The Last Book in the Universe

by Rodman Philbrick

  “Nothing, my lady,” Ryter says.

  “You help me trap my enemy, and ask nothing in return?”

  “Only what you pledged, my lady. Free passage out of the latch. After that, we’re on our own.”

  The Latch Queen points her chetty blade at me. “You! Spaz boy! What do you have to say for yourself? Huh? Nothing? Have you gone mute?” she demands.

  Ryter nudges me.

  “I’m too scared to talk,” I say, fighting to get the words out.

  You can tell the Latch Queen likes the idea. “Scared? Scared of me, Spaz boy? Why ever should you be scared of me?” she cackles.

  “I’m scared my sister will die if we don’t hurry.”

  She snorts and makes a face, as if disgusted to hear of such weakness. “Then be off, the lot of you! Go on, get out of here!”

  We’re hurrying into the takvee, when the chetty blade flashes in my face and stops so close to my nose, I can smell the warm steel. “One last thing, Spaz boy,” the Latch Queen says, breathing into my ear. “Be sure and tell Billy Bizmo about my victory. Tell him to think twice before he brings battle to the White Widow.” She laughs, tickling me with the steel. “I gave myself that name, didn’t you know? It suits me.”

  She raises my chin with her blade.

  “Look upon this,” she says, holding up a bulging sack. A velvet sack exactly large enough to hold a human skull. “Tell Billy this is what happens to my enemies. One kiss of my blade and they lose their heads!”

  Her laughter follows us all the way to Eden.

  JUST BEFORE I LOST my family unit, Bean discovered the color blue. It was just this old cracked plate she found in a pile of rubble, but once she wiped off the brick dust, the color was still bright enough to shock your eyes.

  “Imagine if the whole world was this color,” she said to me, holding the plate up to the gray light of day. “Everything blue, even me and you. Wouldn’t it be wonderful? If something was blue, you’d have to love it, wouldn’t you? No matter what?”

  It was such a Bean thing to say. But I knew what she meant.

  When she tried to make Charly understand, he took the plate away and smashed it to bits. See, he told her, see? It’s nothing now, it doesn’t exist! There’s no such thing as blue, and even if there was, it wouldn’t mean anything!

  And that was such a Charly thing to say. But I knew what he meant, too. He meant I was no longer part of the family unit, no matter how Bean might want it to be different. In his mind I was dust, I didn’t exist.

  I figure I’ve got a right to hate him for that, but somehow I can’t. It’s hard to hate someone for being stupid and afraid, and when it comes to me and Bean, Charly was so afraid, his brain sort of froze up until he couldn’t think his way to what was true.

  “We’re coming up on the Barrier,” Lanaya announces from her console. “There it is, right ahead.”

  We’ve been crossing through the Zone, going slow so the takvee can automatically disarm the mines. I’m in the back tending to Bean, but I can see the vidscreens from here. And what I see looks so strange, it makes me think my eyes have gone wrong.

  The Barrier isn’t a gate or a fence; it’s the color blue.

  “Astonishing,” Ryter is saying. “I’ve heard about this, and have some understanding of the concept. But to actually see it — why, it takes my breath away!”

  Lanaya explains that the Barrier is really this layer of what she calls “charged air” that separates Eden from the Urb. “We can pass through without feeling a thing,” she says. “But because of the charged layer, very little air is exchanged between the two atmospheres. Think of Eden as a rock in the middle of a stream. Everything whirls around it.”

  “What’s a stream?” I ask.

  Lanaya turns from the console. “Are you kidding?” she asks.

  “There are no streams in the Urb, my dear,” Ryter tells her. “No rivers, no lakes, no ponds. No running water at all, except when it rains.”

  “Never mind the stream,” I say. “What’s the blue stuff? Is that the, um, what did you call it, ‘charged air’?”

  Lanaya giggles. “That’s the sky, silly. The sky is blue.”

  “The sky is gray,” I say. “Everybody knows that.”

  “In the Urb,” she says, “because of all the smog. In Eden the sky is blue and the ground is green.”

  I figure she’s pulling my leg. Ground is dirt or concrete, everybody knows that. I figure in Eden the concrete won’t be cracked and the dirt won’t stink, but why would everything be painted green? It doesn’t make sense.

  But I’m wrong, flat wrong. After we pass through the Barrier that separates the atmospheres, Lanaya stops the takvee and opens the hatch. “See it with your own eyes,” she says. “Why I’m always happy to come home.”

  The three of us stand in the open hatch and look up at the sky. It’s so blue and clear, it makes my eyes water. Then I realize my eyes are weeping because they’ve never seen anything this beautiful. I never thought about it before, but in the Urb the sky is so close that sometimes you think you could reach up and touch it. Here in Eden the blue goes up forever and you suddenly realize that the sky is much, much bigger than the earth below. And it’s more than that: Seeing so far makes you know there’s a world outside the world, and a sky beyond the sky.

  And the sky, well, the sky is so big, so never-ends, that it makes your brain feel bigger, too, like there’s room for more ideas. But it isn’t only the sky that fills my eyes. Because what Lanaya said is true: The earth is green. Instead of new concrete, they’ve got all this green feathery stuff, like a soft rug that’s somehow alive.

  “Grass,” Lanaya explains. “Over that way is a small forest of trees. Those velvety things are giant ferns. Aren’t they lovely? I’ve always liked ferns.”

  She notices how I’m looking at everything with all my might. Like I want to stick everything I’m seeing inside my brain before she pushes a button and makes it vanish.

  Ryter is quiet, too. Then he sighs so deep I’m afraid he’ll pass out. “I heard stories,” he says, very faint. “Impossible-to-believe stories. But the reality is much, much more amazing. I swear I can smell the green! Is that possible?”

  “That’s the grass,” says Lanaya, smiling and shaking her head. “The leaves, the trees, the ferns — they all have their own smells. Wonderful fresh smells.”

  “Yes,” whispers Ryter. “Wonderful.” Then he wraps his thin arms around me and hugs me hard. “Thank you, son,” he says.

  “Are you zoomed?” I ask him. “Why are you thanking me?”

  He grins and goes, “Because if you hadn’t come into my stackbox that day, I wouldn’t be here now, seeing this.”

  I shake my head. He really is zoomed. Crazy old man, has he forgotten I went into that stackbox to rip him off?

  Lanaya starts the takvee going again, but we stay up in the hatch to watch with our own eyes as the amazing sights roll by. There isn’t just one color of green, either; there’s endless variations. When leaves shiver in the wind, it changes. Each tree is different, each blade of grass unique, and all of it looks alive.

  The thing that grabs you by the heart is how open everything is. In the Urb the sky is close, like I say, and the buildings and ruins are even closer, but you don’t think about it because that’s the way it is and you can’t imagine it being different. Here in Eden it’s as if you can see to where the world ends, or where it blends into the blue, to the place where the earth and the sky get mixed up.

  My eyes are actually starting to hurt from everything they’re seeing, but I don’t care. All I really care about is wanting Bean to wake up. I figure just the blue alone would cure her, if only she could see it.

  Lanaya says we’re only minutes from our destination, but the weird thing is, we haven’t seen any other proovs. “You’re not supposed to,” she tells us. “Eden was designed that way. Our dwellings blend into the landscape. And we learn to blend into the landscape, too. For instance, you can’t se
e them from here, but I happen to know there are children playing in that forest over there, dressed in leaf-colored clothing.”

  Later the takvee runs along the edge of a stream. Which is sort of like a gutter, only clean, with water as clear as the air. Looking down, I notice the stream has a holoquarium in it, with strange-looking fish the same color as the rocks at the bottom of the stream. But what’s the point of a holoquarium if the fish are hard to see?

  Lanaya laughs. “Those are real fish, silly, not holoquarium images.”

  I’m about to tell her I never knew there was such a thing as real fish, but decide to keep my mouth shut. I hate it when Lanaya laughs at me, even when she doesn’t mean any harm.

  Suddenly the takvee tilts.

  “What’s wrong!” I exclaim.

  “Nothing,” says Lanaya. “We’re going up a hill, is all. Oh, I forgot, there are no hills in the Urb.” We keep climbing. “Actually this particular hill is more like a small mountain,” Lanaya explains. “It’s the highest elevation in Eden.”

  It’s probably stupid to keep being amazed, but I don’t care. Because the hills are amazing. The higher up you go, the more you can see, like you’re climbing one of the old scrapers, except this is the ground getting higher and higher and it doesn’t feel like you’re going to fall off.

  Beside me, Ryter sighs and goes, “No wonder they called it ‘Eden.’”

  “Why?” I ask him. “What does ‘Eden’ mean?”

  “The backtimers had a legend about it,” he tells me. “Eden was a paradise.”

  “Yeah? And what’s a paradise?”

  “A place very much like this,” he says. “A place where you feel happy just to be there and you never want to leave.”

  Just then we come over the rise of the hill. The first thing I notice is the golden light of the sun, how it makes everything glow. At first I think there’s another hill in front of us, or maybe what Lanaya calls a “forest,” but it doesn’t look like the hills and forests we’ve seen so far. Shapes come out of the ground and soar up as high as trees, but they aren’t trees, not quite. Other shapes could be mountains except instead they’re like mirrors that reflect the sky. All the different shapes are joined together, and somehow I know without being told what thing this is.

  “You live here,” I say to Lanaya. “This is your crib.”

  She gazes at the huge and beautiful thing before us, a thing that seems to grow out of the mountains and the trees and the sky, and says, very quietly, “Yes, this is my home.”

  “It’s a palace,” says Ryter in a tone of wonder.

  Then he looks at me. He doesn’t have to say what he’s thinking, because I’m thinking it, too. If she lives in a palace, Lanaya is no ordinary proov girl.

  She really is a princess.

  RYTER SAYS I BETTER keep my mouth closed or I’ll be catching flies. But I can’t help it. The more I look around, the more my jaw drops open. For instance, what Lanaya calls “home” is so huge and spacious, it’s almost like living outside. And each room, which Lanaya calls a “space,” has a different purpose. Some are filled with light and make you feel wide awake — work spaces, and what she calls a “conversational.” Other spaces are soft and shadowy, and those, she says, are for “restful thinking” or dream-rooms for sleeping.

  Most of the spaces have openings or windows that look out on the green landscape, or up into the deep blueness of the sky. The floors are made of this cool slick-but-not-slippery stuff they call “marbellium,” and it changes color and surface depending on who occupies the space and what their mood is. Plus you can make any wall into a fully three-dimensional holoscape simply by touching it. Then you really do feel like you’re in any one of a thousand different landscapes, from something called Lush African Jungle to Nighttime Lunar Surface.

  “Do all proovs live in this kind of splendor?” Ryter wants to know, his old geezer eyes sparkling with interest.

  “Not all of them, no,” says Lanaya.

  Before she can explain, two adult proovs glide into the room. A male with a small, dark, pointy beard and a female with golden hair done up in thick weaves. The’re both wearing sleek white tunics, and little bits of sky-colored jewelry that glint in the sun, and like Lanaya they’re both perfect and beautiful. Like actors you’d see on a 3D, only better, and that makes it hard not to stare.

  “This is Jin and Bree,” Lanaya says, giving each of them a quick kiss and hug. “My contributors.”

  It turns out Jin and Bree are what normals would call “parents,” but since each proov baby is genetically “improved” before conception they’re called “contributors.” Jin and Bree are obviously pleased to have their daughter home, but they aren’t exactly happy to see us.

  “Child, what have you done?” is the first thing Jin wants to know. “You can’t bring normals into Eden; it’s forbidden.”

  “We’ll discuss that later,” she tells him. “Right now we’ve got a life to conserve.”

  “What?”

  “Out in the takvee. Quickly.”

  And that’s how Bean came into the private palace of a future Master of Eden. We figure out the “Master of Eden” part when Bree mentions that Lanaya has been granted certain special privileges because in a few years she’ll be one of the Masters who make all the decisions for the proov world.

  Being a future Master explains a lot. Like her being allowed to travel into the Urb. Or distributing edibles to the normals. Or bringing us into Eden. Apparently a future Master is given what Jin calls “unlimited educational opportunities,” which means she can do just about anything she wants while she’s learning how to be a leader.

  “That includes, of course, the opportunity to make mistakes,” Jin reminds her sternly, tugging at the point of his perfect little chin beard. “And this, child, is a very big mistake.”

  I’ll give him credit: As soon as he sees how sick Bean is, he shuts up and helps me carry her into one of the sleeping spaces. Then he and Bree fuss over Bean as if she was their own daughter. Jin says people in Eden don’t get sick this way anymore, but they do have special life-sustaining systems on hand for those injured in accidents.

  “We can stabilize her,” he says, much to my relief. “We can do that much.”

  The life-sustaining system turns out to be a sort of portable bed with a curved plexishield. The machine helps Bean breathe and it has these special light tubes that keep her fever under control, too. I ask Jin if they have a device that will make her wake up, and he gives me a sad look and says, “I don’t know. I suppose it’s possible. Anything is possible,” and then he and Bree leave the room to make contact with what they call the Authority to discuss the situation.

  The scary thing is, the life-sustaining device looks like some sort of fancy latchboss coffin. And poor Bean is so thin and pale, and her breathing is so shallow that she looks more dead than asleep.

  I put my mouth on the curve of the glass cover and go, “Bean, can you hear me? This is Spaz, okay? I want you to hang on. Don’t go, Bean, please?” until Ryter gently guides me out of the room.

  I go, “Maybe the Authority has a wake-up device.”

  “Maybe,” he says.

  That’s what I’m hoping. If they can make the sky blue and the world green, they can wake up one small girl, right?

  While we’re waiting to hear what the Authority has to say, Lanaya takes us into what she calls her “thinkspace.”

  “Each room has a cyber-intelligence, to control the environment and so on,” she tells us, “but the thinkspace is special. It’s a teaching cyber. You have to be careful what you ask this cyber, because it always delivers.”

  At first it looks like any of the other rooms, but when Lanaya asks a question, the walls seem to dissolve and the answers appear as images. Like she’ll ask, “What is Earth?” and suddenly we’re floating high above this gauzy blue planet. We’re still in the room with our feet on the floor, of course, but it feels like we’re looking down at a planet two thousand mile
s below.

  The illusion is so powerful and so convincing that Little Face starts to cry, and Bree volunteers to take him to the edible space and give him something she calls “cookies and milk” while Lanaya asks the cyber to give us a tour.

  “Anywhere you’d like to go?” she asks Ryter. “Any special place you’d like to see?”

  “What if the place no longer exists?” Ryter asks, mysteriously.

  “Try it,” says Lanaya with a shrug. “See if the cyber can remember.”

  Ryter takes a deep breath. “In that case, I’ve always wanted to see the Grand Canyon.”

  “Let it be,” Lanaya says.

  Suddenly we’re gliding through the most amazing place I’ve ever seen. Even more amazing and exciting than the famous chase scene in Coley Riggins’s Battle Quest. It’s like something from another world. Mars maybe, but it was right here on Earth. The cyber-voice tells us this is the biggest canyon that ever was, until the Big Shake destroyed it. The canyon looks like a city made for giants, with thousands of pinnacles of stone much, much taller than the highest scraper ever built. The cyber tells us the canyon was created by something called “erosion,” and that explains it, but I don’t think anything can explain it, not really, because the canyon looks and feels too big to hold in your mind all at once. The shadows keep changing so that the place seems somehow alive, and you feel like you could stare at it for a thousand years and still not see everything.

  When the cyber-tour is over, Ryter sits there weeping and gasping for breath. “Pay no heed,” he tells me, wiping his eyes on his sleeve. “I never thought to see the place. My grandfather often spoke of a trip to the Grand Canyon — he’d never seen anything so magnificent — but none of his old photographs survived the Shake. So all I had were his stories and my imagination.”

  “How does it compare?” Lanaya wants to know. “Your imagination to the cyber-image?”

  Ryter smiles. “I wasn’t thinking big enough, that’s for sure. And I had no idea about the colors, or the way the sky above seems to echo what lies below. Imagine something that enormous being destroyed by a mere earthquake! It’s another proof of how powerful the Big Shake really was. That we puny humans survived is almost as incredible as the Shake itself, don’t you think?”