FSF Magazine, February 2007 Read online

  The darkness fought him with sharp spines, wet leaves, the resolute limbs of trees, spider webs, insects. Larger creatures followed him through the dark but did not attack, for Stone's bulk was considerable (he had fulfilled the promise of his birth-size), and no taint of fear could any beast detect, only the hot odor of rage and its hunger for release.

  No starlight found him in the jungle, no hint of sky, nothing with which to fix a course, but his course was upward and he followed the ache in his legs, the route that bent his back.

  He traveled for hours—three, by the feel of his calves. At some point, the anger engendered by the book reporter's anguish relented, allowing Stone to regain his senses. He understood that further effort might only take him away from his goal. So he found the blasted stump of a tree, hollowed like a throne, and he brushed out a nest of blind shrews (he recognized them by their fierce cries) and centipedes (their feathery feet), and wrapped himself in the rain poncho that bore the stamp of a warring nation two thousand miles to the north, a war whose outcome he no longer remembered.

  He slept and dreamed or perhaps he did not sleep and only remembered; the images of his memory were so fragmented that they bore the look of dreams.

  * * * *

  "We come here from across time to find the ones who might save us,” the Librarian told the newly enslaved. They were in the auditorium that echoed his voice and made his breath audible. The students sat in hushed rows as the monitors moved down the aisles with supple wands capable of raising a welt.

  As always, the Librarian was dressed in the same uniform the students wore.

  When Stone was a child, new to Knowledge Base #29, he thought nothing of this, but later he realized it was an affectation of humility where no genuine humility existed, for the old man was thin and sharp-featured, and his uniform was precisely tailored, creating an impression of elegance without extravagance. Those uniforms worn by the students were another thing entirely. They were made of some shoddy material, gray and shapeless as rags, the pants wide and overly long, inducing a loutish shuffle.

  The Librarian told them, again and again, that they were the hope of the future. He told them that he was from a future that was in need of hope, for the greatness of Mankind resided in its knowledge. In that future that was the Librarian's present, knowledge had been disrupted. All literature, all science, all history had been blown into smoke by some dark magic.

  Stone thought, What is it worth if a sorcerer can banish it to oblivion?

  But the Librarian went on, as he always did. In the two months since his capture, Stone had already heard the story six times in its fullness, and every morning began with a shorter version as he and his classmates sang “Lost Glory” ("Our grandeur mourning, we watch a savage dawn unfolding"). There was no forgetting that civilization was gone.

  "I don't miss it,” Stone told Lars Stoker, who immediately ran off and repeated that heresy to one of the headmasters, who came and punished Stone with some perfunctory swats.

  The long and the short of it was this: what knowledge remained had wound up in books, those archaic rectangles of pulped wood. With those the world would be reborn to knowledge.

  "My dad's gonna get me out of here,” Stone told Lars, and Lars had replied, “I thought your dad was here. I heard—"

  "He ain't."

  "Well, he won't find you. Couldn't find you with a dozen bloodhounds."

  "Why's that?” In truth, Stone doubted his dad would look much for him. They had never gotten along.

  "This here school moves around. It's what you call mobile. Sliding in and out of space."

  "Who told you that?"

  "Nobody. But everybody knows it's so. Just look out the window, why don't ya? One day you got snow falling down on a lot of piney trees and the next day you got a alley full of garbage and cats. How do you explain that?"

  Stone didn't try. He hit Lars with his fist, a good whack to the temple, and when Lars came around Stone said, “Go tell one of the headmasters I smacked you. You do that, and I'll smack you so hard you'll swallow your tongue and that will be the last of telling headmasters anything."

  The logic of this was not lost on Lars.

  * * * *

  One time Stone was reading about some made-up person who was wrestling and wrestling with his conscience because he'd killed somebody and couldn't make up his mind whether he should tell someone about it or not when any idiot with half a brain would know, with no thought at all, that telling was not a good idea and would only end in grief.

  In a room of desks and half-dozing students, Stone turned the book face down, thinking, not for the first time, If we are going to get knowledge, why can't we have more of the science and how-to knowledge and less of this literature? But he knew the answer because it was another thing the Librarian went on about at every single rally and every single orientation. “It wasn't,” the Librarian would boom over the speakers, “the lack of science that led to the end.” It was the absence of compassion, the absence of empathy, the absence of humanity that brought civilization to its knees. So what needed to be stressed in this bunker where the flame of civilization burned with a small, hopeful light was knowledge of the heart. And where were you going to find that? In literature, of course!

  Stone would have given a lot to trade Crime and Punishment for a book on how to make a small bomb using only kitchen and bathroom supplies. There was knowledge going dying in the world for want of attention, and Stone felt for it.

  * * * *

  In the morning a band of monkeys woke Stone, shouting and leaping from branch to branch. They were overly pleased with their agility and sought to taunt Stone, who threw a net over the closest imp and, as it fought to untangle itself, screaming like a banshee, silenced it with his knife. Stone was always in a black humor in the morning, and hungry to boot. He made a small fire, rousing it with a flint. He carried spices with him, and these he rubbed into the animal's flesh. The spices failed to improve the taste or Stone's mood. He recalled that in Zaruba he had heard a tribesman describe the ancient chief there as a man with “no more savor than a Bakalu.” The chief had been a very old man covered in dust (whether by design or happenstance, Stone never discovered). Stone decided that he had just eaten a monkey of the Bakalu family.

  He climbed the tallest tree and looked about him. The sun was out and already well-risen. He had slept later than was his wont, but that was one of his freedoms; he moved to no clock but his own.

  He could see mountains in the far distance, bare stone wreathed in clouds. By his reckoning, the temple, if it had not been magicked away, was three or four hours’ march ahead. As he watched, a flock of yellow butterflies floated over the trees, moving with a jaunty motion as though animated by music only they could hear. Then two loud explosions from below sent the butterflies wheeling away as half a dozen carrion birds flew out of the jungle, uttering their squawks and dirge-like cries.

  So they are already shooing them off for the day, thought Stone. He fumbled in the pocket of his fatigues and produced the small gem that old N'Loopa had given him when they had both fought the wizard Mesu Pork, and he held the gem up to the light. Within it a red liquid flowed, always seeking the west, and by this he adjusted his course. His travel during the night had not been in vain; he was barely an hour from his destination.

  * * * *

  II

  The Temple of the Librarian

  He spied the golden domes and turrets and strangely angled walls long before the whole of the building came into view. In fact, it could be said that the whole building never did present itself to his eye, for the temple stretched out and back and into the jungle so that its limits were not easily apparent. Indeed, Stone could not tell if it were a single building or a collection of buildings.

  This was nothing like Knowledge Base #29, which was gray brick and stolidly drab. The ornate structure he now beheld could only be a thing of Africa, brown and gold and shining and somehow of the earth, bathed in the blood and dust
of this savage land. Stone did not doubt that mountains of bones lay beneath this labyrinthine structure. It might now be the refuge of the Librarian, but it had been raised by an older race.

  Despite its remote location, Stone assumed the temple would have guards and perhaps sophisticated instruments for spying out intruders. He proceeded carefully, remaining within the trees and tangled vegetation that came within fifty feet of the walls of the temple.

  Another explosion chased more of the brown, ungainly scavengers into the air. They were to Stone's right, coming up over a red and brown domed roof. One of the birds landed clumsily in the branch of a tree just thirty feet to Stone's right. They didn't scare far, these creatures, being fearless or, more likely, addled by the promise of a feast.

  Stone continued his slow progress around the building, staying in the shadows and moving cautiously, always assuming that someone or something watched.

  He saw them then. A familiar revulsion, a sense of suffocation, rolled over him, as though he were imprisoned again in their company.

  The green, gentle hill with its well-manicured grass and tamed fruit trees was littered with the bodies of students. Not a one of them moved. They sprawled, leaned against trees, sat with their knees crossed, and all of them were studying. Books held them in thrall, eyes were willed to pages. The students were of both sexes, sometimes together, but always locked in separate trances as though this learning, this literature, exuded mind-killing vapors that immobilized its victims. The frenzy in the loins to mate, even this proud imperative, the progenitor of wars and fine heroic deeds, was stilled by the paralysis of study. This was death's image, even if the breath still stirred within. Wasn't it enough to fool the carrion birds? And if the monitors failed to fire the guns when the birds proved too bold, would the birds move yet closer ... and feed?

  The mere proximity of these students chilled his limbs. A wave of nausea overcame him, as though a powerful vertigo spell had found its mark, and he remembered the dreaded books.

  "Call me Ishmael,” one book began. Not a hundred pages through and dead sick of whales, Stone called the writer many things, “long-winded” being the least of them. But you weren't allowed to call it quits. They devised tests to see if you had truly read the thing, with solitary confinement awaiting those who failed.

  Damnable books: The Iliad, Silas Marner, Vanity Fair ... The thought of Thackeray ... Stone almost blacked out. Sometimes Stone would have a vision of an old man lying in bed, eating chocolates from a box, obese and in failing health, and talking and talking, occasionally shaking an admonitory finger, smiling or frowning, lecturing, unaware that everyone had left, that no one cared what he was saying. A book was an old man, impotent and raging, or, worse, self-doting beyond madness, a prattling assertion of ego.

  Sometimes, in the years of his imprisonment, Stone broke away from slumber in a blazing fever, grabbed from the nightstand something by one of the infamous Jameses (Henry or Joyce), flipped wildly through the pages—and, full of dizzy revelation, saw precisely what the writer was getting at. He would jump up and run down the halls, banging on doors, awakening his fellow students. Waving the book in the face of some sleep-dazed wretch, he would explain. Yes. He would explain until someone roused the house monitor and a couple of orderlies were summoned. They would tackle and sedate him.

  * * * *

  "Nonsense,” Lars Stoker told him on the morning after one such episode. “Weren't even words you were saying, just gibberish like."

  "'Gibberish?’”

  "Yeah, you know, like bibble bleep bah jabber ho spinnish sputtle hoo!"

  Stone could never remember anything beyond the rush, that sense of having finally got it. Alas, it was a delusion, for when he revisited a book that made no sense prior to the episode, it was, again, an implacable wall. After one such episode, he reopened the Faulkner that had been the catalyst for his derangement and found it as impenetrable as ever. He might as well try to puzzle out the thought processes of a giant squid mulling things over at the bottom of the night-black sea. And he had thought he understood! He roared with laughter, laughter so violent that it convulsed his body. He broke out of his restraints and ran down the hall, smashing through to the adjoining ward where suicidal young women who had recently read The Bell Jar moped around like swamp wraiths. It had taken five orderlies to subdue him.

  * * * *

  Now was not the time for indulging the past. The students, the carefully composed lawn, the massive walls of the temple, all seemed to urge passivity, another name for death.

  Although time might reveal the manner and placement of guards, he could not wait. To remain here would be to surrender to inaction, perhaps to never move again.

  He moved. With the speed and agility that had kept him whole among jungle and desert predators (including the human ones), Stone raced over the grass and reached the wall, releasing the grappling rope from his waist even as he ran, and threw the grappling hook high where it caught on the lip of an ornate ledge. To anyone watching, it might seem that he ran up the wall and disappeared by supernatural means.

  In fact, as soon as he found the roof he threw his poncho around him, and the poncho, made for a desert war (made as a hammer is made to recognize a nail), turned itself the mottled red and brown of the roof.

  Under this camouflage, Stone crouched and ran to a small domed shed that protruded from the roof. Above him, he spied three evenly spaced watchtowers, each containing the tall silhouette of a guard whose right hand clenched a spear-like silver weapon. The door to the shed was locked, but no match for Stone's resolution and the thick sinews of his arms.

  It was dark within. Stone descended a short flight of stairs and discovered a large storage space filled with casks, crates, armor, rusting weapons of mass destruction, and boxes filled with books and ammunition. Stone's mercenary days had taught him the look of fine weapons. Here, hanging from the stone wall, was a silver sword of great beauty and strength. He lifted it from the wall. When he pushed the button at its base, the blade seemed to shimmer, an illusion created by twin blades moving with uncanny speed. This was a sword to cut through stone and steel and bone.

  He made his way to the end of the room where yet another door awaited him. This door opened on a long corridor illuminated by dozens of brass torches that simulated fire. Moving quickly down the hallway, he heard voices to his right and moved toward them—it was not his inclination to hide—and almost immediately the owners of the voices rounded a corner and came into view.

  He saw a teacher, dressed in traditional garb, a tweed jacket, elbow patches that signified thoughtfulness (thought required considerable leaning on the elbows), and an ill-groomed beard, brown and flecked with silver, which some called—it was all coming back to Stone—a tenure. The man was accompanied by five students, two male and three female, who stayed very close to him, almost hugging him, and bent low, a posture that allowed them to look upward into the face of their mentor who was short and yet, by his station, demanded upward gazes.

  Spying Stone, they all stopped abruptly, gone mute until one of their group, a beardless boy, spoke, “Who's this, Professor?"

  "I have no idea,” the professor said, frowning. “He's not a level two, so he has no business here. Where is your uniform, young man?”

  "I gave my uniform to a leper in Wantoga,” Stone said. “Had he not been naked, he would have refused the gift, I'm sure."

  "What's your name?"

  "Stone. And yours?"

  The professor smiled, turning slowly so his students could read his amusement. “Well, this fellow is grilling me like a first year, isn't he?” The students giggled, and the professor, easily encouraged, began to recite a cynical, archly insulting poem.

  That is, Stone took the poem for an insult, but there was no way he could know for sure. He could never know what lay within a poem. The runic words, the incantatory rhythm, seemed a threat filled with sorcerer's guile. A blinding red haze filled his eyes—this had always been so—as t
he madness of the warrior rose up. He leaned forward and sank the humming blade deep into the man's heart.

  Stone looked at the balding academic, lying in a pool of blood, his thinning hair an accusation (You've killed a feeble foe!), and thought, He shouldn't have poemed me.

  The students fled down the hall. Instantly, Stone was restored to his senses. A loud ringing filled the halls, the same ringing that used to send every student into the pavilion back at Knowledge Base #29. Stone felt a need to go outside and stand in a line, but he was pleased to discover that this old imprinting no longer ruled him. He turned and ran in the other direction, spied a door on his right and wrenched it open. He ran quickly up the stairs.

  The Librarian would be above him. The old man loved a view, loved to sweep his hands before a window as though petitioning the world, and he would be up there in some high vaulted room, up there minding the clouds.

  Finally, Stone came to the topmost step and broke in another door. More than a dozen armed guards, bristling with swords, greeted him. Their faces were dark, glowering, their shoulders wide—formidable brutes, but not, Stone thought, bound by loyalty. He knew the mercenary's eye, having lived among them, and for all their love of money, they loved their own blood more and would bolt if the work of killing cost too much of their own red stuff.

  "Good then!” Stone shouted. “Your numbers tell me that something of value must be lodged behind that door! Some treasure? Your master, I think."

  He moved into them with a roar, his humming sword low. He crouched, lunged, moving with such speed that the gleam of his blade left a shining cross in the air, a swordsman's benediction. Stone stepped over the fallen bodies. Others filled the void immediately and died as quickly. Shouts and imprecations thundered in the hall. Stone's foes pressed forward with howling determination, thinking to overcome him with numbers, but their swords broke on his spinning one, and the swords that breached Stone's defenses (succeeding by sheer number) shattered on his desert armor (made from the hides of sentient lizards from the distant planet Celicus, where they basked and rolled in fire as cats will yawn and stretch in a sunbeam).