Unwrapped Sky

by Rjurik Davidson

  He takes another step forward, teasingly, making Autec ask again. He enjoys this little power game. With each request, Autec loses face.

  “Just a few more steps. Just up to the desk here, please, Matisse.”

  Matisse takes one more step and something strikes him in the chest. What? He looks down to see a little bolt protruding from his stomach. He laughs. “The bolt is too small, Autec. It’s like a child’s weapon.” Matisse reaches for the bolt. But before he touches it, its sides burst apart, like the rapid blooming of a flower, and a thousand and more little black antlike specks rushed over the bolt. Fear grips him. Technology of the ancients—no, it can’t be. But it is. The specks crawl up toward his face. He tries to brush them off, but they have a powerful grip and do not fall to the floor. He laughs again, though he becomes aware of it only when it becomes hysterical. The swarm of black things is now on his face and he is filled with dread. The specks are now pushing into his mouth. No! His nose. His eyes. His ears. Desperation grasps him even as pain overwhelms his consciousness, as if someone were driving a spike up into his head, and he starts to forget as thoughts start to disappear from his mind. First feeling in his arms and legs, then a thought here, a memory there, blanking out like candles guttering in the darkness. Then great swaths of his mind: gone, leaving only vast vistas of blackness. He is lost.

  Boris, lying on the bed, is racked by the final deathly memory that he savors more than any of the others. The disappearing of a soul, the feeling of slipping into eternity, the terrible darkness—death is truly something to experience.

  As he drifted in and out of consciousness, a dreamlike sleep, Matisse’s memories having exhausted him, Boris was aware of a presence. Above him stands a tall and terrible cadaverous figure.

  “Elo-Drusa.”

  She reached down and her immense, many-knuckled fingers covered his brow. “Boris. Boris.”

  Boris was scared, but he could not move. It was if his mind had disconnected from his body and now he lay prostrate and paralyzed. She was above him, distorted in his vision. He could not tell if it was simply his fever, the warping of his memories, but her hand appeared grossly large, her head tiny and far away.

  “Boris.” She leaned over him, her face looming large and close, the side of her horselike face close to his so that her cheek brushed against his.

  He groaned softly.

  “Boris—so full of life. You will save me, reawaken the passions of the world into me. Rejuvenate—yes, rejuvenate. We’ll achieve great things together. Great things.” She took his manhood in her hand and squeezed softly.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Images flashed into Maximilian’s mind: sheets of white light, a curved roof far above, with great metal supports, chairlike things hovering in the air. His stomach contracted involuntarily. Instinctively, he rolled over onto his side, heaving. He lay there for some time, until he realized that he was alive, on the floor of the Great Library of Caeli-Enas.

  After a while Maximilian pushed himself up with his hands. He couldn’t be sure how long he had been unconscious and paralyzed. He could remember his heart slowing down, his body on the edge of blissful rest. He stood uncertainly and looked around at the vast reading room. Stale, humid air hovered around him. From the ceiling, a little glowing sphere descended and hovered behind him as he walked, illuminating his path with warm golden light.

  Maximilian wandered unsteadily through that room, enchanted by its age, mesmerized by the thousands of books that still lined its walls. Everywhere his eyes wandered, he found lost gems of history. He saw the huge red spine of A Chymicall Treatise of Arnuldus of Novilla. He noticed The Secret Book of Artephias, and side by side in different editions the Alchemical Catechism of Barone Tschuldi and quite close the Epistle on the Mineral Fire.

  With hands trembling, he took down from the walls a metal-covered copy of Sumi’s Necromancy and Agency and placed it on one of the reading tables that ran out like spokes from the middle of the room. He opened the front cover. In spidery writing the title was written on the front page. Carefully, he reached down to turn the page. With just the gentlest of touches, the edge of the paper crumbled. He drew his hand back in alarm. With even greater sensitivity, he tried turning the page. Again the edge of the page crumbled, like water retreating from flame. And this time the pages beneath crumbled a little also. He touched the top edge of the parchment and again the paper decomposed beneath his fingers. In frustration, he turned the book on its side and opened both covers, hoping the sheets would fall open. Instead the entire insides gave way, sloughing into a mound of crumbled papery stuff, leaving him grasping the covers.

  Ioto’s Histories also disintegrated beneath his touch. He grasped Eribal’s Structure, and the covers themselves decayed in his hand.

  He laughed, the manic sound echoing back at him from the roof and the vast spaces of the empty hall. Stumbling in disbelief across the room, the reality of Maximilian’s situation finally struck him. He had reached the Great Library. Wondrous books surrounded him, but they were ruined by age. He would need to study formulae to preserve them, and yet he had no access to those formulae. And he had no way of escape. His cart was gone, dragged beneath the waters by a creature that waited for him in the murky depths. With it had gone his food and water. He would die beneath the waters and his bones would join all the others in Caeli-Enas. But no: there were still the legends of knowledge that could be drunk like an elixir. There was still the code.

  He staggered from the empty reading room and through the massive archway that led farther into the library. Through long corridors and into drafty halls he passed, entering rooms with chairs that hung like balloons in the air. He wandered past offices separated by shimmering glass walls, ideograms descending their surfaces like snowflakes. In these deeper sections, the architecture took on the sleek lines and unusual angles of ancient architecture, obsessed as they were with geometric shapes, sometimes symmetrical, at other times seemingly without any logic.

  As he walked, his perceptions slowly changed. Ill from his traumatic arrival and the creature’s poison, he passed, thirsty and hungry, through the labyrinthine corridors. Things seemed to Maximilian as if in a dream. Images of the library rose before him and disappeared just as quickly: snatches of corridors, and rooms, walls that flickered with brilliant imagery of unknown worlds, cities that had existed only in myth: the ancient tower of Payrris, the archipelago of Tarynesia, the broken land of Chinar. He came to grand stairs lit by a red glow. As he descended, he heard frightened whispers from figures that moved inside the walls. He could see them, shadows like those that lived in the great ice-halls of the north, where Ejan was born. The shadows twittered to each other nervously and darted along beside him, disappearing in the angles where the walls joined, some obviously rushing away in hidden directions, others emerging trepidatiously. One shadow crouched down and giggled near him, then ran back to join the others.

  Six archways surrounded him. As he stepped into one, he dropped into a shaft. An unseen force picked up so that he descended at a controlled speed. He hovered for a moment and then popped out into another corridor, this one lit by purple and green balls of light. Staggering along the corridor, he lost his sense of the proportions of things. Perhaps this was the result of a combination of the strange light and the effect of the poison.

  The air around him was now heavier and reverberated with a deep sound, like that caused by a faraway engine. There was a soft whisper as if air were escaping from a valve. It felt more significant than those that came from the figures moving in the walls. The whisper increased, beginning softly and increasing in volume. At first, he thought there were many voices, but then as they became louder, he realized it was one voice; the words were repeated so quickly that they were superimposed upon each other, each time increasing in volume, like an echo slowly building.

  Maximilian stopped and cocked his head. But he couldn’t make out the words. He walked on. The whispers continued, and though now he could make out t
he words, he still couldn’t understand them. They were in a foreign language. The voices said, “Panadus, eperantus, el minio el tritian. Espa?”

  Along kaleidoscopic corridors he passed, colors of blue and red and green shifted in patterns that distorted his senses and ruined his perception. Again he was buffeted by a force that lifted him off his feet, across rooms, up shafts that opened in the roof, along corridors, and down, down, always down into the depths of the earth, as if he were plunging deeper into the soul of things. Along the walls ran gleaming ideograms and numbers, or geometric shapes that seem to break the laws of physics, as if the angles of their sides were impossible, as if they existed suspended in a four-dimensional space. At times these forms peeled away from the walls and moved through the air itself, before sinking back onto the plane of the wall.

  The whispering continued, and the repeated words, once echoing each other, were now more clearly superimposed. The voice seemed to be cycling through languages, and Maximilian recognized words from the ancients among them. Until finally it spoke and he understood.

  The voice said, The world spins and the wind wears down the buildings of creatures. Things fall apart.

  “Are you speaking to me?” asked Maximilian.

  Elentra? said the voice. Disparus?

  Maximilian looked at the hexagonal room in which he found himself. Its walls and roof were formed by moving plates. Some of these plates broke away from the others, shifted and spun. On their surfaces ran the words spoken by the voice—Elentra? Disparus?— in many-sized scripts: some written in huge letters that moved slowly across the walls others infinitesimal, fast-moving versions of the word, catching up, superimposing themselves, overtaking the larger ones. Max looked down to see that he also stood on a drifting plate with words drifting across it.

  He said, “I am Maximilian.”

  No, says the voice. That is your name. Who are you?

  “I am a seditionist,” said Maximilian. “I come in search of knowledge. Who are you?”

  Knowledge is not to be used to gain power over others, says the voice.

  “But it has, and only knowledge will set it right,” says Maximilian. “Knowledge and action together.”

  The voice says, You would use knowledge to control things, to warp them to your will, says the voice. But the universes react back upon you, and warp you in turn.

  “But what use is knowledge if it is not to be used? Should we not put it to our ends, to defend us?”

  I am here not for you, but for knowledge. I am here to defend it, the voice said.

  “Can you help me with what I seek?”

  The fall of the ancients was a great one, said the voice. And you and your generations are their children.

  Maximilian said, “We all stand on the shoulders of our forebears.”

  But some of them fell, said the voice. And their children had no shoulders to stand on.

  “Who are you?” asked Maximilian.

  I am the defender. I am the Library.

  Maximilian paused. His mind raced. He struggled to think of the words he wanted to say. Eventually, his body tense and his heart racing, he said, “Can you help me? I need to learn the secrets of the ancients. I need to drink them like an elixir. I have the code.”

  And what knowledge do you seek?

  Again Max paused. Knowledge that might unhinge the dominion of the Houses, his own image of himself as a great thaumaturgist of liberation—these hopes rested on this moment. Yet he was aware that he stood before an entity that predated the House system, that predated the cataclysm itself, that transcended his desires and viewed history with a wider perspective. But he himself was not such an entity; he was a seditionist. So he spoke: “That of the mystagogues. That of the greatest Magi.”

  And what is this code you speak of?

  Maximilian began to recite the numbers. Zero, one, zero, one, zero … On and on he spoke the numbers.

  There was silence. When the Library spoke, there seemed to be the hint of laughter in its voice. Continue on if you dare. Perhaps you will come to adulthood or perhaps you will be ruined. The choice is yours.

  Maximilian waited. When the Library did not speak again, he moved through the labyrinthine passages. The deeper Maximilian descended, the stranger were the arrangements of colors. Light crisscrossed the spaces at unusual angles, as if he were walking not on floors but on ceilings.

  Lost beyond hope, Maximilian found himself bathed in colors, as if he was again beneath a great ocean and lights hovered around him in the water, cut through it at angles. He waded through this timeless space and came upon a huge glittering pillar, composed only of horizontal bars of light that rose above him like a tower. He staggered on and came to another such tower. Stepping close, he reached out and placed his hand into the luminous structure. His hand disappeared as trays of white light emerged from the pillar’s side. A deep sonic hum resonated inside his body, as if his internal organs were shivering. The white light became blinding, a sheet of brilliance. He closed his eyes, but the light pierced his eyelids. He dropped to his knees, cried out, a pain like needles drilling into his head. He placed his hands to his ears, to try to block out the sound, but it was no use. He screamed—a long high-pitched thing that was lost in the sea of sound that enveloped him. Deep thumping sounds vibrated in his chest and he could not tell if it was simply his heart rattling around like a wild animal throwing itself senselessly against the bars of a cage. He collapsed onto the ground.

  Overwhelmed by light and sound and pain, Maximilian frothed at the mouth. His chest thrust up from the ground as if he were having a fit. Now, surrounding him was a bright band with some kind of complex mathematical structure. The band oscillated and coalesced and descended upon him. Maximilian screamed, and felt something splicing into him, interweaving with his body and mind. He cried out again, as some new information of the universe, which was floating in the white ether only a moment before, merged with him. It vibrated against him, and for a while his body struggled back. Some part of Max’s mind tried to process these events. This, he thought, must be the elixir that he is drinking. But that was only a metaphor. Rather, he was somehow fusing with the Library, opening himself up to its world and knowledge, and now he was scared.

  There was the cry of a word. “No!” But it made no difference. Maximilian rose to his knees and hands. His chest heaved. And as he lay twisting and turning in the whiteness, he realized that he, too, was only a band of information waving in the brilliance. And the two bands—his and the Library’s—struggle and fight and threaten at any moment to tear each other apart. Everything around is lost in a sheet of brilliant white—until now he is the light. He is the sound. It has pierced him, and merged with him and now he is the sound and the light. And they are him. He has dissolved into the whiteness around him and is now connected with the entire universe of the Library. Everything he is dissolves into the Library and as he disappears, he screams a final scream as everything fades into the whiteness and is no more.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Max stood in a clearing in a thick forest. High above, the great canopy shut out all but a soft light. Around him grew furnace trees, larger than those that line the streets of the Arantine. Their bulbs glowed like hanging lamps. Farther away stood gigantic tree trunks, as large as an apartment blocks, their roots spreading out from their base like huge curved tentacles. Hanging from high above were thick emerald vines. The scent of rotten vegetation wafted among the sickly perfume of the furnace trees.

  An insect the size of Max’s head buzzed over his shoulder; he backed away. It settled its long spindly legs on one of the bulbs and touched its proboscis to the bulb. When it tried to pull away, it found that it could not. It pulled at one leg, but the others sank farther. It tried another, and the same thing occurred. The more it struggled, the more profoundly it was trapped. As it tried to twist and turn, it was finally absorbed, its delicate lacework wings the last to go. When Max examined the furnace tree, he noticed the silhouettes of giant in
sects and bugs inside; he assumed they were being slowly digested.

  “They’re quite amazing, aren’t they?” said a voice.

  A man squatted on the other side of the clearing, watching Max. His powerful arms rested comfortably on his knees. He had the look of an athlete, at ease, but capable of bursting into action at any moment.

  “I’ve never seen such a place,” said Max.

  “Numerian jungles are something to behold, aren’t they?”

  “Am I in Numeria?” asked Max.

  “After a fashion.” The man stood, looked at his feet, ruffled his blond hair, and walked across to Max.

  Max looked up at the man, who stood many inches taller. “There is something about you.”

  The man turned and ran to a group of little blue flowers. As he passed them, they lit up like candle-flowers in the night. “You could spend epochs here.”

  Max examined the man further: the powerful physique, the happy disposition. A thought tried to rise from deep in his mind but sank back. It needed more time to grow, and Max had other things to think about. “How did I get here?”

  “Would you like to see the waterfall? It’s really something. Come on.” The man ran from the clearing and Max followed as quickly as he could. At times the path climbed giant tree roots that rose from the forest floor like bridges. To the left of the path lay a swamp over which hovered dog-sized dragonflies. Several plants rose from the water and snapped up the insects in mawlike fronds, dragging them, still struggling, back into the water.

  “Come on!” called the man over the sound of a great roaring, like a wildfire burning across the hills near Caeli-Amur.

  When Max emerged from the forest, he stopped in terror. He stood on the edge of a gigantic cliff, higher than he could have imagined. From this height, the canopy below looked like growths of moss. Nearby, a vast river plunged over a waterfall, misty vapor obscured its bottom. Beyond the waterfall, the cliffs continued, an enormous wall curling through the forest into the distance. Every aspect of this jungle-world was alien to Max. The very air was thicker than that of Caeli-Amur, the light softer, the greens deeper.