The Book of Air: Volume Four of the Dragon Quartet

by Marjorie B. Kellogg

  He sits back, glowering at the screen. N’Doch’s song has ended. The silence is hollow and unfriendly. So far, the Librarian has judged all the code he’s looked at to be of human origin. The additions strike him as something quite different.

  What now?

  The Librarian rubs his eyes some more, a habit he never has been able to break. He feels incapable of thought. His back is stiff with cramp and his well-padded butt is nearly fused to the chair. How long has he been at this? It doesn’t seem like . . . but then, how would he know. He works life into his lower limbs, then gets up for a stretch. There’s a bit more light to see by than before. When he turns away from the desk, his breath catches in his throat and he grabs for the chair again. Which is lower than it was. He starts, and almost tumbles sideways from the force of memory.

  The space around him has evolved along with the equipment. Compact fluorescents dangle from the crossbeams inches above his head. He’s in the first real bunker he’d built for himself at his vacation home in the mountains, once he saw the way things were going. He’d hired a local excavator to dig it into a steep hillside, claiming a fancy for a really big root cellar. Small for a large person, however. Dank and claustrophobic, exactly like an oversized grave, once the door was closed. The Librarian’s animal origins kept him from panic, but as it turned out, he wasn’t in it long. It had been unwise to let anyone know about a facility whose proper functioning depends on secrecy, no matter how far in advance of actual need the location is prepared. The excavator’s family apparently had a long memory. The Librarian squeaked out of that crisis alive enough—they hadn’t expected the “tree hugger” to be armed—but he’d made damn sure to dig the next hole by himself, when no one was looking.

  Inhaling the earth-damp scent of the remembered burrow, he glances uneasily over his shoulder. How far does this memory world extend? What will he see if he undoes the several locks and dead bolts, lifts the steel crossbar, and shoves open the heavy wooden door? Wood. That had been the Achilles’ heel. He couldn’t see how to explain to his neighbors the need for a reinforced steel door on a little old root cellar. Eventually, they’d burned him out.

  Interesting, the Librarian muses, how many of my life-threatening events have involved fire. Just how long has this sonofabitch been at this?

  He stumps over to the door and lays a hand on the thick, rough planks. He doesn’t really want to open it and see those lovely, lost pines, those fresh-scented hills rolling green over green over blue into a misty horizon. Dead now. All dead. Chopped down, wind-torn, bulldozed, burned out, poisoned, drought-killed, worm-eaten, pest-chewed, disease-ridden. The evergreens were the first to go. The Librarian sucks in the breeze blowing in his mind: the springy perfume of the needles, the sweet fern carpet beneath, the faint crush of wintergreen, the trailing whiff of wild stock from the meadow’s edge. He’s not easily given to weeping, never has been, but he knows that if he opens the door and sees those trees, he will be unable to hold back his tears.

  He decides to be hungry instead. He goes looking for the refrigerator.

  He’d installed one in this first bunker, using a buried power line. Later, what should have been obvious before became all too clear: he’d need his own power source as well. By the next time, solar technology was available to the rich, and the Librarian’s cleverness with his keyboard had made him a lot of money. But this first, optimistic bunker lost power after the first three hours.

  A tall white rectangle hums up out of the darkness in front of him. He flips open the door and finds exactly what he’d shoved in there so hastily when the time came to pull inside like a tortoise into its shell and barricade the inadequate wooden door. He finds ham from his pigs, and cheese and butter from his cows. Two loaves of bread. A roasted chicken. Eggs. Several bins of greens from the garden. Optimistic, indeed. How long did he think this would last him? How long did he think it would need to last him? Could he have guessed then that no length of time he thought of would be long enough? He’d been so sure he was well prepared.

  He closes the refrigerator quietly. There’ll be bushels of carrots and cabbage and potatoes stored away somewhere, and a row of tomato vines heavy with fruit, ripped out of the furrows in the last moments of his pack up. He feels around in the darkness behind the fridge and knocks his head against the hanging root balls, still moist from the ground. Soil cascades around him in a fragrant shower. The sharp green smell of bruised tomato leaves accomplishes what the Librarian has hoped to avoid by not opening the outer door. He slumps against the humming refrigerator and buries his face in his hands.

  The tragedy was so fresh to him in those days. He had nothing to offset his despair. He hadn’t yet worked out the purpose of his dragon-haunted existence, of his miraculous many lives—which were a tragedy of sorts in themselves, in that they forced on him a very, very long sort of view, and the fullest realization of how much, how terribly much, has been lost . . .not the least of which was any remaining faith he might have had in humanity. Each generation carries forward a part of the experience of the generations before it, but these recollections fade and mutate with time, even among such experts at oral tradition as the Tinker crews. Stoksie, for instance, with all his tales of what his father and grandfather said and saw, has never known a century-old oak tree, a real winter, or a truly green spring. He has only a borrowed, mythic notion of the truth, the real, entire truth which assails the Librarian yet again as he inhales the odors of his vanished hilltop garden.

  How could such a clever species be so stupid, so shortsighted? No sensible animal fouls and destroys its own nest! Only the human animal.

  Cast up on the sharp rocks of despair as if for the first time, the Librarian gives in at last, and weeps. Each time he has wept, he has sworn to be strong and never weep again. But always, always, the loss is too devastating, the ache too profound.

  And this time, he seems to have lost his ability to haul himself back from the brink. This time, along with despair, there is doubt. The doubt is sudden and spreading, like a fast-working virus, like the oxygen being sucked out of his lungs. He’s drowning in salt water and snot. What if . . . what if there is no dragon, no purpose, no rescue? What if he’s made it all up, all of it: a tall tale to defend himself against his paralyzing grief and hopelessness? What if he didn’t really live all those past lives? The Librarian hears a high-pitched mewing. He wishes it would stop, but it’s him making that pitiful noise. What if he’s met no other dragons, never actually confronted one of them on a sun-bleached mountaintop?

  Wait.

  The Librarian halts in mid-motion, massaging his taut brow. His damp hands drop to his sides. He turns toward the door. He smells smoke.

  Smoke?

  Is that it, then? The portal was a trap after all, and he’s to be forced to relive the very nearest of his many near-death experiences? Well, he didn’t panic the first time, so he refuses to panic now. He goes back to the door. The hardware, he remembers, transmitted the heat of the fire outside long before the wood began to burn. He flattens his soft palm against the strap of a hinge. The smooth metal is cool, room temperature at most. And the scent of smoke is fainter by the door. The Librarian pads back to the refrigerator, sniffing studiously. Nothing. Just his imagination, as it were, overheating? He believes his nose is more reliable than that. He replays the moment in his head, calling up the odor again. Not the smell of wood burning at all. More like molten metal, or rock. Magma.

  Ah. Him. The Librarian has managed for a long time to keep below the Intemperate One’s radar, or so he’d thought. But now, those days are over. He glances about, expecting to see a different kind of glow in the darkness, but the acrid tang is gone from the earthy air of the burrow.

  He was here, I’m sure of it . . . if only for a moment!

  What let him in? The vividness of the memory? If simply the recollection of burning allows the Fire Dragon access, the Librarian swears to banish all such thoughts. He yanks open the refrigerator door and fumbles among
the vegetables until he finds the object of his search, smooth and slim and chill. He hauls it out, trying to remember how many he’d stashed back there and how long he can hold out before going back for the next one. He hasn’t had a real beer in decades. He twists it open as he walks, but waits until he’s seated again at the desk before taking his first long swig. Ah. Much better. Until the return of the hops blight, he’d brewed his own. No wonder he was so fond of the stuff. Giddy with nostalgia, he swivels his chair a few times, working up speed, then shoves off with his toes to see how many rotations he can manage in free flight. As the chair spins him around, he spots a reflective glimmer in a direction he hasn’t explored yet. He drops his feet, dragging himself to a halt. Oh, yes, there was an old television over there. As the memory sharpens, the object clarifies and brightens. Just like manipulating a digital image. The TV is a slim-lined table model. The Librarian sets his beer down. He goes over to the television and brushes dust off the screen. Wasn’t it broken past all repair? He’d never used it much even then, but for the hell of it, he tabs it on.

  To his astonishment, he gets a picture. Immediately. He’s further astonished when he recognizes the location. It’s the Citadel. Somehow, this broken-down television is broadcasting the feed from one of the Citadel’s security cameras. He’s looking at a long view down an interior corridor. A still image, or maybe the hallway is empty right now. No, here comes someone hurrying past, huge and close to the lens at first, then quickly diminishing down the dim tunnel. The Librarian sees only shoulders and a back, large and male and carrying a spear. He rocks back on his heels pensively, then stabs a finger at the channel selector. Obligingly, the image blanks and a different camera comes on-line.

  “Hunh,” grunts the Librarian, and is startled by the sound of his own voice. He backs up to where he can feel for his chair without taking his eyes off the screen, then hauls it over and plants himself in front of the television. He shifts through the channels, bringing up each of the functioning cameras in succession, with static or blue-screen for the dead units in between.

  “Hunh,” he says again. Has his subconscious been screaming to know what’s going on back home? He sits up suddenly, then swiftly backpedals to the desk. No reason why it should work, but he tries it anyway. His laptop has become a touch pad. He taps in the address he uses to call House at the Citadel. He gets an error message. He tries a few more times and gives up, but on a whim, keys in his own address at the Refuge, adding the command for voice transmission. The call goes through.

  “Hello? Hello?” A boy’s desperate query.

  The Librarian clears his throat. “Mattias?”

  “Who’s there? Who is this?”

  “Gerrasch, Mattias. It’s Gerrasch.”

  “G? Where are you?” The boy’s yell seems to penetrate the darkness at the Librarian’s back. “I come back, you’re gone! Just gone! Where are you?”

  “Pipe down. My ears.” Illusion or reality? He can’t believe this is happening.

  “I bin waitin’ ferever!” The boy’s Tinker accent rises with his pitch. “Weah are yu?”

  “Difficult to explain. Not where you are. What’s ‘ferever?’ What’s happening there?”

  “Yu okay? Yu alri’?”

  “Yes, yes. What’s up? Is Leif there?”

  “Nah, he’s gone! Dey’re all gone, ’cept da little’uns! T’ree days, nah. Wuldn’t let me go wit’ dem! Said I gotta stay an’ wait fer yu!”

  “And here I am. You say Leif left three days ago?” It doesn’t seem possible that three days have passed since he walked through the portal.

  “Leif an’ da ’hole army! Day shud be ’bout dere by nah.”

  The Librarian glances sidelong at the television. No sign of any action yet. That is, if what he’s seeing on that screen truthfully represents the facts. “Food and water, Mattias? All you need?”

  “Yah, shur. Dey lef’ us ev’ryt’ing. But dere’s nutting ta do heah. Yu commin’ back soon?”

  “Hope so. Listen, Matt. Boring, yes. But stay, okay? More important than you know. Safer if I can reach you.”

  “Safer yu, or safer me?”

  “Both. The world.”

  Mattias groans, but it’s only for show. “I be heah, G.”

  “Good. Now, patch me through to House.”

  “House! Oh boy, kint do dat, G. House wen’ off-line yestiddy.”

  This news convinces the Librarian that he’s talking in real time. “Why?”

  “Doan know. He jess blanked.”

  The Librarian reviews the list of the Citadel’s surveillance cameras. There are none in the library or in the computer room. How can he find out what’s happened to House? Meanwhile, there’s an avalanche of code waiting to be sorted through and analyzed. Can’t let himself be distracted from his search. He must bend his mind to the issue of the differing interpolations. House will have to take care of himself.

  “Mattias. Stay on station. Keep trying House. I’ll get back to you soon.”

  “Wait, G. Tell me whachu bin doin’.”

  “Can’t right now, Matt. Later, okay?”

  “Okay,” concedes the boy heavily. “I guess. See yu soon den?”

  “Hope so.” The Librarian cuts the connection with no real conviction that he’ll be able to establish it again at will. But soon he should be able to witness Leif Cauldwell’s assault on the Citadel, at least from certain points of view. He wheels back to the television and tabs through to the camera trained on the Grand Stair. The landscape is sere and barren. Dust swirls off the wide, steep steps and is lost in curtains of heat shimmer. At the head of the stair, two Temple guardsmen huddle in the slim shadow of the terrace railing, their eyes slitted against the glare and wind-borne grit, fixed on the distant pale gash where the mountain pass empties onto the valley floor. When something happens, he’ll notice. The Librarian leaves the channel tuned to that view, and returns to his code analysis.

  He misses the boy’s eager, trusting voice the second it’s no longer with him, warming the darkness. He wishes N’Doch had not stopped singing. He needs no more eruptions of despair putting him off his course. He decides to attempt to trace the song’s origin. At its current stage of evolution, his equipment should be able to go back and pinpoint a signal’s location anywhere in the world. Of course, the difference in time-location may intervene. He runs the inquiry anyway. A bloom of cool light draws his glance upward. A window-sized wall screen has succeeded the monitor bank. On it, a brightly colored schematic: a vast and repetitious grid. A map, the Librarian decides. Of this very city. But not a map of streets. A map of power distribution. A flow chart of signal. He studies it with the eager anticipation of a lover who’s discovered his beloved’s diary, as if it had secretly been written for him only.

  Certain things are immediately obvious. A green dot marks the origin of the signal he’s inquired about. A red dot marks his own position. According to the map, they’re only a few blocks away from each other. This is convenient but inconceivable. The Librarian knows N’Doch is in twenty-first-century Africa.

  On the other hand, I don’t know exactly where I am, do I? Or when.

  He runs the inquiry again and gets the same result. He sets this conundrum aside as currently unsolvable, and goes back to the flow chart. A deeper perusal tells him that even this trove of information will provide no easy answers. Nowhere does he find the central nexus he’s hoped for, pointing to a master control. If the dragon draws from or imparts energy to this network, she is not currently announcing her presence. The Librarian downloads his disappointment into three long, deep breaths, and returns to his methodical analysis, signal by signal.

  He chooses a random city block for closer study, one of countless seemingly identical squares. He enlarges the scale by a factor of ten, and discovers that what he has taken to be mere digital texturing in the image is actually an underlying layer in the grid: more power lines, myriad and tiny, almost too small to be seen as individual signals. He increases the mag
nification by another factor of ten, then sits staring at the screen, trying to make sense of what he sees. He zeroes in on one line and magnifies it until a pattern reveals itself. More code. Infinite and infinitesimal beams of instructions, blanketing the entire city. Every meter, every centimeter, every millimeter, every . . .

  The Librarian shoves back his chair and lurches to his feet. He glares around wildly. Comprehension lurks like a treasure in the darkness. It awaits him, rich and gleaming, if he’s willing to make the leap. But it’s a big one, and he fears the chasm in between. He starts to pace.

  The space is smaller now, walled in by maps and monitors and wall screens. The void beyond exists only as stripes of darkness between. It’s the Refuge. Not as he’s recently left it, but as it was when he first came to it, sixty years earlier: raw, freshly painted, still smelling of wet concrete. Paia’s grandfather was renovating the Cauldwell family compound fifty miles farther west. “Hardening,” as it was called in those days. The Librarian stalls his epiphany with a moment of nostalgic revisiting.