‘You can’t really go wrong with a cover like that, and it doesn’t even mislead the customer. Plenty of books with misleading titles around to hook the customer these days. One thing about the book trade, you can always count on good old-fashioned customer illiteracy; best title of the last fifty years was
But Indica missed the next part of Mr Shredder’s lecture, as she looked across a row of gaudy science-fiction covers straight into the eyes of her pursuer.
XV
‘Come on Rickwood, I’ll buy you a coffee, you can’t stand here daydreaming all day.’ Luke led him as far as the cashier.
‘You gonna buy that, mister?’ she asked.
‘Buy… that?’
‘The book in your hand, human use of human beings wiener, you gonna buy it or what?’
Luke took the book from his hand and led him on out of Prospero Books, into the great pleasure dome of Vitanuova Shopping Piazza. In general form, it was a kind of interior Hanging Gardens of Babylon, with a small terrace of stores at each level, with plenty of polished stonelike substances, with gleaming escalators, set at every angle, and with every nook crammed with green potted palms, blue caged birds or tanks of red fish. From the top level, looking over a parapet at the whole dizzying spectacle, Luke spotted the yellow umbrellas of a cafe far below.
‘Come on down this escalator — Jesus, Rickwood, I wish you’d tell me what’s going on. Why did we have to go all the way up to this so-called bookstore, just so you could stare at this Indica Dinks? You didn’t even say hello.’
‘Well I, I didn’t want to intrude, just wanted to let her know I’m around, I’m here if she needs me. I could tell by the way she looked at me she understands.’
Luke groaned. ‘Just what kind of Victorian truth is it that she understands? Who is this lady?’
‘My mother, Luke. My stepmother anyway. Sort of. She took care of me when I was small, I think. And, well, she was the first woman I ever saw naked, so naturally I—’
‘You what? Follow her into bookstores?’
They took their seats. One or two people at adjoining tables stared at Luke’s saffron costume.
‘Naturally I love her. I read once how all boys love their mothers and kill their fathers, so—’
Luke held up a saffron-gloved hand. ‘Now wait. Rickwood, you’ve got this a little wrong. Sure, all boys love their mothers in a way, but it just means getting “Mother” tattooed on their arms, or sending embroidered pillow covers, Souvenir of Hong Kong, or maybe asking bar pianists to play “My Mother’s Eyes” until they weep into their low-cal pilsner. It does not mean love, like
‘Well,’ Roderick said loudly, ‘
People at the next table got up and moved away. Others stared and whispered. A waitress hurried over, datapad in hand.
‘We’d like two coffees,’ said Luke. ‘Mine, I want a medium-roast blend of Colombian and Mocha, finely ground and filtered, with real cream (not half-and-half) and Demerara sugar. Serve it in a bone china service, preferably Spode, and with a hallmarked silver spoon. And my friend here will have instant ersatz coffee, half- dissolved in tepid water, served with artificial cream and synthetic sugar in a melamine cup, no saucer, with a styrene spoon, please.’
‘Two coffees,’ she said, and said it again, firmly, when she served them.
‘Well she got yours right, Rickwood. What do you mean, you killed your father?’
‘I mean I hit him with a box-end wrench, 3/4 ? 7/8 I think it was, and he fell down and never got up.’
‘Oh.’ Luke said nothing more until they were on their way to the rally, making their way through a series of glass tubes and corridors to the Conference Centre. The final leg of the journey took them through a glass-covered bridge high above the flat wintry earth. To their left, an infinity of parked cars. Straight ahead, the Conference Centre, a kind of flying saucer in concrete, pre-stressed and poised for takeoff. To the right, Freeway Disaster, the enormous fibre-glass sculpture by Jough Braun, incorporating moulds of an actual freeway pile-up of some twenty vehicles. It was said that, so quickly had Braun worked at the disaster scene, that he had managed to mould in one or two victims. In any case, the German museums had bid very highly for this itern, but what mere museum could provide a setting for it like this?
‘What did you do after you hit him with the wrench?’
‘I nailed myself into this packing crate and sent myself somewhere else. I mean I guess the crate was all labelled and ready anyway, because I was too young to write. So I got in and nailed it shut—’
‘How could you nail it shut? Rickwood, you must have had an accomplice. Your mother?’
‘It might have been a 5/6 ? 1 box-end wrench, or maybe it wasn’t a box-end at all, it might have been an open-end, say 11/16 ? 11/8…’
Mr Shredder helped her climb the seemingly endless spiral staircase to the office, a comfortable little green room. He presented her with a plastic cup of water. ‘Feel better yet?’
‘I’m fine, really. Just a little dizzy spell, it’s over now.’ She found she was still holding a book
‘Well while we’re in the office, I may as well show you our little nerve centre.’
He sat down at a VDU and tapped the keys, with the air of an electric-organ owner showing off at home. Indica could almost hear
‘In the past, you know, nobody would have dreamed of running an operation like Prospero Books, but this little gadget has made the book trade into a whole new ball game. High volume, fast-throughput, unprecedented market sensitivity — well I guess what I mean is, we’re no longer at the mercy of the publishers.’
‘Publishers?’ She felt it was her turn to say something.
‘The way it used to be, the publishers ran everything. If you wanted to sell books, you sold what they gave you to sell, that’s the way it was, and tough! And not just tough, but it was a very bad, wasteful way to run an industry. I mean with all due respect, most publishers are
‘That’s the way it was. We dealers, who know the market, had no control over the business; publishers, who know nothing, had complete control. But the computer changed all that. See with the computer we get complete control over our own stock flow, we tie ordering directly to sales, see? Say a customer buys some book, say number 0246114371, the bar code is on the cover, the cashier runs her laser wand over it, and our computer records the sale. Enough sales of that item and the computer automatically reorders.’
Indica said, ‘Is that new? I thought that was kind of old hat.’
‘Yes but listen: the computer can put data together from fifty stores just as easily as five — or five hundred or five thousand. No matter how big we grow, we can always have real tight, minute-by-minute stock control. Only if we’re big, publishers start listening to us. If we don’t like a book, they print fewer copies.’
