The Library at Mount Char

  Carolyn remembered Margaret calling her “Mistress,” remembered her saying, You’re like me now and We are sisters. How had those words passed by her so easily? Now the chill of them cut bone-deep.

  Father went down the line, speaking to each of the children in turn until he came, finally, to Steve. “What about me?”

  “I saw what you did back there,” Father said. “You’re a very brave boy.”

  Steve’s chest swelled with pride. But when the skin of his chest stretched, he winced. His torso was red, blistered from the fire, even black in spots. He did not cry out.

  Father knelt and examined the burns. “Does it hurt?”

  “A little.” His voice sounded strangled.

  Father took a Ziploc bag from the pocket of his jeans. He squeezed a pale green ointment from it and, working very gently, applied it to Steve’s chest. Steve flinched at first, drew back from Father’s touch—then his eyes went wide and he leaned into it.

  When it was done, Father stood and dusted his jeans off. “Is that better?”

  “Yeah,” Steve said with obvious gratitude. “A lot better. Thanks!”

  Father smiled a little. He even patted Steve on the shoulder. Steve didn’t wince. “You’re welcome. You should heal up OK.” Then Father’s smile faded. “But I’m afraid I’m going to have to send you away. I can’t use you.”

  “What?” Carolyn and Steve spoke simultaneously.

  Father shook his head. “There are only twelve catalogs, and each of them already has an apprentice. I’m sorry.”

  Steve looked at him, not sure whether he was serious or not. Father fluttered his hands in a “shoo” gesture. “Go on. Your aunt Mary will take you in, I think. We’ll make it so that your mother died in the car alongside your father. You were badly hurt. You’ve been in the hospital all this time. You don’t remember anything…do you?”

  “What?” Steve looked confused. “I…”

  “Just go.” Then, in Pelapi: “I must send you into exile, that you may be the coal of her heart. No real thing can be so perfect as memory, and she will need a perfect thing if she is to survive. She will warm herself on the memory of you when there is nothing else, and be sustained.”

  Rubbing his neck, Steve walked down the road to the entrance to Garrison Oaks. He stopped there, looked back over his shoulder, and waved at Carolyn. She saw real longing in his face.

  She waved back.

  Then, without saying anything, Steve stepped out of Garrison Oaks and back into America. Carolyn, eight years old, looked up at Father and said, “Couldn’t he stay? He’s my best friend.”

  “I’m sorry,” Father said. “I truly am so very sorry. It must be exactly this way, and no other.” Then, lighting the coal of her heart, “But perhaps you’ll see him again someday.”

  Carolyn, tears streaming down her cheeks, gave a fierce little nod.

  When Steve was gone, Father dried her tears. He let those of them who still had houses go back to them, to get toys, or clothes, whatever they liked—but only as much as they could carry in a single trip. The twins returned with a partially burned gym bag full of G.I. Joe dolls. Michael piled his clothes into a red wagon and dragged it down the street.

  Carolyn’s house had been vaporized, so for her there was nothing to pack. All she had left in the world were the clothes on her back and the copy of Black Beauty that Steve had given her. She walked with Father to the back patio.

  “I do wish they would hurry,” Father said, scanning the street for returning children. “I haven’t got all the time in the world. It will be suppertime soon, and I still have to punish President LeMay.”

  “Punish the president? Why?”

  “Well, he’s the one who sent the bomb. Don’t you think he deserves to be punished for that?”

  “Oh. Yes.” She thought of her mom and dad. Her lip trembled. “Punish him how?”

  “Well, for starters, he’s not going to be president anymore.”

  “You can really do that?”

  “Oh, yes. I really can.”

  “How?”

  “Well…I’ll tell you later. For now let’s just say that the past kneels before me.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  Father shrugged. “Maybe not. But it’s true. Tell me, who do you think I should replace him with? Carter? Morris Udall? Jerry Brown?”

  “Which one is nicest? My dad says President LeMay is a mean man.”

  Father considered this. “Carter, I should think.”

  “Make him president, then.”

  “Carter it is. Would you like to watch me change the past?”

  Carolyn said that she would. She was about to ask if that was all, if LeMay’s only punishment for killing her mom and dad was that he wasn’t president anymore, but she never got the chance. Knowing Father, though, I doubt that was all there was to it. As she was opening her mouth to ask, David returned, lugging a suitcase almost as big as he was. Father said that he was a strong little fellow. David grinned.

  When they were all back, Father led them around to the front porch and opened the door into the Library. The house seemed normal enough from the lawn, but with the door ajar the space inside seemed to loom. It was very dark. “Come in,” Father said. “What are you waiting for? It’s time to begin your studies.”

  One by one they filed in—David first, then Margaret, Peter and Richard, Jacob, Emily, Jennifer and Lisa, Michael, Alicia, and Rachel. Carolyn waited until last. Even then she hesitated at the threshold.

  “Don’t be afraid. It will all be OK, in the end. Come. We’ll go in together, shall we?” Father reached down to her, smiling.

  Still she hesitated.

  “Come along,” he said, wagging his hand, a don’t-leave-me-hanging gesture. “Come along now.”

  After a long moment, Carolyn took hold of his fingers, thick and rough. She did so reluctantly, but in the end it was of her own free will. They crossed the threshold together.

  “Step down into the darkness with me, child.” Just that once, Father looked at her with real love. “I will make of you a God.”

  Chapter 14

  The Second Moon

  I

  The entrance to the apothecary was on the onyx floor of the Library, between the catalogs of healing and mercy. Carolyn rarely came down that way. That was probably for the best—she’d lost a lot of the dead ones on the night that she projected the Library into normal space, and there wasn’t anyone around to do the housework. It had been ten weeks or so since anyone tidied up, and Jennifer’s shelves were cobwebby. Carolyn left footprints in the dust as she walked.

  She kept a smaller version of Jennifer’s medical kit in her chambers, fleshed out to suit her specific needs. Medicine was never going to be her favorite subject, but she’d been chain-smoking Marlboro reds since she was sixteen and it was starting to catch up with her. Jennifer had fixed incipient carcinomas twice, and she’d treated her own emphysema a few weeks back. What she was dealing with today was a bit more serious than cancer, though. She would need extra supplies. “Open.”

  The floor in front of her fell away, reassembling itself into stairs. Down below, the lamps in the hall lit themselves, lending the bronze walls a particular sort of glow. Seeing this, Carolyn winced. That glow was something she associated with Jennifer. Carolyn was no longer aging at a cellular level, but the choices she made were beginning to carve lines in her face.

  The particular line that wincing brought out ran deep.

  Jennifer’s apothecary was a good-sized hall even by Library standards, ten acres or so. When Carolyn opened the door, a cloud of scent rolled over her—nightshade, ethyl ether, a hint of fried clams, other things. She surrendered a small, nostalgic smile. Once, late at night, she’d gone to Jennifer for an aspirin and found her just ridiculously stoned, frying clams over a gas burner. Jennifer had been too high to use verbs, much less track down an aspirin. After a certain amount of unintentional slapstick she managed to communicate that she t
hought the weed would probably help Carolyn’s headache. Carolyn, desperate, had conceded a couple of puffs. To her surprise it did help. Also it made the clams taste fantastic. That was a good night, she thought. They weren’t all bad. Not all of them.

  The apothecary was a minor labyrinth of exotica. Probably there was some system to it other than “Be confusing,” but Carolyn would need the map. Happily, it hung in plain sight, tacked up over Jennifer’s desk in the far corner. As she made her way there she traced her fingers across the things lining her path—tiny wooden drawers filled with dried roots, a two-foot bronze sphere engraved with runes of binding, a baby stegosaurus in a tank of liquid. The stegosaurus blinked at her as she passed.

  Jennifer’s desk was flanked by stacks of notebooks, teetering and, to Carolyn’s eye, painfully untidy. Even so, seeing them made her smile a little. Jennifer, like Father, had something of a fetish for office supplies. A Miquelrius spiral notebook lay open on her desk. Carolyn picked it up and blew off the dust, stifling a sneeze.

  On the morning that Carolyn consecrated the reissak, Jennifer had been working on an anatomical drawing. The notebook was open to a half-finished diagram of something like a millipede with a baby elephant’s torso, its musculature laid bare. Carolyn didn’t recognize it. Far future? Distant past? Shrug. Who knows. Whatever it was, according to a note in the margin it had “hypertrophied inguinal mammae.”

  Whatever that was.

  She set the notebook down, closed it, laid her hand on the cover. “I hope…” she began, then faltered. What, Carolyn? What do you hope, exactly? That wherever Jennifer is now, the clams are good? Then, suddenly furious: Keep it to yourself. You don’t have the right.

  In addition to her own first-aid supplies, she kept a fairly well-stocked resurrection kit upstairs—she’d given up on bringing Steve back, but every so often the dead ones had an accident. Today she would need other things as well. She un-tacked the map from the wall. Using it as a guide she drifted through the shadows of the apothecary gathering supplies—a Klein bottle half-filled with anaconda blood, the crystalline ash of a rare psychosis, two ounces of powdered arsenide of gallium-67. It took about an hour. When it was done she fled upstairs, not quite crying.

  The floor closed behind her with a little whoosh of air. She breathed out a sigh and tilted her head back. High above, the lights of the Milky Way burned down upon her. It was getting up on lunchtime. Maybe I’ll climb up there. She could spread out a picnic and—

  No.

  The word for that is “procrastination.” Instead she trudged up to the ruby floor, radial seven, row sixteen.

  His remains lay where they had fallen.

  The wood floor was stained black with the juices of decomposition, but his body was pretty well mummified. Happily, the smell had dissipated. Yesterday, or whenever, she’d stashed a wheelbarrow there containing a keg of distilled water, two gallons of ammonia, enough food for a week or two, and a good-sized baggie of amphetamines. This was probably going to take a while.

  The expression on her face when she took off her knapsack was that of a person picking up a burden rather than setting one down. It would be a spectacularly difficult resurrection, even for Jennifer, but Carolyn figured she’d make it work somehow. She always did.

  Sighing again, she sat down next to the corpse and began to work.

  It took longer than she thought, closer to three weeks. Maybe longer? She lost track of time—she’d been doing that a lot lately—but all the water was gone and she was almost out of amphetamines before she got a heartbeat. After a certain amount of trial and error, three days or so, she got him back to normal brain activity. Not long after that he started snoring.

  Her back ached, her knees ached, even her fingers hurt. She fell back the length of half a dozen shelves and put on a plain-looking but spectacularly lethal glove she’d gotten out of David’s armory. There she squatted, intending to keep an eye on him until she was certain everything between them was good. Instead she collapsed almost immediately into something between “deep sleep” and “mild coma” on the responsiveness scale. Some time later it penetrated, gradually, that someone was shaking her foot.

  “Fuggoff.”

  Instead, he shook harder. Carolyn, remembering, jerked herself awake and held the gloved hand before her like a shield.

  He stopped shaking her foot, then took half a step back and held out a steaming mug. “Hello, Carolyn.”

  She sniffed. Coffee? She eyed him warily for another moment, then lowered the glove.

  “Hello, Father.”

  II

  Normally she hated coffee, but someone had hidden her uppers while she was asleep. She took the mug, nodded thanks. “How long have you been awake?”

  “Twelve hours or so. How long was I dead?”

  She rubbed her eyes. “I’m really not sure. A while. Months.”

  He nodded. “I thought so.”

  “How?”

  “It doesn’t smell too bad. And everything’s all dusty.”

  “Oh.” A thought occurred to her. “I’m, uh, sorry about…you know.”

  “Murdering me?”

  She nodded.

  “Forget it. We both know I had it coming. Nicely done, though. Been a long time since someone snuck up on me like that.”

  “Really?” In light of Father’s big Adoption Day revelation, it had crossed her mind that maybe he had let her kill him.

  “Oh yeah. I know what you’re thinking, but I didn’t. If I’d seen it coming, I’d have shut you down. Shut you down hard. Nope. You got me fair and square. And you’re so young. I wasn’t expecting you to make your move for at least another fifty years. A century wouldn’t have surprised me.” He patted her on the shoulder, gently. “I’m really proud of you, Carolyn. I hope you don’t mind me saying.”

  “Mind?” She thought about it. “No. I don’t mind.”

  “So…who’s left?”

  She shook her head. “Just me.”

  “Oh.”

  “You’re surprised?”

  “A little. I wasn’t sure you’d have the heart to…well. David and Margaret, sure. They wouldn’t have been hard. But the others? Jennifer? Michael?”

  Michael. Michael had always been kind to her—a rare thing in itself—but there was more to it than that. The first time David murdered her, Michael had been in Australia, but he’d known, somehow. He came back for her. He was the one to find her body. Then, after he fetched Jennifer he ducked back into the woods. At sunset he returned, this time in the company of a wolf pack and a pair of tigers. The lot of them set on David, practicing in the back field. He had to have known this was futile, had to have known that David would hurt him for the attempt, but he did it anyway. “Yeah,” she said. “Even Michael. I couldn’t leave any loose ends. You understand, right? The stakes were too high.”

  “It was the correct move. If it makes you feel any better, I arranged things so that you didn’t have much choice. Knowing what you knew at the time, leaving anyone alive would have been an unacceptable risk.”

  “I understand that. But it doesn’t help. Not really.”

  “No. Of course not. So…what? You went to Liesel?”

  She shook her head. “Americans.”

  “Ah. Interesting approach.”

  “It worked well enough.”

  “And Steve?” Father’s tone was gentle.

  She didn’t answer with words, only grimaced.

  “Dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Some sort of dramatic suicide, I expect?”

  She blinked. “How did you know that?”

  “It’s the way he’s wired. His great-great-great—seventeen times great—grandmother was the same way.” Father made a dramatic face and pantomimed stabbing himself in the heart. “ ‘Free my people, Ablakha!’ ” He lolled his head, let his tongue hang out the side of his mouth. “Sound familiar?”

  “Close enough.”

  “How did he do it?”

  “
Fire, the first time. A couple other things as well.”

  Father winced. “I’m sorry. That must have been hard for you.”

  She shrugged. “You adjust.”

  He nodded. “That we do. I’m still sorry.” He paused. “Could you bear a little fatherly advice?”

  “You’re asking?”

  “I am, yes. You’re in charge now, Carolyn. If you want me to keep my mouth shut, just say so.”

  “No…no.” She straightened. “It’s gracious of you to ask, but I’ll attend any lesson that Ablakha might care to give. It would be an honor.” She bowed her head a little.

  Father bowed back, a little deeper than she had. “How did Steve seem, the first time? With the fire? Was there something different about him?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you think it was?”

  “He seemed…happy, I think. Happier than I ever saw him. Well…maybe not ‘happy,’ exactly. At peace. It was the only time I ever saw him that way.”

  Father nodded. “Just so. He meant well, and he was a brave boy. But if you hadn’t been around, he would have found something else to martyr himself over.” He watched her reaction carefully. “Or, perhaps, he would have died mourning the lack of it.”

  “You’re saying he was born that way?”

  “Partly. The potential was there. Some people have an enormous capacity for feeling guilt, deserved or otherwise. The bit with his friend dying cemented it. By the time you caught up with him, there really wasn’t much to be done.”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. I’ve been studying. I think I can—”

  “What?” Father said, gently. “Fix it? Make it so the two of you can be together?”

  “No! Not like that. I mean, maybe…but it’s not the point.”

  “What is the point, then?”

  “He was my friend,” Carolyn said softly.

  “Did you try talking with him?”

  She nodded.

  “How did that go?”

  “He was…kind. Compassionate, I think. That was the word he kept using, anyway. But…”