. Now the jokes are the gears. You have to get them just the right size and configuration, or you wind the pedals and – hey presto! – the chain falls off.” That got a good laugh. “So I always plan my gags in detail and in advance,” he says. “The whole book is like a machine, planned in detail in advance and well oiled with a smooth writing style.”
There was quite a bit more like this. Then Mervin Thurless upped and said yes, he agreed in every particular, except he thought humour was more like planning spices for a sauce. Then the woman upped in her turn and said she agreed with both of them, it was utterly mechanistic, but she said (as if she was very ashamed to admit it) sometimes her jokes made her laugh.
At this, Uncle Ted seized the mike again and said he never laughed: it was fatal.
And Thurless said it was bad form anyway, to laugh at your own jokes.
By this time I was really depressed. I thought of Uncle Ted’s wobbly windows, and I began to think he must really, truly never look through them or anything else. Coming on top of everyone being nice to me just because the news sheet told them to, it was just too much. Can’t anyone look out there and see that you need not thing of everything in terms of what works, or what they ought to do?
To do the Ceremonies lady justice, she began to look a trifle glum as well. At length she said, “But what about that extra factor, the miracle ingredient? Doesn’t a joke ever take off on its own for any of you? Let me stick my neck out here. What about inspiration?”
“No,” says Uncle Ted. “To work, it has to be all hard graft. You can’t afford to get carried away, or your book becomes a dangerous, out-of-hand thing and it may not sell.”
“I’ll go further,” says Mervin Thurless. “If there is a miracle ingredient, it’s money.”
“Precisely,” says Uncle Ted. “It’s how much you get paid for using the right formula.”
I got up and went out. I didn’t care if the door did crash behind me. I felt totally let down. Machines. Bicycles. FORMULA. Bah!!
As I stood there with a sort of gloomy thunder and lightning playing round my mind, the door behind me clicked quietly and the Prat crept out and closed it gently behind him. He looked, to my surprise, just like I felt.
“Money!” I said to him. “Bicycles!”
“Yes, I know,” he said. “What price imagination, let alone integrity? And for God’s sake don’t push your glasses up your nose at me like that. You make me feel I’ve got to defend those three, and I don’t want to. How about some coffee?”
So, to my further surprise, I found myself having coffee with him in the corner of a corridor somewhere, at a glass table. I think the Prat was fairly surprised himself. He had a wondering look behind the gold-rimmed glasses. But, just to be on the safe side, I asked him if he had read the news sheet. At this, his wondering look increased and he said, “What, do they have a news sheet as well as all the rest? They work pretty hard, don’t they?” Then I was satisfied he was not giving me coffee out of kindness and, as I was still fulminating, I told him angrily about Uncle Ted’s wavy windows.
“And all he could say about them was they added value to his house!” I said. “Gah! Phooey!”