The Book of Air: Volume Four of the Dragon Quartet (27 page)

He calls up the frequency list, marks this one as identified, and moves on to the next. He ceases worrying about the limitations of his equipment. Each time he complains of a particular shortcoming, the machinery evolves to compensate. More memory, more speed. The CD-ROM drive. The emergency fuel cells and storage batteries. The voice recognition capability. And none of it is an illusion. Nothing
so simple. The Librarian shrugs. No common standard of credibility can be applied to this situation. He believes in the material reality of place and machinery, equally, in each succeeding incarnation. It occurs to him after the first few mutations that it might all be a metaphor for processes actually taking place in his head, a sort of visual aid to help ground him and move him forward. Otherwise, wonder and disbelief might bring him to a dead halt. The Librarian can’t afford wonder or disbelief. Not right now. Time, he knows suddenly, is of the essence.

He’s in his loft in New York by now. He recalls the big steel desk and the double banks of monitors. It still smells old, but not so decrepit. Better digs, more add-ons, now that computing skills can equal an income. He has the Internet, and a hacker’s access to the databases. Software engineer by day, eco-terrorist by night. The decoder works faster, almost as fast as he can think. He checks off several more signals. One sends instructions to the street-cleaning machines, simply and traditionally written in a long loop, so that when each machine has completed its assigned task, it will begin the process all over again. Another resolves easily into a video image: an elderly black man drinking espresso in a quaint twentieth century café.
Must be an old movie clip
. The Librarian lets the illogic of this notion pass, along with his temptation to watch for a while and see what happens next. He marks the frequency and moves on. The next several signals seem to be associated with the city’s air quality maintenance and power routing. Another is a more complex set of machine instructions, but appears to be somehow damaged or degraded.
Tampered with
, the Librarian amends, then wonders why this conclusion came to him so surely and suddenly. He cannot quite make sense of it. In the next signal, the tampering is more obvious, like a text broken up by commentary from a nonnative speaker.

He sits back, glowering at the screen. N’Doch’s song has ended. The silence is hollow and unfriendly. So far, the Librarian has judged all the code he’s looked at to be of human origin. The additions strike him as something quite different.

What now?

The Librarian rubs his eyes some more, a habit he never has been able to break. He feels incapable of thought. His
back is stiff with cramp and his well-padded butt is nearly fused to the chair. How long has he been at this? It doesn’t seem like . . . but then, how would he know. He works life into his lower limbs, then gets up for a stretch. There’s a bit more light to see by than before. When he turns away from the desk, his breath catches in his throat and he grabs for the chair again. Which is lower than it was. He starts, and almost tumbles sideways from the force of memory.

The space around him has evolved along with the equipment. Compact fluorescents dangle from the crossbeams inches above his head. He’s in the first real bunker he’d built for himself at his vacation home in the mountains, once he saw the way things were going. He’d hired a local excavator to dig it into a steep hillside, claiming a fancy for a really big root cellar. Small for a large person, however. Dank and claustrophobic, exactly like an oversized grave, once the door was closed. The Librarian’s animal origins kept him from panic, but as it turned out, he wasn’t in it long. It had been unwise to let anyone know about a facility whose proper functioning depends on secrecy, no matter how far in advance of actual need the location is prepared. The excavator’s family apparently had a long memory. The Librarian squeaked out of that crisis alive enough—they hadn’t expected the “tree hugger” to be armed—but he’d made damn sure to dig the next hole by himself, when no one was looking.

Inhaling the earth-damp scent of the remembered burrow, he glances uneasily over his shoulder. How far does this memory world extend? What will he see if he undoes the several locks and dead bolts, lifts the steel crossbar, and shoves open the heavy wooden door? Wood. That had been the Achilles’ heel. He couldn’t see how to explain to his neighbors the need for a reinforced steel door on a little old root cellar. Eventually, they’d burned him out.

Interesting
, the Librarian muses,
how many of my life-threatening events have involved fire. Just how long has this sonofabitch been at this?

He stumps over to the door and lays a hand on the thick, rough planks. He doesn’t really want to open it and see those lovely, lost pines, those fresh-scented hills rolling green over green over blue into a misty horizon. Dead now. All dead. Chopped down, wind-torn, bulldozed, burned out,
poisoned, drought-killed, worm-eaten, pest-chewed, disease-ridden. The evergreens were the first to go. The Librarian sucks in the breeze blowing in his mind: the springy perfume of the needles, the sweet fern carpet beneath, the faint crush of wintergreen, the trailing whiff of wild stock from the meadow’s edge. He’s not easily given to weeping, never has been, but he knows that if he opens the door and sees those trees, he will be unable to hold back his tears.

He decides to be hungry instead. He goes looking for the refrigerator.

He’d installed one in this first bunker, using a buried power line. Later, what should have been obvious before became all too clear: he’d need his own power source as well. By the next time, solar technology was available to the rich, and the Librarian’s cleverness with his keyboard had made him a lot of money. But this first, optimistic bunker lost power after the first three hours.

A tall white rectangle hums up out of the darkness in front of him. He flips open the door and finds exactly what he’d shoved in there so hastily when the time came to pull inside like a tortoise into its shell and barricade the inadequate wooden door. He finds ham from his pigs, and cheese and butter from his cows. Two loaves of bread. A roasted chicken. Eggs. Several bins of greens from the garden. Optimistic, indeed. How long did he think this would last him? How long did he think it would
need
to last him? Could he have guessed then that no length of time he thought of would be long enough? He’d been so sure he was well prepared.

He closes the refrigerator quietly. There’ll be bushels of carrots and cabbage and potatoes stored away somewhere, and a row of tomato vines heavy with fruit, ripped out of the furrows in the last moments of his pack up. He feels around in the darkness behind the fridge and knocks his head against the hanging root balls, still moist from the ground. Soil cascades around him in a fragrant shower. The sharp green smell of bruised tomato leaves accomplishes what the Librarian has hoped to avoid by not opening the outer door. He slumps against the humming refrigerator and buries his face in his hands.

The tragedy was so fresh to him in those days. He had
nothing to offset his despair. He hadn’t yet worked out the purpose of his dragon-haunted existence, of his miraculous many lives—which were a tragedy of sorts in themselves, in that they forced on him a very, very long sort of view, and the fullest realization of how much, how terribly much, has been lost . . .not the least of which was any remaining faith he might have had in humanity. Each generation carries forward a part of the experience of the generations before it, but these recollections fade and mutate with time, even among such experts at oral tradition as the Tinker crews. Stoksie, for instance, with all his tales of what his father and grandfather said and saw, has never known a century-old oak tree, a real winter, or a truly green spring. He has only a borrowed, mythic notion of the truth, the real, entire truth which assails the Librarian yet again as he inhales the odors of his vanished hilltop garden.

How could such a clever species be so stupid, so shortsighted? No sensible animal fouls and destroys its own nest! Only the human animal
.

Cast up on the sharp rocks of despair as if for the first time, the Librarian gives in at last, and weeps. Each time he has wept, he has sworn to be strong and never weep again. But always, always, the loss is too devastating, the ache too profound.

And this time, he seems to have lost his ability to haul himself back from the brink. This time, along with despair, there is doubt. The doubt is sudden and spreading, like a fast-working virus, like the oxygen being sucked out of his lungs. He’s drowning in salt water and snot. What if . . . what if there is no dragon, no purpose, no rescue? What if he’s made it all up, all of it: a tall tale to defend himself against his paralyzing grief and hopelessness? What if he didn’t really live all those past lives? The Librarian hears a high-pitched mewing. He wishes it would stop, but it’s him making that pitiful noise. What if he’s met no other dragons, never actually confronted one of them on a sun-bleached mountaintop?

Wait
.

The Librarian halts in mid-motion, massaging his taut brow. His damp hands drop to his sides. He turns toward the door. He smells smoke.

Smoke?

Is that it, then? The portal was a trap after all, and he’s to be forced to relive the very nearest of his many near-death experiences? Well, he didn’t panic the first time, so he refuses to panic now. He goes back to the door. The hardware, he remembers, transmitted the heat of the fire outside long before the wood began to burn. He flattens his soft palm against the strap of a hinge. The smooth metal is cool, room temperature at most. And the scent of smoke is fainter by the door. The Librarian pads back to the refrigerator, sniffing studiously. Nothing. Just his imagination, as it were, overheating? He believes his nose is more reliable than that. He replays the moment in his head, calling up the odor again. Not the smell of wood burning at all. More like molten metal, or rock. Magma.

Ah. Him
. The Librarian has managed for a long time to keep below the Intemperate One’s radar, or so he’d thought. But now, those days are over. He glances about, expecting to see a different kind of glow in the darkness, but the acrid tang is gone from the earthy air of the burrow.

He was here, I’m sure of it . . . if only for a moment!

What let him in? The vividness of the memory? If simply the recollection of burning allows the Fire Dragon access, the Librarian swears to banish all such thoughts. He yanks open the refrigerator door and fumbles among the vegetables until he finds the object of his search, smooth and slim and chill. He hauls it out, trying to remember how many he’d stashed back there and how long he can hold out before going back for the next one. He hasn’t had a real beer in decades. He twists it open as he walks, but waits until he’s seated again at the desk before taking his first long swig.
Ah. Much better
. Until the return of the hops blight, he’d brewed his own. No wonder he was so fond of the stuff. Giddy with nostalgia, he swivels his chair a few times, working up speed, then shoves off with his toes to see how many rotations he can manage in free flight. As the chair spins him around, he spots a reflective glimmer in a direction he hasn’t explored yet. He drops his feet, dragging himself to a halt. Oh, yes, there was an old television over there. As the memory sharpens, the object clarifies and brightens. Just like manipulating a digital image. The TV is a slim-lined table model. The Librarian sets his beer down. He goes over to the television and brushes dust
off the screen. Wasn’t it broken past all repair? He’d never used it much even then, but for the hell of it, he tabs it on.

To his astonishment, he gets a picture. Immediately. He’s further astonished when he recognizes the location. It’s the Citadel. Somehow, this broken-down television is broadcasting the feed from one of the Citadel’s security cameras. He’s looking at a long view down an interior corridor. A still image, or maybe the hallway is empty right now. No, here comes someone hurrying past, huge and close to the lens at first, then quickly diminishing down the dim tunnel. The Librarian sees only shoulders and a back, large and male and carrying a spear. He rocks back on his heels pensively, then stabs a finger at the channel selector. Obligingly, the image blanks and a different camera comes on-line.

“Hunh,” grunts the Librarian, and is startled by the sound of his own voice. He backs up to where he can feel for his chair without taking his eyes off the screen, then hauls it over and plants himself in front of the television. He shifts through the channels, bringing up each of the functioning cameras in succession, with static or blue-screen for the dead units in between.

“Hunh,” he says again. Has his subconscious been screaming to know what’s going on back home? He sits up suddenly, then swiftly backpedals to the desk. No reason why it should work, but he tries it anyway. His laptop has become a touch pad. He taps in the address he uses to call House at the Citadel. He gets an error message. He tries a few more times and gives up, but on a whim, keys in his own address at the Refuge, adding the command for voice transmission. The call goes through.

“Hello? Hello?” A boy’s desperate query.

The Librarian clears his throat. “Mattias?”

“Who’s there? Who is this?”

“Gerrasch, Mattias. It’s Gerrasch.”

“G?
Where are you?
” The boy’s yell seems to penetrate the darkness at the Librarian’s back. “I come back, you’re
gone
! Just gone! Where are you?”

“Pipe down. My ears.” Illusion or reality? He can’t believe this is happening.

“I bin waitin’ ferever!” The boy’s Tinker accent rises with his pitch. “Weah are yu?”

“Difficult to explain. Not where you are. What’s ‘ferever?’ What’s happening there?”

“Yu okay? Yu alri’?”

“Yes, yes. What’s up? Is Leif there?”

“Nah, he’s gone! Dey’re all gone, ’cept da little’uns! T’ree days, nah. Wuldn’t let me go wit’ dem! Said I gotta stay an’ wait fer yu!”

“And here I am. You say Leif left three days ago?” It doesn’t seem possible that three days have passed since he walked through the portal.