stuff," Ember said to her, while still staring at Zed. "Where did he come from, I wonder? There was nobody here when we arrived."
"Resident, maybe?" Edeline suggested. "There was that other door, remember?"
"Not a resident," Zed informed them. "Nor a Guest neither. Me? I'm employed here. This is my work site. Where I do."
"Where you do what?" Ember asked.
"What I do," he replied as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "Now you will sleep, right? You are to sleep. Tomorrow is, after all, another day. I would do that," he concluded and then, with an index-finger salute to his forehead, he said good night, and left the room. Ember and Edeline burst into laughter as the door closed behind him.
"What an odd little boy," Edeline said.
"Crazy!" Ember agreed, "But he was right. I could fall asleep standing up right here."
"Then get in bed," Edeline advised. "It sure looks comfy."
And it was. Moments later they were both under the covers and snoozing away, while the lights in the room flickered and dimmed and went out on their own.
Four
Outside the night was darker than usual, as the moon seemed to have forgotten to rise. Also, it seemed to Red Cliff, the stars were not all in their regular places, again. As he sat on one of the long wrought-iron benches behind the station's rear doors, waiting for Soma to join him, he considered how fortunate they were to no longer rely on constellations for navigation, for in that case they would be well out of luck. He closed his eyes and imagined there were still railroad tracks stretching out along the dunes before him, and tried to conjure up the sound of a steam engine coming towards him, but it was no use. He couldn't remember what that noise was like.
The old giant stood up and stretched. He reached into the pocket of his red flannel shirt and fumbled around before recalling that he'd left his pipe on the ticket counter, and that it wouldn't do him any good anyway, because he had had nothing to put in it for ages. In his other hand he held a battered yellow paperback book. It looked like an old Farmer's Almanac, and perhaps it was once, but now it was the way he received his instructions. The book was continually rewriting itself. He only needed to hold it flat on the palm of his hand, and if it had something to tell him, it would fly open to that page on its own accord. Some might think it cute, he pondered, but he often wished it simply wouldn't do that.
They would get a message through to him anyway, he figured, so it might as well be the book. He placed it in his hand that way now, in the dark, as a sort of a somber joke, but the book remained closed. Maybe the Coalition was sleeping too, like those new recruits that Soma had dragged out of the forest.
"They're exhausted," Soma's voice came from behind him. "I hope they don't sleep through the whole day tomorrow."
"If they do," Red Cliff replied, "it wouldn't matter much. They would only be losing their last day as themselves."
"I remember my last day." Soma glanced at the book in Red Cliff's hand and felt relieved to see its placid state. There were times when the book flipped and flapped itself so wildly they had a hard time reading fast enough, or understanding what it was trying to tell them. The Coalition spoke through the book in tongues, it often seemed. They would mix in weather forecasts along with palm readings, stock market statistics, miscellaneous scientific facts, legends about extinct creatures and all sorts of nonsense before finally landing on a page with explicit instructions. Most recently they had been taught about the care and feeding of humanoid infants, one in particular.
"Hard to believe it's only been a week," Red Cliff said, sitting back down on the bench and stuffing the flimsy book back into his rear jeans pocket.
"Not even that long," Soma said. "The baby only showed up on Monday, if we want to say that today is Thursday."
"The book says it's Thursday," Red Cliff growled. "Of course yesterday it said it was Tuesday, so who really knows anymore?"
"Not that it matters," she agreed. "But I think it's been four days. Ha! I was still in my twenties then."
Last Monday, if that's what day it really was, Red Cliff was sitting on the front porch of his old abandoned farmhouse, up the long winding path through the marsh, minding his own business. He had a backlog of books he'd been meaning to read, books that appeared out of nowhere, arranging themselves on his shelves in order of their desire to be read. He could hardly keep up with their demands. The books were insistent, and if he did not pick up the first in line every day and sit down with it for at least an hour, and at a minimum glance at several of its pages, that same Number One book would fly off the shelf and follow him around, dancing in the air in front of his face so that he could not get anything else done. Also, the books would make a whiny, irritating noise which only grew louder the longer they were neglected. Reading them was the only way to shut them up. The most annoying thing about them was their subject matter. They were almost all fiction, absolutely useless garbage that told him nothing about the world he lived in, only about worlds that didn't even exist, fantasy make-believe stories about nothing that ever happened or ever could. Even the so-called literary and detective novels were absurd, propping up phony characters only to knock them back down again, as if their authors had nothing better to do than play with dolls.
He had been reading an old pseudo-biography that morning, a story about a painter who only painted on walls with his body parts, and whose medium was only the skin cells he shed in these endeavors. He had been one of the earlier GMO's, endowed by his creator with iridescent skin cells, whose colors only became apparent upon application. Back in those days, there were many types of experimental beings in the world. Since then the varieties had become more and more distilled. The Coalition liked to say that the creatures were continually being perfected, but in Red Cliff's opinion the other types had gone extinct due to their own limitations. That painter, for example, had rubbed himself low on skin, and the ozone had roasted him until he was little more than a steam engine himself.
Red Cliff believed he was a control subject. That was the conclusion he reached after long consideration. As far as he could tell, he was a normal human being, larger than most both in height and in weight, but with all the organs you would expect, and the mind, and the odors. He'd met many of the so-called "evolved" beings, and surmised that evolution had not taken its natural course in their cases. They were all tweaked, not-so-intelligently designed genetically modified organisms. There were those who could live and breathe underwater, those who had wings and could fly, and those who were given claws on all their extremities for easier scrabbling through trees. He'd met creatures with IQ's so high they were unable to see the ground beneath their feet, and were constantly tripping over rocks or falling off cliffs. He'd met beings so stupid they had difficulty pushing a button on machines that were nothing but a button. All in the name of progress, according to the small yellow book.
That book, which was more of a pamphlet, had ripped itself out of his pocket and flung itself down on top of the book about the painter that morning, and dialed itself open to a page toward the back where it was written, in bold face and a very large font, "LOOK OUT FOR THE BABY." As was often the case with the almanac, Red Cliff had no idea what it was talking about, until he heard the sound of a newborn, crying, and there it was, in a basket, at his feet.
That had been on Monday. The yellow book had kept him busy all that day, and all day every day since, teaching him how to feed the boy, how to clean its bottom, how to help it learn to walk, how to help it learn to speak. It all had to be done right away, because by Tuesday morning, the boy was a toddler, and by Wednesday it was a child, and now, call it Thursday, it was a regular young boy, somewhere around seven or eight years old. The Coalition had named him Zed Fortune, and instructed Red Cliff to journey with the child to the station, to meet up with Soma, who was bringing two people whom the Coalition referred to as 'critical' and 'chosen'.
Zed was all eagerness and readiness, and had been like that, incessantly, since his creation. R
ed Cliff did not use the term 'birth'. He still had no idea where Zed had come from, or who his parents were, if indeed there were any such beings. All he knew was the ominous warning that the almanac had provided him the day Zed arrived: Proper Care Required In Order To Avoid Extinction.
"Rapid change is hard," Soma was saying. "Especially when you're not used to it. Just like me, life had been the same for Ember and Edeline, day in and day out, year after year after year. They'd adapted to slowness and stability. They were at peace, absolutely at ease in the only world they knew. They had no worries, no problems, nothing to think about except how to fill the time, and even that was nothing because time will always fill itself, or so they thought. There was no beginning and there was no end. Everything was good, or at least indifferent. You knew who you were, and you were who you'd always been. Now I don't have any of that."
"The world's gone crazy," Red Cliff said. "I'm not pointing any fingers, you know, but up until you and your buddies showed up, everything was pretty slow around here too. The sun even knew what to do with itself. Not anymore."
"Oh, like it's all my fault," Soma said, rolling her eyes.
"I didn't say that," Red Cliff replied. "But I don't think it was just a coincidence either. I think they brought you out of that place for a reason, maybe the same reason they had you go back and fetch the other two. The yellow book said they were needed. I only wish it would tell us a little bit more."
"Like what the heck is going on?" Soma laughed. "That would be nice, wouldn't it?"
"Where's the boy?" Red Cliff asked, changing the subject. Soma looked around and shrugged.
"Last I saw he was mopping the floors."
"Boy does like to work," Red Cliff shook his head. "Can't keep still, that one. Always got to be doing something."
"He had a biology book following him around," Soma said, "but he wouldn't look at it. He kept taunting it, making it cry. Go ahead, he said, scream all you want but I'm not reading you today!"
Red Cliff laughed. He didn't know how the boy could stand it. Those books would get so annoying with their screeching and begging and bouncing all around your face. Every time he resolved to withstand their pressure he found himself giving in only moments later. Zed had a lot more willpower than he did. Only that morning he'd seen the boy surrounded by pushy textbooks, but Zed elbowed them aside, even kicked a few that tried to block his legs. Eventually the books gave up and returned to wherever it was they'd come from. Red Cliff had looked all around the station but seen no sign of them after that. He and Zed had only arrived that morning, and he was certain there had been no books on their trail. The pesky things seemed to pop right out of the air. No doubt it was the machines.
That was a sore subject. None of the books that ever flung themselves at Red Cliff had anything to say about the machines, and the machines were the one thing he most wanted to find out about. They were everywhere and seemed capable of doing anything and now that the world was going haywire, the machines were perhaps the only hope for setting things right again. It was maddening. The books, especially that little yellow one, were always giving him orders, telling him what they wanted to tell him, but he had no way of asking them any questions. The Coalition spoke, but they never listened! As far as he knew, they might even be machines themselves.
"What do we really know about them?" he said aloud, and Soma instantly knew what he was talking about.
"They said they were the coalition," Soma replied. "They said we had to hurry. They said we had to 'do the right thing' but they didn't bother