Chapter 19 #2
She just lay there, breathing. Books rustled all around us.
By the fireplace I could see the ghostly outline of Dennis hovering with War and Peace, not even reading it, just nervously flipping the cover open and shut.
Flip, flip. Behind him I could see more floating volumes, more of the library ghosts clutching their unfinished books.
“Could I just stay here forever?” Not open the door for the Board tomorrow; live here on Darjeeling and lemon-lavender shortbread and caramel popcorn.
Never go into a book, because as Elizabeth had threatened, Library Security would follow me to any world I entered; never go back to the world where I’d started out because Elizabeth owned my identity and my bank account and my life. Just stay here, in stasis, forever.
“She’ll find another way in here,” I answered my own question, running my finger across the ageless wood of the polished floor.
“That Board will locate themselves another loser with no money and no spine, wreck their life so that when they get invited into the Library they’ll jump for it just as hard as I jumped, and fall just as hard as I fell once Elizabeth reels them in.
She’ll get her foot in the door, one way or another.
And then what happens to you?” I asked the Librarian.
She lay so still. If you didn’t look closely, you’d think she was a waxwork.
“Elizabeth didn’t really say what would happen to you once the Board has their hooks in the Library. She made some noises about retirement . . . Can you even survive without this place?” Looking around these walls. “Will it survive without you?”
These walls. These emerald windows. These beautiful, wild books.
“What’s going to happen to this place?” I screamed up at the vast vaulted ceiling.
My howl echoed through the endless shelves, echoed and then died away, and that’s when I wept.
I wept surrounded by distressed books and anxious ghosts and a Librarian about to be sheared of her dragon wings, and I didn’t know if I’d ever felt more alone.
What’s your dream library?
Every bookworm has one, after all. Maybe yours has sweeping spiral staircases double-helixing around each other, or an enameled art deco cage of an elevator.
Maybe yours has the austere stone walls of a medieval castle, or the gilded swirls of a rococo palace, or the columned tranquility of a Greek temple.
Probably your dream library features a ladder.
We all watched Beauty and the Beast, after all, and dreamed of being Belle sailing the length of a bookshop on a rolling ladder.
My dream library was the Reading Room at the BPL, so that’s how the Astral Library presented itself to me: the barrel-vaulted ceiling, the long windows, the marble busts, and the endless shelves.
Only unlike the BPL, the Astral Library went on forever into the distance, the shelves stretching out into infinity, holding all the books of all the worlds that were ever written or ever would be written.
I wanted to see the rest of the Library, if this was going to be the Library’s end.
I had no confidence that the evil goddamn Board was going to let this place continue in its current state, so if this was its last night remaining fully and completely itself, I was going to see it all.
I was still crying a little as I got up from the Librarian’s side and began to walk down the endless line of books.
At first it all just stretched on, shining oak shelves and impassively staring busts, barrel vaulting and emerald windows.
It took a long time before I realized that the library wasn’t stretching ahead of me in a straight line; it was on a very, very faint curve—the curve of the earth, the curve of an infinite horizon on a fantastical sea like the ones I’d dreamed about as a kid, where the water ran sweet instead of salty, where dragon-prowed ships beached at the edge of the world and elves carried themselves off to die.
The windows weren’t opaque green glass anymore, they were growing clearer with every pace of my heartsick feet, and when I pressed my nose to one wavy, ancient pane, I could see the endless ivory roll of the parchment waves outside, eddies of words casting up against the window in fragments.
Quest broke in a spray of letters across the glass and slowly slid down the window; I followed the Q with my fingertip until it dripped off the glass and back into the eddying foam of words below, and then I kept walking.
The ceiling, changing above me—intricately carved vaulting to time-worn, smoke-blackened beams almost close enough overhead to graze with my fingertips, then to white and gold swirling panels enclosing plump cupids who fluttered between clouds passing books to each other, then to ultra-modern glass skylights letting in buttery bars of sun.
The floor, changing under my feet—ancient stone slabs sloped toward the middle by the passage of a thousand thousand years of feet; then Byzantine mosaics laid in uncountable tiny swirling tiles to look like bookstacks beneath my worn boots; then wine-colored Persian carpets so deep I sank nearly up to my ankles.
The shelves, changing from carved oaken stacks to deep chests piled one upon the other to asymmetrical cubbies built from gleaming alien alloys.
The books themselves changing: massive hand-illuminated things bound to their shelves with loops of gilt chain; then scrolls of papyrus on ornate carved spindles; then clay tablets lettered thickly with cuneiform.
Modern mass-market paperbacks with shiny movie poster covers; leather-bound gilt-edged volumes trailing ribbon bookmarks; slim electronic e-readers teeming with title lists in Times New Roman; marble columns etched in story murals winding toward their pediments; sandstone walls covered in hieroglyphs; tiny futuristic e-chips that vented their stories in three-dimensional holographic displays.
A million tragedies and triumphs stretching to infinity, a million what-might-have-beens, a million beginnings and a million endings—but all of them still stories.
Stories on parchment, on rice paper, on scraped unborn-calf skin vellum; stories scripted into pixels or stitched into silk or incised in stone by chisels.
All stories, regardless of form, and every one of them alive.
They fluttered as I passed, as if in greeting: paper pages rippling, clay tablets clattering, woven panels of story tapestries moving in a windless breeze, holographic figures bowing.
And this time when I looked out the nearest window at the parchment sea with its slow ripple of pages turning over like waves and its foaming eddies of words, I saw in the glass’s reflection a glimpse of other library levels even stranger than this one.
Libraries fathoms down under the word-ocean, where barnacle-encrusted humpback whales with vast heavy-lidded eyes stored books of songs; beehive libraries where pages were packed into hexagonal cells smelling of honey and wax and pollen; libraries of nothing more than air and breeze where the four winds collected stories from all corners of the earth and piled them on pink-tinted clouds, waiting to see if they’d hold together long enough to find a reader or blow away again in a storm shower of words raining back down into the parchment ocean.
And in the reflection of another window, I even thought I saw—just for a moment—the long-vanished Library of Alexandria.
The pale marble columns, the lost scrolls in their tidy rows, the serene-faced statues of the nine Muses, the graceful green gardens where figures in chitons and togas strolled, and over it all the pale, tapering spire of Alexandria’s great lighthouse, flashing its mirror to every horizon of the world: Here there is knowledge. Here there is the cure of the soul.
I could feel the crumpled sticker in my tattered reticule: They Got the Library of Alexandria—They Aren’t Getting Mine.
I’d never turned around and reversed direction in my slow pace through the Astral Library’s halls, and the path under my feet had never varied from its long bending curve, but I was somehow back right where I’d started: under the barrel-vaulted ceiling so much like that of the BPL Reading Room, looking up at the great door with its sweeping staircase.
Slowly I moved past the bronze globe, the anxiously fluttering books, the Librarian in her enchanted slumber, crossing to the huge oak counter.
I could feel the drum of my own heart inside the cage of my ribs as I picked up the green tablet.
I was still signed in: Alix Watson, provisional status: Page.
I looked at the Librarian, who had shielded me under her wings and flown me across the word-sea to offer me sanctuary.
I looked at the tablet and I didn’t try any sweet talk this time; didn’t try to guess what might unlock its capricious heart.
I just looked at it, the same emerald color as the windows of this place, and told it something true:
“Maybe you didn’t choose me. Maybe you wouldn’t ever have chosen me. Maybe I don’t belong in the Astral Library, not really.” A deep breath. “But even if you didn’t choose me—I choose you.”
And my heart rang like a bell as the screen lock dissolved with the message Full Librarian access granted and the Astral Library gave up its secrets.