The Book of Air: Volume Four of the Dragon Quartet (28 page)

“Leif an’ da ’hole army! Day shud be ’bout dere by nah.”

The Librarian glances sidelong at the television. No sign of any action yet. That is, if what he’s seeing on that screen truthfully represents the facts. “Food and water, Mattias? All you need?”

“Yah, shur. Dey lef’ us ev’ryt’ing. But dere’s nutting ta do heah. Yu commin’ back soon?”

“Hope so. Listen, Matt. Boring, yes. But stay, okay? More important than you know. Safer if I can reach you.”

“Safer yu, or safer me?”

“Both. The world.”

Mattias groans, but it’s only for show. “I be heah, G.”

“Good. Now, patch me through to House.”

“House! Oh boy, kint do dat, G. House wen’ off-line yestiddy.”

This news convinces the Librarian that he’s talking in real time. “Why?”

“Doan know. He jess blanked.”

The Librarian reviews the list of the Citadel’s surveillance cameras. There are none in the library or in the computer room. How can he find out what’s happened to House? Meanwhile, there’s an avalanche of code waiting to be sorted through and analyzed. Can’t let himself be distracted from his search. He must bend his mind to the issue of the differing interpolations. House will have to take care of himself.

“Mattias. Stay on station. Keep trying House. I’ll get back to you soon.”

“Wait, G. Tell me whachu bin doin’.”

“Can’t right now, Matt. Later, okay?”

“Okay,” concedes the boy heavily. “I guess. See yu soon den?”

“Hope so.” The Librarian cuts the connection with no real conviction that he’ll be able to establish it again at will. But soon he should be able to witness Leif Cauldwell’s assault on the Citadel, at least from certain points of view. He wheels back to the television and tabs through to the camera trained on the Grand Stair. The landscape is sere and barren. Dust swirls off the wide, steep steps and is lost in curtains of heat shimmer. At the head of the stair, two Temple guardsmen huddle in the slim shadow of the terrace railing, their eyes slitted against the glare and wind-borne grit, fixed on the distant pale gash where the mountain pass empties onto the valley floor. When something happens, he’ll notice. The Librarian leaves the channel tuned to that view, and returns to his code analysis.

He misses the boy’s eager, trusting voice the second it’s no longer with him, warming the darkness. He wishes N’Doch had not stopped singing. He needs no more eruptions of despair putting him off his course. He decides to attempt to trace the song’s origin. At its current stage of evolution, his equipment should be able to go back and pinpoint a signal’s location anywhere in the world. Of course, the difference in time-location may intervene. He runs the inquiry anyway. A bloom of cool light draws his glance upward. A window-sized wall screen has succeeded the monitor bank. On it, a brightly colored schematic: a vast and repetitious grid. A map, the Librarian decides. Of this very city. But not a map of streets. A map of power distribution. A flow chart of signal. He studies it with the eager anticipation of a lover who’s discovered his beloved’s diary, as if it had secretly been written for him only.

Certain things are immediately obvious. A green dot marks the origin of the signal he’s inquired about. A red dot marks his own position. According to the map, they’re only a few blocks away from each other. This is convenient but inconceivable. The Librarian knows N’Doch is in twenty-first-century Africa.

On the other hand, I don’t know exactly where I am, do I? Or when
.

He runs the inquiry again and gets the same result. He sets this conundrum aside as currently unsolvable, and goes back to the flow chart. A deeper perusal tells him that even this trove of information will provide no easy answers.
Nowhere does he find the central nexus he’s hoped for, pointing to a master control. If the dragon draws from or imparts energy to this network, she is not currently announcing her presence. The Librarian downloads his disappointment into three long, deep breaths, and returns to his methodical analysis, signal by signal.

He chooses a random city block for closer study, one of countless seemingly identical squares. He enlarges the scale by a factor of ten, and discovers that what he has taken to be mere digital texturing in the image is actually an underlying layer in the grid: more power lines, myriad and tiny, almost too small to be seen as individual signals. He increases the magnification by another factor of ten, then sits staring at the screen, trying to make sense of what he sees. He zeroes in on one line and magnifies it until a pattern reveals itself. More code. Infinite and infinitesimal beams of instructions, blanketing the entire city. Every meter, every centimeter, every millimeter, every . . .

The Librarian shoves back his chair and lurches to his feet. He glares around wildly. Comprehension lurks like a treasure in the darkness. It awaits him, rich and gleaming, if he’s willing to make the leap. But it’s a big one, and he fears the chasm in between. He starts to pace.

The space is smaller now, walled in by maps and monitors and wall screens. The void beyond exists only as stripes of darkness between. It’s the Refuge. Not as he’s recently left it, but as it was when he first came to it, sixty years earlier: raw, freshly painted, still smelling of wet concrete. Paia’s grandfather was renovating the Cauldwell family compound fifty miles farther west. “Hardening,” as it was called in those days. The Librarian stalls his epiphany with a moment of nostalgic revisiting.

His office down on the fourth level monitored the sea level rise. Next door to the left were the ozone boys. To the right, the Storm King, the scowling head of Meteorology whose office was always on high alert. The Librarian and his fellow post-docs told themselves how lucky they were to have wrangled jobs on high ground and in a secure location, away from the chaos in the cities, the food riots, the epidemics, and with all the hardware they could want. Let’s watch the planet go into the toilet on a hundred different screens in gorgeous living color! But of course, they
all assumed the need would be temporary. With the horrors of the final collapse yet to come, they still thought their work had meaning, that civilization could be saved if there was somebody out there doing good science. And it could have been saved, if anyone in power had cared to listen. But Power has a very, very short view, the Librarian learned. It’s just down the block to the intersection of Profit and Job Security. Daily in his office at the Refuge, it was someone else’s turn to shove open the door and exclaim, “You’re not gonna believe what they’ve done now!”

The Librarian is sorry not to see those weary young faces around him again. Long dead, most of them, or vanished back into the maelstrom in desperate search of family and loved ones, or for a reason to continue living. The Librarian has hoped for one or another of them to resurface among the Tinker crews, but sadly, none ever has.

He pads up to the old map he’d pinned to the wall next to the door, a huge, laminated USGS composite of the Adirondack counties. His red-penciled scrawl spiders the contour lines, notating an inked-in overlay that detailed the successive backing up of the Hudson River into the flood-plain of its tributaries, and after that, into the lower valleys. New York City had gone under around the turn of the last century. The Librarian sets his toes against the base of the wall and brings his face up to the map until the tip of his nose is nearly touching the surface. The pale green-and-beige shapes blur out of focus. The thin red letters waver like splashes of blood. In his mind, he sees the machines in the city square, tearing up the patterned pavement and setting it right back down again.

“I know what you’re made of,” he murmurs to the map, suddenly willing to admit it. Not a dream. Not his imagination.

Nanotech. It has to be.

Nanotech. Still science fiction in those early days at the Refuge, but close enough to being a reality, if the resources for R&D hadn’t dried up entirely. After the Collapse, the Librarian just assumed that technological development had ceased, and it was all downhill from there. He must have been wrong.

Nanotech
.

He feels a big, involuntary grin stretch his face, his body
responding to the news before his brain has registered all its implications. His feet shuffle out a little two-step. He wraps his arms around his barrel chest and gives himself a hug. Somehow, somewhere, progress has continued. The reign of the God of the Temple of the Apocalypse is not the Last Days. There is a future after all.

And . . .

The Librarian stills as the last insight drops into place. There is a future, and he’s probably in it. Now. Right here.

Nanotech. How long did it take to develop? No wonder each remembered place has looked, felt, and smelled so real to him. They
were
real, as real as matter ever truly is. Built, then rebuilt upon the instant. A numberless submicroscopic legion of machines, working at the molecular level. A whole city created and maintained by their constant labor. Worlds of memory, remade as reality. Just add water.

The Librarian lets out a slightly mad cackle. He staggers back to his high backed, high-tech chair and throws himself into it. It absorbs the force of his weight and rebounds gently. He feels it mold obediently to the curve of his back. Creepy, but astonishing. He tries not to shiver with awe.

Nanotech.

Now that he’s sitting down again, he can ask himself the really scary question. The existence of nanotech is a minor miracle compared to the really big mystery: how do all the little nanomechs have access to his personal memories? From where or whom are they getting their building instructions?

The Librarian is fairly sure he knows.

E
rde returns to the garden and slides into a seat at the stone table. Looking into Rose’s distant stare, she is convinced that a terrifying darkness lurks within. Much more than exhaustion has driven Rose of Deep Moor into retreat from the world.

“Should we bring her to him?” Raven asks.

“He says it would be better not to move her,” Erde replies.

“I’m glad to hear it. Linden thought a change of scene might help, but I’ve been resisting that.”

There’s a third chair at the stone table under the apple tree, directly opposite Rose. Erde can’t recall it being there before, but Raven takes it without comment. Rose’s uncanny stillness doesn’t mar the compassion and intelligence in her features. She is not a beautiful woman, like Raven, but certainly the one you would turn to in a crisis. Now, the crisis is hers. Though Rose’s face is suffused with calm, it’s the calm of withdrawal, not of being alert and in command of one’s self. Erde is sure that some terrifying darkness lurks within that distant stare. Much more than exhaustion would be needed to drive Rose of Deep Moor into retreat from the world.

Erde seats herself, then signals Raven to join her at the table.

“Are you sure?” Raven has been holding back in the fragrant leaf-shadow of the rose arbor. “I won’t be in the way?”

“Of course not. The more support we offer, the better, wouldn’t you think?” She wonders if Raven expects a
grand gesture of some sort. Whatever healing the dragon can manage, it will be a very quiet event.

Now, dragon . . . how shall we proceed?

I WILL NEED SOME BODILY CONTACT WITH HER IN ORDER TO DETERMINE IF THERE IS ANYTHING PHYSICALLY WRONG.

Erde is utterly certain that Rose’s healing will not be so easily accomplished, but she is equally certain that things done properly must be done as the dragon requests. So she takes Rose’s strong, mute hands in her own and quiets her mind to give the dragon room to do his good work. She pictures Rose busy and smiling, and lets the music of the garden fill her awareness: the birdsong, the hum of passing insects, Raven’s shallow, anxious breathing. But all too soon, Earth has completed his exploration.

THE DAMAGE TO HER BODY IS NOT THE CAUSE.

But there is damage?

I MADE A FEW . . . ADJUSTMENTS THAT MIGHT BETTER NOURISH HER HEART AND MIND. BUT I DARE GO NO FURTHER.

Erde sets Rose’s hands back on the table, side by side.

“What does he say?” Raven whispers.

“That the problem is in her mind.”

“Can he heal that?”

“Do you remember at the Seeing, when I first came to Deep Moor and was still mute, how Rose could hear the dragon in her head?”

“I remember it was very painful for her.”

“Exactly so. He worries that he’ll make matters worse if he intrudes upon her thoughts, whatever they may be.”

“So . . .?”

“It will require a human touch to help her.”

“A human touch in her mind?”

Erde nods. She is reaching her own understandings seconds before she must convey them to Raven.

“Would that be . . . yours?”

Erde nods again, less confidently. “So he says.”

Raven settles back a bit, throwing one arm over the back of her chair. “I also recall Rose commenting on the power you would come into, once you found your voice.” She
tilts her dark head playfully, though her tone is serious. “I assumed she meant the voice you speak with.”