A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  What about those books Ozymandias’s had rescued from the Great Fire of London? What had been their names? It didn’t matter. I could google “St. Paul’s fire books,” and find them that way.

  I did. It brought up a bunch of articles about the London Blitz and a bookstore fire in St. Paul, Minnesota. I googled “St. Paul’s fire 1667 books” instead. And stared at the screen.

  “Thousands of books had been stored for safekeeping in St. Paul’s,” the screen read. “Attempts were made to direct the fire away from it, but they proved useless. The roof caught fire, and within hours the church lay in ashes.”

  “That’s not true,” I said to my laptop. “St. Paul’s didn’t burn down. It’s still there. They must be talking about some other church,” and looked up, “History of St. Paul’s Cathedral.”

  I’d been right. St. Paul’s, with its famous dome, hadn’t burned down. But this wasn’t that St. Paul’s. It was its predecessor, the thirteenth century wood-and-stone cathedral Christopher Wren had been hired to rebuild. After the Great Fire of London burned the first one down.

  “As the flames approached, booksellers and publishers from the surrounding streets had stored their inventories in St. Paul’s in an attempt to keep them safe,” the screen read, “but the effort proved fruitless as their books perished along with the cathedral.”

  They didn’t all perish, I thought. At least a few of them survived, and clicked on London: A Compleat History to see if it listed the titles. “The books had been stored in the safest area possible, the crypt,” it said, “but as the fire progressed, the lead of the roof melted and ran down between the cathedral’s building stones, and the roof itself collapsed through the crypt’s roof.”

  “Just like Wheeler Field,” I murmured, and clicked on Moseby’s A Full History of the Great Fire.

  It read, “Tens of thousands of books were destroyed, including Sir William Dugdale’s Originales Judiciales, The History of Embanking and Draining, Sir Thomas

  Urquhart’s The Jewel, and every copy of the just-published The Carolies by John Ogilbie.”

  “Not every one,” I said.

  I read on. “The air in the crypt had been superheated by the surrounding flames, and when the roof collapsed, it ignited in a fireball that instantly incinerated all the volumes stored there for safekeeping.”

  “Then how did they get that copy of The Carolies out?” I said.

  They didn’t, I thought, a sick feeling settling in my gut. That’s why Cassie wasn’t worried about flooding. And why she’d given me that pitying look when I’d said I’d have to find my copy of Ambush in Apache Canyon and read it again.

  But that’s impossible. They have to have saved it, I thought, and googled “Lewis Carroll’s diaries.”

  A whole page of sites came up, and I felt a rush of relief. “There, you see?” I said, and clicked on the first one. “Charles Dodgson’s personal diaries, kept by him from 1855 on,” it read. “Only Volumes 2, 4, 5, and 8-12 remain in existence. Volumes 1, 3, 6, and 7 and several additional pages were burned by his family after his death.”

  The sick feeling was back. I hastily called up the next site. “Lost Literary Treasures,” it was headed, and under that it said, “The following books and manuscripts are known to have been written, but no longer exist.” It listed Richard Crookback and Cardenio and Gibbon’s History of the Liberty of the Swiss.

  “No,” I said, and googled Sylvia Plath and scrolled through her bibliography, looking for the title I’d seen.

  Double Exposure. That was it. Or Double Take. Nobody knew for sure—because it had been destroyed, too, either by Sylvia or her husband. They weren’t sure about that.

  But they were sure it was gone. “No copy of the book is known to remain in existence.”

  No.

  I googled the Yancey Creek Library Flood. “Due to the swiftness of the rising waters,” the local newspaper account said, “librarians were unable to save any of the library’s contents, including the library’s extensive, irreplaceable genealogical records.”

  They couldn’t save Noah’s Ark on Ararat either, I thought, looking at the photo that accompanied the article. It showed the building completely submerged, only the roof and the word “Carnegie” showing above water.

  Below it was a second picture, taken a week later, of a front loader dredging up a scoopful of disgusting-looking muck that had once been books and was now a muddy, foul-smelling glop, and preparing to dump it in a giant trash bin.

  Because there was no way to salvage those books. Just like there was no way to restore the moldy, rat-feces-covered volumes in those hoarders’ houses or put back together the ones blown up by bombs or burned to ashes.

  And that was why there hadn’t been any smell of smoke in the Fires section, and no sprinkler system, no listings on AbeBooks or BookFinder or Alibris. There weren’t any books to list.

  It explained everything—why Melville’s The Isle of the Cross was there and not Moby Dick—which there were tons of copies of—why Cassie hated libraries so much, why so many of the books were old. Cassie was right. Time was the biggest enemy of books. Over the years, copy after copy would fall prey to wars and weather, to bookworms and bookburnings and fraying bindings, disintegrating paper, careless children, till at last there was only one left in some college library or old lady’s attic, and when she died or the library needed to make room for more banks of computers, it succumbed, too. And came tumbling down the baggage chute into Ozymandias’s.

  Ozymandias’s wasn’t a book preserve—it was a morgue, and the books were shelved not by the disaster they’d been rescued from but by what had done them in. And the reason I couldn’t find it was because it wasn’t there either.

  But it had to be. I was there. I was on those stairs, in those stacks. I saw Cassie take out those books and look at them.

  Which means they—and Ozymandias’s—are here somewhere, and the reason I haven’t been able to find it is because the entrance is somehow hidden. After the flooding, a lot of storefronts were screened off by plastic sheeting and equipment pumping out the water, or the door might be blocked by hoardings or scaffolding or a parked delivery truck.

  Or I somehow skipped the block when I was searching. Like I told you, all the streets look exactly the same, and now there are Christmas lights and snowflakes and Santas in all the windows, making them look even more alike.

  Or maybe I’ve been looking in the wrong part of Manhattan. It occurred to me yesterday that that first day, when it started to rain and I was focused on finding shelter and/or an umbrella, I might somehow have gotten turned around without realizing it and headed back south—or east—and I should be looking over on Lexington Avenue or down in the Twenties. And checking out the subway stations.

  When Jude called in that day, she said the station was flooded and she was going to have to find a taxi, so that means she usually comes to work by subway, and if I wait at the station entrance, at the top of the stairs, I might be able to spot her and get her to take me there so Cassie can explain everything, can tell me how The Carolies was miraculously saved from the Great Fire, how Ogilbie’s publisher snatched it up as he fled, and how Noah’s Ark on Ararat had been checked out when the flood hit the Yancey Creek Public Library and a robot submersible brought up The Plight of the Vicar’s Daughter and A Brief History of Ocean Travel from the Titanic. And my copy of Ambush in Apache Canyon is safely in my mother’s basement—even though when I called her she said she’d donated all my old books to her church rummage sale after I graduated.

  Cassie can tell me she’s wrong, that Ambush in Apache Canyon wasn’t sent to the sale, that she missed it because it was hidden in among a bunch of old videotapes and thirty-five-millimeter slides. Just like Ozymandias’s is hidden in among the cleaners and pizzerias and souvenir shops.All I have to do is find the subway station and Jude. Or that lobby where I came up. Or the recessed doorway of the bookshop itself.

  I know it’s here someplace. Because if it isn�
��t, all those books I saw (and who knows how many since then? I just read on my phone about a famous bookstore in Seattle closing) have vanished.

  And everything I said about our only allowing things we don’t need to disappear was a gigantic lie. There’s no decision-making in the process. It’s all completely accidental—a conflagration here, a teething puppy there, leaky pipes and wars and peanut butter and bookworms and bookburnings and book-culling and being left out in the rain.

  Aided by our well-meaning attempts to stop the slaughter by microfilming them and digitizing them and parking them all together in the middle of the field. And assuming there are plenty of copies around, and that sending one more to the landfill won’t matter. Till all that’s left is a dash on Amazon and sometimes not even that.

  And we don’t even know they’re gone. At least when the Library of Alexandria burned, we knew it. Here, it’s happening in front of our very eyes, and we can’t even see it. Till we try to find a copy of a book we loved as a kid. Or accidentally stumble into Ozymandias’s.

  Brooke just called again, demanding to know why I hadn’t shown up to my meeting with Random House. “This is the fifth time I’ve rescheduled it,” she said. “I can’t keep covering for you like this. What’s your excuse this time? And don’t tell me research. What are you really doing? I called your hotel and they told me you’d checked out three weeks ago. Have you gotten involved with someone?”

  Yes, I thought, scanning the faces coming along the street for Jude’s, for Cassie’s.

  “You can do whatever you want with your love life, but this is your career we’re talking about. And mine. And you’re destroying both of them,” Brooke said, but she sounded more concerned than angry. “Are you okay?” she asked. “What’s going on?”

  They’re gone, I thought. All those books. Double Exposure and Ambush in Apache Canyon, Raleigh and Lewis Carroll and Tommy Toad and The Daring Debutante, and thousands, millions of others. And more of them disappear every day, tumbling down that chute from fires and hoarders’ houses and book sales, so fast that even working extra hours and calling in Jude and Thaddeus and Rita and everybody else Cassie can think of to help, there’s no way they’ll be able to keep up with the deluge.

  “I said, are you okay?” Brooke repeated. “I’m worried about you. Have you gotten in some kind of trouble? Where are you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, looking vaguely around at the delis and hoardings and souvenir shops surrounding me. “All the streets look alike.”

  There was a silence, and then she said, sounding very calm, “Listen, I want you to find a taxi and tell them to take you to my office. I’ll pay for it. I’ll be waiting for you outside on the sidewalk, and we’ll work this all out, whatever it is. Just find a taxi and come here to me. Okay?”

  “Yes,” I said, but I can’t. I have to find Ozymandias’s first. It’s here someplace, on one of these endless, look-alike streets. It has to be.

  Because otherwise all those endless shelves of books—all those histories and plays and adventures and sentimental novels and textbooks and teen star biographies are gone. And whatever fascinating or affecting or profound things were in them are as lost to us as that vanished kingdom of Ozymandias’s. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair indeed.

  And I know, I know, most of them were junk, and nobody’s going to miss The Vagabond Boys or Chickens is Chickens. But what about Cardenio and Edgar Allan Poe’s story and The Carolies and Ambush in Apache Canyon? And even The Dionne Quintuplets in Hollywood might have had something important to say to us.

  But now we’ll never know. Because, in spite of what I told the interview guy on WMNH, in spite of what I believed, there isn’t any way to get them back. They are, as I so carelessly, so callously, put it, gone for good. And we let them go.

  But that’s too terrible a thought to even contemplate. We can’t just have let them all disappear without a trace like that, can we?

  Surely not. Which means there’s some other explanation for all this, and the books are just endangered and there’s still time to save them. I just have to find Ozymandias. It’s here somewhere, on one of these goddamn look-alike streets. It has to be.

  VANGUARD 2.0

  Carter Scholz

  From the cupola, Sergei Sergeiivitch Ivashchenko looked down on Petersburg. It was night and the gloomy city sparkled. Around it curved the northern breast of the Earth, under a thin gauze of atmosphere.

  Today would have been his father’s sixtieth birthday. Sergei père had been principal bassist for the St. Petersburg Symphony. He’d died fifteen years ago, from multiple aggressive cancers. It happened to a lot of Russian men his age. He’d been a young teen at the time of Chernobyl, living in Kyiv.

  Vera, Sergei’s mother, was a beautiful young singer when she married his father. She promptly retired, at twenty-three. Never a pleasant person, Vera grew more unpleasant as her looks faded. When his father got his diagnosis, she immediately filed for divorce, moved out, and took up with one of his colleagues in the woodwinds. She said, “I have to protect myself.” Sergei himself was sixteen, an only child.

  Two months later his father was dead. Sergei filed for an extension on the apartment, and was turned down. He’d been playing the part of the rebellious punk nekulturny, which didn’t help. (His band was called Alyona Ivanovna, after Raskolnikov’s victim in Crime and Punishment.)

  They sold his father’s instruments. Vera took most of the proceeds, but Sergei’s own share kept him going for a drunken while. He couch-surfed with friends for most of a year. He had scholarships and grants and no other options. So he straightened up, and blazed almost contemptuously through math, compsci, and astrodynamics. He had his kandidat nauk at twenty-three. But there were no jobs, not in Russia, and competition in the EU and U.S. and India was fierce.

  So he switched tracks, took commercial astronaut training, and ended up in Uber’s NSLAM Division: Near Space Logistics and Asset Management. The work was menial—glorified trash collection and traffic management—but the pay was good, and he liked being off-Earth.

  NSLAM employed about twenty astronauts, in shifts, to staff its two inflatable habitats. Apart from the Chinese and European space stations, theirs was the only ongoing human presence in orbital space. All told there were several hundred astronauts worldwide, working for nations or militaries or private industry, but few stayed in orbit.

  Sergei was in the hab for three or four months at a time, then back on Earth for the same. Up here he sat in his cubby and remotely managed ion-thrust drones to deorbit space debris, or to refuel satellites. The drones would be out for weeks or months at a time on their various missions.

  Once in a great while he left the hab in a spacecraft, to work on more complex projects. One such task, still ongoing, was dismantling the International Space Station. It was decommissioned in 2024 and sold to NSLAM in 2027. They were still salvaging parts—recycling some, selling some on eBay as memorabilia. He made a side income from that.

  But crewed missions were rare, because they used so much fuel, and that was fine with Sergei. He liked being off-Earth but he didn’t like leaving the hab. There were too many ways to die in space. Debris, for one. NSLAM tracked one million objects one centimeter or larger. Smaller untracked objects numbered over a hundred million. And it was all moving up to seven times as fast as a bullet, carrying fifty times the kinetic energy. A fleck of paint had put a divot the size of a golf ball in a Space Shuttle back in the day. The habs were made of dozens of layers of super-kevlar and foam, which flexed and absorbed small impacts, but they were still vulnerable to larger objects.

  Then there were solar flares. There was usually sufficient warning, but unprotected astronauts had died. Even inside, he wasn’t crazy about the minimal shielding in the habs. During serious solar events, he’d seen flashes behind his closed eyelids. Often he felt like he was following his father to the same early grave.

  Petersburg drifted out of view across the northern horizon as th
e hab orbited south. They’d be back in ninety minutes, but further west, as the Earth rotated under them.

  Below, a meteor flashed over the blackness of the Baltic Sea. Nearer the Earth’s limb, over Finland, a green veil of aurora flickered. He’d see Izumi in Helsinki next week; his shift was almost done.

  He swiveled and opened the cupola hatch. Cold LED light streamed in from the central shaft. He pushed gently to propel himself feet first down the shaft.

  She’d hugged him goodbye, kissed him, and said:

  Who will take care of your heart and soul?

  He shrugged.

  She pointed at him. You will. Promise me.

  He’d promised, but he wasn’t sure he knew how. He could take care of himself, but that was mere survival. The self is not the soul. The soul is what you were as a child, until you learned to protect it, enclosing that fluttering, vulnerable moth in the fist of the self.

  As he drifted past Boyle’s cubby he heard his name called. He grabbed a stanchion.

  Sergei’s job title was orbital supervisor, which made him the most important person on the hab, responsible for the launch registry, collision avoidance alerts, and flight plans. But Boyle, the shift boss, was his superior. Competent enough, Boyle tended to see nothing beyond his position, so Sergei played his own to type: the stolid Ukie who kept to himself and loved his wode-ka. In truth Sergei hadn’t seen the Ukraine since his father moved them to Petersburg in 2010, and his drink was single malt. Talisker 18 Year, for preference.

  What’s up, Geoff?

  We’re going to have a visitor. A civilian.

  Civilian? Why is he up?

  He’s Gideon Pace.

  Gideon Pace was Uber’s CEO. He was one of the world’s ten or twenty newly minted trillionaires. The exact number changed daily with the markets, but they were still rare as unicorns, already persistent as myth. This tiny cohort controlled about five percent of the world’s wealth.