by Meg Elison
She turned her head to the side too fast and everything swam again. She blinked hard, trying to get her brains in order.
Eddy was there, tied to a pole just as she was. He was still knocked out.
Flora looked up, trying to assess how bad things were. Above her, a bundle of fish hanging on her pole shivered and rained down drops of salt water.
Twenty men, maybe more. Almost all armed.
She rotated her rib cage, trying to sense the weight of her gun against her body. It was there.
Maybe they don’t know that I’m armed?
She looked over and saw the butt of Eddy’s gun where it always sat. With his hands tied behind him, it wasn’t even really out of reach. He could pull it, but aiming it would be a challenge.
Still, it could start enough chaos. Maybe they don’t have guns here. Maybe they don’t know what they are.
The men were not paying attention to her. Night had fallen, and they had all turned their backs on Eddy and Flora to watch the sea. Flora scanned the horizon, looking for Bodie, for the Ursula. She saw nothing.
Fog lay heavy against the flat sea. The tide was out. Flora thought about making a sound but did not.
Then the glow from a ship lit up the fog but did not break through it. Flora saw it like a tiny moon advancing on the shore. She shook her head again.
What the hell is that?
Beside her, Eddy was beginning to stir.
“Eddy,” she hissed through her teeth. “Eddy! Eddy, can you hear me?”
Eddy rolled his head on a limp neck, looking at her out of one eye.
“What the fuck?”
Flora shrugged. She saw Eddy immediately move his hand to check for his gun. He had his finger on the trigger at once, the muzzle laid against the sand.
“Wait,” Flora said. “Just wait.”
Eddy’s jaw set, but he did wait.
Through the fog there came two dinghies. In the front of each sat a person holding a flaming torch. Flora looked back at the moon-ship, veiled behind the wall of fog.
It’s torches. They’ve got a boat covered in torches.
As they came ashore, Flora knew they were women. It wasn’t their clothes; many of them wore leather wrap-dresses over breeches. It wasn’t their hair; two or three of them were shaved like Eddy preferred to be. But it was in every line of them; the way they braced their weight in their hips before flexing muscular arms to haul their boats up the beach. It was in the way they stood and looked at one another.
I ought to feel safer, Flora, thought, squirming. So why don’t I?
She thought of Alma and the women of Shy. She thought about herself, keeping watch over Eddy in Estiel.
It doesn’t mean that they’ll be better. Just that they might understand.
As the women came closer to the fires on the beach, Flora saw that they too wore tattoos that lay across their chins, as if ink had dripped from their bottom lips and dried there.
One of them stopped and spoke to the spear-bearers.
“You’ve got two?”
The man bowed his head. “I do, Mother. As I signaled.”
“Are they well? Are they young?”
He nodded again, gesturing toward the place where Eddy and Flora were staked to the sand.
The woman who had spoken stepped forward. She was broad in the shoulders and hips, the wrap of her dress accentuating the hourglass shape of her body. Her hair was long and loose, black shot all over with gray and woven with the feathers of seabirds. A string of sea-glass beads hung just below her ear. Flora saw it catching in the firelight.
She searched the woman’s eyes and saw no malice. She sat up straighter and prepared to speak, but the woman turned to Eddy first.
“Are you a keeper?”
Eddy cocked his head to the side. Flora saw him dragging the gun, straining against his bonds. “A what?”
“A keeper,” the woman said in a low, calm voice that just carried over the sound of the sea. “Are you a keeper of women?”
She inclined her head toward Flora. “Is this woman your property?”
“Oh,” Eddy said at once. “You mean am I a slaver? No, I’m not a fucking slaver.”
“Is that true?” The woman turned to Flora, searching her face. “Are you free?”
Flora shrugged. “Right now, I’m tied to a pole. Usually I’m free. Eddy doesn’t own me. We don’t do that.”
The woman nodded, then bent down to free Flora. Standing up again, she said, “I am Dell, and I am the Mother Librarian. Forgive the fishermen for binding you. It’s my orders. We are always searching for women.”
Flora stood up and rotated her shoulders a few times. “I’ve had worse. Why bother tying us? Couldn’t they have just asked us to stay and meet you?”
Dell fixed her with a quizzical eye. “Why would you stay when we might be slavers? Only slavers have boats.”
Flora looked down at Eddy, still tied.
“Mother Dell,” Eddy said. “How about it?”
Dell looked him over again, her black eyes critical. She looked back to Flora.
“He’s really okay,” she said.
Dell shrugged and freed Eddy, who stood and put his gun neatly away.
“I’m sorry to treat you this way. We have a real problem with slavers up and down the coast. Most of them are coming from the Bay, we think. We’ve had to become more aggressive in our precautions.”
Flora turned to look as if these precautions would be clear to see, but was immediately distracted. Women had come off the ship in numbers she hadn’t expected. There were forty or more spread out over the beach. They were eating roasted fishes and fresh oysters. They were standing grouped and talking with one another, all of them dressed somewhat like Dell.
But a dozen or more sat in the sand, each cradling a full-grown man in their laps. They were breastfeeding. Flora took in the same scene over and over again: a man curled up, blissful with his eyes closed, a hand resting on the breast to which he was not currently connected at the mouth. Cheeks working and working.
Dell followed Flora’s eye line. “Would you like one? I’m sure one of the librarians would be happy to have you.”
“No,” Flora said quickly. “Thank you. Why do you do that?”
Dell shrugged. “A man needs milk. So where are you travelers from?”
Eddy stepped forward, tearing his eyes away from the strange sight. “We’re from far, far inland. Near the river called the Misery. We’ve come all the way around from Florda to find the Midwife’s Bay.”
Dell looked up at the starlit sky. “Misery. Missouri, do you mean? And Florida?”
Flora and Eddy exchanged a glance. “Place names are different,” Eddy said uncertainly. “But that sounds the same.”
“And this Midwife’s Bay you mentioned. Is that the San Francisco Bay?”
They looked at one another again. Flora, who had been rereading the Midwife recently, thought that was correct. “I think so, yes. Based on her book.”
Dell’s eyes lit up and she reached out a hand to Flora. “What book? Show me.”
Flora smiled nervously. “I don’t have it on me. It’s on our ship . . . which was right out there. I don’t know where it is now.”
Dell nodded. “We spotted her as she was moving away from the shoreline. She’s not far. But you must tell me more about this book.”
So they sat by the fire and tried not to notice the men lining up for milk in the cool of the evening. Eddy told Dell about the Midwife, about Nowhere, and about them. Flora broke in here and there, but mostly she listened to Eddy speak.
He never talks this long to any of us, she thought. Not even Alice. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say this many words at once.
Dell’s smile never faded, and only seemed to become more knowing as the story went on. When Eddy had run out of words, she spoke again.
“We are all librarians,” she told him. “Do you know what that means?”
Flora spoke up. “I’ve raided libra
ries in a couple of cities. I’ve seen pictures of old-world librarians. They were women who kept books, so that people could share their knowledge. They taught children to read.”
Dell nodded. “We keep books of the old world, but our mission is to collect the books of the new world. There is often only one copy of each. We copy and collect and preserve. We keep them safe from fire and invaders and slavers. We are the library of the new world.”
She said all this with a simple grandeur. Flora thought she saw a glint in Eddy’s eye.
“We would like to collect the story of your Midwife. To copy it, before you move on.”
“I don’t know,” Flora began. “It’s over twenty volumes, and we may not have the time to—”
“I can give you one woman per volume,” Dell said, looking over her people on the beach. “That’s not a problem.”
Eddy looked at Flora. “I don’t see why not,” he said.
“We have to get back to the Ursula. I want to check on my kid, anyway.”
“You have a living child?” Dell’s eyes were sharp.
“I have a living child,” Flora agreed. “But not of my body.”
Dell nodded. She arranged for two women to row them in one of the small boats back to where she had come from. Once they passed through the fog and Flora saw its full size, she gasped out loud.
CHAPTER 37
The Book of Flora
Shore to ship to ship . . . who knows where we are now
Winter, cold fog at sea
104N
We see the boat like a city rising out of the sea. It’s lit with torches, but only at the prow. The rest of it runs dark, and that helps hide its size. It’s enormous.
The hull is gray metal, and the sides rise up so tall that we can hear our voices echo off of it and come bouncing back at us.
“What the hell runs that thing?” Eddy asks, his head cranked back all the way to look up at the edge of it, blacker than the night. It blots out the stars.
“This thing is called the Alexandria,” Dell says, looking mildly offended. “And we have a reserve. It’s stored offshore and no one knows about it.”
“A reserve of what?”
“Diesel,” she says. Above us, someone throws down a rope ladder. The drop is so long that it seems to hang in the air before unrolling toward us.
“Deez,” I say, low, to Eddy.
“Yeah,” he says. “But how much must something this size burn through?”
“Can you climb?” Dell looks back over her shoulder.
I nod, thinking about the endless ascent out of Ommun. If I can do that, surely I can do this. But the rope ladder will not hold still and I’m knocked against the metal side of the ship more than once, bashing my shoulder or my hip. Eddy holds the bottom of the ladder and that makes it a little easier, but I’m not looking forward to coming down the same way.
Eddy follows me up and Dell comes last. Our pilots stay on our rowboat, which helps me relax and accept the idea that I’m not trapped here. Once I’m on the deck, I can’t help but look for the Ursula. There are no other lights on the sea. Black night in every direction but the beach, which is a haze of orange through the fog.
There’s a lookout in the crow’s nest, and women come and go across the space of the deck. No one pays much attention to us. The ship is as broad as a town square and twice as wide. Its surface is black as an old road and mostly smooth. It’s so large that I can barely feel the movement of the water. Not at all like the Ursula, which is always rocking and tossing beneath my feet. This is like an island. It’s unnerving.
Dell beckons to us. “This way. Let me show you.”
She walks us to a doorway that opens on a set of stairs leading down. The ship has electric lights below, unlike the torches on deck.
She sees me looking. “The system is old, but we’ve kept it in very good shape. We have stations where we can get replacement copper wire and other supplies. They won’t last forever, but they may not have to. This way.”
She makes a right turn and takes us deeper down into the ship. It’s labyrinthine and metal; it reminds me immediately of Ommun. But the people are very different.
Coming and going throughout the ship, I see only women. I think about Shy and the place Kelda was from, Womanhattan. I think about the places I saw with Archie, how many of them kept men and women separate. I think about how many places I never felt that I could belong, because I would not be sorted correctly when the time came to put me on one side of the wall or the other.
I look over at Eddy and wish I knew if he was thinking the same thing. He is lost to me, has been lost to me, since we found each other in that cave. Estiel only made it worse. I won’t ever really know his mind, and I grieve for what might have been. For that wall.
But maybe I’m not as far off as I think, because Eddy opens his mouth and says what I’m thinking. “The ship is all women.”
Dell nods, not turning around. “That’s right. Boys live on the beach, they learn to fish and weave and fight. Girls stay on the ship and learn to do library work. We come to shore twice a week.”
“What if a child is neither?”
“Don’t be silly,” Dell said. “Everybody is one or the other.”
“Are men allowed on the ship?” Eddy is catching up to Dell.
“No, never,” Dell says equably.
“But you let me on,” Eddy says at once.
Dell laughs a little. “I know what you are. We have women like you on board.” She looks over her shoulder at me, giving me the once-over I know so well. “Like you, too.”
Eddy’s jaw sets, but if he is going to say something else, he misses the moment. “Here,” Dell says.
She turns a wheel that moves two enormous lockbolts, and opens the metal door.
The air inside is fragrant with the smell of books and old papers. For just a moment I am reminded of Estiel, and my heart pounds, but then I realize it is only the scent of a cat. A small one.
“You keep cats on board?”
Dell turns to face me. “They control the rats. No avoiding them, I’m afraid, and they’ll destroy our work. And the cats are happy to eat the guts out of a fish.”
She gestures to the shelves lining the walls. There are some old-world books, as she said there would be. But most of it is diaries, journals, notebooks, and collections of papers.
I can’t help it—I want to touch everything. I reach out and very gently handle a notebook bound with a spiral made of thin metal.
“How long has this library existed?”
Dell sighs. “Since the plague.”
“The Dying,” Eddy counters.
Dell nods. “There are many names for it. There’s a whole section of diaries from that time. We are particularly interested in those, of course. The ones that told us how this world came to be.”
She pushes her heavy dark hair off her shoulder. “Beyond that, we have extensive collections of writings from people all over this continent, from the last century. We have the complete story of our attempts at civilization, in all the forms it has taken. Every one with the same goals, every one taking a different route to get there.”
“I’ve seen some of that,” Eddy says. “I have stories to tell. There’s no way you’ve got it all.”
Dell looks him over. “Maybe you’d stay with us awhile, and help us with this work.”
I don’t think Eddy would have considered it at all if Alice hadn’t gotten pregnant. But one by one, we had all left him. I had not been who he wanted me to be, and I had Connie. Alice had never been satisfied with one, and had always taken other lovers. And Bodie had done for her what Eddy never could. Kelda had chosen to return to Ommun, for all her endless devotion to Eddy. Ina had died. Eddy looked so alone, staring around at those books.
And then he burst into tears.
“This is what I was supposed to do,” he says between sobs. “My mother. Always wanted me to leave a book behind. To be like the Unnamed. I am like her. I was. But I pic
ked to be like her in just the one way. I could have done more.”
Dell looks shocked, and doesn’t quite know what to do with this weeping stranger.
I go to Eddy and take his hands. “There’s still time,” I tell him. “You aren’t done. You’re here with the Midwife’s book. You still have your story to tell. And you don’t have to be anybody but who you are.”
But he’s shaking his head. Never letting me in.
“You don’t understand,” he says.
I drop his hands. I think I do, but there’s no winning that fight. Here I am, with my own journal in constant work, and knowing that he never writes anything down. Here I am, trying to always record what new places and new people are like. Here I am, tucking Connie’s drawings into my pages, making the record complete. The work of this ship makes sense to me, but he’s the one having the breakdown.
“Are you taking on women?” I ask Dell, turning from Eddy.
Dell nods. “And their stories. Forever, as long as the boat can float. This is the work that women do. We keep the fire of civilization burning, by collecting and protecting stories. It’s what we’ve always done.”
I think of the library in Demons, the pictures of the old-world women who did the same job then. Everyone seems to have an idea of what women do, what we are. But Dell’s makes more sense to me than most.
Shouting from above, as a message is passed from mouth to mouth. Dell lifts up her head.
“Sailboat off the port,” comes the report.
Dell looks at us.
“That’s our boat,” I tell her.
We go back up to the deck and see that it is Bodie, steering the tiny Ursula toward us, with Alice waving on the bow.
I wave back, hoping Connie can see me.
“Why would they approach this huge ship?” Eddy asks, scanning the water behind them.
But the library crew has sprung to life all around us, because they already know the answer to that question.
A slave ship is pulling into the harbor just behind them.
CHAPTER 38
THE ALEXANDRIA
The ship was too big to turn around quickly, but the crew began to prime the engines and bring the ship about. Eddy and Flora sought cover but found none. They were exposed on the flat deck of the ship, and nobody was paying any attention to them.