Page 47

A vast acreage of parchment has vanished beneath the ink expended upon the subject of growing old. Many cite the benefits of slowing down, gaining perspective, and the like. Others speak of the value added by life’s use-by date. But don’t believe for a moment that any of them would not wipe away the years if that were an option.

Time to Die , by Roy Battery

Kerrol

“This place has changed!” Kerrol couldn’t help staring as they emerged from the shop.

“Places do that.” Yute followed him into the street. The bookshop door closed behind him, jangling a bell that had the same voice as the one that had hung there when Madame Orlova ran the place. Mayland followed silently, eyes flitting from one thing to the next.

Kerrol let Yute take the lead and followed him along the crowded pavement. None of the humans bustling past, bound within their own business and thoughts, gave even a first glance to the aliens among them, the rear two both head and shoulders above even the tallest of their number. Kerrol mused on their differences, the humans with their delicate teeth unsuited to rending and tearing, with their weak limbs and clever hands. The canith with jaws that remembered the hunt and the kill, and a proclivity for warfare that might even exceed mankind’s. And yet these differences had done nothing to stop his brother and his sister finding a match among the human’s numbers.

“It’s up this way.” Yute took a right turn, leaving behind the bulk of the noisy vehicles with their bright colours and fuming engines. He glanced briefly at Mayland, mistrustful. Mayland ignored him. “Not far now.”

“Good.” Kerrol wrinkled his nose. The town had smelled better when he had left it. Not good, but better.

Yute might be wondering about Mayland’s presence, but Kerrol knew why his brother had insisted on accompanying them. Mayland needed control. Despite Evar’s obsession with escape, it had been Mayland who first found an exit from their chamber of the library. And he hadn’t shared that knowledge. Mayland was here because Yute had wanted to be here. Mayland wanted to see the levers of power that he assumed Yute must be reaching for. That had always been Mayland’s failing. He didn’t understand the secret hearts of other people. For all the million histories he had studied, Mayland didn’t fathom the breadth of motivations that set a person to act. History offered alternatives, an array of possible reasons for any decision. But there was only one reason Yute had come to this place again, despite the danger. And Kerrol supposed that the same must be true of him.

A hundred yards further on, Yute came to a halt before a short wall topped by tall iron railings and split by a double gate that stood open. “Here.” He went on through into the tree-lined drive beyond.

Kerrol followed, frowning. “We can just walk in on their young?”

“Apparently.”

They emerged into a wide yard paved with some dark, unyielding surface. The uninspiring grounds surrounded what looked rather like a grand house that had been extended several times, each time employing a less ambitious architect and a more limited budget.

A grey-haired man in uniform hurried towards them. Kerrol’s fists closed without instruction, remembering the last uniformed man to approach them in the town. Yute took a scrap of paper from an inner pocket of his robe and held it up.

“Ah.” The man slowed his approach. “I wasn’t told there was a school inspection today.”

“It wouldn’t be much of a surprise inspection if you were told about it, now would it?” Yute smiled.

“No.” The man laughed; it made him look younger. “I don’t suppose it would. I’ll let you be about your business then, Herr…”

“Yute,” Yute said.

“Herr Yute.” The man nodded. He paused. “We’ve another visitor today. A scheduled one.”

“I know.” Yute smiled. “I was hoping to meet her.”

The man pointed to one of the newest classrooms.

Yute thanked him and walked towards the door. He waved his piece of paper across a light near the entrance, and the door opened, surprising Kerrol with a strange beeping sound. Mayland started at the sound, revealing his well-concealed tension. He moved on, rumbling in complaint.

Yute followed the corridor and came to a stop before a door, looking into the room beyond through its window. Kerrol joined him and stooped to see. Mayland waited behind them, his mane brushing the ceiling.

The classroom held about two dozen children, all sitting at their desks. They looked more than half-grown, but Kerrol hadn’t enough experience with children of any kind to be able to hazard a guess at their age. A fair-haired young teacher stood to one side of the room, her hands knotted together, eyes bright. The children’s attention was fixed upon a frail figure sitting at the head of the class, facing them, presenting the back of their head to the door. A halo of wispy hair, as white as Yute’s, seemed to float around the person’s skull, turned into some kind of aura by the sunlight that slanted in through the far windows.

Kerrol tried to speak, found his throat too dry, swallowed, and tried again. “You couldn’t have made it sooner?”

“The efforts that brought us here were immense. To say mountains were moved would not be exaggerating. But the library’s sense of timing has always been its own.”

The library seldom gave a person what they wanted. Kerrol had to hope that it made more of an attempt to give them what they needed.

Applause broke out within the classroom, the children clapping, led by their teacher who clapped hardest of all. Not joyous applause, Kerrol thought, but the kind offered in respect and gratitude. He hadn’t the skill in reading human faces that he had for canith ones, but he thought he saw sadness in the children, shock even.

The figure in the chair looked away from her audience towards the exit. She stood up unsteadily and said something to the teacher. The young woman started to address her class as the old woman picked up her stick and began to walk towards the door.

She wasn’t merely old. “Ancient” would be a fairer word. Wrinkled, shrunken, bowed beneath the weight of many decades. Yute opened the door as she approached.

“Anne,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”

“Yute.” She nodded, then looked up at Kerrol with watery eyes. “Kerrol. I wasn’t sure I would ever see you two again. But I always hoped so.”

“We…we came back as soon as we could.” Kerrol wasn’t sure why he had to fight to keep his voice steady. She was just old. The child had become a woman and grown old. Nature’s work. It shouldn’t hurt him like this.

“And you’ve brought a friend?” Anne peered over Yute’s shoulder.

“My brother Mayland.” A short introduction, Kerrol thought, but the alternative seemed to be practically a book in itself.

“Come.” Anne shuffled past them. “There’s a bench in the playground. On the shady side. We’ll sit there.”

And so they sat, looking out across the empty sun-drenched yard, Yute and Kerrol on either side of the girl they’d left behind yesterday. Mayland sitting on the ground in front of them with his knees drawn up.

Without speaking, Anne reached out with her right arm and took Yute’s hand in hers. She took Kerrol’s in the other, her age trembling in her limbs.

“You have a number.” Kerrol wasn’t sure what to say, so he said what he saw, a blurry number tattooed on Anne’s forearm, exposed as she’d reached for his hand.

“I show it to the children when I come to schools to talk about what happened. For some of them it’s not until they see it that they really believe me. Some of them need to touch it.”

Kerrol covered the numbers with one finger. They were ugly. He couldn’t read Anne well, but he could read her well enough to tell that the story those numbers told was a terrible one, bad enough that just touching them would fill a person’s eyes with tears. He wiped his own with the back of his other hand. “We should have made you come with us.”

“No.” Anne shook her head, voice fragile with age. “No, you should have listened to me and respected my decision. Which was exactly what you did.”

Kerrol opened his mouth but didn’t find words there.

“Look at you both,” Anne said brightly. “I never realised quite how young you were, Kerrol. You seemed terribly grown-up to me back when I was sixteen. And look at you now, just a boy, with your whole life before you. I do hope you use it well. And Yute, still so handsome, still so serious.”

“You could come with us this time,” Yute said gently.

“There are wonders to see!” Kerrol hadn’t thought of taking Anne back with them. “So many worlds and times.”

Anne squeezed his hand. “You came to see me. That’s a wonder in itself. And one thing I’ve found over the years, is that if you stay in one spot long enough, and pay close attention, you’ll find that there’s magic everywhere.”

Yute nodded in surprise as if he had observed the same thing himself, though it had taken him longer to discover that truth. “To be honest, Anne, I didn’t come here with high hopes of finding you. I thought we would find a wasteland, still burning with the fires of your war.”

“You saw that?” Anne blinked her own surprise. “But you left almost a year before it started.”

“I felt it coming.” Yute shivered. “Your world then looked close to discovering fire.”

“Of course they had fire.” Kerrol frowned. “We saw it!”

“I mean the second kind, the burning of star dust. ‘Fission’ they call it.” Yute shaped his mouth around the unfamiliar word. “To look around this city now I can’t believe you don’t have the third kind.” He glanced at Kerrol, then at Mayland, his gaze lingering. “The burning of star fuel. Fusion. That’s a fire that will make dust of whole civilisations in a single day.” He returned his attention to Anne. “So, I’m extremely glad to find you alive and well.” He patted her hand. “And also surprised. Will you tell me all about it? If you have time?”

And she did.

They sat awhile on the bench as the shadows stretched and the children came out to play then returned to their classes. Anne talked, Yute asked questions, Kerrol listened and from time to time clenched his teeth together tightly to keep back the growls, the snarls, and the howling that Anne’s story wanted to draw out of him.

Mayland watched in silence, his dark eyes wide and unblinking, rumbling only when she spoke of the camps and the children and the gas.

“And so you come and talk to the children, to ensure that this terror is not forgotten.” Mayland was first to speak when at last Anne fell silent.

She nodded. “We humans are very good at forgetting uncomfortable truths.”

“And you think this particular truth should be kept forever. Held in books in the library.” Mayland didn’t voice it as a question, and Kerrol could hear his tone hardening. He could read the distrust on his brother’s face, the feeling that he had been walked into a trap of some kind.

Anne looked at Mayland closely, tilting her head slightly, the old intelligence still in her dark eyes. “I hope there will be a time when mankind reaches a point when it can forget such things. As any mother wants her children to forget the fears that torment them. But that time is not now.” She smiled, though Kerrol didn’t know how after the story she had told them. He assumed she had been gentler with the children or surely they would have been crying and running home to their parents. Unless human young were much sturdier than he imagined. “When you speak of the library, Mayland, I think you must be imagining the library your brother and Yute have spoken of. We don’t have that here. We have many libraries, big and small. Most of our books are in people’s homes, or on the shelves of shops like my own.”

“The library will find you,” Mayland said. “Perhaps in the ashes when all this is gone. Holding your books for you, and many others, eternal, unchanging. All sacrifice recorded and kept, all horrors endlessly repopulating the shelves no matter how many times the fire purges them.”

“Goodness.” Anne watched him closely. “I’m all for thwarting the book burners, young man, but I’ve always been uneasy with the idea of any one person or any one system reigning supreme. What if it’s the wrong one? Who sets these rules for everyone else?” She shook her head. “No, what we have is far from perfect. I don’t believe there is a perfect, not in this life. But its strength is in diversity. Its strength, curiously, is in its biases, which lean in every direction. Its strength is in many systems, many ways, the curation of many and varied hands. Whatever hits us, something survives. We adapt, we change, and with god’s blessing, we get better. It’s hard to become so exercised over what the right answer is when you can have many answers. If you don’t like how I run my bookshop, you can take your business across the street, or start your own.”

Mayland bowed his head in thought before his next question, and this time it really was a question. Anne gave her thoughts on it, and the next one, a tiny old human chatting to a canith as tall as her when sitting, in the playground of a school to a background of screams and shouts and the wildness of children.

When the school emptied, they let the tide take them too, returning to Anne’s home. She lived above Madame Orlova’s bookshop, which she now owned, and which her grandson had recently taken over running from her daughter. She served them little cakes in the kitchen at the back.

“The books that were banned are no longer banned. We sell all sorts. You would hardly believe the fiction today.” She snorted. “But you can read about Helen Keller too. Madame Orlova would approve, I think. Those nice boys from Weber’s too, they write about…they call them gay now, yes? I can’t remember their names anymore…” Anne looked distressed. “They never came back.”

“Herman and Carl,” Kerrol said. It had only been yesterday. But like Anne’s family they had been taken to murder camps and…murdered.

“Yes, that was it. Herman and Carl.” Anne closed her eyes as if seeing them again. As if Kerrol had given her a gift. “Thank you.” She paused. “I have grown old, haven’t I? It comes to us all, I suppose. Now, where was I? Another cake, Mayland? And one for you, Kerrol?”

“Thank you.” He took the tiny, delicious cake and held it close to his heart, and understood why the laws of time should not be broken.