“But, Papa, we gotta go out sometime. Can’t just sit in here for the rest of our lives. Much as I love the Rive, and all. Remember, when I was little, you always gave me one of . . .” N’Doch looks around, then strides to a table to grab up a glistening brown lump from a white porcelain bowl. He holds it up, triumphantly pincered between thumb and forefinger. “. . . one of these! And sent me home to Ma.” His grin fades. He returns the lump to the bowl. “Papa, I couldn’t even bury her or anything. The whole town’s a war zone.”
“It was more important to find you,” Paia adds softly. “Alive.”
“We’re all the family we have now, boy.”
“You got it, Papa.”
In the silence that visits uninvited, Paia’s relief and exhaustion draws up around her like a warm blanket. She yawns, wishing for a more comfortable seat than the rickety metal chairs around the tables.
“Can I get you anything, my dear?” the old man asks.
There is a pitcher of water on the table now, with three glasses beside it. Lemon slices float among the ice cubes. Paia lets Djawara fill a glass for her. She’s too tired to eat. N’Doch wanders about the little café, poking into cabinets and corners, lifting lids and uncorking bottles. Djawara sips his coffee silently and lets his grandson wear out his restless energy. Finally, N’Doch comes back to the table and drops heavily into the third chair.
He pours himself a glass of water and drains it. “Okay. Now, let me get this straight. You think real hard about what you want, and it appears. It does this right in front of you?”
“No.” Djawara sets down his cup. “I always come upon it, as if it’s been there all along. And asking for silly things doesn’t work. Apparently, it has to be something I really need.”
“Like coffee?”
“Well, need is evidently relative in this situation.”
Paia yawns again, laying her head on her propped-up palm. “Maybe you just need to think you need it.”
“What happens if I do it?” N’Doch asks.
“I don’t know. Try.”
N’Doch closes his eyes. In her sleepy stupor, Paia finds this comical. She giggles. N’Doch’s eyes pop open in a glare, which makes her giggle again. “Why don’t you try it?” he growls.
“I’m too tired.”
He closes his eyes again. “I’m imagining a big plate of steak and pommes frites.” After a moment, he opens his eyes. All three survey the room. Nothing has magically appeared on any surface. N’Doch tries again. Nothing.
“What the hell? What am I doing wrong?”
“Maybe it’s like making a wish,” Paia offers. “You shouldn’t tell us what you’re asking for.”
N’Doch makes a rude noise. “What does it care if I tell you or not?”
“Interesting,” Djawara says. “That you say ‘it.’ I also find myself personifying these appearances, as if they are a gift from some entity, rather than an inherent reflex of the landscape.”
“Perhaps you must make the request,” Paia suggests.
“Go for it, then, Papa. I’m getting hungrier just thinking about it.”
“Or perhaps,” Paia amends, not sure what has made her think of this, “N’Doch should sing it.”
“Hey, off my back, huh?”
“I’m serious!”
“It’s not such a bad idea,” Djawara adds.
“What, sing about food? Oh . . . you mean like . . . oh, man, I gotta make up a song about steak, pommes frites?”
N’Doch shifts his chair irritably, allowing Paia a new angle of view that reveals an informal seating area in a far corner, with sofas and easy chairs arranged like her mother’s reading parlor in the Citadel. While N’Doch fulminates about singing for his supper, Paia gets up and drifts across the room to the nearest sofa. A worn patchwork quilt like the one from her childhood lies folded over one pillowy arm. The cushions receive her softly as she throws herself among them, sinking gratefully toward sleep. The last thing she hears is N’Doch’s musical mutterings resolving into a melodic hum. But what ushers her into delicious slumber is the homey odor of potatoes frying.
CHAPTER NINE
The white-tiled terrace holds his weight as he steps out onto it. The Librarian had been worried about that. The surface looks insubstantial, transparent, like the reflection on a still pond at dawn. He remembers such a pond, from his earlier days. But that pond was sanctuary. This is . . . something else.
Stoksie appears beside him, apparently untroubled by issues of solidity. He assesses the situation with quick Tinker pragmatism. “Dull sorta spot, G.”
“Humming. Hear it?”
“Doan heah a t’ing. Watsit?”
It’s a background noise, not the soundless imperative that’s been urging him to speed for so many hours. It’s like static or the steady breathing of circuitry. The Librarian shrugs. Maybe his ears have carried the sounds of the com room with him out of mere habit. He peers around. Stoksie’s right. It is a dull sort of spot. The walls and roof enclosing the terrace are plain enough to suit the most rigid minimalist, a Bauhaus patio before the decorators arrive. The Librarian sighs. All his metaphors are archaic lately. Minimalism is no longer a choice. It’s all that’s left. He is unsurprised when he looks back at the portal, and encounters a blank gray wall.
Stoksie follows his gaze. “Heh. Guez we’re heah fer a while, den.”
The Librarian nods. Was it foolish to let himself be drawn so easily through that opening, and his good friend with him? Did he really have a choice? The hum is louder. He shakes his head. It doesn’t vary or go away. But he’s sure it’s not his imagination. Just in a frequency the Tinker can’t hear.
Stoksie ambles up to the terrace railing, with its expanse of blue beyond. The Librarian notes that the little man favors his bad hip all the time now. He wonders if the dragon Earth could fix that for him, in a spare moment, if any of them are to have any spare moments, ever again. At the railing, Stoksie leans out and looks down. “Weeeooo! C’mon an’ lookit dis, G!”
The Librarian quails. Something about the light glinting off Stoksie’s bald brown head as he leans over the edge. Something inexorable in its cool white glow. He knows suddenly that he’ll never see his console again. Another refuge has served its purpose and become obsolete. His own evolution could be charted by the dens he’s made over the centuries, and then outgrown. He suspects this is why he feels so different since the morning’s confrontation on the mountaintop. Time for the next step forward. Maybe the final step.
“C’mon! Yu gotta see dis!”
As always, the Librarian’s first instinct is to resist. He’d flee back to the familiar shelter of that console if he had half a chance. But his Destiny knows him well enough to make sure he doesn’t—by the destruction of a home, by the pursuit of enemies, by an outbreak of war, by the slamming of a door. Always impelling him onward. Resigned, the Librarian shuffles across the terrace. The pale insubstantial tiles still hold him up. Isn’t this why he came, after all? To confront the inevitable, whatever it may be? The humming, constant in his ears, suggests that the inevitable is near. But then, he’s often thought that in the past, only to see the distance to his goal again become elastic, stretched toward infinity. Long practiced in the exertion of will over reluctance, the Librarian gains the railing and gazes out over the white city he’d known would be there since the moment the portal opened.
The terrace perch is astonishingly high off the ground. Even in the old days of the skyscrapers, the Librarian was never so high, except in an airplane. And this city is a forest of such towers. Clouds gather around them like luminous, upside-down shrubbery. The expanse of blue is not empty sky, but endless ranks of towers fading into blue distance. An artificial Himalaya. The Librarian’s knees go weak, partly in fear, partly in admiration. It is a magnificent creation, an urban architect’s wet dream.
“Yu t’ink da One is down deah?” Stoksie asks.
“Hoping. Hoping.”
“How we gonna git down?”
“Elevator,” murmurs the Librarian, knowing they’ll find one. It doesn’t take long: a rectangular outline on the nearest wall, like a box drawn on a blueprint. The Librarian approaches it, and it opens with a willing hush. He’s confused for a moment, for the cab is identical to the elevator back at the Refuge. Has he misunderstood? Is Destiny leading him back to the com room, his journey over before it’s begun? The Librarian shrugs, renewing his commitment to inevitability, and steps inside. Stoksie hurries to join him, and the doors whisk shut. There is a brass placket on the wall right where it should be, but no buttons to press. Time passes, without any sensation of movement. Stoksie whistles absently under his breath.
“Itsa long way down, aftah all,” he remarks finally.
The Librarian chuckles. He’d love to be as firmly moored to reason as this staunch little man.
Without a warning tone or chime, the doors whisper open. It’s like stepping through the portal all over again. It requires the same resolve. The Librarian’s agoraphobia assails him. The space beyond the doors is so vast, so bright, so white. So empty.
“C’mon, G.” Stoksie takes his arm.
Grateful, the Librarian lets himself be led.
He’s expected a lobby, or an atrium at least, not this abrupt delivery out into the open. It’s unsettling, architecturally, to be dropped without transition at the brink of this enormous and light-drenched plaza. Light, not sun. It’s too white for sunlight. The Librarian recalls Tien-an-men, in the ancient city long destroyed. But the buildings surrounding this square are infinitely taller. To his agoraphobe’s eye, the towers seem to be falling inward, toward the ground. But the Librarian is used to compensating for this old deficiency. He steps bravely forward. What brings him to his knees on the blank white pavement is not terror. It’s the sound of that sunless light.
The sound!
Deafening, breath-shaking, a steady excruciating pounding on his head, his back, his ears.
“Whatsit, G? What?” Stoksie wheels back, struggles to help him up.
“The light . . . out of the light.” He fumbles the speaking. He’s barely able to complete the thought. He stumbles backward, blinded by noise. “Must get out of the light.”
But there’s no shade to back into, no retreat, no shelter. The elevator door has closed behind them and vanished into a gray wall as flat as painted granite.
“Okay, yu gottit. C’mon dis way!”
The Tinker is stronger than he looks. He guides the Librarian into the shadow of a tall, arched doorway. The hum still vibrates in his ears, but the pain subsides to a bearable level, and the Librarian can catch his breath. He tries to explain his predicament.
Stoksie sucks his crooked teeth. “Yeah? What kinda soun’ duz da light make?”
The Librarian has not tried to identify it. He’s been too focused on resisting it. His hands flutter. Words seem more elusive than ever.
“Izzit, y’know, like muzik?”
The Librarian shakes his head. He almost expects to hear loose parts rattling around. “Hum. Growl. Snap. Whine.”
“Nice kinda soun’, dat,” Stoksie retorts disapprovingly. “Soun’s ’lectric, like.”
The Librarian has taken this for granted. But what’s the source? And how will he manage to go about this huge city, searching for his dragon, if he’s disabled from the start by the very daylight?
As if reading his thoughts, Stoksie says, “Y’know, G, if we go along in da shade a da bildins, mebbe yu’ll be okay.”
It’s not a perfect solution. The flat facades fronting the square don’t offer much shade, just the occasional recessed doorway. And none of the recesses have actual doors in them. No chance of retreating inside. But it will get him moving. The Librarian suffers through regular sound-beatings as Stoksie leads him from recess to recess. He tries plugging his ears, but the screaming, growling light invades his body, storming up and down his nerves. It drowns out all other voices, all other thought. Finally, they reach an intersection, where the height of the buildings lays a strip of deeper shadow along both sides of a narrow cross street. The Librarian is too relieved to question this directionless anomaly. He wishes he could sit down, just for a minute. Even at only bearable, the cacophonous light tires him out.
“Heah, G. Take a load off yer feet.” Stoksie drags up a stout wooden crate. The Librarian notices there’s only one. Otherwise, the streets are entirely empty, and clean as if newly made. The Tinker leans against the flat gray wall, shifting the weight off his bad hip. “I suspected da One wud be ina greener sorta place.”
“Greener?” He’s amazed to hear that Stoksie has thought about the One at all. He was never a professed believer.
“Yah, like yu say da wurld’ll be agin, wen she come. Y’know, ta fixit.”
“Patience,” he says, hating his inadequacy with words. But how can he say ‘have faith’ to a man who’s always insisted he had none? Does Stoksie’s question indicate some sort of conversion, based perhaps on the arrival of dragons? Or is he still humoring his mad old friend, as he always has?
“Mebbe wen we find’er, it’ll be green dere.”
“Mebbe.” He hopes so. He can’t imagine a less green place than the one they’re in, unless it’s the desiccated world of 2213.
“So howyu wanna do dis serch, sizdammaddic-like, or as da win’ take us?”
The Librarian is at a loss. He had no plan when he stepped through the portal. If he’d waited for a plan to occur to him, he might not have gone. Perhaps he’d assumed that the dragon would find him, once they were both in the same place. This is still theoretically possible, if indeed she is here. But will she know he’s arrived? Is his mere presence a sufficient announcement? The task ahead is not as simple as he’d imagined when he stepped through the portal. Any search should be systematic, of course, but how to accomplish it in a strange and inexplicable city, away from all his equipment, his electronic eyes and ears and brain?
“Systematic,” he says anyway.
“Den we gotta mark as we go, so we’ll know weah we bin.”
Leave it to a Tinker to come up with a plan. “How?”
Stoksie pulls a small jackknife from a hidden pocket. He unfolds a blunted metal spike and tries a few experimental scratches on the wall beside him. The awl leaves a clean line as bright as chalk. Stoksie grunts in surprise. He rubs his palm across the scratches and they disappear as if erased. “Mus’ be sumkinda soff stone, dis.”
“Convenient,” the Librarian agrees dryly.
“Betcha.” Stoksie draws three short parallel lines with a circle to the right of them, then stands back, grinning. “Dat’s Tinka fer ‘we wen’ dattaway.’”
The Librarian grins back. “Yer a gud man, Stokes.”
They set off down the side street. He’s tempted to haul the crate along with him, but he’s slow enough already. He’ll sit on the sidewalk if he has to, or maybe another perfect crate will appear when he needs it, as this one did, apparently out of nowhere.
“Big, emptee place,” Stoksie observes, when they’ve walked several blocks and seen exactly the same rows of opaque windows, punctuated by the same doorless doorways, repeated over and over and over.
“Big, empty, boring place.” The Librarian worries that the hum is getting louder again, though he’s made sure to keep to the deepest shadow.
At the next intersection, the boredom is finally broken. Around the corner, in the middle of the wide street, sits an enormous hunk of machinery. Though it does not look rusted or broken, the Librarian knows right off that it’s derelict—it has no working ‘aura.’ Stoksie would prefer to avoid it, as a large and alien device of unknown purpose, but the Librarian approaches it without scruple and lays his hands on its smooth surfaces, offering it solace for its untimely end. It’s an awkward, ugly machine. He feels an instant kinship, grateful that he’s not yet been cannibalized for parts, as this machine has. He can see the raw gaps and vacant connectors, empty housings for circuit boards and sensors. Clamps an
d cables have been ripped out. Its wheels have been removed, along with all their mounting hardware. He details the destruction to Stoksie at great length until curiosity overcomes the Tinker’s scruples and he moves in closer.
“Mebbe gud salvage heah,” he jokes. “Gud trade, huh?”
“If there was anyone to trade with.”
Stoksie’s shrug suggests there’s always someone to trade with. “So wadda we know so fah? One, dere’s masheens heah. Two, we know dey break doun. An’ t’ree, we know dere’s no endlis supply a parts.”
Three useful observations, the Librarian agrees.
“But watsit fer, G? Yu know?”
The Librarian shakes his head. It had wheels, so it was mobile, probably under its own steam instead of being driven by an operator. It has no structure to support working arms of any kind. It has no decorative or protective carapace. With all its parts exposed, what’s left of them, it looks complex. Yet it could have been something as simple as a street cleaner. With that thought, he glances at the street. What need could there be to clean such already pristine streets? But because he’s looked, he spots something his sharp nose would have alerted him to, if he’d been paying proper attention. He jogs Stoksie’s elbow and points.
Along the gutter behind the machine is what appears to be a trail of animal manure, spread out as if the creature dropping it was still moving forward. Its organic nature is a screaming anomaly against the faceless pavement. The Librarian can’t believe he’d missed it until now.
“Da first sine a life!” Stoksie crows delightedly. He hurries over to scoop up a drying lump. He sniffs it studiously, then crumbles a small bit between thumb and forefinger. “Not long sinze. Mebbe a day, mebbe less. Funny kinda mule, seems.”
“Cow. Cattle. Some kind of.” The Librarian has dealt with all kinds of domestic animals in his time.
“A cow?” Stoksie’s world-weary eyes go as eager as a child’s. “I’d likta see dat!”
The Book of Air: Volume Four of the Dragon Quartet Page 13
