by Molly Flatt
Finn turned, scrubbed at his hair, nodded. ‘By the seventeenth Taran had been trying to Edit for almost a year, secretly taking Dughlas’s shifts under my father’s name.’
He leaned against the shelves and Alex realized that this room must be familiar to him, more familiar than it was to MacBrian. ‘At first he didn’t expect to get anywhere. He was never a great Reader, and he hadn’t worked a full shift for years. But he said that the very first time he Read a root Memory in I-537, he felt the change straight away. It was very small, he said, the faintest tug. He said that a busy Reader in full flow wouldn’t notice a thing, but of course he knew what he was looking for. He said that the first Edit must have taken extraordinary talent, but that now, it seemed, my father had created a pathway anyone could find – if only they knew it was there.
‘Over the months, as he tried to sink deeper into that tug, it became stronger, then stronger again. By the beginning of February he was able to keep Storylines suspended for several seconds while their root Memories struggled to detach.’
He looked at Alex. ‘That’s what he was doing with your Storyline, when my father appeared. He was sure the root Memory was finally about to come free. My father shouted at him to stop, but Taran was Reading too deeply to hear, so my father grabbed him and shoved him the ground. Apparently Taran took your Memory with him. It didn’t just slide out, like the first one had with my father. This one ripped. And as it tore away, the wound let out a burst of Library energy that hit my father right in the chest.’
Meanwhile, Alex thought, back in Haggerston – I woke up, puked and proceeded to become the sort of person I’d always dreamed I might be.
‘He says he’s sorry my father had to die,’ Finn said. ‘Or rather, be sacrificed. But he still thinks he was right, to do what he did. And he’s been trying to do it again, all this time. He’s been taking advantage of the strikes, working in the deserted Stacks. He thinks that if he can only prove it can be done without ripping, he can take it to the Board. He’s sure, if they believed it could be done safely, they would approve Editing as a standard Reading practice. He plans to write manuals, so the other Chapters can learn it. He thinks he’s about to usher in some sort of new age for the Library. He even has a name for it. Assisted intelligence. He seems to think that if only the Board could be made to understand the potential, they’d let him carry on.’
MacBrian pinched her temples. Iain, arms crossed, shifted in his chair.
‘Would they?’ Finn asked.
‘No,’ said MacBrian, without hesitation. ‘No. Not if I have anything to do with it.’ She cleared her throat. ‘It seems that I owe you an apology, Finn. I underestimated your father. I admit, I was envious of him. Everything always came so easily to Egan, ever since we were children, and I let my personal feelings blind my judgement. But I promise you, as long as I am Director, I will do my very best to ensure that his integrity is upheld. All the rules of the Board, all the principles of democracy, demand that I make the truth of this public. That I open it up to debate. But quite honestly, I am going to think long and hard before I do so. And I also promise you this. Taran MacGill will never set foot inside the Library, ever again.’
Alex said, as firmly as she could, ‘And what if he’s the only one who can fix me?’
They all looked at her.
‘I’m just asking,’ she said. ‘Seeing as he’s the one who ripped it out it in the first place.’ She looked at Finn. ‘Do you think he can?’
‘I don’t know,’ Finn said. ‘I don’t think he knows.’
Alex walked back to the table and picked up the Ryman’s pot. Her Memory went batshit. The void ached. ‘So what is it?’ She asked. ‘What’s my Memory about?’
‘That,’ Finn replied, ‘he wouldn’t say. He said he’ll only tell you.’
A guard and two horses were waiting at the bottom of the index steps, being steadily pickled by the rain. Iain cupped his hands beside the nearest horse’s stirrup and nodded at Alex to put her foot in it. Alex walked towards him, then stopped.
‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘For coming to get me. Outside.’
Iain said nothing.
‘I hope it didn’t hurt too much.’
Raindrops bounced off his back.
‘Okay. Well,’ Alex slotted her trainer onto his interlaced fingers, ‘I wanted to say thanks. And sorry I thought you were, you know. A killer. And thanks.’
They cantered down the road along the front of the peninsula, Iain keeping her horse in line with a rope. As Alex jolted past the archives’ seemingly endless wall, she imagined the billions of cards tucked into cubbyholes on the other side. Centuries of human hope and fear and hubris and frailty, laid bare in Ryman’s cheapest paper and ink. She thought of the text that Taran believed all the strongest Storylines in the Library were collectively building towards, and wondered what it might boil down to. All you need is love? Trust no-one? Forty-two?
She started to laugh. By the time they reached a tightly packed jumble of grey buildings perched at the end the cliff, the laugh had a distinctly hysterical note. By the time they stopped outside a dark entryway, it had morphed into something not unlike a sob. Thankfully, there appeared to be something caught in Iain’s horse’s foot. The good ten minutes it took him to dig it out gave Alex just about enough time to downgrade the sob to hiccups.
At some invisible signal, two guards came to take their horses. Alex followed Iain through the entryway and into a tiled lobby that smelled of leather and wax. Two more guards, stationed behind a desk, nodded at Iain. They passed through a door into a bewildering warren of whitewashed corridors, stairs and more corridors. There were none of the spikes or bars or echoing screams Alex had been expecting; overall the guardhouse seemed more utilitarian public-sector office than Castle Black. Eventually they reached a door with a young male guard stationed outside. He saluted Iain, gawped at Alex, then caught himself and stared back at the wall.
Iain unlocked the door, then paused. Alex became suddenly, ludicrously aware of the wet saddle-patch straddling her crotch, the crusty yellow streak of indeterminate equine origin ingrained in her jumper, her rain-frizzed hair, her puffy eyes. No. She wasn’t ready. She wasn’t ready at all.
‘They’re right, you know,’ Iain said. ‘You are extraordinary.’ Then he opened the door, put a hand on her back and prodded her in.
The room was square and windowless. There was a low, unmade bed set along one wall, and a small table and chair pushed against the other. Taran was sitting at the table, hunched over a sprawl of papers. As they walked in, he looked up and smiled his crooked kid-about-to-show-off-his-science-project smile. ‘We’re nearly there, Alex,’ he said.
There was a dressing over his nose. One side of his bottom lip was swollen. His left canine had been snapped in half.
‘Nearly where?’ Alex said.
‘Guidelines,’ Taran said, gesturing at his paperwork with a Ryman’s Assorted Ballpen. ‘Rules. A suggested method for training. Ways to track the effects of Editing on early test subjects, using the GCAS cover story and social media surveillance. Nice neat processes to make Sorcha MacBrian and her small-minded international counterparts feel safe.’
Realizing that her hands were shaking, Alex shoved them into her damp back pockets. ‘Small-minded,’ she said, ‘because they don’t think people should be given a physiological lobotomy – just because they struggle to cope with the basic un-copeableness of life?’
Still writing, Taran gave one of his hiccupy-gasp laughs. ‘Come on, Alex. These have been the best six months of your life. You said so yourself many times.’
‘Maybe they have been. But they haven’t been mine.’
‘You said you felt free.’
‘Maybe I did. At first. But none of it was real, was it?’
‘No more or less real than any Story.’
‘Except it isn’t a Story.’ Alex took a step forward, itching to wrench the pen out of his fingers. ‘You’ve made me into a . . . a bloody compilat
ion. With a gaping hole at its heart.’
Taran put down the pen. ‘Maybe that gaping hole is the door to your cage.’
‘At least the cage was my cage,’ Alex spluttered. ‘I had no choice about the hole.’
‘So you would rather return to being the miserable trapped animal you were before the seventeenth of February?’
‘Yes. No. I don’t know. I don’t know what it really felt like, to be her. But that doesn’t matter. I can’t stay like this, even if I wanted to. It’s hurting me. It’s hurting everyone. Don’t you care that Iskeull is drowning? Don’t you care that millions of people are suffering from un-Read Stories, because of what you’ve done?’
‘Of course.’ Taran nodded sadly. ‘Don’t imagine that these things bring me any pleasure. Of course I wish that breakthroughs could happen without something having to break. But this one failure with your Story has been more valuable to the Library than a billion routine Readings. You know, Alex, you made an inspired comment, back at that first interview. You said that entrepreneurs must be willing to fail.’
‘Oh God.’ Alex gripped her forehead. ‘I meant, like, getting the colour of a Buy Now button wrong. I didn’t mean they should go around killing people.’
‘No. But Egan died, in the end, because he was not brave enough to embrace progress. The Library killed him, Alex. You and I were only its instruments.’
‘Oh, right! So was Dughlas MacFionn’s shotgun an instrument of the Library, too? And was the Library mystically channelling itself through that broken bottle you held at my throat?’
Taran sighed. ‘That was a mess, I admit. I panicked when I heard you had been found. I should never have sent Dughlas to London. It turned out to be much more valuable to meet you in person, even if I had to persuade everyone we were investigating a case of Story-surging, to make sure no-one suspected the truth. I mean – Story-surging! Imagine! Editing is a hundred, a thousand times more exciting. But the farce served its purpose. What you told us about your experience of the past six months helped me understand so much more about what the procedure had done.’
‘Procedure?’
‘Once I had heard your sorry tale, of course, it was clear that there was no way you were going to be able to piece together the truth about your Storyline and identify your missing root Memory from the outside. I was nervous about you visiting your Story, of course, but there was nothing I could do about that. And, as I suspected, the experience was far too overwhelming for you to identify the tear.
But I didn’t count on the depth of Finn’s need to prove himself to his father, even once he was dead. Nor, I admit, did I foresee your willingness to come back to Iskeull. And so I panicked again when I heard you tell Finn what you had found. I needed more time. I needed to show them that Editing didn’t have to be done that way. That it could be done right.’
He shrugged. ‘Perhaps I could have handled things better. I’m only human, after all. Unfortunately. But I’m sure that once the Board understands the potential we have here, I mean really understands it, they’ll forgive a misstep or two.’
‘Look,’ Alex said, feeling her dread start to harden into rage. ‘I didn’t come here to listen to your fucked-up manifesto for some Reader-controlled dystopia. I don’t really give a toss about poor wounded Freya, and poor misunderstood Taran, and why you think it’s okay to rip a stranger’s consciousness apart and kill your best friend. I just want you to tell me two things, Professor MacGill. One: how I can repair my Story.’
‘Ever the woman of action!’ Taran chuckled. ‘Oh, Alex, I really do hope we can continue to work together. Well, to begin with, there’s a decent chance your Story might repair itself without that Memory. The Storyline with the tear might eventually give up the ghost, so to speak, and disperse. The others would probably find a way to adapt, rearrange, maybe swap in new root Memories. Stories can be incredibly adaptable, when they want to be. In that scenario, you’d continue as you are now, liberated from your past. But the rot would stop, and your Story would eventually unstick. The other Stories would no longer sense that it was dangerous to surface in that Stack, and they would flood back into the wall to be Read. And that should convince even Sorcha MacBrian that we have an unmissable opportunity here.’
‘And what if none of that happened? What if it never recovered and just kept rotting, and both of us withered and died?’
Taran tutted. ‘Come on, Alex! Dear me! Where’s your famous positive attitude?’
‘So there’s nothing I can do? Except wait and see?’
‘Far from it.’ He gestured to his papers. ‘I’ve worked through all the possible scenarios, and frankly it would be fascinating to test any one of them out. Of course I suspect that, as ever, the simplest solution is the most likely to succeed.’
‘And what would that involve?’
‘Physically transferring the separated Memory back into your Story.’
‘Okay. And how would that work, if none of the Readers can open it?’
‘You’d have to take it down there yourself. Through the tunnel in the centre of the Stacks.’
No. Please, no. Not there. Not again.
Alex took a deep breath.
You’re extraordinary, said Iain. You’re strong, said Finn.
‘How sure are you that would work?’
‘Fifty–fifty, I’d say. It’s perfectly possible your Story will simply reject the Memory. Who knows what being outside the Library has done to it? On the other hand, of course, it might simply reintegrate, just like the first time Egan Edited.’
‘And if that happened, I’d be okay? Healthy? Back to how I was before you got your hands on my Storyline?’
‘Maybe. Maybe not. Even if the root Memory did reintegrate, I suspect that your Story would then have to suppress all the Memories you’ve created since that night. Thanks to the tear, they’re probably riddled with scar tissue, imperfectly formed. To get your Storylines back to normal, those recent Memories would have to be left out.’ Taran had picked up his pen and was sketching deformed-looking squiggly lumps.
‘So – what? I’d forget everything that’s happened, since the seventeenth?’
‘Mmm.’ He started to add random splatters all over the page. ‘Then again, your Story might have some kind of complex immune reaction, and die.’
Alex looked from his face to the sketch, all out of words.
‘Now,’ Taran continued, adding a final splatter, before replacing his pen with a satisfied air. ‘I think I can guess the second thing you want to know. You want to know what that cage door looks like, before you try to slam it shut, don’t you, Alex? You want to know the contents of that poor little root Memory?’
Alex crossed her arms. ‘Are you going to tell me?’
‘If you’re really sure that’s what you want. I’ll give you a clue. It dates from the sixteenth of July 1995.’
Alex closed her eyes. I want to tell someone. I want to tell someone so much it hurts.
‘What was it?’ she asked hollowly. ‘What was so life-changing about that bug I caught?’
‘That’s just it,’ Taran said. ‘There was no bug. You were only sick because of what you saw. You were late for a camping trip, weren’t you, Alex? You should have left half an hour before. But you took longer than expected to pack your bags, and then you ran up to your father’s study to say a final goodbye. That’s why, when you opened the door, you saw an empty bottle of vodka roll out. That’s why, when you walked in, you were just in time to find your father standing on a chair, with one end of a tie secured to the beams and the other knotted around his neck.’
26
Egan MacCalum’s Honda roared, jerked, roared, lurched, then settled into a juddering thrum. Alex laced her fingers, wrapped in Egan’s wife’s gloves, against Egan’s son’s hard stomach. She leaned the unscratched side of her face against his back and felt her heart bump faster than the motorcycle against his spine. Then, as they sped through the rain, she dropped what Taran had told her into
the iridescent dark behind her eyes and watched her fuzzy past slowly sharpen into vivid polychrome.
Sunday, 16 July 1995. The day she should have been on her way to a Lake District campsite, 300 miles away from Fring. The day she had vomited, to her mother’s consternation and concern, all over the bathroom. The day she had spent curled in bed, angsting into her diary. The day, it now seemed, that her childhood had died – a milestone that had nothing at all to do with the prospect of a fancy secondary school.
Then, the age of the miserable shadow. The abandoned friendships, the academic backsliding, the withdrawal, the rows. Without full access to her Memories, Alex couldn’t begin to imagine the unspeakable, unspoken emotions she had been feeling. The ones that her mother and Diya, Dom and her teachers had so badly mistaken for fish-out-of-water nerves and teenage hormones.
So why hadn’t she spoken up? Why hadn’t she run straight out of her father’s study that morning and into her mother’s arms?
Had she wanted to pretend it never happened? Had she been trying to limit the damage, to quarantine that poisonous Memory in some far corner of her Story? Vain hope. From the evidence of her uniformly nonsensical Storylines, that Memory had become part of every single adult belief she’d created about herself. Without it, none of them – life-affirming or self-destructive – worked.
But there was another possibility, one that sprung back up higher every time she tried to push it down. Her father could have asked her not to tell. Explained that he’d been playing a game, acting out a plot point; insisted that she’d misunderstood what she’d seen. Begged for it to be their special secret. Entreated her to think of Mum – how she wouldn’t get the joke, because she never did. Emphasized how much it would hurt her, if she got the wrong end of the stick. Or the tie.
Your father might not buy me flowers, her mother had said in that seemingly random Memory in her bad Storyline. In fact he often neglects to say a single word from breakfast until dinnertime. But I know he would never purposefully do anything to hurt me, and that’s everything, Alex. Everything.