The book factory stood on a low hill, though it seemed like it’d rather squat. Or maybe sink. It was one of those buildings that looks like someone’s basement no matter how many stories it has.
It ran all day and it ran all night. It ran for six days of the seven, with a break for exhaustion and to prevent illiteracy outbreaks. Overexposure to mass-market literature can do that if you don’t get some fresh air, and many was the management team member who bitterly resented the damned regulations of ’72 that held them liable if a shift worker came home with ink for eyeballs or a pen stuck in their nose.
It was a big factory. Third-biggest in the state. It produced cheap, reliable hopes and dreams and far more importantly it provided Jobs, that nebulous, capitalized sort of thing that mattered to people’s guts if not their long-term health prospects.
There were sixty people manning the stamping lines, branding and tagging the covers.
A hundred people on the inking crews, mashing the nouns and verbs and adjectives into proper forms.
Two hundred hose-runners, who filled the paper husks with words and sealed them off.
Forty-six fermentation attendants, who adjusted the light and air in the aging room to ensure proper genre fermentation.
One hundred and twenty-eight workers tending the great steel bookshelves where the final products were herded and broken before shipping.
And four and a half C-level executives who got paid.
On the fifth day of the six-day week, a stranger came to the book factory.
“I am here to right wrongs and perform great deeds.”
“Pass.”
“What do you mean?”
“You got a pass?”
“No.”
“Then stay out.”
On the fifth day of the six-day week plus a good few hours, a stranger came again to the book factory with the mutual aid of a small unbarred window and a rock.
“Psst!”
The shift worker looked up. Above them, clinging to the rafters, was a sort of murky thing wrapped in what seemed like a lot of blankets.
“Ah?” she said. This seemed noncommittal enough to be safe.
“Take me to your leader at once!” whispered the lurking thing. “There is little time!”
“Sure.”
The shift worker’s leader was as far beyond her grasp as the galaxy’s core; her leader under him as untouchable as the sun; beneath that, the moon, and so on.
So in the end the shift worker took the mysterious stranger to the foreman of station 10, subteam B, who was her immediate superior. He was long and grey and dead in the eyes and thus his only distinguishing characteristic was his name, Neewmaan, which he had acquired when a vowel line exploded in his face at the age of twenty-two.
He was standing at station 10, subteam B, close enough to another shift worker that he could surreptitiously grab at her ass when she wasn’t looking. This happened a lot, because her attention and both hands needed to be on the line.
“There is little time,” whispered the stranger (who was no longer lurking, just standing around wrapped in his extremely conspicuous and enormous cloak).
“Right,” said Neewmaan. “’Bout two hours left in the shift. Lull’s almost over and we gotta clean a belt before-”
“Not THAT!” said the stranger, whose voice was deep as a spring brook, soft as a bolt of silk, clear as the blue sky. “There are things to be done!” We must free my people and yours from tyranny!”
“Uh? Yeah. Right. Gotta tell ‘em.”
“Yes!” exulted the stranger, who was taller than any mortal man, and spry of limb. “We must rally them from the brink of defeat!”
The stranger’s vision was as keen as a hawk; his ears as sensitive as a mole’s; his mind as piercing and insightful as a big sharp sword through somebody’s liver, but he’d never run a warren like the lower workings of the book factory before. It took many steps and many hands poking and prodding him.
“What’s that?”
“Punctuation tank. They gotta heat it to separate the periods from the commas and semi-colons. Grades by density.”
“What’s THAT?”
“Hard boilers. Need ‘em to temper the private eyes before they get installed.”
“What IS that?”
“King-pins. They install dynastic politics in genre fiction, Iunno.”
“What in the name of the Great Shining Ones happened to that man?”
“That’s Ten-Ten Finger-Finger Eddy-Eddy. He got overwritten on the press line.”
“What’s that awful shrieking sound?”
“The presses. They got to run them hot or the ink gums and the characters get blurry and fat. Bakes ‘em right into the pages before they can slide off.”
And then they reached the great main hall, and the stranger’s questions were all removed because there was no doubt what lay in front of him.
The production line was difficult to conceive of. It was a space that seemed too large to fit inside a building…that was also overstuffed. Smooth steel surfaces covered in microscopic byproduct froth. A million moving arms and legs. And a churning, endless flow of names and places and things and people being ground down, grounded down, onto pages and paper and product.
“HOLD!” called the stranger. Such was the power of his voice that it carried over the great grey grinding machines and the endless drone and every eye – if not every head – turned towards him just a little, to see what was going on.
“Despair no more!” called the stranger, and his hood fell from his shoulders to reveal a beauty almost blinding. “I am Asee’iiime’imbleck’toro’pisc’i’b’t’’q’d’h’j’dzip, last of the line of Twoggles, heir to the Golden Seat, and” then the long grey men of station 10, subteam B picked him up and threw him over the mandated four-foot safety railing, which so surprised Asee’iiime’imbleck’toro’pisc’i’b’t’’q’d’h’j’dzi that he forgot to shout or fight or do anything much on the way down. He made no noise at all, even as the pressers grabbed a limb apiece and he vanished in a titanic fountain of ink and crushing sounds.
“I’ll go report it,” said foreman Neewmaan, who didn’t want to. “Goddamnit, what was that?”
“Four,” said a shift worker.
“Three?” asked another.
“Four,” said a third. “Over-par for the month.”
As a matter of fact it was station 10, subteam B’s FIFTH Reverse-Narnia for the month, four months running. Foreman Neewmaan became shift worker Neewmaan, the presses kept churning, and life went on.
In particular it went on for one shift worker, who’d been leaving a quiet word to her cousin over in the shelving squads every week or so. She had a lot more time to focus on the line now.