The Bookman

by Lavie Tidhar

  The clothes, though worn, were comfortable. Loose trousers and shirt, both grey.

  When he finished his bath and dressed he saw Elizabeth approaching. She held a small object in her hand, and looked distressed.

  "Hello," Orphan said, awkwardly.

  Elizabeth came closer, then stopped. "I brought you the book," she said.

  "What? But it's dangerous to–" He stopped. Elizabeth shrugged. "I go out alone all the time," she said. "I wouldn't have found you otherwise, would I?"

  Orphan couldn't argue with that. He took the book from her hands and Elizabeth immediately looked relieved.

  Orphan turned the book in his hands. The leather binding looked worn, rotting in places. The title was hardly discernible, the gilt having been chipped away. The page edges looked rusted. Holding it, he felt Mary's story becoming truth. It was the book his mother had held. The way she once may have held him. Carefully, he opened the book onto the first page.

  It was empty.

  The paper was brittle and yellowing, with spots of water damage and rust. It was, in booksellers' terminology, foxed. It was also blank.

  Orphan turned the pages one after the other, but none were printed. Nothing but empty pages. Frustrated, he leafed through till the end. Only there, on the back endpaper, did he see something. A small, barely legible mark in fading blue ink, hand-written in an oldfashioned script. He peered at it. It said, "Under the Nursery, the mushrooms grow flat. – M."

  Orphan sighed. What was it with those people and mushrooms? Even his m– even Mary. He closed the book and put it away in a pocket.

  "There's nothing in the book," he said to Elizabeth. "Maybe there was once, but now – it's just an empty book."

  He was rewarded with a smile, though it was soon gone. "I…" she said, then stopped. "I ran into soldiers when I went to get it," she said. Seeing Orphan's expression she shook her head. "I hid this time. I didn't have you to get in the way."

  "That's good," Orphan said.

  "I heard them talking," Elizabeth said. She frowned at him. "They said there was someone on the island. Someone out to sabotage the cannon. That's why they were out patrolling. They weren't very happy about it."

  "What?" Orphan said.

  "It's very busy in the crater," Elizabeth said. "Frantic. I looked. They're all out. I heard the soldiers say Moriarty pushed the launch forward."

  "What?" Orphan said.

  "To tonight," Elizabeth said. She suddenly looked quite pleased at the idea. "Do you think we could watch it?"

  "Moriarty is here?" Orphan said.

  "I guess so," Elizabeth said. "I don't know who he is."

  "He's the Prime Minister – quite a good poet, too."

  "I don't really like poetry," Elizabeth said. "It's boring."

  "Wait," Orphan said, not really listening. "They can't launch now – they have to wait until Mars is close enough, and that's not until…" His voice died and he thought, I am an idiot.

  The probe wasn't going to Mars. He had forgotten that. That was just a deception. It only needed to get far enough out into space to send a signal. All the rest of it – the ceremony in Richmond Park, the public proclamations, the newspaper articles – they were all a sham. And he had to act now, or there would be nothing left for him; and Lucy – and, perhaps, humanity – would be doomed.

  "How can I get to the cannon?" he said.

  "To the crater?" Elizabeth looked both scared, and excited. "You can't. We're not allowed."

  "But you must have some interaction with the people there?" Orphan said. "You mentioned something about kitchens."

  "Yes, but the kitchens are underground," Elizabeth said.

  "So how does the food get to the people in the crater?"

  "Through a shaft, I think," Elizabeth said. "There's a pulley system."

  Orphan sighed. Images of the future flashed before his eyes. They were not promising.

  The dumbwaiter was a small confined metal box. It stank of stale food. Orphan looked at it doubtfully. He did not like the thought of what may be waiting above ground.

  He and Elizabeth had made their way through the tunnels into the kitchens. They were situated in a great, ill-lit cavern that was full of smoke. Wherever he went the people he encountered stopped and stared at him, then came closer and touched him, as if to reassure themselves of the reality of his existence. He had found it all very trying.

  But, on the plus side, nobody tried to stop him. It was as if these people had curiosity bred out of them, leaving in its wake a kind of numb acceptance of the way things were. Elizabeth took him directly to the dumbwaiter. It was sometime between breakfast and lunch, and the machine wasn't being used.

  Orphan climbed inside it.

  "Good luck," Elizabeth said. And hit a button.

  The dumbwaiter shook, coughed, and began to rise. Orphan crouched in the corner, trying to make himself as small as possible.

  He rose through a shaft of rough stone. The dumbwaiter clucked and shook. At last it emerged into light, coughed once more, and stopped. Orphan peered out.

  The room ahead was empty. He slid out of the box and stood up cautiously.

  He was, he soon discovered, in the back of a sort of mess hall. Long tables stood in perfect rows. Small windows cut into the walls filtered in sunlight. He walked over to a window and peered outside.

  The giant cannon glared at him. From here, it was impossibly large, dominating everything. People moved about it, as small as ants in comparison. There was an air of tense anticipation to those people, a feel of buzzing activity. Again, he was reminded of ants. The crater had become a colony of them, he thought. And somewhere, then, there must be the Queen – or rather, the Prime Minister. Wasn't Moriarty there?

  "Oi, you're not allowed to…!" He swung around as soon as the voice registered, swung at the speaker even before his mind caught up. A soldier, young, almost a boy, in a too-large, muddy uniform, a shorn scalp, a nose that had been broken before and was now, because of Orphan, broken again.

  The boy clutched his bleeding nose and stared at Orphan, then rushed at him.

  Orphan ducked, barely, and smacked the boy on the back of the head.

  The boy dropped to the floor. Orphan swore.

  What did you expect? a part of him said. Did you think you could just walk up here, destroy these people's life-work, and stroll out again?

  Yet he hated what he had to do. He had changed. He was no longer the young man whose greatest crime was in belonging to the Persons from Porlock, who were merely pranksters, modern clowns out to stir a bit of trouble for the literati. He was a fugitive now, a desperate man, who had both seen and caused violence. He swore again, then dragged the unconscious boy to the back of the room, and hastily stripped him. He put on the boy's uniform (it was a little tight, but otherwise fit) and put his own clothes, or rather those of the subterranean people, piled on the soldier's body after he dumped him in the dumbwaiter.

  He hit a button on the wall. The machine creaked and began to descend.

  There is no other way, he thought. He had to get rid of the soldier somehow. But in doing so he put the subterranean people – my own family, he thought, appalled – in danger.

  He tried not to think about it. He picked up the soldier's gun and marched out into the sunlight.

  He wasn't challenged. The area he found himself in was a loose collection of low-lying stone buildings and large tent-like bubbles. It must be the living quarters, he thought. But there were few people around, and those that were merely glanced at him, noted the uniform and paid him little attention.

  Ahead of him was the cannon. It dominated everything, its silver metal flashing in the sunlight, its tip reaching high into the blue skies until it seemed to rip through clouds.

  The cannon stood in a clearing, beyond which were the temporary-looking structures of bubble-tents. He could see the two black airships in the distance, anchored to the ground, keeping watch.

  He had to find the control room. Or could
he go up to the cannon itself, and act then?

  No. As he came closer the number of soldiers grew, and he could not afford to be stopped by them. Panic took hold of him. He only had limited time. The soldier he had hurt was bound to come awake down below, to raise the alarm. Already they were suspicious, had known he was on the island. He had to hurry.

  It was then, as he paused and squinted in the sun and looked again towards the cannon, with a befuddled sense of being suddenly helpless, that he saw Moriarty.

  The Prime Minister looked uncomfortable in the unforgiving haze of the sun. He was a short man turning to fat, and sweat stained his face as he walked quickly, with sharp heavy breaths, away from the cannon. He was surrounded: scientists in white smocks; functionaries in outlandish tropical clothes no doubt concocted in expensive Savile Row tailors, a long way from any tropical sun; and soldiers. This group, with Moriarty at its centre, moved across the arid landscape, and Orphan followed at a distance.

  It was a long walk; the sun beat down hard on Orphan, who was uncomfortable in the unfamiliar uniform. He wondered how the soldiers handled it. The group moved away from the ramshackle assortment of buildings and headed further out, towards the edge of the crater. Where were the lizards? Orphan wondered. He had seen none in the crater, none in the tunnels. This was their home, their hidden seat of power, and yet, there was no sign of them. He felt uneasy. What else was hiding on the island?

  Moriarty and his people approached the rise of land and disappeared around a crest. Orphan, sweating, followed. He reached the low crest of a hill – but the group had disappeared.

  He swore again.

  Descending the small hill, he found only a dry brook at the bottom but, as he looked down at the ground he struck lucky – there were footsteps in the sand. He followed them a short way up, but found the way blocked by a giant boulder. The footmarks ended just before the stone.

  Where did they all go?

  He began searching the stone, his hands touching the rough, warm surface in search of a hidden spring, some kind of artificial control, but could find nothing but unbroken rock.

  He swore again and sat down. It was all part of a big, invisible web, he thought. With the spider forever hidden, weaving forever more strands to confuse and entrap. Where did they go?

  He let his mind wander. Suddenly, none of this seemed particularly important. How was he to sabotage the cannon, anyway? And for what? Should he prevent the lizards from calling to their own people? Were they planning invasion – or did they simply desire to escape a backwards world that was for them a prison?

  Perhaps, he thought, it was a little of both. His eyes tracked a column of ants across the sand. A lizard darted out of nowhere and snatched several of the ants with its tongue. The remaining ants continued to march, despite the attack.

  Are we the ants? he thought. Or… His train of thought was interrupted. Where had the lizard come from? He could no longer see the reptile, but his eyes caught the quick darting trail it left across the sand. There!

  He bent down on his knees and crawled forward in the sand until he was directly beneath the boulder, in its shade. Something flashed. He cleared sand with his hands.

  Below him there was, revealed, not more earth but bars of dull metal, stretching away from him. He was standing on some kind of a ramp!

  Before he could move again the ground shook, and for one terrified moment he was convinced the boul der was about to roll over and crush him. Then the ramp descended, sand, ants and all, and he found himself voyaging once more below ground.

  "It is I," Orphan muttered, "Quod feci, Arne Saknussemm," and he thought of Verne, the fat writer's image forming before him in sharp relief, and he suddenly missed home very much indeed.

  The ramp did not travel far. Orphan found himself in a small antechamber, empty, with no features or signs of life. As the ramp touched the ground it almost immediately traversed its course and began to slowly rise. Orphan rolled away and landed on the stone floor. The ramp rose and soon blocked out the sunlight. Orphan stood for a moment and let his eyes adjust to the semi-darkness. Something crawled on his hand and he panicked, but it was only an ant, separated from its comrades in the disturbance. He put it down on the floor and wished it well. It was lost, just like him.

  Then he got up and stepped through the door of the antechamber, and into a corridor and the sight of guns aimed levelly at him.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Moriarty

  "Who, then, is Porlock?" I asked.

  "Porlock, Watson, is a nom de plume, a mere identification mark, but behind it lies a shifty and evasive personality. In a former letter he frankly informed me that the name was not his own, and defied me ever to trace him among the teeming millions of this great city."

  – Arthur Conan Doyle, The Valley of Fear

  This time he couldn't fight. There were three of them, and they were armed. What's more, they had obviously been waiting for him.

  The soldiers didn't speak to him. First they frisked him, finding no weapons but confiscating the book, his mother's book. He tried to protest but they merely pushed him along. They were young, about his age, and they marched him along the corridor, their guns at his back, making sure he followed the route to wherever he was being taken. Orphan breathed in air and tried to calm himself down. All in all, his attempt to sabotage the cannon, such as it was, had not gone very well.

  The soldiers led him further down, but now there was a fresh breeze blowing through and he thought he could hear, in the distance, the far cries of seagulls. The path twisted around and around, as if meant only to confuse him. At last they came to a door.

  Unlike the rest of the tunnels, which seemed old and worn with time, this door seemed new. A coat of white paint so fresh it could have been applied an hour before, a gleaming brass handle, a small window of patterned glass: it had the feel of an office in the City, or a Whitehall interview room.

  The nearest soldier knocked, then pushed the door open. As it opened Orphan, too, was pushed, and he stumbled into the room. He stood alone in a room empty of furnishings but for a solitary unoccupied chair in the centre, and a desk in one corner.

  Behind the desk sat Moriarty.

  One of the soldiers had followed him into the room. He went to the Prime Minister's desk, whispered some words to him, and handed him the book. Moriarty nodded. The soldier saluted and left the room. The door closed behind him.

  Orphan had never seen the Prime Minister up close, yet he immediately recognised his face. The bald, high dome of his head, the deep-set eyes, the austere yet sensual mouth – here was a man of great ability, a poet as well as an administrator of great renown, the man who effectively ran the empire. Now, those dark eyes examined Orphan, and the hint of a smile lifted the corners of the Prime Minister's mouth.

  "Please," Moriarty said. "Sit down." He had a pleasant, dry voice which was a little high-pitched. He gestured for the chair and Orphan sat down, facing the Prime Minister. This is it, he thought. This is where it ends. The room had no windows. He could no longer hear the call of seabirds. A deep unsettling silence lay on the room like a dust-sheet.

  "So you are the mysterious saboteur," Moriarty said. "The would-be saboteur, I should say."

  Orphan didn't reply, and Moriarty shrugged. "Don't feel bad," he said. "It was easy enough to deduct the path that led you here. Clearly, you would be taking shelter in the tunnels, or you would have been caught already. Clearly, you only survived the island because of your blood – and my people tell me that you are indeed the rightful heir to the throne…" He stopped when he saw Orphan's eyes open wide, sudden panic mounting behind them. "You didn't know?"

  "I…" He didn't know what to say. To be related to the ancient kings was one thing, but this?

  "You are, or so I'm told, the only grandson of Catherine and Bertram. Ergo, you are first in line to the throne – were there a throne, young William." Moriarty's face absorbed his previous pleasantness as if it never existed. "Were there a throne.
"

  The King of England. Orphan almost laughed.

  "It was easy enough to deduct you will attempt something soon, and to reason that your only easy way into the crater would be via the food duct. Don't worry, by the way: the soldier you disabled is fine."

  Orphan had flashes of the soldier he surprised at the mess hall. "You were waiting for me?"

  Moriarty shrugged. "Of course. After all, it isn't every day that one meets a King-in-Waiting. And a poet too, I hear? In fact, I do believe I read something of yours, in the Review?"

  "Well…" Orphan said. He had published in the Poetic Review a couple of times, but…

  "'Finding a two-pence coin I lift it from the mud and see, the profile of an unknown monarch, her mouth slack and her eyes locked into infinity…'" Moriarty quoted. "Something of this nature? I remember you, Orphan. I thought you had great potential as a poet. It is a shame you had to choose adventure. Poetry, I find, is so much better coming from a life lived as dully as can be."