The Library at Mount Char (42 page)

“The Library?”

“Yeah. Apparently the pyramid thingy over Garrison Oaks is heavy. They say it's got the same mass as the moon, or something? It's shifting tectonic plates around?” He took a sip of her drink before he handed it to her. “You hadn't heard any of this?”

She shook her head.

“Yeah,” Steve said. “I figured. Keeping an eye on your Father's enemies, right? And catching up on all these other—what did you call them?”

“Catalogs,” she said. “I've been consolidating the catalogs. Strategizing. And laying the groundwork for some contingencies. Just in case.”

“Sure,” Steve said. “Sure. You're careful. You've got a lot on your mind. That's the world you live in, the world you know.”

“Yeah.” She ran her fingers through her hair, stressed. “Look, Steve, about the earthquakes and the famine and all that—I'll figure something out. But there's more going on here than you know. Q-33 North is in motion, and I can't find him. If Liesel or maybe Barry O'Shea decided to make a move against me now, it would be bad for—”

“Bad for everyone. All of us. Regular people. I get that too. And these are legitimately large problems. I do not doubt you for even a single second.” He drummed his fingers against the marble tabletop. “But it leaves me with a problem of my own.”

“What's that?”

“I talked this over with Erwin. And the rest of them too, the president and the Army guys, but Erwin was the only one who seemed to really get it.”

“Get what?”

“How I can't get through to you.” He held his hands out to her gently, palms up. “I've said it every way I know how, and it's like you don't even
hear me. I was talking to Erwin about it and he said it's because we don't have a common vocabulary.”

Carolyn's eyes narrowed. “My English is pretty good.”

“That's what I said too, but that's not what he meant. He told me about how when he got back from the war, everyone kept telling him to let it go, to find something that made him happy and do that. He said he heard the words, said they even made sense, but he just couldn't relate to them. Then he said there was this kid, this kid he helped somehow. And that was the thing that made him understand it was possible to move on. And after that the words made sense.”

“Dashaen,” she said. “I remember him.”

“So then I started thinking about how you must have had to shut down, inside. You had to be cold, didn't you? To get through things like a little kid getting her head split open with an ax, and people being roasted alive.”

Carolyn didn't answer.

“Cold. Yeah.” Steve was peering at her again. “But you're not frozen through. Not quite. There's that one little thing left, isn't there? The heart coal. That's it, isn't it? The very last thing.”

After a long moment she surrendered the barest possible sliver of a nod.

“I thought so. Yeah. That's going to be the only way anyone can reach you, isn't it? The only possible way for you to…wake up. To not be cold anymore.”

She didn't answer.

Steve nodded to himself, then smiled.

Something about that smile was different.
What's changed?

“You never came right out and said, but I think I've guessed what it is. The heart coal, I mean.” Still smiling, he stood and walked over to the stock pot.

It took her a moment, but then she got it.
He's at peace
, she realized.
That's what's different about him. It's the first time I've ever seen him look really happy
.

Standing at the counter, still smiling, he picked up the orange juice. “Another drink?”

“No.” Her voice was hoarse. “What are you doing?”

“I'm so glad you asked. Thank you for cooperating with my segue. Sure you don't want another drink?”

She shook her head.

“Well, that's OK too.” He picked up the stock pot filled with Everclear and poured it over his head.

The room filled with the sharp chemical scent of 90 percent pure ethanol.
It would
, Carolyn suddenly understood,
be highly flammable
.

Steve spoke to Naga. “Now, sweetie.”

Carolyn, very quick, moved to stop him. Naga, quicker still, moved to block her way.

Steve smiled at her, calm and friendly. “Before I move closer towards my vision of the Buddha, I would respectfully plead that you adopt a stance of compassion towards the small things of this world.”

He closed his eyes. Somehow he was holding Margaret's lighter.

Clink. Scratch. Click
.

Then, suddenly, all of the great and eternal now was blue flame. Naga held the space between Carolyn and Steve, an impassable frenzy of claw and fang. Carolyn could only watch, helpless, as the flame rendered Steve into blazing tallow, rendered him into black smoke.
Normal men
, she understood for the first time,
burn surprisingly fast
. In less than a minute, he was dead.
Therein, perhaps, we find God's mercy
. Beyond that, the outer darkness.

Alone now, Carolyn felt the regard of Isha and Asha settle cold upon her.

Someone was screaming.

TITAN

C
arolyn resurrected Steve, of course. It took a couple of weeks. She was getting the hang of medicine, but burns were tricky. He asked her for two more bottles of Everclear. She said she couldn't find any. A week later she came down and found him dead in the bathtub, razor at his side. She had to tranquilize Naga to get at the body. That one only took a day or so to fix, but she got the blood type wrong—a rookie mistake, but she was upset—and he died of heart failure almost as soon as he came back. She replaced the razors with an electric and brought him back a fourth time, but the next night at dinner he recited his little speech—“adopt a stance of compassion”? what the hell did that even
mean
?—before downing a glass of Liquid-Plumr with his roast.

She had left him dead, after that. She couldn't bear it. Not anymore.

That had been over a month ago. Now she was fully immersed in her studies. One day while she was researching the theoretical framework of reality viruses she happened upon something mis-shelved. There, among the pale violet mathematics, a brown folder. It turned out to be the crafting of the
alshaq shabboleth
.

It changed everything.

In and of itself the
alshaq shabboleth
was of little consequence. It was conceptually related to the technique she had found on the bookmark, the one that enabled her to move through the Library invisibly. Its only
advantage over the
alshaq urkun
was that it could be invoked very quickly, with a single word. She had seen it used—once.

“Adoption Day.” She spoke softly, but the vast spaces of the Library seemed to seize on her words, amplify them. She looked down at the parchment in her hand.

Through my studyes of the one True Speeche which Commandeth Alle, I have wrought the Crafte of alshaq shabboleth, which maketh the slow things swifte
.

She unrolled the scroll another few inches. It was ancient, written before Father came into the height of his power. It concerned itself with minor procedures of only occasional use. She might very well have gone years—millennia—without stumbling across it. Chance? Possibly, but in matters where Father was involved she was very suspicious of chance.

He meant for me to find this
.

To the side was a hand-inked illustration of a man outrunning a lightning strike, and another, less faded, of the same man on fire and screaming. Her expression darkened.
“Alshaq shabboleth,”
she said, testing the sounds.

But approach the alshaq with trembling! It is a dangerous Crafte at the best of times, and though it may be a great friend in time of need, it can also be a grievous Enemy! Only the wise should—

Next to the pale, ancient ink, the following was scrawled in ballpoint pen:

It was a catalog designation—Onyx floor, radial seven, branch five, case twelve, shelf three, third from the left. Chapter seven. Blood roared in her ears. Very softly, she whispered, “Father?”

No answer.

Then, with something like a roar, Carolyn pitched the brown folio down the stacks. A dead one holding a feather duster shuffled away in distant, dreamlike terror.

Adoption Day
. That was what they'd called it—the day their parents died, the day they stopped being Americans and became librarians, part of Father's world. Before that, Garrison Oaks had been just another subdivision. Before that, as far as anyone knew, Father was just Adam Black, some old guy who lived down the street.

There had been an attack. It was not an especially clever attack, but it was very strong, and executed quickly. It caught him off guard, or at least he let it seem so. She thought it might even have stood a chance of killing him. Not a large chance, perhaps, but a chance. It was this suspicion and what it implied that ultimately gave her the courage to act. Father was not quite omniscient. Sometimes he could be surprised. If he could be surprised, he might possibly be vulnerable.

All that came after sprang from that.

Numb, feeling not quite all there, Carolyn made her way down the main corridor of the jade floor and onto the onyx face of the pyramid. There, moving alone through vast, empty spaces she walked over to the book he specified. It was in the apothecary section, part of Jennifer's catalog. The volume was titled
An Assortment of Useful Elixirs
. Chapter 7 was “The Font of Perfect Memory.”

INSTRUCTIONS

Having prepared the liquid as indicated, retreat to a place of solitude. There begin your contemplations. You shall find that the formulation releases in you every smallest memory; it will be as if you are there again in the flesh, experiencing it with fresh eyes.

She took down the book. Then, browsing the nearby shelves, she added a couple of others—one on chemistry, another on lab techniques. She took the stairs down into the apothecary and set about assembling ingredients.

C
arolyn was not much of a chemist. It took three frustrating days before she learned enough of the basics to even understand what the formula was telling her to do. It was another week, long and almost sleepless, before she completed a batch that tested to the purity she required and didn't kill any mice.

When she was reasonably confident she had it right, she went back to her chambers, ate a huge meal, and slept for twelve solid hours. The next morning—or it might have been evening, it was impossible to tell and, really, who cared?—she went back to her desk in the great hall and sat there for a moment, looking at the small glass vial that contained the fruit of her labors. Gently, careful not to spill, she wiggled the cork out and set it down on her desk blotter. She cut a lemon into quarters and set them next to the cork.

The vial contained about two tablespoons of brown, bitter liquid that smelled like tears. Grimacing, she tossed it back like a shot of liquor, then bit down on one of the lemon quarters to get the taste out of her mouth.

There begin your contemplations
.

“Well,” she said. “All right.”

Adoption Day, she remembered, had been a holiday of some sort. It was one of the turning points of her life, probably
the
turning point, but she hadn't thought much about it in years.
It was at the end of the summer, still hot out during the day, but if you were outdoors at night you could sometimes feel the first breath of winter, blowing down from the north
. School had just started up a week earlier, and she remembered thinking that was silly. Why start school and then give you a vacation just a week later? It was a silly time to have…

“Labor Day,” she said out loud.
Perfect memory indeed
. An hour ago she couldn't have conjured that name to save her life.

Labor Day, 1977. She would have been about eight years old. She woke up in the bedroom at her parents' house. There was a stuffed animal in bed with her, a green puppet shaped like a frog.
Kermit
, she thought.
His name is Kermit the Frog
. Next to Kermit sat Miss Piggy. She had
slept in later than usual because she'd stayed up late the night before and watched
The Waltons
on TV.

In her memory, Carolyn went downstairs. Her mother, a pretty blond woman about the same age that Carolyn was now, was doing something in the kitchen. Mom went to the shelf and took down a box of Frosted Flakes—Carolyn was too short to reach it herself—then turned back to her cooking.

Carolyn no longer had any clear memory of her mother's face. She remembered her only as a series of impressions—laughter, cashmere, hair spray.

Until now.
Hi, Mom
, she thought.
Pleased to meet you
. Alone in the Library, she gave a small smile.

Still, though, she was relieved that the woman's face remained unfamiliar to her. She wasn't sure what she would have done if Mom turned out to be one of the dead ones. She was glad she didn't have to find out. She made an effort to commit her face to memory.
I'm sorry, Mom
, she thought.
This time I won't forget you
.

Back in 1977, when little Carolyn was done with her cereal she and her mother worked at making a big batch of potato salad for the picnic later—boiling the potatoes, chopping things, mixing it all together in a bowl. Just as they were finishing up, her
actual
father came home from the hardware store. He was a handsome man, a few years older than her mother. His hair was graying at the temples. She addressed him not as “Father” but instead as “Dad,” which sounded delightfully informal to Carolyn's adult ear. Little Carolyn kissed his cheek. The stubble was rough against her lips. He hadn't showered. He smelled of sweat and, faintly, yesterday's Old Spice.

When the potato salad was ready, Carolyn covered the bowl with Saran Wrap and put it in the “fridge.” She helped her mother clean up, then went back to her room to kill a couple of hours. The picnic wouldn't start until noon. Now, a quarter century later, she ached to stay in that kitchen, to be with them again for one last time, but the memory was immutable. Carolyn was a bookish child, even before Father had come into her life. She preferred to spend time in her room reading.

Just before noon, the three of them put on suntan lotion and walked across the street toward the little park behind the houses. “Dad” held out his hand and she took it, weaving her small fingers around his large ones. His palms were rough, she remembered.
He must have worked with his hands. But doing what?
But she hadn't thought about it that day. Now it was gone, gone with his name, the stories he told, any other time they might have spent together.

He smiled down at her distractedly. Remembering this, Carolyn thought,
He has such a kind face
. With that her tears slipped free and rolled unnoticed down her cheeks.

The shortest route to the park took them through the yard of the man they knew as Adam Black. He was on his back deck, wearing shorts, an apron, and a chef's hat. Standing on the concrete slab that served as his back patio was his eccentric barbecue grill, a huge bronze cast in the shape of a bull. Carolyn remembered how this thing had been an object of fascination for her as a small child. One stormy afternoon she had snuck into his yard and lay her tiny hand against its smooth leg, seen her reflection in its shiny belly. Now, smoke drifted from the bull's nostrils.

“Hi, Adam,” Dad called out. “Mind if we cut through your yard?”

“Adam” raised a hand in greeting. “Hi yourself!” He spoke in English, suppressing his usual trace of Pelapi accent. “Yeah, come on through.”

They stopped on the way to chat for a minute.
This is “being neighborly”
Carolyn thought. Two decades ago Father looked exactly as she last saw him.

“Man, that smells
great
,” her dad said. “What you got in there?”

“A little of everything—mostly pork shoulder and lamb at the moment. They should be done in an hour or so. I've been smoking them all night. When the pork is ready I'll probably do a batch of burgers.”

“One day would you teach me the recipe? I don't mind telling you, that stuff you made last year was about the best barbecue I've had.”

“Sure. Why not? I've been in a teaching mood lately.” He poked the meat with a carved wooden fork. “The secret is to start with a hot fire, as hot as you can make. Such a fire will burn away impurities, you see. Plus, there's a ceremonial aspect to it. Fire gives a person something to focus
on.” He rapped the bull with his knuckles, grinning. “So, yeah. Fire. That's the first step.”

“Yeah? That's it?”

“Well, there are some spices for the meat as well—old Persian recipe.” This time he let a little Pelapi accent slip in—“reshipeeeeee.”