Dystopia

governments were deciding if they would fight the terrorists, and reoccupy the Amundsen-Scott station again; that had been abandoned by our government years before. While the South Pole wasn’t anyone’s territory, it hadn’t stopped people like the free colonists from moving there and trying to start new lives for themselves.

  “You should have seen all the books that were there. Real ones,” she said to me. I must have had an early connect-time before they could censor it because I didn’t see those books in the other rebroadcasts.”

  I hadn’t believed her at first, but she kept insisting. “Chance, the colonists must have had thousands of books there. I’ve never seen so many.”

  The train crossed over to the Gold Shuttle Line and when it did it bumped to a stop while it waited for the other cars to attach themselves. When we crossed the flat frontier, the windows automatically turned black and they would remain so until we reached the hub’s central station. While we rode the rest of the way, the artificial overhead light made us both look ill.

  A heretic mother and daughter moved from the car they had been in and into ours; they must have been going to the same destination as us. The girl had a copy of this year’s Last Book. I thought she was too young to read it, but I knew that some parents like to spoil their children. The mother was smartly dressed in a jacket that could’ve been worn on an old English Estate, and she had dressed the girl as a Hollywood child-star, from the far-flung 1980’s. Neither the mother nor the daughter were moderately dressed, and sometime I forgot there are women who didn’t cover their heads with Hijabs.

  There she was with her own copy of the book, and when she sat down she ignored the rest of us, and started to read hers in a world all to herself. I had my book in my pack, and I had wrapped it in a special cloth that I knew would keep it safe and undisturbed. When Janet saw the girl with the book, she waited a short time until the girl looked her way, and she said to her with a smile, “Its good…isn’t it?”

  The girl, who must’ve been nine or ten, said back to my wife with a way that only a young girl could say, “It’s really wonderful.”

  Janet asked, “Did you read the one last year’s book?”

  “No,” said the girl, and I could see that her mother was proud of her daughter while the girl continued to talk to my wife. “This is my first real book…And I’m going to read it over and over again until it has to go back to the librarian.”

  I was surprised when Janet and the girl both started to quote their same favorite passage from this year’s Last Book at the same time.

  ‘We were appraised at a very small amount. Haven’t you heard my name throughout the world?’ Then for the final part they both started to shout it together. ‘I’m nobody, I’m nobody, and I’m nobody.’

  When they finished both of them started to laugh, and I don’t think I ever had seen my wife look so young before. Janet looked up at me and smiled, and I knew she would be happy for the rest of the day.

  The bomb exploded. The train was knocked off of the electrified tracks. The car we are in, flies up and goes sideways. We’re knocked to the right. The car lands on the side. I stay awake. There’s blood. There’s broken glass. I saw Janet. She’s near. I saw her hair. I want to cover it up. I want to use my hand and pull her Hijab down. My wife is a proper woman, and I don’t want others to think badly about her. My arm didn’t work. The mother and the daughter are dead. Their eyes show they’re dead. Their eyes stare out, but they no longer see. The blood flows over my eyes, and I no longer see anything. I no longer remember.

   

  Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form. -Rumi

  Nestor had disappeared. I hadn’t ridden the river with him for weeks. His link had been disengaged, and I wasn’t able to contact him. I knew I had to ride the data by myself in a solo-kayak if I were to find him.

  Angels danced angrily in front of my eyes. I wanted to enter the stream, and I knew I should wait for it to clear. Nestor wasn’t with me. I’d been left on my own. I had left many messages for him, but he wasn’t plugged in. There were many currents and channels that I couldn’t see because the angels had left the entire river turning and swirling.

  I hadn’t been on the river without Nestor Khan for a long time. I could see that the data-angels were still calling for me to follow. I knew better, and I knew that the angels like to call a solitary guide out on their own to his doom. I remembered what Nestor said to me, ‘Allah is beauty; he waits for beauty.’ I could no longer wait.

  Angels had their own dance in the air. Analyzers had their dance when they threw the bones. Librarians had their own spinning dance. All guides knew the river changed every day, and it was never the same river twice. A current that runs towards the left bank one day might veer towards the right the next. Maybe it was our dance. Guides danced upon the water in their kayaks, and I knew that dance is how I would find my friend. I was going to attempt the Steiner without a backseat-analyzer. The Steiner was named for the German Chess Master, Rudy Steiner. It was said that the Russians made the best violinists and the best chess players, but, the German Steiner was the exception to the rule. He was the master of both the violin and the chess board. He used to lay defensive traps where he could wait and take the queen from his opponents. Steiner’s chess play had a weakness because if an opponent could wait him out, he could defeat him by moving a pawn to the back row and receive a second queen. Even a great player couldn’t defend against two angry queens.

  So it was the same with the Steiner in our data stream. The trick was to give the backseat analyzer enough time to make all of his calculations, and if given proper amount of time he could throw the bones properly and find the best route through it. Heretic or not, Nestor had always done his job well, but this time he wasn’t on this trip with me.

  When I lifted my head up, I saw a librarian who had been watching me for some time. Like most Librarian this one was a woman. I had been in a resting position, but when I saw her, I raised up the rest of my body. This librarian was a third level one and she wore the purple cords around her neck that showed her rank. A third level librarian was said to be focused on heaven all the time, so I was surprised that she was distracted by the concerns of someone else.

  I had only seen a genuine third level librarian a few times, and I knew guides that had gone their whole careers without ever seeing these women in person. Yet, all of us guides had seen angels because they were common in our work. Angels are infuriating creatures who cause us guides unhappiness and sorrow on a daily basis. Even though angels are small, a single angel could flip over a two-man kayak with ease. I knew I had to find Nestor. I knew I would find him at the end of the Steiner. He might need my help, and I knew a guide’s first duty was to rescue their backseat analyzer.

  “You seek your coworker, yet the river is too dangerous without him,” said the librarian to me. She held her spinning-dancing position three feet above me and the river, and I might’ve been able to touch her with the blade of my paddle. The librarian never looked directly at me, but she always looked someplace else, someplace far away, and some where far off that only she could see. “Your friend won’t be there at the end of this journey.”

  I was disappointed, and I didn’t understand, and it must have shown on my face. I hadn’t thought that she was looking at me, but maybe she had been. Because the next thing she said to me, “While he may not be where you thought he was…it doesn’t mean you can’t help him.

  “Where is he?” I asked making sure I had enough flat-water ahead of me, and I still didn’t need to do anything before I reached The Steiner.

  “He’s someplace else. He’s at the last library on earth, a great library that rivals the ancient ones.”

  “There’s no such place. All the books have been reclaimed, digitized, and recycled. There’re no books, no bookbinders anymore,” I said.

  “So that’s what you’ve been told. Yes, the libraries have been all emptied at our bidding, but there’s still one. You didn
’t think we would recycle them all did you?” she asked. She spun closer to me. “Chance, we have even allowed you to keep your own little collection of books. The Earth will not always be like this. There’ll be a time again…there’ll be, a need, a want for them again, please, we aren’t all barbarians trying to bring down Istanbul’s gate. The future must be preserved, and some of us still know that.”

  “The river is a prayer…,” I said to myself because it was time to recite my simple Guide’s prayer over and over again like I always did before my kayak went into the Steiner’s mouth. I could start the prayer, but I couldn’t finish it. “The river is a prayer…”

  “There’s no past, present, but only the future. We wait in the future for the past to come at us again,” said the Librarian saying her own prayer as she started to gain altitude and to fly off leaving me alone on the river. “It’s there you’ll find the Augur.”

  “Who’s the Augur?” I asked but she had left me. The angels that were waiting for me at the Steiner made an enraged attempt for me and my kayak. They glided low over the data, heading straight for me.

  It wasn’t until I got to the first chute of the Steiner that the first flight of angels tried to gang up on me. The first eddy of the Steiner is