The Library at Mount Char (10 page)

They were still friendly, though, if not precisely close. They bore each other no grudges, and protected each other when they could. Among the Pelapi that counted for a lot. Carolyn held him in her lap all through that autumn afternoon, saying things like “I'm so very sorry” and “I know the two of you were friends.” The words felt like ashes in her mouth. She knew every word that had ever been spoken, but she could think of nothing to say that might ease his grief. All she could do was wipe away his tears with the tips of her fingers.

Shortly before sunset, Michael rose. He washed his face in the creek, stood, called out to Peter and Alicia. They came a few minutes later. Both of them were flushed, and Alicia's robe was on inside out.

“Nobununga said something, before he left.” Michael was sometimes
childlike, but he was not weak. His voice had grown calm, controlled, despite his grief. “You all need to hear this.”

“We're so sorry, Michael,” Alicia began, and reached out to him.

He waved her away. “All of you know that Nobununga is—was—more than he appears, yes? He is ancient. He is wise. He told me that he understood what was going on here. He said that Father would let no harm come to him. It seems now that he was wrong about that part”—he gestured back at the neighborhood—“but, even so, we would be foolish to discount his other thoughts.”

“What did he say?”

“He knew what it was,” Michael said. “The thing keeping us out. He has seen such before. They were used in the third age. They are called
reissak ayrial
.”

“Yeah, we heard him say that. What is it?”

“It means ‘the denial that shreds,' ” Carolyn said.

“Yeah, Carolyn,” Peter said. “But what
is
it?”

Carolyn shrugged, thinking of “heart coals.”

“Poetic license?”

“I know,” Alicia said.

“You do?”

“Yeah. I wasn't going to say anything. It's part of my catalog.” Alicia's catalog was the far future.

“Well, then don't—” Peter began.

She put her hand on his arm. “It's OK. Really. This
reissak
is happening
today
.”

“What do you know about it?” Carolyn said. “That you can tell us, I mean.”

“Well…” Alicia considered. “Not much in terms of technical detail. I couldn't make one. But I know it's sort of a perimeter-defense mechanism. Basically, it's a sphere anchored in the plane of regret. There's some sort of token associated with it—”

“Token?” Peter said. “Like what?”

“It could be anything. The token needs to be an actual physical object, but all it really is, is an anchor. The closer you get to the token, the more powerful the effects are.”

“That fits,” Carolyn said. Her voice was meditative.

“Wait. It gets better. There's also a trigger.”

“I don't understand.”

“It's something about a person that brings the
reissak ayrial
into focus.”

“Like what?”

“The trigger would be something internal—an emotion, an experience, a memory…” Alicia shrugged. “Something like that. The people who share it feel the effects of the
reissak ayrial
. For everyone else, it's like it doesn't exist.”

Peter considered. “That fits too,” he said.

“Who among us would know how to make such a thing?” Carolyn asked. “David?”

“Nooo…no. Not David. The
reissak
has defense applications, obviously, but it's not like a spear or something. It's pretty complex.”

Carolyn gave her a suspicious look. “You say in the future these things are pretty common. Are they maybe for sale, or…something? If you wanted one, how hard would it have been to—”

“It wasn't
me
!” Alicia said. “And no. You have to alter the shape of spacetime locally—space
and
time. It's very customized. You can't just pick one up at the market, even in the future.”

Carolyn continued to look at her.

“Come on, Carolyn,” Peter said. “We know it's not—”

“Yeah, OK,” Carolyn said. “I guess I'm inclined to believe you.” When the barrier—the
reissak ayrial
—first came up, they had all tested themselves against it. Alicia came away with massive internal hemorrhaging. It wasn't immediately obvious, but within a day or so she was one big bruise. She stayed that way for weeks. Whatever the trigger was, it worked on her.

“If not David, who, then?” Peter asked.

Alicia gave him a sympathetic look. “I hate to say it, dear, but the likeliest candidate is, well…you?”

“
Me?
Alicia, come on, you know that—”

Alicia held up her hand. “
I
know this. Carolyn and Michael may not.” She turned to them. “The
reissak
is mostly a mathematical construct.” As such it would be part of Peter's catalog. “Sorry, dear.”

“Guys, I've never even heard of such a thing,” Peter said. “You can either believe me or not, but—”

“It's all right,” Carolyn said, holding up a hand. “I remember. I believe you.” On the day the
reissak
was first set, the day that Father disappeared, Peter made it two steps beyond the sign and began to smoke. By the time he came back out, his skin was already blistering.

“Who, then?” Peter asked.

“I'm not sure,” Carolyn said, “but I have an idea. This trigger you were talking about—is there any way to know what it is?”

“None that I know of. Why?”

“Well,” Carolyn said, “it occurs to me that the dead ones still get packages delivered most days. Also, there's always somebody driving in to deliver those big round cheese-bread things that David's fond of.”

“Pizza?” Peter said. “I like that too. It's a good point. If the
reissak
worked on Americans, there'd be piles of them dead in the street by now.”

“Yeah,” Carolyn said. “That crossed my mind as well. You said that the token can be anything, but the field of effect is a sphere. If that's the case, we can just map the outline of the effects and we'll know pretty much where the token is. Right?”

Peter was grinning. “And if we know where it is—”

“We can find someone to
move it
,” Alicia finished. She was grinning. “Carolyn, you're a genius! Library, here we come.”

“Yeah, well, it's a little early to start celebrating. Among other things, we still need an American. Do you guys know anybody?”

They shook their heads in unison. “That's going to have to be on you, Carolyn. None of us even speaks the language.”

“Yeah,” she said. “OK. Fair enough. I'll come up with something. Also there are the sentinels to think about.”

They plotted together until well after dark. Carolyn pretended to resist at first, but eventually she let them convince her that David would have to be involved as well.

UZAN-IYA

B
y the third year of her apprenticeship, Carolyn had mostly forgotten the outside world. Most of the others supplemented their studies with outings, or at least vacations. Michael went to the woods or the ocean. David killed scores of men on every continent. Margaret followed them down to the forgotten lands. Jennifer called some of them back.

Carolyn's studies did not require travel. Native speakers were brought to her when she needed practice, and after the summer with Isha and Asha she no longer cared to take vacations. So her world was only the Library, her studies the only escape. She spent her childhood in a circle of golden lamplight, bounded on all sides by teetering stacks of books; folios; dusty, crumbling parchment. One day when she was about eleven years old—in calendar terms, at least—it occurred to her that she no longer remembered what her actual parents looked like. Time was different in the Library.

She lost track of the exact count of languages she was fluent in at around fifty—trophies were never her thing—but she thought that whatever the count was, it was probably pretty high. One of the more challenging was the language of the Atul, a tribe of the Himalayan steppe that had died out about six thousand years ago. The Atul had been linguistically isolated. Their grammar was nearly impenetrable, and they had some exotic cultural norms. One such was the notion of
uzan-iya
, which was what they called the moment when an innocent heart first contemplated the act
of murder. To the Atul, the crime itself was secondary to this initial corruption. Carolyn found that idea—and its implications—fascinating. She was turning this over in her mind one dry summer afternoon when she realized, with a bit of irritation, that her stomach was rumbling. When had she last eaten? The day before? The day before that?

She went down to the larder, but it was bare. She called out for Peter, whose catalog included the preparation of food. No answer. She walked to the front door and went out into Garrison Oaks.

Jennifer was sitting on the porch, studying. “Hey, Carolyn! Good to see you outside for a change.”

“Is there any food?”

Jennifer laughed. “Driven out by hunger? I might have known. Yeah, I think some of the dead ones got a grocery dump last week.”

“Which ones?”

“Third house down.”

“Thanks. Want me to get you anything?”

“Nah, I'm good. But”—Jennifer looked up and down the street furtively—“you might want to swing by my room tonight.”

“Why, what's up?”

“Michael brought this back from his last trip.” She held up a little baggie with green leaves in it.

“What is it?”

“It's called marijuana. Supposedly if you smoke it, it makes you feel good. We're going to try it tonight.”

Carolyn considered. “Can't. I've got a test tomorrow.” The last time she missed a question, Father gave her ten lashes.

“Oh, OK. Next time?”

“Love to.” Carolyn paused. “You might ask Margaret, though. I think she could use a little fun.” Margaret was no longer screaming herself awake every night, which was a relief, but she'd developed a nervous giggle that was at least as bad.

Jennifer made a sour face. “I'll ask.” She didn't sound happy about it.

“What's the problem? You two used to be buddies.”

“Margaret
stinks
, Carolyn. And she and I haven't hung out in ages. You really need to get out of your room more.”

“Oh.” Come to think of it, Margaret actually
had
smelled pretty bad the last couple of times Carolyn had seen her. “Well…it's not really her fault.”

“No. It's not. But she still stinks.”

Carolyn's stomach rumbled, audible to both of them. “I've got to go get something to eat,” she said apologetically. “I'll catch up with you later.”

She hurried off down the street. The houses of Garrison Oaks belonged to Father now, as did the things that lived in them. Most of the homes had dead ones inside as camouflage. These were what remained of the children's actual parents, and some other neighbors who hadn't been vaporized on Adoption Day. Carolyn wasn't entirely sure how they had been transformed into dead ones, but she had a guess.

For a year or so Father had been murdering Margaret two or three times a week. He did this in various ways. The first time he snuck up behind her with an ax at dinner, startling everyone, not least Margaret herself. After that it was gunshots, poison, hanging, whatever. Sometimes it was a surprise, sometimes not. Another time Father pierced her heart with a stiletto, but only after telling her what he would do, setting the knife before her on a silver tray, and letting her contemplate it for three full days and nights. Carolyn would have supposed that the ax would be the worse of the two, but Margaret seemed to take that one in stride. After a day or so of looking at the knife, though, she started to do that giggle of hers.
And after that, she never really stopped
. Carolyn sighed.
Poor Margaret
.

But Margaret wasn't really the point. When she was dead she'd usually spend a day or two in the forgotten lands practicing whatever lesson was next in her catalog. Then Father would resurrect her. By this point Carolyn had seen enough of the resurrections to gather that they were a two-stage process.

First, Father—or, lately, Jennifer—would heal whatever wound had done it for her in the first place. Then he would call her back into her body. Once, though, he'd taken a break in the middle of all this to go use the bathroom. That time Margaret's healed body had gotten up and wandered around the room, picking up random objects and saying “Oh no” over and over again. She seemed to be not all there.

Carolyn suspected that was where the dead ones came from. They had been
reanimated
but not
resurrected
. They looked fairly normal, at least from a distance. They wandered the green lawns and grocery stores convincingly enough, but in every way that really mattered they were still in the forgotten lands. They could interact with one another and even with Americans—they exchanged casseroles, filled the cars up with gas, ordered pizza, painted the house. They did these things automatically. It was useful and, she supposed, easier than hiring a lawn service. They could also follow orders if it was something they knew how to do already, which could be handy as well. But they could not take instruction, could not learn new things.

Perhaps most important, they served as a security system. Every so often a stranger would stumble into Garrison Oaks and go about knocking on doors—salesmen, lost FedEx drivers, missionaries. For the most part these outsiders noticed nothing terribly out of the ordinary. Once, though, a burglar actually made it into one of the houses. After he saw what was inside he couldn't be allowed to return to the outside world. When he tried to sneak out the window, the dead ones were waiting for him. They fell upon him and tore him to bits. Father did to him whatever he'd done to the others and the erstwhile burglar took his place in one of the houses as someone's cousin Ed. Or whomever.

Carolyn and the other librarians could come and go as they pleased, though. Hungry, she opened the door of the house Jennifer had pointed at and went in. There were three of them inside: a little girl of about eight, a teenage boy, and an adult woman.

“Make me some food,” she said to the woman.

Lately she had been focusing on mythical languages. The English felt strange on her tongue. Evidently it sounded as bad as it felt. She had to repeat herself twice before what was left of the woman understood her. Then it nodded and began pulling things from here and there—a can of fish, white stuff from a jar, some sort of green goo that smelled like vinegar.

Carolyn sat down at the table next to the little girl. It was drawing a family: mother, father, two daughters, a dog. The family stood in a park. Something that might have been the sun but wasn't blazed down on them,
huge in both the sky and what passed for the little girl's memory. It was far too hot, far too close. As Carolyn watched, the little girl took a yellow crayon and added some flames to the father's back. The red O of his mouth, she suddenly realized, was a scream.

Carolyn stood up fast, the wooden chair scraping across the linoleum. She didn't want to be there anymore. She fled to the family room. There a teenage boy sat slack-jawed in front of a lighted box.
Do they still grow up, or will he be like this always?
She couldn't figure out what he was doing at first, then it came to her.
Television
. She smiled a little.
I remember television
. She sat down on the couch next to the dead boy. He didn't seem to notice. She waved her hand up and down in his field of vision.

He turned his head, looked at her without much interest, and pointed at the television. “It's time for
Transformers
.” A trickle of drool ran out the side of his mouth.

On the screen, giant robots were shooting each other with rays.

A few minutes later the woman drifted in and handed her a plate of food and a red can that said Coke. Carolyn fell on it, ravenous. The soda was sweet, delicious. She drank it too quickly and it burned in her throat. She had forgotten about Coke. The woman watched her eat, a flicker of disquiet crossing her face. “Hello,” she said. “You must be…” She—it—trailed off. “Are you one of Dennis's friends? Dennis, is this…” she said to the boy. She broke off. “You're not Dennis,” she—it—said to the boy. “Where is Dennis?”

Carolyn knew what this meant. When Father reanimated the neighbors he had assigned them to houses more or less at random. The boy on the couch was not actually the woman's son. Probably the girl wasn't her daughter. The man she laid down with at night wouldn't be her—

“Dennis?”

Carolyn stood up, grabbed the sandwich, and handed the plate back to the woman. “Thank you.”

“You're welcome, dear,” she said absently. “Dennis?”

On the television, a robot screamed. Carolyn strode back to the front door and out into the summer sunlight, slamming the door behind her. They would settle down once she was gone.

But when she saw what was waiting for her, she wished she had stayed
among the dead. Halfway back to the Library black clouds boiled over the face of the sun. The pressure dropped enough to make her ears pop. The tips of the trees bent nearly double in the sudden wind. Here and there she heard flat wooden cracks as the weaker branches gave way.

Father was home.

T
hey all knew from the thunder that he had returned. It was expected that they would meet him at the Library. They trickled in and gathered on the lawn—Michael from the forest, Jennifer from the meadow, and so on—all except Margaret. She was with him already.

“Look,” Father said. They all did. Margaret's left arm was badly broken. It hung limp, a spur of bone poking out of her skin. Jennifer moved to help her, but Father waved her away. “Why does she not cry out?” he spoke lightly, as if talking only to the breeze.

No one answered.

“Why does she not cry out?” he asked again. This time his tone was more menacing. “Will no one answer me? Surely one of you must know.”

David mumbled something.

“What? I can't hear you.”

“I said, ‘
gahn ayrial
.' ”

Carolyn's mind whirled. The words “
gahn ayrial
” meant, in a literal sense, the denial of suffering. The phrase itself was kind of meaningless—suffering existed, just look around you—but the way he pronounced the words suggested that it was the name for a skill set.
Some sort of self-anesthesia?
Carolyn knew that Father knew all sorts of things about that, and about staunching your own wounds, and healing.
But he only teaches that sort of thing to David
. With a kind of slow-boiling horror she realized what all this was about.
If Margaret knows about
gahn ayrial,
then…