The Multitude made a brief gesture with several hands, and a duo collected the residents and brought them to the heir. The heir, surprised, bowed. “Thank you.”
“We do not have time to study your pets, interesting though the little one might be. The page is full of the unintended consequences of our art, and we have more pressing things to do than dissect pets. We must find a way to defeat the monster that has invaded our realm.”
“There was something from the page of my youth that may be helpful,” the heir said. “There were creatures—large lizards that flew and breathed fire. I have never seen them, but perhaps your artists could draw something of that description.”
The heir was impressed with the quality of the artists’ work. Duos and trios worked tirelessly on the blank paper at the edge of the page, creating enormous lizards with leathery wings and sharp claws. On command, they could send forth jets of fire. They hunted down the giant leech that had come onto the fourth page through the heir’s door, and burned it to ashes. The remains of the monster looked like tiny flakes of the paper from which it was drawn. Paper to paper, white to white.
The Multitude was grateful. “For a singleton, you have an uncommon creativity.”
It was high praise, but the heir wanted more than words. “Let me take the fire lizards to the third page. There are more monsters there, and I worry that they will escape to the page on the other side, and lay waste to the earlier pages of the sketchbook.”
“To the later pages of the sketchbook,” the Multitude corrected, but gently. “If we give you these fire lizards it would leave our page unprotected,” the Multitude said. “What do we care what happens to pages besides our own?”
“With your fire lizards, I can get rid of all the monsters, ensuring the safety of your realm in the future.”
“You are a singleton, we are the Multitude. For what you have done for us, you may have one fire lizard, and we will keep the rest.”
The heir bowed. It was not ideal, but it would have to do. They climbed upon the back of their fire lizard, and beckoned for the residents to climb aboard after them.
The Third Page of the Sketchbook
Blank white paper. No monsters here. Hurry to the bound edge of the page, before it is too late. Find the bridge. Run.
The Second Page of the Sketchbook
The page I returned to was nothing like the one I remembered. The orderly rows of buildings were gone, and the ground was covered in sparkling mirror shards. Black birds flew across the sky in swarms, sometimes descending on piles of debris to try and erase the mess, but it was beyond them. I told myself that the monsters of the third page might have found their way here even without my bridge, but it didn’t ease my guilt.
In among the broken bits of art were chunks of watercolor paint, edges smoothed by rain and colors smeared together. Here and there were splinters of wood, bits of pink eraser, and even a heartblade, slightly rusted from exposure to the elements. One of the residents picked up a chunk of watercolor paint and a section of pencil. It sharpened the pencil on the rusty heartblade, letting the shavings fall among the debris.
Was this what death would bring for me, someday? I shaved a curl of wood from my shortest finger, an offering to the dead artists. The resident tucked the paint and pencil into its clothing, which struck me as odd. No worse than leaving the artist’s body to deteriorate in the rain, I suppose. I wondered whether the pieces scattered here were from the first couple or the artists they had made. Or perhaps all of them, their pieces mixed together, like the vast multitude the fourth page artists believed was the endpoint for us all.
There were no monsters here, but the destruction was surely the aftermath of their passing. I commanded the fire lizard to kneel and climbed onto its back. The residents climbed up after me, their expressions grim. “Away from the bridge, it may be better,” I told them.
Further down the page, birds were trying to paint the buildings back into existence. Misshapen buildings rose from the rubble, tipsy spindly shacks with oddly-colored walls and lopsided roofs. The birds were meant for tedious copying and simple patchwork. Their attempts at original art were unstable. From the fire lizard’s back, I reached over and gently touched one of the walls. It quivered at my touch, trembling as though afraid it would fall, a valid fear if so light a touch could make the building shake. The birds, displeased at my interference, began to cluster at my feet, their tail feathers fanned in a threat of erasure.
We rode onward, leaving the bird-made city behind us. We passed the pair of rifts, and I saw that tape no longer covered the torn area. The art-sucking leeches had eaten the tape, and the wildflowers, and the maze of rose bushes. They had even consumed the creek that once ran through the garden district.
Near the unbound edge of the page, we came to an area that was less thoroughly destroyed. Great walls of mirror-glass rose up from the ground, not entire buildings, but a few of the mirrors were big enough to use for copywork. I slid down from the fire lizard’s back. I unrolled the paper I carried on my back, but it was shorter than a fire lizard, too small for what I wanted. So I drew myself a bigger roll of paper, shading and blurring the far edge in the illusion of distance, a hint of scale. The paint dried, and the new roll of paper was the proper size.
I unrolled a section as tall as a fire lizard and several times as long. This was third iteration paper—paper drawn onto paper that had been drawn on the original page. It was thinner and smoother and tore easily at the edges, but there was too much debris here to uncover the blank page, so we had no other options. I whistled to the birds, hoping that the flock the pencil woman had assigned to me would respond.
Only one bird answered my summons. It landed at my feet and bowed its head. Then it fixed its beady eyes on the fire lizard, an almost hungry expression on its face. It recognized the creature as alien, drawn in a style that was not consistent with this page.
“We need more birds,” I told it. “We need copies of the fire lizard.”
The bird whistled, a call that seemed indistinguishable from mine. But the flocks in the sky could clearly tell the difference. Birds that had ignored my summons now dove down from the sky and landed on every available surface.
“We haven’t seen a single monster,” one of the residents said. “If the monsters have moved on, why do we need more fire lizards?”
“Those leeches suck up the art that others have created. They left because there is nothing here for them to feed on. They need fresh art. We came from the third page, and they were not there. So they must have gone on to my parents’ realm. If we rebuild this world, the new art would just draw the leeches back here, and they would destroy the page again. Instead, we have to find a way to destroy them.”
I led the fire lizard up next to a large mirror and set the birds to painting—tracing the reflection on the mirror as they were trained to do. I tore a sheet of paper from the roll and pressed it over the wet-paint reflection, but the sheet was too small, which left the newly painted copy with a somewhat shortened tail. Birds flew to the paper and sketched the outlines of the painting, not altering the shape in any way, even the stunted tail. The deformity did not seem to hamper the copied fire lizard, for as the paint dried the beast rose from the whiteness and let out a fiery belch. Our one fire lizard had become two, in far less time than it took for the artists on the fourth page to draw one from scratch.
It occurred to me that while the original was truly a fire lizard, an alien creature drawn by the artists of another page, the copy was something rather different. It was like an echo of a fire lizard, or the memory of a memory, like a creature of legend or myth. I remembered the name my father had given the creatures, or rather the name that he would give them, when we somehow got back to the first page—dragons.
We stood our dragon next to a mirror, and now two teams of birds could work in parallel, each flock painting a new dragon. Two dragons became four, and four became eight. Eight became sixteen, and then our progress slowed. For
one thing, we didn’t have enough mirrors for another doubling. For another, even with the residents helping, it was difficult to keep up with the birds. Each time they finished a painting, someone—either myself or a resident—had to press a paper to the mirror to capture the art into reality.
For hours, we made dragons in sets of eight. They were not perfect copies. The first couple would have cringed to see them, missing bits of tail, or with oddly textured scales because the paper was of such low quality. They were smudged and blurred in places, sometimes even missing a foot or the tip of a wing. But they were every bit as fierce as the fire-breathing lizards from the planet on the fourth page, and I would somehow take them back to the beginning of all things, and save my parents’ realm from the art-sucking leeches of my rage.
Packed so close together, and with nothing else to do, several of the dragons launched into the air. One let out a jet of flame, and the others folded their wings and dove back to the page, narrowly avoiding the fire. The birds, unnerved by the fire, scattered. I did not call them back. We had seventy-two dragons. Surely that would be enough to defend my parents’ realm.
“So now you draw a door to the first page?” one of the residents asked.
“No. If we use a door we will arrive too late. The leeches have already gone through the cut-out door in my old apartment, or perhaps through the torn-page rifts. Somehow we must go back to the start of the first page, and arrive before the leeches. I know we can do it because the dragons came to the first realm before I left.”
A resident tore a scrap of paper from the roll we’d used to make the dragons. “A page is like a piece of paper?”
“Yes,” I said, “but the paper is better quality than this.”
The resident turned the paper over in its hands. The paper had come off of the roll, so instead of being flat it had a bit of curl to it. The resident rolled the paper so the edges met. “Perhaps like this?”
I shook my head, but it reminded me of the thin strip of paper my father had used to make the Möbius loop. A loop with a half twist would get us back to the beginning, not the start of the second page, but the start of the first. I took the rectangle of paper from the resident and tried to make the loop with a half twist that I remembered from the page of my youth. The paper was too wide, and not long enough, and I couldn’t make the loop without crumpling the paper.
Or tearing it.
I carefully tore the paper, once on each side, a matching pair of rifts like the ones that marred the first and second pages of the sketchbook. It decreased the width of the paper enough to form the Möbius loop. I showed the loop to the residents. “I think we can do this with the page, and go back to the very start of the sketchbook.” I studied the residents who had followed me dutifully across the pages. “You can stay here, if you’d rather.”
The residents looked at one another. The tiny resident cooed. “We will stay. Someone has to rebuild this world.” The resident took out a broken piece of pencil and a chunk of paint, and tore a sheet from the roll of paper I had drawn.
For a moment I was appalled that she would presume to make art from the broken pieces of a dead artist. But no, this was fitting. The true end of an artist came when all the wood was sharpened away and their graphite and paint was spread across the page.
I looked at my own hands, my watercolor-pencil fingers nearly gone. The pencil woman of this page had drawn her hands clean away, cut off her eraser-wrists and sharpened the pencils of her arms to continue her art. Soon, it would come time for me to do the same. I was not as young as I once was. I had left my mark upon the pages, for good or for ill.
“Stay well away from the rifts,” I warned the residents. “I don’t know exactly what will happen when I try to twist the page and loop it back around.”
I took my army of dragons to the unbound edge of the page and climbed aboard the back of the original fire lizard. I commanded them to grab the edge of the page in their mouths. They pulled. The page began to warp, curving inward so the tips of the few remaining trees leaned in toward each other, rather than reaching straight up into the sky. It was just as well, perhaps, that the leeches had destroyed the mirrorglass city, because it seemed unlikely that such fragile structures would have survived even the gentle curving of the page, much less the twist that was still to come.
The underside of the page was white. The dragons continued to pull, and when they neared the bound edge of the page they flew around each other and upside down to create the half twist that folded space and time into a loop. A Möbius sketchbook page, with the world of the second page below us, and the pure white paper of the untouched first page stretching up above us and disappearing into the sky.
The first page was new and fresh and blank. I knew that the dragons arrived after my parents, so I waited, staring at the white page and waiting for them to appear. The dragons began to tremble from the strain of holding the page. Where were the watercolor king and the pencil queen? This was the beginning, why did the world not start?
I thought back to the Möbius strip I had played with on the first page. In the beginning, I myself had drawn the tiny artist onto the paper, but the second time around, it had been the tiny artist that had restarted the cycle. There were no other artists here but me.
I reached up to the paper and began to sketch. I was tempted to draw some other kind of artist—someone like me, or the half-and-half artists from the second page, or the Multitude from the fourth. What would happen to the cycle if I changed it, redrew the world to suit my own desires? I wished that there was time to run a test, but the dragons were nearing the end of their endurance. If I hadn’t been angry at my parents, I wouldn’t have created the third page, but I also wouldn’t have created the fourth. There was beauty all throughout the sketchbook, beauty that would never exist if I did not begin at the proper beginning.
I sketched my parents as I remembered them, and painted them true even knowing what would come of it. These sketchbook pages weren’t perfect, but they were salvageable, and I would save them. King and queen and all.
I watched my parents draw the beginnings of their realm, and when they vanished beyond the paper that I could see from where I stood, I stepped from the second page back to the first, to the beginning of the sketchbook, and called my dragons to join me.
The First Page of the Sketchbook
The pencil queen surveyed her army, several dozen soldiers, wearing suits and helms of silvery metal and armed with swords. The soldiers had made their camp between the giant boulders that stopped the great rifts from tearing the page in two.
The army was woefully inadequate. The soldiers were smaller than the dragons, and they only outnumbered their enemy two to one. Even with the heir to help her, it would take quite some time to draw enough soldiers to defeat the dragons, and they’d have to wait for the king to paint them.
She saw the king approaching. “You’re supposed to stay at the castle and paint soldiers after the heir sketches them.”
“The heir has vanished,” the king replied. “Drew a door onto the blank-page wall and cut through to the second page.”
“My princess,” the queen said sadly. “If these dragons hadn’t invaded our realm, I could have stayed with her, and she would not have left us. We must redouble our efforts, and banish these dragons. Then we can search for our heir and bring her home.”
The queen stood before one of her many easels and began to sketch, using the last nubs of her fingers. The time had come for her to slice off the erasers of her wrist joints and draw with the pencils of her forearms.
“Perhaps we should try to find the heir first. What if he’s in trouble?” the king asked. He saw the queen bring her wrist up to her heartblade, and he looked down, unable to watch her cut so much of herself away. He heard the soft thud of her eraser wrist as it fell to the ground.
“The realm must come first. We can draw another heir when the war is done, if we survive the battle. A true princess, not some bizarre creation of wate
rcolor pencils.”
The king shook his head. Even now, having seen what the heir could do, the queen could not appreciate the child they had created. Was it his fault, for making their child something other than what she intended? The heir had diverged from their vision, grown in ways they had not expected, and in the end, abandoned them. But was that not the way of art, to begin to change from the very moment it left the artist’s hands?
The queen’s hands were gone, her pencil fingers all used up and the erasers of her wrists now sat useless on the ground. The king’s arms were smaller too, but being paint his limbs simply grew thinner with time, without the dramatic change of chopping off portions of his limbs at the joint. He bent down and picked up the queen’s erasers. They were too large to fit into the box of her pencilself shavings, and she did not seem to want them anyway. She had already set to the task of sharpening the pencils of her forearms, and these shavings she carefully collected into the box he’d made real for her, so many paintings ago, when the page was blank and white.
He put the erasers into his heart jar, where they bobbed and floated in the water. A shadow passed over them. He peered at the sky, expecting a dark cloud. What he saw was a dragon. The soldiers started shouting and pointing at the sky. The dragons had left the border of the realm, and they were flying in circles above the soldiers.
The heir scanned the realm from the back of a flying dragon. The leeches would arrive soon, and the best hope for the realm was for the dragons to incinerate the art-suckers before they could do too much damage. A single leech on the fourth page had destroyed a building, and a horde of leeches had destroyed the entire second page. The heir didn’t know whether the leeches would come through the old door or through the torn rifts, but the rifts were by far the more dangerous entry point because they were large enough for all of the leeches to pass through at the same time.
Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World and Other Stories Page 17