Read Online My Hero by Tom Holt - Free Book Online Page B

of the girl sitting opposite) but, with the third, fourth and fifth whiskies, things began to come back to him, albeit rather bedraggled and with several days’ growth of beard. He considered.
    Authorship theory, he remembered, is a subdivision of basic creation theory. Creation theory is easy.
    In an infinite, curved universe, everything is possible. One needs only to recognise the possibility of a particular set of circumstances, and it then exists, somewhere, in some form. This is creation theory. Let there be light; and there is light. Let, by the same token, there be huge
single-cell life forms called greebles who inhabit ventilation shafts and eat the smell of cheese, and there are greebles. The difference is that light is a fairly sensible, practical concept which can fit into virtually all reality systems; whereas greebles can only subsist in the really low-rent backstreets of reality where nobody gives a damn any more, and where no one with any sense ever goes except as the result of a horrible accident.
    Fine, said Regalian to himself, that’s basic creation theory. He found a half-eaten packet of smoky bacon crisps in his jacket pocket and started to chew.
    Authors do to creation theory what highly paid accountants do to the tax laws; without breaking the rules, they contrive to bend them to such an extent that they might as well be made of Plasticine.
    Authors take untrue things, people who don’t exist, events that never happened, and make other people believe in them. Belief is water poured on the blazing chip-pan of creation. A fictional thing which people believe in can never be real, but it can exist far more vehemently than any number of real things which are too boring for anybody to be interested in. The shipping forecast is real, but The Archers live because people want them to.
    Basic authorship theory.
    â€˜More whisky.’
    â€˜That’ll be one pound forty, please.’
    â€˜Here.’
    â€˜Sorry, we don’t take foreign money here.’
    â€˜Hey, this is a saloon, ain’t it?’
    â€˜Well, it says saloon bar on the door.’
    â€˜Right. Well, in any saloon this side of the Rio Bravo, a silver dollar buys a bottle of raw drinkin’ whisky. Or are you callin’ me a liar?’
    Trish’s brows furrowed. On the one hand, the better
part of her intellect advised her that she was going to have fun and games persuading them to accept silver dollars at the bank in the morning. On the other hand, an influential minority of her could see the logic; and besides, a big coin made of pure silver’s got to be worth a lot of money, hasn’t it?
    â€˜Right you are, then,’ she said.
    Basic authorship theory, as amended by the publishers’ lawyers, goes on to say that characters can exist without being real, on the strict understanding that they stay inside their books and don’t ever get loose, because of the damage they would inevitably cause this side of the screen.
    Basic authorship theory, as further amended by the writers’ agents, goes further and states that in any event a character belongs to his author body, soul and merchandising rights, and has to do exactly what he’s told on pain of editing.
    Basic authorship theory, as further amended by the characters’ agents, adds the proviso that characters can only believably do things which are in character, and any attempt to get out of their allotted book would be a breach of credibility, resulting in immediate implosion.
    Basic authorship theory, as amended by inserting a crowbar into a weak seam and leaning on it, states that there are loopholes. These range from the well-known minor technicalities, which make it possible for tired and overworked authors to carry out the occasional discreet cattle-raid into an adjoining author’s stock of ideas, to the celebrated and entirely mythical airlock in the cellars underneath the west wing of the Library of Congress.
    There is