“More purple,” muttered Iris.
“Many people have called me by many names; all were wrong and all were right.”
“First, it tries to kill us, complains when we protect ourselves, and now answers our questions with stupid riddles.” Thyme detested inconsistencies.
“If you must possess something as trivial as a name before answering my questions, ‘The Elder God’ will do as well as any.”
“Thank you. I’m relieved we have that settled,” said Iris.
“Now, will you have the courtesy to answer me? Whatever are you doing here? Why have you invaded my home?” While the creature was saying this, oily tentacles had extruded from hand-like appendages and were slithering across their faces, caressing their hair and examining their ear-cavities.
“Argh! What in the name of bastard kittens do you think you are doing?” Thyme barked.
“I’m trying to discover your weaknesses—your price. Everyone has one.”
“And you think that rubbing slime and squid spit in our hair will make us reveal it?”
“Do you know a better way?” The mouth part of the monster smirked.
“Stop that!” Iris pushed an intrusive tentacle away from the corner of her eye socket.
“Yes. Why don’t you just ask us what our price is?”
“What an intriguing idea. No one has ever suggested that before.” The monster leaned back, appearing to be deep in thought. “All right, what is it that you care about more than all else in this life?”
“Books!” they shouted in unison.
“Ouch! Not so loud, if you please.” Several tentacles clutched the places on its head where—in a humanoid—ears would be, and grimaced.
“Books, book, books!” they screamed again.
“Books on paper, whole books, old books, new books, books between cardboard covers…” shouted Thyme.
“With leather bindings,” added Iris. “Unexpurgated, uncut, undoctored, unelectronic—real books!”
“Books for children—that they can hold.”
“And young adults and students.”
“All right, I get the point. So, tell me how I can use that to get you to leave my pets, my sweet little nekrobees, alone.”
“’Sweet little nekrobees,’” Thyme mimicked the Elder. “About as sweet as a tarantula crossed with a rattlesnake.”
“You don’t like my little pets?” it asked, as one settled on its frontal area. A tentacle reached down and caressed the bee before popping it into a mouth. Crunch and it was gone. The Elder belched a stench of rotting violets.
“Euw! Don’t you ever brush your teeth?” Iris complained.
“My, you are a silly girl. Answer my question, please. How can I persuade you to stop persecuting my bees?”
“Keep the damnable, flying vermin out of our library,” said Thyme.
“Oh, but I can’t do that. They have work to do there—important work.”
“What’s that, then?” said Thyme.
“And what kind of work causes my books to cry and scream?” demanded Iris.
“Surgery is always painful—is it not?”
“Surgery! What kind of surgery?” They cried, this time in unison.
“When something is diseased or broken or wrong, it should be cut out, like a cancer. Don’t you agree?”
“There are no cancers in my books, only ideas,” said Iris.
“Ah, my dear Iris, I’m sure you would agree that ideas can sometimes be dangerous, that wrong ideas can spread like disease until they infect entire civilisations.”
The creature’s beaming, oily smile made Thyme want to smash her fist right into the middle of that blubbery gob.
Iris thought about The Elder’s words before she answered. “I believe, if people read enough, are educated enough—think about hard things enough, they can protect themselves against dangerous ideas.”
“My darling Iris, you are so idealistic. “
“I’m not your darling.”
“And who gets to decide which ideas are good and which are dangerous?” Thyme demanded.
“In this case, I do.”
“Wait! No...I get it.” A shining yellow globe lit up above Iris’ head. “That’s what those horrid bees are doing. They’re changing texts—to suit...YOU!”
“What a clever child you are.”
“That’s monstrous.”
“Why bother? Nobody reads these books—nobody but us, anyway. The rest of the world gets its ideas from electronic libraries.” Thyme, muttered.
“That’s right. And where do you think electronic libraries get their texts from?”
“Huh?”
“Your books, and those in the other central depositories, are the foundation texts for all the world’s electronic media.”
“So, if you change our copy, you change all the rest.”
“What smart little girlies you are.”
Growling and hissing, Thyme was temporarily beyond speech, so Iris took up the cudgel.
“Let me see if I understand you correctly: You’re not re-writing history….”
“That’s so passé. Nobody believes what’s in history books, anymore.”
“Because monsters like you have re-written them so often.”
“I’ll ignore that, but yes, history books have become irrelevant. Facts don’t influence individual actions—except for soldiers, anyway.”
“And you think novels do?”
“Certainly. The world’s great books form the underlying paradigms of all human behaviour.”
“At least we agree on something. What’s wrong with our books the way they are?”
“Oh, Iris, are you really so naïve? Your books are so nice...so moral. They have nothing to teach us about how to live in a modern world.”
“You’re saying that if Madame Bovary hadn’t been so guilt-ridden, she wouldn’t have ended up riding around the French countryside with her lover’s head on her lap?”
“Exactly. Had she been more pragmatic, she’d have lived a long and happy life.”
“Next, you’ll say Anna Karenina shouldn’t have thrown herself in front of that train.”
“Stupid, stupid, stupid...a sorry waste of human resources.”
“You think that, by changing the plots of great novels, you can influence how people behave? That’s nonsense—nobody cares about literature these days.”
“Not necessarily. Even if very few have read a particular book, everyone knows the basics. The ideas in them permeate our global consciousness.”
“You think altering the core ideas in our books will change human behaviour? said Thyme. “It won’t work. Nobody but people like us reads, anymore. The general population won’t be exposed to your changes,” said Iris.
“That’s because your books,” the Elder sneered, “are so removed from real life. But if I and my bees bring these into line with current realities...Do you have any idea how many people think popular media—novels, TV, films...ARE the truth? Remember the flap back in the ‘oughties caused by Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code?”
“Yuck! Unfortunately.” Iris looked as if she had bitten into something rotten and very bad-tasting.
Thyme said, “You want to Dan-Brownify our classical heritage?”
“Please.” The creature looked affronted. “Nothing so egregious as that. I like to think I’m a better writer.”
“Irrelevant. We can’t allow you to pervert our books.”
“How do you plan to stop me?” the monster sneered. The effrontery of these two simple young women delighted him.
“We’ll burn the Necronomicon—all the copies, in all the depositories. How many copies exist? Five?” asked Thyme.
“Six,” prompted Iris.
“You can’t...you wouldn’t do that,” it said, horrified.
“We can and we will, if you don’t leave our books alone.”
“I...I will have to consider that....” The Elder retracted all its tentacles and humanoid features. The twins w
ere facing a massive, featureless, stone obelisk.
“What’s to think about? You leave our books alone or your book is a goner!” Thyme shouted.
“Dead, splat...ash,” added Iris.
An eye and a speaking tube appeared. “I could kill you, or keep you here—turn you into ice statues.”
“You could, but you won’t,” said Iris.
“Why is that, pray tell? Please enlighten me.”
“Because our colleagues know we were looking for the source of the books’ distress. If we don’t return, they will initiate a meticulous search of the stacks.” Iris was lying baldly, hoping the monster wouldn’t guess.
“They’d find your eye into our world,” added Thyme, smiling.
“Humphf!” grunted the Elder. “We seem to have reached something of an impasse.”
“I would say so.”
“Let me see if I understand this correctly: If I don’t stop altering the books in your library, you will destroy the foundation document of my world, left for safe-keeping—and in good faith—in your TGB.”
“That sums it up,” said Thyme. “And all the other copies.”
“If I promise to leave your books alone and return you safely to your blasted library, you promise to leave my books alone?”
“Done,” said both.
“ Do you promise never to come to my world again?”
“Definitely! I’d offer to shake on it, but I might vomit all over you.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.” The Elder produced a high-pitched humming sound that continued for several seconds, bringing a phalanx of gangly mantis creatures at a gallop. “See that these two are delivered intact back to the portal from which they entered.’”
High, fluting voices responded. “Yes, Your Evilness! Nothing will happen to these ugly creatures while we clean them out of our home.”
“Good. Now get them out of here.”
The Mantis Guard, forming a tight square around Iris and Thyme, marched forward. There was no escape and nothing to be done but move with them. After about ten metres, the ground under their feet disappeared. They were flying upwards though what seemed to be a giant wormhole. As on the downward journey, time ceased to register until they were propelled through a membrane in the tunnel. Pop!—and they were back in the library.
“Ow, that was weird,” said Iris. “Are you okay?”
“I think so.”
“What time is it?”
Thyme looked at her watch, which had started working again, “It reads 22:00 hours. Can that be right? We’re back before we left?”
“Let’s go to the front desk and check.”
As the twins walked through the tunnels of stacks towards the reception area, a soft, melodious humming began. “Iris, what’s that?”
“I think the books are thanking us.”
“Oh, how lovely.”
In the cavernous, marble reception area, everything looked just as it always did. The brass clock above the main desk read 22:15. “Look at that,” “said Thyme. “It felt like we’d been gone for hundreds of years.”
“But it was less than nothing...minus an hour. Weird.”
“Seems so. I don’t care right now. Let’s go home.”
“You took the words right out of my mouth.”
“Didn’t change them, though—did I?”
The twins went through the routines for securing the building; recalibrating and turning on the sensors, checking that all peripheral doors were closed and locked; setting the alarms; and, finally, locking the main entrance doors with their bronze bas-reliefs. Someone else could open them tomorrow. They were going to call in sick. They’d earned it.
Just as the heavy doors were clicking shut—way, way back at the end of the oldest, dustiest stack—a black eye opened and closed; a tiny violet light winked on and then out.
GO, GO, GO, SAID THE BYAKHEE
By Molly Tanzer
Molly Tanzer is the Managing Editor of Lightspeed and Fantasy Magazine. Her debut book, A Pretty Mouth, is forthcoming from Lazy Fascist Press in late 2012. Her fiction has appeared in Running with the Pack, Historical Lovecraft, Lacuna, The Book of Cthulhu, and other places, and is forthcoming in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine. She is an out-of-practice translator of ancient Greek, an infrequent blogger, and an avid admirer of the novels of eighteenth century England. Currently, she resides in Boulder, Colorado with her husband and a very bad cat. You can find her at http://mollytanzer.com. More frequently she tweets over at @molly_the_tanz.
...human kind
cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
—T.S. Eliot
WRIGGLER LIVED IN the lake, and when you didn’t throw stones at him too much, he would bring up purple-scaled balık and tiny scuttling yengeç for roasty crunchings. Feathers lived in a hut in the treetops and she would help pick the highest-up kayısı when they were ripe and juicy—sometimes. Feathers was mean. Half the time, if you so much as looked at her funny, she would open her mouth wide like an O and birdy squawks would come out, eee eee eee, which, true, were the only words she ever said since she changed, but she could make them sound so angry! No one cared if she was angry, though, because even with the wings, she couldn’t fly. Wriggler could breathe underwater, and Whee! could swing from branch to branch with his long fuzzy tail, and Mister Pinch could bruise you with the handy claw on his extra arm, if he ever got mad at you. Ouch! Feathers, she looked like a birdy, but wasn’t, quite. Everybody said it was because she didn’t pray hard enough when she went on pilgrimage to Tuz Gölü, to see the Mother in the Salt.
Dicle was still a two-legs, two-hands, two-eyes, upright skin-wearer, so she still had her cradle-name that said nothing at all about who she really was. Bo-ring! But that would change soon, she knew it. When she went to fetch water, she could see, in the shiny surface of the well, two of the protuberances mammals and mostly-mammals got when they were ready to give live birth and suckle their young, and she’d had a dream about Wriggler coming to the surface and touching her between the legs with one of his long, bendy arms. Those were the signs, Whee! had said, but then again, Whee! couldn’t be trusted, not completely. Whee! wanted to be the one Dicle took as a snuggler, once she was given her true shape by the Mother in the Salt. But Dicle knew she’d rather snuggle with Wriggler, even if they had to do it mostly underwater, so he could huff and puff through his gills.
But Stag-Face said Dicle wasn’t ready for pilgrimage, or for huff-and-puff. Stag-Face said she was still a baby-girl and, since Stag-Face was the boss of everybody—those who’d visited the Mother in the Salt, those who hadn’t yet, and especially those who failed—she had to heed him. She hated it, though! Ugh! Kids like her, they couldn’t dance in the nightly revels, and they had to do all the worst chores, like climbing up the burning rocks to every single one of the hill-caves to dump out the piss-pots, or sweeping away the rubble to find the empty meat-shells when the earth shook and there were cave-ins, or weave reeds into wind-shields so people could sleep out of the dusty, gusting breezes. But Dicle didn’t like climbing, and she didn’t like to clear away rocks to find meat-shells, and she didn’t like weaving, either. She liked to run as fast as she could and she could run so fast! Stag-Face said maybe she could be a messenger, once she was old enough. But she was old enough and that was why she’d come up with the secret plan.
Well, it wasn’t a total secret. Wriggler knew, but he’d promised not to gurgle it to anyone else. In fact, he’d helped her by catching balık a-plenty, just for her. Dicle had built little fires and smoked them so she’d have food for the overnight journey to Tuz Gölü. She knew it was wrong to disobey Stag-Face, but ever since her mama had been crushed to death in the cave-in during the shivery months, Dicle had been restless. She was going to go on pilgrimage, whether mean old Stag-Face liked it or not, and when she went, she’d take
her mama’s bones to the Mother in the Salt, so Mama could really rest. The Mother in the Salt would be so very pleased she’d change Dicle just how she’d always wanted, and then Dicle would come home and snuggle with Wriggler and everything would be wonderful.
***
The morning she left, early-early she awoke, after the revelers were all in bed and before even the dawn-time scurriers were out and about. She snuck away at a run, the rucksack she’d stuffed full of Mama’s bones and smoked balık bouncing on her back, the skin full of water slapping her hip. She’d also strapped a gleaming knife to her arm, so the beasties of the wood and the ghouls of the salt flats would see she was one dangerous girl. She bared her teeth as she ran, grr!
The path was made of cracked black stuff, and was smooth from ages and ages of people going to Tuz Gölü and elsewheres. Dicle wasn’t scared, though—at least, not at first. Back during the shivery months, right after Mama had died, she’d gone down the path a fair way before Whee! had caught her and told Stag-Face. Stag-Face had beat her, bad, and Whee! had laughed at her. That, more than anything, was why he’d never-ever be her snuggler.
Everybody, even little, unchanged girlies like Dicle, knew that time and space were the same thing, except when they weren’t. There were a few places around K’pah-doh-K’yah everyone knew to avoid, where, if your eyes worked right—which was no promise!—you could see how the trees grew backwards in time and would gobble you up, if you got too close to them. Stag-Face said those places were holy because, if you looked at them too long, or thought about them too hard while you were there, you’d get a nosebleed and that was the sign of the Mother in the Salt. Also, if an animal or person went there and he or she had a baby inside them, the baby would grow so fast it would tear its way out and make its mama or papa a meat-shell instead of a mama or a papa, and the baby would be a ghoul and never know anything except hunger. That was a bad thing and it happened a few times a year, even if everybody was careful, since time isn’t always the same and, therefore, neither is space.
Dicle ran through a few of those Mother-places the first day of her pilgrimage (She ran as fast as she could, so time didn’t slow down too much for her and make her journey take too long), but she saw more and more of them on the second day, as she drew closer to Tuz Gölü. She knew she was getting closer because all the trees had gone away, and she could taste salt on her lips when she licked them, and she was thirsty. She wasn’t scared, though, because she didn’t have a baby inside her and, if any of the ghouls said boo! to her, she showed them her knife and they slithered away back to their hidey-holes.
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