by Brandt Legg
Chelle read the fear on his face. “What’s happened?” she asked, moving toward him.
“The county just notified me that the burn will take place on Sunday instead of Monday. The AOI will be at the library Sunday morning. We’re dead.”
“No,” she said. “We’ll just have to get them all out today.” She checked the time. “We’ve got fifteen hours until midnight. We can make it.”
“Only if you can defy the laws of physics and the AOI patrol doesn’t return.”
“Have you always been a pessimist, or is that something new?” she said lightly, but with a stern stare.
“Forgive me, but I only get that way when I’m breaking the law, smuggling contraband, involved in a treasonous conspiracy, and watching people getting executed across the street.”
“I think you got that way when your wife died.”
Her comment bit him, and he had to resist the urge to lash back. But he thought too much of her to risk an argument, and in any case, he knew she was right. Life had indeed gone gray when Harper died. He’d even thought of suicide, and might have followed through with it if it hadn’t been for Grandyn.
His son saved him, not just because he needed to take care of him, but because his son shared much more in common with his mother than he did with Runit. His rebellious streak, determination and passionate extremes, intense creativity, commitment to a cause, all had come from her. In his son, Runit saw a faded reflection of his wife as if she were still alive inside him somehow. When Grandyn spoke, particularly on serious topics, Runit heard Harper, as if distant music, still talking to him.
“Let’s go tell Grandyn that we’ll need all the TreeRunners that he can get, and maybe Deuce’s plumber can bring in more people,” Runit said.
Chelle smiled. “See, I knew there was a fighter in there somewhere.” She brushed her palm over his heart. “I’ll go tell Nelson.”
As he headed to locate his son, Runit felt as if he’d been fighting through a weird dream. He recalled Mark Twain’s words, “Truth is stranger than Fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”
Grandyn thought he could get four or five more TreeRunners. The plumber, after contacting Deuce, said ten additional people would arrive in the next few hours. It still seemed impossible, but like his mother, the more difficult the challenge, the more resolved Grandyn became.
“They aren’t burning these books!” he’d said through gritted teeth as he heaved another five bundles onto a cart bound for the back door staging area.
Runit caught up with Nelson in the long storage room on the lower level. The room had once been offices, back when the library needed a bigger staff to serve several thousand patrons a day. Now they were lucky to see that many in six months. And, of course, Runit thought, No one will ever read in this building again.
“What are these books?” Nelson asked, leafing through an old, leather-bound volume.
“They’re the private collections. After the Banoff, when book ownership became so expensive, many families and private libraries donated their books. Without any budget, it took decades for volunteers to sort them. Many were discarded, but there are many gems in there. “
“Are they in the system?”
“Not these.”
Nelson squinted his eyes. “Are you serious?”
“Damn. In all the confusion I forgot that the DesTIn will not have run these.”
“Is there a list?”
“Nothing complete.”
“Then we have to take them all,” Nelson said, looking at boxes containing a couple of thousand books.
“Didn’t Chelle tell you?”
“Yeah, we’ve got to finish by midnight,” Nelson said. “But we have to get them all. We don’t know what they’re after. There could be one paragraph on one page inside one of these antique books that changes everything.” He blew dust off an old copy of The Revolution. “This was written in 1918 in Norway, the year after the Bolsheviks took power in Russia. It’s a study of repression throughout the ages and analyzes revolutions throughout history, including the American in 1776 and right up through Russia’s in 1917. And look at this,” he said, holding up another thick volume. “This is an encyclopedic work on the true cause of every war ever recorded up through 1975. It’s called, The First Shot. Ever hear of it?”
“No.”
“Of course you haven’t. They don’t want anyone reading this stuff. Maybe they closed every library just to suppress these two books. Shoot, I’m going to hand-carry these out of here myself.”
“I know.” Runit thought again of the people he’d seen killed. He thought of his wife’s copy of Zinn’s book. “Change lies sleeping within books, just waiting for the covers to be opened.”
“Exactly. Your life has been books. These two books have been in this building since before you were born and you’ve never read them!”
“Maybe because I’m not interested in revolution the way you are.” They’d been friends for decades, and Runit often tired of Nelson’s romanticized notion of controversy.
“Yes, you are. You’re just afraid of death.”
“Afraid of . . . do you really want to talk to me about that?” Runit moved toward Nelson as if he might shove him. His face flushed. “I welcome death! There have been many days when I actually invited it, when I would have embraced it. You know what I’ve been through. I’ve had to hold it together for Grandyn. For my son. I can’t just drink and eat my way through life the way you do!”
Nelson pushed a box in the direction of Runit, and two cartons full of books teetered off a stack and landed at his feet. “I’m a little bored with your damned ‘poor-me-single-dad’ routine. Do you think you’re the only one who ever lost anyone? Maybe you think you have a monopoly on grief, but there’s a world full of loss out there. Where is your courage man? Why haven’t you written your book? Try creating something sometime. Risk it!”
“Torg off!”
“Damn it, Runit! Do something instead of feeling sorry for yourself.”
“Mutsu said, ‘Creativity can’t be coaxed, it is fragile and sometimes comes only when the world is ready; waiting until it is safe for it to grow into something great.’”
“Really? I see it another way. ‘An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.’ Oscar Wilde.” Before Runit could reply, Nelson added, “I think I agree with Kafka: ‘We ought to read only the kind of books that would stab us.’”
“Writing isn’t everything,” Runit said quietly, reaching down to pick up the books.
“Leave them!” Nelson shouted. “They’re going to burn anyway, right?”
“Why don’t you face up to reality? Life isn’t a novel.”
“Wrong! Life is a novel that no one bothers to write down.” Nelson took a slug from his flask. “Maybe if you realized that, you’d be better at playing the part of the hero.”
“Why am I the hero?” Runit asked, still picking up books. “Because I’m the last librarian?”
“Yeah. That’s all that’s required. You’re in the right place at the right time. Don’t you feel it? We’re here at the crossroads of history. This is as great a moment as any of the ones in these books.” He smacked his hand on The Revolution and The First Shot. “We can change everything. We can get it right this time.”
Runit stared at him for a moment. “I may not have read those books, but I am a librarian, as you like to constantly point out, and I’ve read thousands of books. I was also Harper’s husband, so I picked up a thing or two about pre-Banoff history, and I can tell you that the revolutionaries always think they’re right. They always plan to make it better, get rid of the oppressors, and create a wonderful world. But you know something? They never do. They end up corrupt like the rest until someone comes along and throws them out, thinking they’re going to make it better. Believing the same lie.”
“Eventually someone has to get it right,” Nelson said, taking another shot of liq
uor. “It might as well be us. We have to try to find the right path or we become complicit in the crimes against us.”
“You tell me to create something. I’ve created a son. I’ve run this library and countless things have been created here under my watch. My library has helped you write your books. There are a million ways to create. It’s not always typing words, painting pictures, or acting in a play. And you don’t get to decide which is correct.”
“Fair enough.” Nelson said, sitting on the edge of a table and reaching for a bac. “But, Runit, you’re just scared. They’re going to burn these books. Nice and reasonable people don’t do that. The perfect world they’ve given us is a lie, and there’s a reason it’s a lie.”
“I am scared,” Runit said. “And I’m brave enough to admit that. But you didn’t see how easily they killed those people. True, I don’t know what they might have done, but they never got a chance to defend themselves before being sentenced to an immediate and violent death.”
“I knew them,” Nelson said, lighting the bac.
“Who?”
“The people you watched die.”
Chapter 40
Runit looked at his old friend and wondered if he really knew him at all. “Why do you, a bestselling author, know people that the AOI executed without even bothering to arrest? Just how deep are you in this thing? Damn it Nelson, you tell me right now. What’s going on?”
“We don’t have time for this Runit.”
“Make time.”
Nelson lit a bac and tapped the air around his INU. Chelle’s face came through. “We’re up in the collections room. Would you mind joining us? Runit wants to know . . . everything.”
“Can’t we do this tomorrow?” Chelle asked Nelson in a businesslike tone. “We don’t need any distractions until we get the books out.”
“No,” Runit yelled. “I’m tired of being lied to!” His outburst surprised himself even more than it did Chelle.
“I’ll be right there,” she said, disappearing off the VM.
“I’d really rather you didn’t smoke,” Runit said. “I know they’re going to burn this place tomorrow, but I’d rather not breathe in that poison.”
Nelson took another drag without commenting.
A few seconds later, Chelle came into the room. “You’re allowing him to smoke in the building now?” Chelle asked.
“No, he’s just being rude.”
“Put it out, Nelson,” Chelle demanded, and her brother complied. “Now, please listen to me Runit. I know you’re confused about all of this, but you’re better off not knowing everything right now. You’ve already reached the point of no return, so it hardly matters when you get briefed. But I promise, as soon as the books are safely out of here, I’ll answer your questions.”
“No.”
She looked at Nelson. He nodded.
“Have you ever heard of an organization called PAWN?”
Runit shook his head.
“For decades PAWN has sought to end the rule of the Aylantik government and the elite super-rich who control them.”
“Why? I mean I know everything isn’t perfect, but compared to the shape the world was in before Aylantik came to power, we’re living in utopia.”
“Before the Aylantik came to power was before the Banoff,” Chelle said bitterly.
“Are you telling me that since the Banoff, there has been a group, PAWN, trying to stop Aylantik?”
“Yes.” Chelle took his hand into hers. “PAWN stands for People Against World Nation. Even before the Banoff, there were those who sought to unite the world under one government. The Aylantik is just a front for the super-rich corporate owners who control everything.”
“And the books?” he said, thinking he should pull his hand away but wanting to keep it there.
“There is something in them that Aylantik wants to suppress. Therefore, we must find it.”
“But we don’t know exactly what it is?” he asked, not believing they really didn’t know.
“We’re working on it,” Nelson said.
“You both should have told me all this in the beginning,” Runit said, yanking his hand away.
“Would you have gone along with us?” Chelle asked.
“Hell no!”
“That’s why we waited to tell you,” Nelson said.
“Well, good for you.” Runit scowled at his old friend. “Is that how you generally get what you want? By deceit and trickery?”
“Desperate times,” Nelson said.
“Yeah, well one day someone will write the history of what we’re doing here and I sure as hell hope they get the facts straight.” He glared at Nelson.
“Maybe you’ll be the one to write it,” Chelle said.
“Nah. I’ll be long dead before they work out this tangled mess.”
“I hope not,” she said. “But you’re right about one thing. It is a tangled mess. And once you learn more about it, you’ll realize why we kept you in the dark.”
“Real friends don’t have to lie to each other to coerce them into doing something,” he said, drilling another look into Nelson.
“Really?” Nelson shot back. “Then why didn’t Harper ever tell you?”
Chelle let out a sharp sigh. “Damn it Nelson!”
“What? What did you say?” Runit gasped. “What didn’t Harper tell me?”
“That she was part of PAWN.”
“We don’t need this now,” Chelle said, shaking her head at Nelson.
“You better tell me what in the hell you’re talking about Nelson, or I’ll zoom the AOI myself right now.”
“Harper was active in PAWN,” Nelson said defiantly, taking another swig from his flask.
Runit just stood there, gaping for at least half a minute. Finally, with contorted facial expressions, something between pain and anger, he almost whispered, “Were you sleeping with Harper?”
“Oh, good God!” Chelle threw up her arms, exasperated.
Nelson looked confused, but didn’t respond.
“You’d better answer me right now. Were you having sex with my wife?”
“How did this turn into a high school drama?” Chelle asked.
Nelson managed to get a bac lit and, with an exhale of smoke in a gravelly voice, said, “I loved her too you know.”
“Yeah, I know that, but my question is were you screwing her?”
Nelson’s eyes filled as he found Runit’s gaze. “It only happened once. She regretted it, I’m sure of that.”
Runit’s lips tightened and then quivered. He opened his hands and extended his fingers, then made a fist, glanced at Chelle’s face to confirm she had known, then walked out of the room.
“Don’t just walk out Runit!” Nelson called after him. “We’ve been friends too long.”
“There is no friend as loyal as a book,” Runit responded, barely loud enough to be heard, but Nelson recognized the words of Ernest Hemingway, and in them the hope that they might get past this.
Runit moved though the familiar confines of the library as if he’d been dropped on the surface of an unexplored planet. Nothing seemed recognizable. Even the air felt strange. He wanted to un-know everything he’d heard that day. The crimes and broken illusions pushed him into a wall of blinding fury. He expected tears, cornered in that dark part of the cold building which held centuries of lessons and emotion, but all that came was a silent chant from Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland. “I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.” He repeated it several times until he stumbled away, bleeding a bloodless pain that he wished would kill him.
He wandered until, coming to the lower level, he saw the only friendly face in a world suddenly lost. His son, the one all this effort was supposedly for, but now even that seemed in question. The crushing realizations of doubt piled in on him.
He didn’t live in a utopian society. His life had been wasted on books. Friends used him and lied. His beloved wife was an adulteress, and beyond that, she was some
sort of spy or secret agent for a clandestine revolutionary group bent on taking over the world.
“Dad, we’re going to make it!” Grandyn shouted upon seeing him.
He watched his son push a cart piled high with bundles toward the back door. Grandyn’s elation rallied Runit. He nodded and gave him a thumbs-up before going back upstairs to find Chelle.
Chapter 41
Polis Drast looked over the maps lighting the tiles beneath his feet. Three INUs filled the room from floor to ceiling with projected images so that he walked in a real-time 360-degree view of wherever the action was. He zipped from the investigation at the charred Portland AOI headquarters to the wilds of Oregon Area’s mountains, then to coastal cliffs of the southern Washington Area. The search for the woman leading PAWN had narrowed to four sectors in and around the Washington and Oregon Areas. Even without help from Blaise Cortez, they would have her by nightfall.
He tromped through the virtual room as troops arrived in the Pacyfik region’s major cities. Lance Miner’s warning that Blaise might be using the woman as a smokescreen concerned him.
No, he thought, it terrifies me.
Drast moved like a choreographed martial artist as he went from location to location, making the INU show him people and places, tapping the KEL and integrating data overlays, intelligence analysis, and probability projections. Polis Drast was more than a rigid policeman, more than a skilled politician. He was an INU wizard, and could glean more from the “mighty marble” than perhaps anyone other than Deuce Lipton.
His DesTIn assistant circled the room, its thin blue light signaling that an assessment was ready and waiting for engagement.
“What?” Drast shouted, arguing with DesTIn as if it were an angry spouse.
“War appears imminent,” the digital voice said.
“Of course it is, but it needs to wait. I will never become World Premier if a war starts first. Particularly if it breaks out in the Pacyfik.”