Stories: All-New Tales

Then the laughter died in Poseidonia’s throat, and she exclaimed, “You poor thing! You truly do not understand, do you?”

“If I understood, would I be at this very instant begging you like a fool for a simple and straightforward answer?”

She regarded him with a sad little smile. “I think it is time you talked with my father,” she said at last.

“IS MY LISSOME YOUNG daughter not energetic enough to please you?” asked the king of the Mummelsee.

“That and more,” said Jack, who had long grown used to the sylphs’ shockingly direct manner of speaking.

“Then be content with her and this carefree existence you lead, and do not seek to go questing out beyond the confines of these ever-so-pleasant pages.”

“Again you speak in riddles! Majesty, this business is driving me mad.

I beg of you, for this once, speak to me plain and simply, even as if I were but a child.”

The king sighed. “You know what books are?”

“Yes, of course.”

“When was the last time you read one?”

“Why, I—”

“Exactly. Or that anybody you know read one?”

“I have been in the company of rough-and-tumble soldiers, whose response to coming upon a library might typically be to use its contents to start their campfires, so this is not terribly surprising.”

“You must have read books in your youth. Can you tell me the plot of any of them?”

Jack fell silent.

“You see? Characters in books do not read books. Oh, they snap them shut when somebody enters the room, or fling them aside in disgust at what they fancy is said within, or hide their faces in one which they pretend to peruse while somebody else lectures them on matters they’d rather not confront. But they do not read them. Twould be recursive, rendering each book effectively infinite, so that no single one might be finished without reading them all. This is the infallible method of discovering on which side of the page you lie—have you read a book this year?” The king arched an eyebrow and waited.

After a very long silence, Jack said, “No. I have not.”

“Then there you are.”

“But…how can this be? How can we possibly…?”

“It is the simplest thing imaginable,” replied the king. “I, for example, dwell within chapters eleven through seventeen of book five of something called Simplicissimus. It is, I assure you, a good life. So what if the walls of my palace are as thin as paper, the windows simply drawn on by pen, and my actions circumscribed by the whimsy of the artist? I neither age nor die, and when you, taking a brief rest from your romantic gymnastics with my daughter, care to visit me, I always find our little conversations diverting.”

Glumly, Jack stared out through a window paned with nacre polished so smooth as to be transparent. “It is a hard thing,” he said, “to realize that one is not actually real.” Then, after a long moment’s thought, “But this makes no sense. Granted that my current surroundings and condition are hardly to be improved upon. Yet I have seen things in the war that…Well, it doesn’t bears thinking upon. Who on earth would create such a world as ours? Who could possibly find amusement in such cruelties as, I grant you, I have sometimes been a part of?”

“Sir,” said the king, “I am not the artist, and he, I suspect, is nobody of any great esteem in his unimaginably larger world. He might pass you on the street unnoticed. In conversation, it is entirely possible, he would not impress you favorably. Why, then, should you expect more from him than he—or, as it may be, she—might reasonably expect from his or her vastly more potent creator?”

“Are you saying that our author’s world is no better than our own?”

“It is possible it is worse. From his work we can infer certain things about the world in which he lives. Our architecture is ornate and romantic. His therefore is plain and dull—sheets of gray concrete, perhaps, with each window the exact twin of all the others—or he would not have bothered to imagine ours in such delightful detail.”

“Then, since our world is so crude and violent, it stands to reason that his must be a paragon of peace and gentility?”

“Say rather that ours has an earthy vigor while his is mired down in easy hypocrisy.”

Shaking his head slowly, Jack said, “How is it that you know so much about the world we live in, and yet I know so little?”

“There are two types of characters, my son. Yours is forever sailing out of windows with his trousers in his hand, impersonating foreign dignitaries with an eye to defrauding uncharitable bishops, being ambushed in lightless alleys by knife-wielding ruffians, and coming home early to discover his newlywed bride in bed with his mistress’s husband.”

“It is as if you had been reading my diary,” Jack said wonderingly. “Had I a diary to read.”

“That is because you are the active sort of character, whose chief purpose is to move the plot along. I am, however, more the reflective sort of character, whose purpose it is to expound upon and thus reveal the inner meaning of the narrative. But I see you are confused—let us step briefly out of my story.”