The Book of the Night

by Pearl North

  Burke sat down and leaned toward her. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, like for instance, when I was outside of the vault, I didn’t hear just any book, I heard the instruction manual for the vault, and not just any part of the instruction manual, but the part that dealt with opening the hatch. The passages I hear from books often seem to be commenting on whatever is happening at the time.”

  “You think there’s some connection between that and this particular book making itself heard over all the others?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Burke shrugged. “Maybe you really need to hear whatever it has to say.”

  “Is it going to tell me how to keep doing this every day?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Leading the community.”

  Burke chuckled. “You don’t need a book for that, Haly. You do fine.”

  “Why does everyone think that but me? Well, and Hilloa.”

  “Well, competent people always underrate their performance. As for Hilloa, she doesn’t know what it’s like to be responsible for other people’s lives.”

  But Burke did. She had been the Libyrinth’s only physician for years. She had helpers now, but she was still the most experienced doctor they had. Haly let Burke’s understanding smile warm her. She took a deep breath and nodded. “Yes. I would like to act as next of kin for Palla.”

  * * *

  The Libyrarians believed that the world was comprised of seven Tales: Birth, Peril, Hunger, Balance, Love, Death, and Mystery. Each tale had a guardian spirit embodied by an animal. The seven towers of the Libyrinth were each assigned one of these animals, as were the seven alcoves in the Great Hall.

  When Libyrarians reached puberty, rituals were performed to determine their tale and corresponding animal guardian. And when they died, their body was placed at the top of the appropriate tower, exposed to the elements until nothing was left but bones. Then the bones were placed in a box engraved with the person’s name and placed in the stacks, behind their favorite book. It was up to their next of kin to place the box where it belonged.

  As Haly wandered the closely spaced shelves beneath the Libyrinth, she clutched the box holding Palla’s bones to her chest. This was where she had spent much of her childhood, but it was dangerous to be down here now that the Libyrinth had regained its full power and function. The shelves were no longer stationary. Like a Victorian-era clockwork device on a grand scale, they moved in response to a request made to the console in the center of the Great Hall, bringing the requested book to the scholar.

  At one time, getting lost in here was the great peril, but now, one could get lost and squashed. So interaction with the console was suspended for the duration of the interment. This was one of her few opportunities for Haly to revisit her beloved shelves.

  How strange it was to walk here in silence. At one time, the voices of the books would have clamored for her attention, but now all she heard was the gentle, persistent hum of the Song inside her—unless she focused her mind on a specific book or touched it.

  There was very little light. A few stray traces of palm-glow still lit the way to particularly useful areas, but for the most part, the phosphorescent gel had died and left the shelves in darkness. Haly put one hand out to the books on the shelves and felt her way along.

  “Behind the child blared the noise of the TV set; the sound worked but not the picture.”

  “When finally he found the bottom of his sadness he looked up and wiped his eyes on his forearm.”

  “It’s true that you could ask the same question a hundred different times and get a hundred seemingly different answers. But the S’kang concept of “truth” was indirect, malleable, subtle.”

  At least it still smelled the same down here. The dry peppery smell of old books filled her nose and brought with it wave after wave of memories. The time she met her first Nod, the time she had brought Clauda down here and confessed her ability to hear the books. And then, of course, the last time she’d been down here, with Gyneth, when they’d given the Libyrinth its heart back and found her parents.

  They were properly interred now, too, behind Rebecca and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Haly thought about visiting them, but decided against it. She’d never even known them.

  But what was Palla’s favorite book? Haly would have chosen Charlotte’s Web, but that book had been burned over a year ago by the Singers when the Singers were still known by the Libyrarians as Eradicants.

  But Palla had loved statecraft. It was she who had introduced Haly to the works of Mencius, Winston Churchill, and Mobeus. Their works had guided her in the past months. Yes, any of their books would be fitting resting places for Palla’s bones.

  Haly focused on Mencius. “But you don’t think about tomorrow when people are feeding surplus grain to pigs and dogs. So when people are starving to death in the streets, you don’t think about emptying storehouses to feed them. People die and you say It’s not my fault, it’s the harvest. How is this any different from stabbing someone to death and saying It’s not me, it’s the sword? Stop blaming harvests, and people everywhere under Heaven will come flocking to you.”

  Haly lifted the box holding Palla’s bones over her head to slide it behind the books, where it could rest on the shelf space in the back. All of a sudden she stopped, as the full magnitude of it hit her all at once. She pulled the box back down, clutched it to her chest, and sank to the floor.

  What was she doing? How could she be here and not be surrounded by the voices? How could she have let herself lose them? How could she have let them fall silent, and for what? For the Song. To be the Redeemer. The figurehead of an alien religion. And for this she had forsaken the books. How could she have made such a monumental mistake?

  The Redemption, the Song—they were transient. Even when they were permanent they were transient. You couldn’t hold on to them, and not only had she allowed herself to rely upon them wholeheartedly; she had founded an entire community upon them.

  Up there in the Libyrinth, and outside in Tent Town and in the fields were people who were relying on her. Five hundred souls and more, and each and every one of them was counting on her to make the right decisions. What if she made a mistake? Or rather, another mistake.

  No. Her vision wavered and her tears streamed down her face in hot rivulets. No. She didn’t want this. Her breathing came in gusts and staggers and she wanted to throw up. She put Palla’s bones on the floor and sank down on her knees, resting her face against the wood and the carving of her nurse’s name. “Put it back,” she begged, her voice soft.

  So many had died. And now everything was different. How could that be? How could everything change so much in such a short period of time? How could she change so much? Who was she? And where was that world she used to know? “Put it back,” she pleaded, with Palla, with the books, the Song, the Libyrinth, with who or whatever would listen. “Put it all back, please.”

  She wanted to be ignored. She wanted to be quiet and small. She wanted to stay in the background while other people made the important decisions. She wanted the books to talk to her of their own volition. She missed their interruptions so badly. How could she not have noticed that? It was as if she’d been walking around for the past year or more with a huge hole right through her chest and she’d never even noticed. How could she be so empty and still be alive? “I want to go home.”

  She wanted none of it to have happened: the quest, the torture, the capture, the war, the fire. Everything was so different now. And they’d lost so many. It wasn’t fair. She hadn’t asked for this. She hadn’t asked for any of it. She sat up suddenly, lifting her face to the word-filled darkness. “Put it all back!” she screamed.

  The rage in her voice frightened her. She sank back against the shelves and buried her head in her arms and lost herself in the tide of her emotions.

  It was some time before she noticed the tiny hands in her hair. A slight tugging and it may have been going on for some time, sh
e wasn’t sure, and then, a piping voice: “What does she say?”

  Nod. That much, at least, was still the same. Nod wanted to hear a story. Haly sniffed and lifted her head and swallowed. The creature was about a foot tall, with red pebbly skin and exaggerated facial features. And bald. And without sexual characteristics of any kind. Why had she always thought of Nod as he? Haly wiped at her face and coughed, and gave a shaky laugh.

  Nod had a book in its hand, which it pushed at Haly. “What does she say?”

  Haly took the book from Nod, and at once her fingers knew it, even before it spoke to her. “On the contrary, I’ve found that there is always some beauty left—in nature, sunshine, freedom, in yourself; these can all help you. Look at these things, then you find yourself again, and God, and then you regain your balance.” Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl. Oh.

  Nod and Anne had been her companions during her time of captivity among the Singers. And it was because of Anne, because of the words she’d written, that Haly had stood up to the Singers, had embraced the role of Redeemer, and through it changed a religion. However daunting circumstances might be now, it was nothing compared to what they’d been that day in Siblea’s office in the Corvariate Citadel. The Redemption was widely considered a miracle, but the real miracle had been her finding the strength to challenge Siblea and the other censors. That was the first miracle. And every other miracle had stemmed from that one. Maybe that was enough reason to believe that this could all work out. Fresh tears came to her eyes but this time they were tears of gratitude. “Thank you,” she whispered, though to Nod or to the book or to herself, she couldn’t be certain.

  “What does she say?” came another voice, and Haly saw another Nod emerge from the shelves across from her.

  “What does she say?”

  “What does she say?”

  Two more Nods appeared and they all sat at her feet, their scrawny arms wrapped around their scrawny knees, waiting for her to read to them. Before long, a whole troupe of them had gathered. They sat down in front of her in a semicircle. More arrived by the second. In the space of two more breaths there were hundreds of them. They sat on each other, clustered together so closely it was impossible to tell where one ended and another began.

  “What are you, anyway?” she asked them.

  They didn’t answer. All of them sat watching her expectantly. The one that had first approached her reached out and nudged at the book in her hand.

  Well, all right.

  Haly read to them for an hour or more. “And whoever is happy will make others happy, too. He who has courage and faith will never perish in misery!” It was the most relaxed she’d felt in over a year.

  At last she stood and placed Palla’s bones on the shelf behind Mencius. She paused, and put her hand on the spine of the book. “When there’s more grain and fish than they can eat, and more timber than they can use, people nurture life and mourn death in contentment. People nurturing life and mourning death in contentment—that’s where the way of emperors begins.” Yes. Definitely. She slipped Anne’s book into the pocket of her robes and when one of the Nods … was it the first one who had approached her? Did it matter? When it leaped upon her shoulder, she let it stay there.

  “At its heart, my theory was a simple one. If matter is an illusion and process is the whole of existence, then everything is information.”

  Haly stopped in her tracks. There it was again, the same voice she’d heard earlier in her office. It was closer now, she felt certain. Intrigued by the tale, she crept down the aisle, quickening her pace as the voice grew louder.

  “A fallen leaf, a shooting star, a fly on the windowsill, all arise from the same process, the rules of which lay implicate in their structure. The key is understanding how to look.”

  Haly turned down another aisle, then doubled back when the voice grew fainter.

  “This was the foundation of my approach and since I saw the secret of the universe everywhere around me, teasing me with its shy implicate order, I thought it best to go after it from as many possible viewpoints as could be brought to bear on the topic.”

  It was louder than ever now. Haly zeroed in on a shelf in a part of the Libyrinth she’d never been in before. She pulled a jar of palm-glow from her pocket and smeared some of the phosphorescent gel on one hand, which she raised to the shelf. “First there was transcendence.”

  The voice came from a black book with an image of a fly in white on the spine. The title read, The Song That Changed Us.

  Haly pulled the book from the shelf, and ran for the Great Hall.

  * * *

  Haly found Gyneth and Burke at the main console. “Listen to this,” she said, showing them the cover of The Song That Changed Us. “They all thought I’d lost it when I delved into the work of Dr. Bohm, but at that point, after fifty years, m-theory had yet to yield its promised results. We were as far from a Theory of Everything as we’d ever been, and I was reminded of Einstein’s famous quote: ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.’ While my colleagues took the approach that if strings and membranes had not yet cracked open the universe like an egg and spilled its secrets, then the answer was to do strings and membranes even harder, I decided to try a different tack.

  “I’d always been taken with Bohm’s concept of explicate and implicate orders. In fact, his ink dot and fish tank thought experiments were my first glimpse of the truths behind the mystery of spooky action at a distance, and largely responsible for my entry into the field of quantum physics.

  “Bohm’s unwillingness to hide his interest in spiritual matters and his belief in a connection between the numinous and the scientific ruined his reputation and cast his work, unfairly, into disrepute. More shortsightedness from the same sorts of minds that denounced me when I began my interdisciplinary experiments.

  “At its heart, my theory was a simple one. If matter is an illusion and process is the whole of existence, then everything is information. Not just information, but fundamentally, the same information. A falling leaf, a shooting star, a fly on the windowsill, all arise from the same process, the rules of which lay implicit in their structure. The key is understanding how to look.

  “Consider those stop signs that are painted onto the surface of the road. When viewed directly from above the letters are elongated, but when seen from the perspective of a car approaching the intersection, they look perfectly proportional. A more extreme example is a digital video signal. Until translated by the receiver, it is a stream of ones and zeros totally without meaning to anyone but a specialist. But to say that it is only a stream of ones and zeros is grossly inaccurate. The video is implicit, or as Bohm would say, implicate, in the data stream, but it takes the right viewpoint (i.e., through the receiver) to make that hidden order available to the viewer.

  “This was the foundation of my approach and since I saw the secret of the universe everywhere around me, teasing me with its shy implicate order, I thought it best to go after it from as many possible viewpoints as could be brought to bear on the topic.

  “They threatened my tenure when I brought a biologist onto my team. When I hired a composer, they fired us all. Fortunately, by then my project had caught the attention of Bella Gunderson and we were able to continue working on her payroll, which was even better.

  “I remember clearly one evening in early summer when I stepped outside the facility in Des Moines and stood staring at the sunset. I thought then that I would die happy if I could just solve this problem. It makes me laugh now. Because of course in the end it was not the information itself that changed everything, but the process by which we discovered it. Even then I should have known that once you learn how to make the implicate order of a thing explicate, it is a small thing to alter that order. When you can do that, then you can do anything and death becomes a quaint artifact of the past.

  “Still, there is much to be nostalgic for in that time. We were so innocent, and our q
uarrels and our loves, that seemed so important, were so small and insignificant.

  “Every evening, Fisher played concertos on the baby grand in the great room. And Cow and Mouse would curl up on the couch in front of the fire. Everyone had a nickname, except for me. The animal motif started with Stephenson, my colleague in physics, whom we all noted worked like a dog. Nichols, the biologist, who would eventually earn the moniker the Lion, for his temper, started calling him Dog and it went from there.

  “Privately, I was quite hurt at being the only one of the team without a nickname, though of course later, after the demonstration in which I turned a fly into a rosebush and back again, I became known as the Fly, not just by our little group, but by the whole world over.

  “While Fisher composed the song which, when played at the correct frequency, caused the hidden dimensions to unfold and express the information embedded within them, it was Avendal, our linguist, and Masters, our visual artist, who designed the device that streamlined the process and expanded it to the ability to manipulate that information, and thus reality. It was her whim to design it as a pen, though it could have taken many forms.

  “But I’m getting ahead of myself. The pens came later. First there was transcendence. Since information from dimensions five through eleven cannot be properly observed by mere three-and-a-half-dimensional beings, the observers, too, needed to change.

  “That was Nichols and Foster’s project, and it was the one that created the most furor in the general populace. While authors as far back as Egan and Vinge had speculated on the ability to upload human intelligence into immortal, synthetic processing systems that did everything the human brain could and more, people freaked out when the notion became a reality. Until they grasped that they were being offered immortality.

  “Within a decade, everything changed. Scarcity became a thing of the past. The human race became immortal, and we seven who wielded the pens were gods. Time ceased to have meaning to us. We could create universes at will, or stop them from being born and use their energy to power our other creations.”