The sign that conditions were approaching their nadir was that even crashborn denizens like Ty and Book, who always hid their emotions behind a grim deadpan, were beginning to look fearful and distraught. Vertical’s multi-directional sprints were noticeably slower, and Hippo, who usually remained in the Council Chamber, could be seen pacing the hallways of the Cyst, his shoulders slouched in defeat, his eyes wide with indignant disbelief, his jaw set, tight breaths squeezed from his nostrils as he frowned with such intensity his thoughts seemed to radiate from his brow like a vague flame of jumbled words. Even when Amon walked right past him, Hippo didn’t notice he was there, and when Amon had said hello one evening, he had only given him the faintest mumbled sound in response, as though he lacked the will even for simple greetings.
With no mirrors except the one in the council chamber reserved for screenings, Amon began to take Rick as his reflection, since they had both crashed at nearly the same time, and he watched as their appearance deteriorated in tandem. While on the day of their reunion Rick had been a bit skinnier than in their Free World days, now he was properly gaunt, his skin grayish pale and drawn tight to his cheek bones, his eyes bulging somewhat from his taut face, his once intentionally mussed hair now shaggy and knotted; his bulky, muscled arms and legs stringy and lean, bulging veins running from his hands to his shoulders. Amon could sense that the same changes had come over himself when he patted his own body in the privacy of their room, his once neatly shaved head a cauliflower top of frizz, his torso now grooved with divots beside his ribs that he could fit his pinky into. Meal replacement ink was advertised to provide all essential nutrients, but clearly they weren’t hitting the minimum quantity, and lying in hungry torpor on his floor at night Amon sometimes imagined his meager flesh sliding right off his bones, leaving a bare skeleton that soon dried and crumbled into white dust, blowing off in the wind with the rest of the city.
When Vertical brought word that Hippo was inviting him and Rick to the next council, Amon was happier than he could remember feeling in a long time, as it would give his voice a chance to be heard. Not that Amon had any grand solutions in mind, but if he could contribute something, anything, to the discussion, it might lighten the leaden ball of helplessness in the pit of his stomach that seemed to grow heavier with each passing hour.
After Hippo had set up the conundrum for everyone, there was a minute of fraught silence where the councilors looked back and forth at each other to see who might be the first to speak.
“I’ve got a proposal,” said Yané, his gray-streaked beard puffed up to an unruly bramble. “We get more women to gift their babies. That way we reduce hungry mouths and boost individual supplies just like that. Plus it’d send a message to the charities that Xenocyst is a rich mine for resources. Then our negotiations—”
“Are you suggesting we force mothers to sell their babies?” said Jiku, the woman with the clam-shell face Amon had met at the equinox festival. “Who are we to order them around on such a sacred choice? And how on earth would we decide who makes the sacrifice?”
“On the assumption that this is a proposal the council deems worthy of serious consideration,” said Book, “perhaps we could make the selection by lot. Practically speaking, this would require producing a roll call of all the women who do not wish to gift voluntarily and marking those who are requested to procure one baby so that they will be exempt from procuring the next.”
“All of them could be made to gift,” said Yané. “Parents with marketable babies only raise them here ’cause of our standard of living, but that’s dropping fast. Unless we cut back on hungry mouths. So giving them away is what’s best for all of us—the parents, the babies and the community.”
“Taking that choice from parents is monstrous!” Jiku exclaimed. “We’d be no better than OpScis. And there’s no guarantee that the charities will increase our supplies. We might violate Xenocyst’s core principles and still end up no better off than we are now.”
The two councilors sat staring at each other with intensity. Yané’s cheek twitched a few times as though he was going to speak, but he never opened his lips.
“Fine. So we have two proposals now,” said Hippo. “Force some mothers to gift by lot or force all of them. I think we’ve heard a few arguments for and against. Does anyone have anything to add to this particular discussion?” There was no response from the circle. “Then let’s put this aside and see if we have any other suggestions.”
Again heads and eyes rotated. When no one spoke, they settled facing straight ahead, some staring at the floor. Throat-clearing, swallowing, and the rustle of dissolving clothes reigned until Ty said, “How about we try the opposite?” A circle of necks craned towards him. “How about we refuse to give up any resources at all? And not just in Xenocyst. We’ll partner up with our allies and as many other enclaves as we can get. Then the charities get nothing until we get steady shipments.”
“A human resource embargo?” Vertical scowled in disbelief. “Good luck maintaining cooperation with that! All the charities have to do is toss us a few scraps of useful materials and we’ll be snarling at each other like hungry wolves.”
“With the new weapons we’ve got, it doesn’t have to be a request,” said Ty, reaching around to grip a wheel for effect. “We can make it an order.”
“And push more of our allies onto the OpSci side? All that does is leave us isolated from other enclaves. Then we’ll be facing the Brigade alone with even less supplies than we have now.”
“I agree with Vertical,” said a man with a grating voice at the rear of the circle. Amon could see a horseshoe-shaped bald spot on the back of his head. “If Ty’s plan goes wrong, those slum-free-world people could show up at the gates of Xenocyst tomorrow. We’ll be demolished! Crunched into nothing! Then what will we have achieved?
Ty just hung his head, wearing an unconvinced smirk, and said nothing.
After a few scattered coughs, Hippo said, “Alright. Do we have any more ideas?”
“Tip-a-tap. Yes taptataptap,” said/tapped the Books. “I do not believe this qualifies as a solution, per se. However, in the short term, I propose that we permanently dismantle the library.”
The entire room stopped breathing, the muffled rakhaws of crows outside filling the silence like an underworld choir, while Book and Little Book just sat there impassively taking in the crowd with their tired, studious eyes.
“What’s that?” said Ty, raising his weathered forehead to give them a hard stare.
“I can surmise precisely how surprised you all must be to hear me of all people putting forth this recommendation, as I have long defended the utility of the library,” said Book ta-taptap. “However, as you are all aware, we are sorely deficient in space. Without some means to alleviate lower floor population congestion, some of our buildings will need to be demolished to make room for foot traffic, and our existing structures will have to be built higher. However, the former will only exacerbate the problem and the latter will be a significant strain on those living on the upper floors, as calories are already critically under-provided. Whatever urban planning strategy we employ, we are approaching an overcrowding crisis. I am proposing that we begin with the library, as it is the most precious area to me personally. My hope is that others will follow my example by making changes they find undesirable to accommodate everyone else. In the future, we might perhaps consider downsizing the hospital and diverting the running water we have specially piped in for medical purposes into a storage tank in case the feeding station beverages are depleted any further. Our books might also be traded for supplies to nosties, some of whom may value such items more than a meal. If there is no demand, then we will have plenty of fuel to keep ourselves warm during the upcoming winter.”
The rakhaw-filled silence returned as most of the councilors stared with looks of perplexed astonishment at Book, and Amon remembered the passion in his voice when he had spoken of education after tea, no better able than anyone else to process s
uch words coming from his mouth. But three heads were nodding in agreement and Amon wanted to call out Come on! You can’t actually support this! Yet his feeling of indignation was so strong he couldn’t gather his thoughts to produce convincing counterarguments and would have been too shy to speak out as a first-time guest if he could have. So he remained simmering in the corner, thinking how perverse it was that the idea of trading babies had become so normal that he’d hardly blinked at the previous proposal while wanting so intensely now to save something that only a few months earlier he had thought was entirely worthless.
Amon had recently been spending most of his evenings in the library. With Rick rarely around, calories too few for climbing to stargazing platforms, and the compound too dark at night for wandering now that the remaining stock of firefLytes had been distributed around the border to assist the night watch, Amon’s options for passing the time after work were limited, and this was the best one remaining.
He continued to pick up Woman in the Dunes. For the first week or so, the text still looked like incomprehensible runes. Nevertheless, he found the process of turning the pages and scanning their rows of alien scrawls inexplicably addictive. And strangely, when he recalled the act of reading afterwards, images would arise behind his eyelids, as though some subliminal dimension of his mind were absorbing the meaning even though he wasn’t conscious of it in the moment.
In this way, he “read” Woman in the Dunes several times. He would stand still in the aisle between the shelves, holding the book open in both hands until his feet ached and the faces of the readers browsing around him had all been replaced. Soon he could imagine the entire story from beginning to end and somehow knew that Kobo Abe had written it, though he still couldn’t see this name on the cover. He was even able to recall specific phrases word for word. One in particular kept resurfacing in his recollection:
The man’s eyes began to sting. Neither tears nor blinks could fend off all the relentlessly falling sand.
The novel was about a man imprisoned with a woman at the bottom of a pit in a sand dune, forced to shovel the sand that is constantly encroaching. Only by performing this endless, utterly unproductive task can he prevent the sand from burying them alive and earn food and water from the locals while struggling against the seductions of the woman, with whom he might produce a baby that would tie him to that place. To Amon, this scenario seemed like a perfect metaphor for life in the bankdeath camps generally, and this quote in particular felt personally significant. He often ruminated over it at length while lying on the floor of his room before sleep while Rick was away, feeling sad and helpless but oddly consoled, as it reassured him that others, at the very least the protagonist, shared suffering like his.
Then one evening he entered the library and found he could read the spines and covers of all the books. Though the pages of the dozen or so he picked up and consulted remained an inscrutable wash of lines and squiggles, it was not long before they too began to resolve into the ideograms and phonetic characters he was used to. A few visits after he reached this stage, these began to coalesce into words, then words into whole phrases, and eventually phrases into paragraphs, as though day after day he were adjusting to a voice in a crowd. Soon he discovered a certain way of looking at the page that would make the script take on a discernible shape and order, like 3D pictures.
Though he had little patience to read more than half a chapter at first, slowly he began to sample sections of various documents. The selection may have been limited, but Amon’s progress was gradual and so to him it seemed inexhaustible. He took stabs at various novels, short stories, poems, and plays from Japan, both ancient and pre-Free Era, as well as translations from here and there. He briefly experimented with non-fiction and a few textbooks, but found it frustrating that they had not been updated in some cases for decades, rather than in real-time as they should have been.
It was confusing to him that the content in the library was organized by type of medium and author’s name rather than by price, as it had been with the gold, silver, and bronze search engines. Such arbitrary ordering seemed as good as a senseless jumble, for without any indication of each unit of information’s market value there appeared to be no way of guessing at its quality, as determined by the endorsement of specialists, intelligent demand, and other objective factors. But soon he realized that the equality and accessibility of information was presenting a challenge to him. While alphabetization was admittedly arbitrary, it was also egalitarian. Available to all who might reach out their hands for them, the books were asking him to decide for himself what their value was, to sort and stratify them in his own mind, to accept the responsibility born by all autonomous agents of endowing signals from others with an interpretation and evaluation that only their unique consciousness can provide.
Before bankdeath, he had considered himself literate—fairly uncommon in the Free World, where many got by purely on video and audio. But he was used to short, pithy articles, clickbaity listicles, fragmented blogs, and jumpy webchat that read themselves to him if he grew tired and were equipped with explanatory hyperlinks or songs, sound effects, and animations that played when he scrolled to a particular passage. The thick volumes of the library filled margin to margin with inert script felt dead to him. Though he could skim them rapidly, he struggled with careful reading, which many of the books, because of the careful way they were written, demanded. To draw out the meaning of each line and the interlinking nuance buried between them, he had to learn how to ponder, an intellectual effort that taxed his focus all the more now that he was hungry, and he never managed to finish another book.
Nonetheless, Amon derived such fulfillment from the bits and pieces he could parse that he began to wonder why he’d never discovered this pleasure before, and it wasn’t long before he realized the answer. It was the scarcity of information that made it precious—not as a rare mineral goes up in price as supply decreases, but the way gold only shows its authentic glinting majesty to the eye in darkness. Plenty, it seemed, had flooded his mind with a great torrent that drowned out the significance of each drop, the constant effort to find signal amidst all the noise numbing him to the importance of deeper content while reducing media consumption to an unconscious and automatic cost-benefit metric, a frantic scramble for that which provided the most concentrated jolt of truthiness and entertainment in the shortest span of time. Everything else had to be dismissed as banal, irrelevant, cognitively toxic. A mind so attuned, he now understood, could never grasp the pleasure of literature, with its gradual accumulation of polysemic complexity and ambiguity that took hours, days, and sometimes weeks to culminate. Although he was still learning to immerse himself in this way, he found the effort rewarding and sometimes enthralling, until his brain chugged gradually to a halt and all he could do was stagger home to sleep.
The library was his refuge from the boredom, absurdity, and misery of his life. It seemed to open the way towards answering his many questions and fulfilling his promise to the PhisherKing. It was the sole bastion against the ignorance that had made so many unwitting pawns of the powers that be. And while Amon might have agreed it should be trashed back when he had little respect for nosties, the mere suggestion now seemed like a personal attack, and so he felt fully vindicated when Hippo leapt in to its defense.
“Well,” said a middle-aged man on the left side of the circle with big round cheeks that were freckled so thickly he looked spotted with tiny gum wads. “I for one second—”
“I couldn’t disagree more,” cut in Hippo, his eyes wide and challenging. “I know there are those of you who have long petitioned to get rid of the library and I’m sure you agree with Book, but I will do everything in my power as special advisor to stop this. The closing of the library is to me synonymous with the death of Xenocyst. Since the Philanthropy Syndicate has coerced us into shutting our schools, we need a place to learn and educate ourselves. Yes, we have other arts here—our skyscraper comics and reliefs, our embyrsculpture
s and cinderworks, our music—and these are of supreme value for giving our residents just that much more reason to exist. But here, behind the Digital Divide, books offer us the only way to have sustained dialog with minds and epochs and cultures beyond what is familiar to us. Without such dialog, we are doomed to lose the knowledge and know-how that sets us apart from our peers and rivals in the District of Dreams. If we’re going to let that slip away, we might as well just give up now.”
“But we must prepare for the worst,” said Yané. “If the crowding get any thicker, what do we do? Tell residents without rooms to test their luck outside? No one reads anyways!”
Three heads nodded.
“Abandoning the library only postpones the problem,” said Hippo. “If the decrease in roombuds continues at this rate, overcrowding will reach critical levels. But once the library is gone we’ll have no more spaces to sacrifice.”
“How about this chamber? The helipad? The storage floors?” demanded the freckled man. “Nothing can be sacred anymore. We must do everything we can to hold together!”
“It may be that delaying the inevitable is the best we are capable of in the present situation,” said Book, bringing all breaths to a standstill once more.
Only the rakhaw of crows could be heard until a sonorous voice said, “May I contribute something to the discussion?” Amon looked along the back wall to the opposite side where Barrow knelt, his back straight and his broad shoulders raised just as in his former days as the great leader Amon had admired. The entire council had turned towards him as one, those on the left side of the circle twisting their torsos and craning their necks, called to attention by the music of his words.
The Naked World Page 44
