“Miss Thorn can’t do anything. She was late, and it’s now time to vote,” Kenneth said sternly. “How are you voting, Petra?”
“Nay,” she said, stuffing her hands in her pockets.
The resolution passed five to three. All eyes flew to Miriam as Kenneth announced the outcome for the minutes, but Miriam didn’t crumple under their stares. She raised her coffee cup, obscuring her face, and forced down another swallow of the bitter drink.
An anger like nothing she’d felt in decades burned in her belly. The nerve of these people, making decisions about her books.
She felt her cheeks tighten and her smile become more brittle as the meeting progressed. Amy passed her a miniature chocolate bar, murmuring about blood sugar.
Miriam popped the entire sweet into her mouth, hoping the chocolate would dampen her anger. She needed to get a hold of herself, or else there’d be another Incident. Nobody on this board was old enough to remember, but Miriam had found the process of building a new library stressful and exhausting. She couldn’t do that again.
The painful memories doused her anger, and she was able to finish the meeting without biting anyone’s head off.
“Can I give you a ride home, Miriam?” Amy asked as they meandered with the other board members to the staff entrance.
“I still have to close up the library, but thank you, Amy.” Miriam leaned closer to her friend and whispered, “The chocolate worked wonders.”
Amy smiled and patted her purse. “I never leave home without a stash.”
“Quite sensible of you, my dear,” Miriam said. They hugged, and Amy ambled out to her car.
A few more board members left, and Miriam managed to politely bid them farewell. Soon it was Petra’s turn through the exit.
“I thought you’d be able to do something,” Petra said as she pulled on a denim jacket.
“I am sorry, Petra,” Miriam said. “Kenneth outmaneuvered me this time. I’ll put together a counter-proposal for the next meeting.”
“Really?” Petra asked.
Miriam nodded. “Really.”
Some of the stoniness melted from the girl’s face, and she smiled. “Thanks, Miss Thorn.”
And with her departure, Kenneth was the last board member left. Miriam held the door for him.
“Petra sure has a lot of confidence in you,” he said.
“I am the librarian,” she said, brows arching.
He nodded. “Yeah, but there’s something more, isn’t there, Miriam? You’re not just a librarian.”
Her face froze; she could feel the muscles stiffening. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Kenneth,” she said softly. “I’ve been the Erebville librarian since before you were born.” She pulled the door open another few inches. “Now, I have to finish closing the building for the night.”
Kenneth stepped forward, but paused in the doorway. “This isn’t over, Miriam. That filthy book doesn’t belong on our shelves, so don’t try any tricks.”
Then he faded into the darkness of the parking lot, and she was alone, finally.
She proceeded with her usual closing tasks: shutting down the computers and copier machine, emptying the recycling bins, straightening the circulation desk. She wiped clean the jam-splotched book the toddler had enjoyed so much. Then she trudged to the meeting room.
There were half a dozen copies of Flowers’ Waltz—it was insanely popular with the teenaged girls. And, she knew, the tween girls as well, although she’d kept that tidbit of information from the library board. The official reason for removing the book was its depiction of lesbian relationships. But what she suspected really stuck in their craw was that the book showed girls and women having full and happy lives without men.
It was an important book, especially in a small, stodgy town like Erebville, where gender roles were rigid.
Sighing, Miriam gathered up the books and carried them to her desk. With the automated system, it took just a couple of minutes to have the books formally withdrawn from the collection. She didn’t stamp them, though. She stared thoughtfully into space for several minutes, and then she shut down her computer.
Tucking the books under her arm, she turned off the lights to the library. The dark didn’t bother her, and she easily made her way to the supply closet. Her fingers hooked the latch under the shelf struts, and the rear wall opened with a click.
A dim, orange glow illuminated a staircase. Miriam trotted down the familiar, narrow stairs. At the bottom, she inhaled deeply, with pleasure. She loved the smell of books. She especially loved the smell of books in her true workspace.
Books were everywhere. On the bookcases that lined the walls. Stacked haphazardly on the floor. In piles on her large, wooden desk. They covered every available surface, except for a narrow path that weaved from the stairs to a large circular patch directly in front of her desk. In the low light provided by strategically placed floor lamps, the books shone warmly. Miriam adored all the books in her library, but these—these were special. These were hers.
Over the years, books had to be withdrawn from the collection. Broken; missing pages; old editions. She brought them all down here, to her workspace, where they were given new bindings, pages were repaired or replaced, and they were read and loved. While her library had several book repair tools, it was this space, her lair, that had specialized equipment for extensive repairs and preservation.
She cleared a space on her desk, pushing aside an inkwell and quill, her old-fashioned nameplate, and a shriveled apple. She set the short stack of books down and drummed her fingers on the desk, thinking. Finally, she nodded. Not only had she promised Petra, but Flowers’ Waltz was important. Knowledge was important.
Miriam extended her right pointer finger at the books. The finger elongated, her skin peeling to reveal copper scales, her nail splitting to release a long, sickle-shaped claw.
She opened the first book and, using her claw, sliced along the crease of the inner hinges, separating the manuscript—the text block—from the front and back covers. From there, it was relatively simple to separate the text block from the spine. She tossed the used cover to the floor and repeated the process on the next book.
When she had six sets of bound text blocks, Miriam knelt on the floor to rummage through a trunk that abutted her desk. What sort of material to cover the books? Buckram, perhaps? Yes… a wonderfully dull, tan buckram. It would repel adults’ gazes, dismissed as stuffy literature. Old books.
It took some time, even for someone as skilled as she, to measure and cut the boards and buckram to fit her text blocks. Fortunately, Miriam didn’t need much sleep.
She had just decided on a new title—Botany: Wild Roses—and was preparing her stamping machine to emboss the covers, when she heard footsteps.
Her breath caught. Someone dared to enter her sanctuary? Scowling, her belly broiling with anger again, she set down the new cover and called, “Hello?”
The footsteps paused, then clattered down the stairs. It was Kenneth. His eyes were wide and his cheeks flushed.
Miriam stood up. “What are you doing here?”
“What is this place?” He gawked at the towers of books. “This isn’t in the library blueprints!”
“This is my workshop,” she growled. “What are you doing here?”
“I wanted to talk about that filthy book,” Kenneth said. “But you weren’t home. So, I came back here.” He took a few steps toward her, parting his lips in an oily smile. “You see, I know your secret.”
Miriam kept very still, not daring to even twitch. This again. She’d been careful—not toasting her own marshmallows during breaks at work and taking only the occasional flights during nights of the new moon. No, she reasoned, he didn’t know about her true self. She relaxed, tilting her head. “Oh?”
“Yeah.” He stepped closer. “I know that you’re really Delia Strike, the author of Flowers’ Waltz! That’s why Petra thought you could keep it in circula
tion!”
Miriam laughed. She howled, bent over and clutching her stomach, as the laughter bubbled out of her. When it subsided, she straightened, wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. “Oh, I needed that. Thank you, Kenneth.”
Kenneth blinked. “I don’t understand.”
“Of course not.” Miriam gave him one of the patient smiles she used on unruly children. “I’m not secretly an author, Kenneth. I don’t know where you got such an outlandish idea. But we do need to talk about you finding my lair.”
“Your—what?” He shuffled closer and peered at the nameplate on her desk. “Your name is spelled wrong.”
“Is it?” Miriam spun it around.
WYRM, it read.
Miriam turned it to face Kenneth again. “I think my current name is a clever take on it, don’t you? I’ll miss it. I’ll have to create a new one when ‘Miriam’ retires.”
Kenneth was starting to look less confused and more afraid. She liked that look on him.
She stepped around the desk. “You silly human. I’ve been librarian of Erebville since 1754. First, you try to take my treasure, and now you’ve defiled my lair. What am I going to do with you?”
She grinned, showing off too-large and too many teeth. Kenneth squealed and stumbled backwards, landing on his rump. The pungent odor of urine bit the air. One of the book towers teetered and fell, scattering books.
“Don’t eat me!” he cried.
“Eat you?” Miriam laughed again, smoke curling from her mouth. “Oh no, I’m not going to eat you. Humans taste terrible.”
Her nose and jaw stretched into something resembling a crocodile’s snout. A jet of flame streamed from her maw.
“However, I can’t let you live, either,” she said, leaning forward to inspect the pile of ash on her floor. She sighed, more smoke seeping from her mouth. She had important book binding to do, and now she had to cover up Kenneth’s late-night visit as well.
Worst case scenario, there would be a repeat of the Incident of 1902, when she’d burned the library to the ground. That had been traumatic, for both her and the town, and she didn’t think it would come to that. The library didn’t have any alarmed doors or security cameras, thanks to Kenneth’s penny-pinching ways, so all she had to do was return his car to his home, maybe start a little rumor about Kenneth’s out-of-state girlfriend at the Seniors’ Tea tomorrow, and let the police investigation run its course.
Humming, she turned to her desk and stroked the pile of buckram-covered boards and text blocks. “Soon you’ll be on the shelves,” she crooned. A few quiet recommendations would see Botany: Wild Roses in the hands of every girl in town. She’d personally give a copy to Petra.
Bacon seemed appropriate again. “Ipsa scientia potestas est,” she murmured as she swept the ashes into a tidy pile. “Knowledge is power, Kenneth, and my humans will be properly equipped.”
Ribbons of smoke trickled from her maw as she chuckled, disposing of the ashes.
M.L.D Curelas lives and works in Calgary Alberta. She will have a better biography here before we actually go to print.
JENNIFER LEE ROSSMAN
OF DRAGON GENES AND PRETTY GIRLS
The first eleven were easy enough to collect. Okay, that’s a lie. The tiger was a bitch to track down and the boys in the cryo zoo almost refused to part with the embryo, but I’ve never met someone who can’t be bribed for the right price. Theirs ended up being unlimited access to the ship’s information core. A little hacking, one artificial womb missing from a gene splicing lab, and three months later, and I had a white tiger cub sucking on my finger.
Now Bái Hǔ is big enough that she’s getting dangerous to share a bed with, and I’m still no closer to finding myself a dragon.
I knew what to expect when I volunteered for the task. Dragons were rare enough on Earth that people called them myths—folkloric monsters that evolved from our collective fear of snakes and the unknown. But finding one on a spaceship?
Just this side of impossible.
I pace my quarters, Bái Hǔ matching my strides, occasionally rubbing her cheek against my knee like a housecat. A housecat the size of a large dog, but a housecat nonetheless. Her massive paws make no sound on the steel floor and it occurs to me how silent she’d be sneaking up on somebody if she ever got out, and how I should really put a bell on her, but I have more pressing issues at the moment.
We’re scheduled to enter New Earth airspace in less than a month. The twelve animals are supposed to precede us into our new home, racing out of the ship and determining the new order of the zodiac that will rule our lives for generations to come.
We’re a beautifully superstitious culture, and being in space for the last hundred years has messed us up something awful. Time dilation and all that Einstein crap means a year spent traveling close to the speed of light isn’t the same as a year on Earth, making it hard to know how to mark the calendar.
I think I was born in the year of the snake, making me intuitive and enigmatic like the ball python tracking us from his terrarium above my bed, but some calendars say I’m a horse. Energetic and humorous, irritable but overly sentimental.
Might not make a whole lot of difference to me, but there are sects within the community that say it determines everything from your lucky numbers to the people you’re compatible with. My girl’s part of one of those sects, and she won’t make a commitment until we know our signs. Typical goat.
So we need to hold a race, just like Buddha’s way back when, to decide the order of a new zodiac for a new planet.
So I need a dragon.
I find Ah Fen in the stables tending the livestock that supplement our mostly-synthetic protein diets. She works there as well as in the fields. We have all sorts of droids to do that stuff, but some people like tradition and it does make the ship feel alive when you walk the decks and hear a distant whinny or bellow.
Her face lights up when she sees me. “There’s my little cinnamon roll.”
I raise an eyebrow.
“No?”
I laugh and kiss her. She smells like straw and animals and honey. “No.”
“My lucky cricket,” she tries instead, cooing it in my ear.
“Or you could try ‘Min,’” I suggest. “That being my name, and all.”
She rejects this with a wrinkle of her tiny nose and goes back to raking the stall we commandeered for our ox. Her parents have cutesy pet names for each other, and she’s determined to carry on the ridiculous tradition.
“No friends today?” she asks, peering at my hands and shoulders as if I might be hiding a rat or rabbit somewhere.
“This isn’t a social visit.”
“So that was a business kiss, then?” she teases.
I lean heavily on the stall door. “I don’t know where I’m going to find a dragon.” It’s not an easy thing to admit. Back on Earth, my family were dragon tamers. We’re genetically predisposed to seek out the impossible, to go into the mountains with nothing more than the clothes on our backs and come out a month later riding a feathered serpent.
They would have gone extinct when the Industrial Revolution chugged its way into China if not for us relocating them and teaching them not to make nuisances by challenging zeppelins. My baba used to say we could talk to them because we were descended from the Dragon Emperor, a great dragon in human form, and thus we shared the same blood.
I don’t know about all that. I only know they all got left behind, and I’m a dragon tamer without a dragon.
Ah Fen leans her rake against the wall and puts her elbows on the door beside mine, mirroring my pose. She nods at the horse across the way, a short and stocky dun stallion with a black mohawk. My boy Chevy, who we’ve had pegged as our race horse for months now.
“Przewalski’s horses were extinct by the time we left Earth,” Ah Fen says softly. “We bred them back. DNA is just code, and most of an organism’s DNA is backups of old versions. Modern horses only need
ed a few tweaks to revert to a common ancestor they shared with Przewalski’s horses, and from there it was easy enough to breed for the qualities we wanted.”
“I like how you say ‘we’ like you were part of it.”
Ah Fen’s cheeks turn a shade rosier. “‘We’ being us humans. My point is that Chevrolet looks identical to the extinct species he was modeled after, even at the molecular level. He may have been manmade, but he’s a Przewalski as sure as I’m a human.”
She says “human” with a pointed glance in my direction that turns my blood cold. Not because it’s ludicrous, but because it’s not actually ludicrous. Here in the stables, surrounded by sawdust and horse crap, it’s hard to forget we’re hurtling through space in a ship filled with the most advanced machinery humanity has ever seen.
“You’re serious.”
She shrugs, tracing the wood grain of the stall door. “You told me what your father said about the emperor. Do you know if it’s true?”
“No,” I whisper. “You want me to...” I can’t even say it.
“My little snowpea—” She pauses, brows raised in query, and I shake my head at this latest attempt at a nickname. “—I think you should genetically engineer a dragon.”
The people at the genetics lab balk at my request. They can’t let just anyone mess around with gene splicing, and I’m hardly trained for this kind of work. Or any work, really; I’m more a Jill of all trades on this ship, doing odd jobs and taking on impossible tasks no one else wants to tackle.
I can hem a silk robe and fix the couplings on a G20-X droid. I can bake a mean gāo diǎn and hack the code in the lighting systems to give us a few extra hours of sunlight a day.
But go inside the DNA of a living embryo and splice wings on a snake to make a dragon? Yeah, that might be a little out of my wheelhouse. Which is why I’m not going to do that, but I can’t tell them why I really want access to the lab.
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