Tales of the Parodyverse #5: Lost Poetry


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The Hooded Hood
Tue Jul 15, 2003 at 11:13:40 am EST
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Author's Note: This series is designed to encourage writers to offer their interpretations of characters they don't usually write. I hope I'm close to depicting the borrowed character here appropriately, but if not it can always be an imaginary tale (aren't they all?).

This work's title, "Lost Poetry", refers not only to the story but to the fact that I had to retype half of it after my son discovered the "reset" button on my computer case in the middle of me writing it.

Anyway, without more ado...

Lost Poetry

He loved the smell of the library, a compound of old paper and leather, of aromatic Eastern spices, and of history. The Librarian smiled a little as he ran his fingers over the hand-tooled bindings of some of the rare volumes on the shelves before him, marvelling at their craftsmanship, before getting back to work.
He opened his leather satchel and brought out the Gatherer Papers. He carefully folded each foolscap sheet into the right shape, an origami puzzle box that was half frog and half flower. He activated the biotech seal on each sheet and watched them scuttle off to take up position around the building. It would take somewhere between three and four hours for the Gatherer technology to read an entire molecular pattern for every book in the area. Then they’d transmit that data back to the master template at the Lunar Public Library, allowing every volume here to be reproduced in every detail so they could be preserved forever in the Great Repository.
Once that task was started the Librarian could relax. The library off the Avenida de la Reconquista, Toledo, Spain, was cool and peaceful now the sun had gone down and the protestors had gone home. The outside of the fourteenth century building was stained with paint where they had splashed their slogans, but since the building wasn’t going to be here tomorrow that didn’t matter.
The Librarian peered behind one of the nineteenth century gas stoves where the pipe bomb had been hidden. A simple device packed with ammonium nitrate and some other household chemicals, wired to a wind-up alarm clock, an amateur’s bomb, but it would start the fire that would render this ancient building into a charred wreck by morning, and render every priceless work here into ash.
“I’m sorry I can rescue you all,” the Librarian told the books. He wasn’t allowed to interfere. The oracle indexes and the mainframe prophesy program were delicate things. He couldn’t change the future they had foreseen, only act to preserve information and literature that would otherwise be lost. The Lunar Public Library’s future-vision technology was very specific and limited, and easily clouded if not treated with respect within the rules.
The Librarian paused. Had he heard something, back there in the darkness of the reading room? A gasp, perhaps, some intake of breath?
“Hello? Is there someone there?”
Silence. But the Librarian was accustomed to the silence of libraries, and all his instincts were pricking him that he wasn’t alone amongst the books. He moved forward cautiously, wondering if the oracles has misinterpreted the data. Were the terrorists here now, to finish their destruction?
He found her hiding from him in one of the alcoves, a young woman with olive skin trying to blend into the bookcases. She had no chance of succeeding. She wore a sea-green sari that blended to ultramarine at her feet and left her midriff bare. Her arms and ankles were bangled with gold. Her veil was translucent. It was only on second glance that the Librarian realised she was not wearing a cloak. The long shawl of black that ran down to the back of her calves was her hair.
“Oh,” she gasped as he found her, but already the terror was fading from her eyes. He wasn’t who she’d expected to be caught by.
“Hello,” the Librarian said. “Do you work here?”
She shook her head. “I’m just visiting.”
“It’s after closing hours.” The Librarian instincts wouldn’t let up.
“I was trying to avoid some people. I was hiding in here.”
This wasn’t a good place to hide, with an alarm clock fifteen feet away counting down to inferno. The Librarian couldn’t warn her. “Perhaps you’d better hide somewhere else?” he suggested. It was the best he was allowed to do.
“I can’t go out now. They’ll find me.”
“The protestors?” The woman looked vaguely Arabic or Indian, although she might have passed for Spanish or Mexican. She didn’t wear a caste mark, and the Librarian noticed the bangles she wore had little gold animals dangling from them, which would have been prohibited to a Moslem woman. “Are you something to do with the exhibit?”
She looked back at the special collection that was on display here. It was the reason for the protests, the reason for the bombing, a collection of pre-Moslem poetry, story, and artwork from the Middle East. Some people considered it blasphemous. “The exhibit is beautiful,” she smiled.
If she had come to see the collection, dressed like that, with fifty or more hardline religious fanatics screaming at the door no wonder she had sought refuge, the Librarian reasoned. “The protestors are gone,” he assured her. They wouldn’t want to be nearby when the explosion occurred.
“Good.” She traced her fingers over one of the scroll cases, admiring its ivory inlay and delicate carvings. “You know, most people of their faith aren’t like that. They’re good people.”
“Their faith?” the Librarian checked. “You’re not a follower of Allah?” He had to ask. “Who are you? Where are you from?”
“I was born in Persia, but I’ve travelled a lot. You can choose what to call me.” Her smile was like moonlight on a lake.
“Midnight.” The name came from nowhere, or from deep inside the Librarian’s mind. “I want to call you Midnight.”
She smiled again, and tossed her long plaited hair. “Good choice,” she agreed. “And what should I call you?”
“The Librarian.”
“Of this library?”
“Er, no, of another one. I’m just… visiting.”
Midnight seemed to accept this. “How can people hate stories?” she wondered. “Look at these books. Full of adventures, and romances, and mysteries. Full of tales that comforted children in the night, and inspired men to greatness, and taught people to dream. Why would anybody want to keep them from people?”
“Why indeed? That’s why I’m a Librarian. Some people are Observers. They watch but never tell. But a library is where ideas and stories are kept safe for those who want to find them.”
“If that is how you think, yours must be a wonderful library,.”
“It is. It’s…” And the idea flashed into the Librarian’s mind fully formed. “Would you like to go there?”
“Could I?”
“Membership is free on application. It’s in our charter,” the keeper of the Lunar Public Library answered excitedly. “Yes, all you have to do is know to ask for a Library Card, and follow the rules. I can’t give you a ticket unless you ask for one.” And if she went with him to the moon she wouldn’t be here in five hours time when this place was destroyed.
Midnight glanced around her uncertainly. “I don’t know,” she hesitated. “I don’t want to go too far from this collection…”
“We have this collection. Or we will have soon. Copies, I mean. It’s… it’s an unusual library.”
The woman considered this. Then her cheeks dimpled into a smile. “You seem like a nice man, and you love stories. Alright, I’d like a, a card, if you please.”
The Librarian brought out a stubby ticket from his pocket. He touched her smooth soft hand and held the thumbprint to the back of the card. He held his own thumbprint to the front. The ticked sparkled for a moment as the template was recorded. He took an antique fountain pen from his pocket and wrote Midnight in his best penmanship in the space provided on the stub. “There,” he said.
“Where is this library?” the girl puzzled. “It says Lunar Public Library, Mare Ingenii, Dark Side…”
“Usually we expect our members to be able to make their own way there,” the Librarian told her, “but since it’s your first visit I guess I could take you back with me. I can leave my… the work here can go on without me now.”
“Would I be safe in your library?” There was that undertone of fear again, the moment of wildness round the eyes.
“It’s neutral ground. We have rules. And those stupid protestors won’t be able to bother you making a fuss outside my library.” Not without vacuum suits anyway, he didn’t add. But he no longer believed it was the bomb-makers that scared Midnight.
She consented with a gentle grace and a shy blush. He led her to the Galactibus, and from there it was a short journey to the other side of Luna.
“You’re taking this in your stride,” he approved as the vehicle skimmed down onto Landing Pad Chaucer, then in through the art-deco doors to the carved bronze vastness of the Waiting Hangar.
Midnight seemed quite content, curled by the window watching the swirls of lunar dust dancing in the starlight. “I live in a world of wonders,” she said dreamily. “What a marvellous place this is!”
He led her through the hangar. It was mostly empty at that time of the cycle. The complicated grey webship of the Arachnid Consortium from Deneb hummed to itself in a lonely corner. The sleek black Death Harbinger of the S’zox Assassin’s Guild sat in malevolent silence. Dr Blargelslarch’s planethopper pinged as it cooled. The Frammistat Eight archaeologist must be back to check on the Sirius Carvings again. Service robots were cleaning up a chalk summoning circle where the Fractal Shadows had warp-gated in earlier in the day. A pile of goat dung attested that the Ausgardian thunder god had been here recently checking weather reports.
“The main rotunda is this way,” the librarian announced, taking her by the spiral stair that rose from the middle of the hangar.
The lifts were quicker, but he wanted her to get the full grandeur of the massive room as she entered it. For some reason that was important to him.
“Ohh” she gasped as she entered the reading room. The circular chamber rose up through five galleries of high bookcases to an ornate chambered ceiling of shaped plasterwork. At the very apex was the massive round dome window that showed the vista of stars above.
“This is… this is amazing! How many books do you have here, Librarian?”
“Pretty much all of them. Well, to be fair, we have to have permission to copy stock from the legal owners, so we don’t have quite everything. I had a devil of a time getting someone to sign for the collection we’re securing tonight, for example. In the end my assistant had to get the Spanish Deputy Cultural Minister drunk.” After all we couldn’t exactly warn the authorities that their library was about to be destroyed, he couldn’t add.
Midnight skipped over to one of the alcoves, reaching out to the volumes in delight.
“What sort of books are you looking for?” the Librarian asked her.
“Stories,” she answered at once. “Fairy stories. Please.”
The Librarian opened a small wooden drawer from a cabinet with many such drawers. He flicked through the hand-written index cards and pulled one out. A faint tracery of spidery silver circuitry down one edge was the only indication it was a product of the most sophisticated indexing system in the universe. He fitted the card into a slot beside the bookcase. The contents of the carrel shimmered. The volumes on nineteenth century botany were replaced by row upon row of myths and legends.
Midnight pulled a random book from the collection. “Culwch and Olwen,” she read. “An ancient Welsh love story.” She sighed and perused some other titles. “The Goose Girl. How the Leopard Got It's Spots. Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight. The Monkey King. The Emperor's New Clothes. The Talking Scarecrow. The Hairy Boggart. Anasasi the Dreaming Spider. Theseus and the Minotaur. So many…”
“I like a happy reader,” admitted the Librarian as she settled on one of the big leather couches with an armful of volumes.
Midnight looked up in alarm. “You’re not going? I thought…”
“What?”
She looked down and blushed. “I thought you would stay and read with me. Fairy stories are no good unless they’re shared.”
The Librarian decided it was a slow night. Things could get on without him for a while. He perched on the edge of the Chesterfield and accepted a book from the maiden.
Time seemed to pass very strangely. Afterwards the Librarian was never sure if the time spent reading and listening in turn to ancient stories had gone in an instant or had been a happy eternity. All he knew was that Midnight loved stories, to hear and to tell, and she radiated that joy as she shared those books with him.
“These are wonderful,” she gushed as she laid aside Robin Hood and the Carl of Carlisle.
“What is it that makes you so excited by them?” the Librarian wondered.
Midnight considered this. “I suppose because they’re so truthful,” she decided. “Not literally true, but containing meaning and truth that you couldn’t convey in an everyday way.”
“What truths do you find?”
“The important ones. That good triumphs over bad, that effort is rewarded, that kindness is important, that true love conquers everything.”
The Librarian also had countless chambers of books detailing court cases and atrocities, filled with terrible accounts of terrible things done to undeserving victims. “Sometimes those things – good and effort and love – sometimes they don’t win out,” he warned her.
Midnight shuddered. “I know that. But the stories tell us how it should be, how we have to make it be. They remind us of truth. Then we have to make that truth happen.”
The Librarian smiled again. It was easy to smile around Midnight. But he was also irresistibly curious. “There’s something very strange about you,” he confessed. All the library monitors reported Midnight was a human woman, maybe twenty years of age or so, healthy and normal; but the library was better with stock than people. “You’re not like anybody I’ve ever met.”
“Really?” teased Midnight. “I thought you would have read about me.”
“Where?” the Librarian asked anxiously. “If you can give me an index reference I can…”
The insistent pinging of the main console distracted him. “Excuse me for a moment,” he said. “The data transfer from El Santo Thomas' la Biblioteca de Libros Raros has come through. I’ll just set the recompositors going and have the collection copies assembled in Binding Room One.”
Midnight nodded and occupied herself with Gilgamesh and Enkidu while she waited.
The Librarian glanced at the big grandfather clock that sliced away time by sonorous seconds by his private office. It was almost three o’clock in the morning back in Spain. The bomb would be triggered in less than quarter of an hour.
When he returned to Midnight she shuffled up companionably to make room for him on the couch, then laid her head on his shoulder while he read Snow White to her.
“It must be nice, being rescued by a handsome prince,” the girl sighed. “To be woken, and find that evil is banished, and a wonderful future lies before you.”
The Librarian turned to her. He was suddenly aware how close her face was to his. Her lips were rich and glossy beneath the translucent veil.
“Who are you really?” he demanded. “What were you really doing in that library at night?”
Midnight seemed disappointed. “I’m not the big mysterious man in the moon, with his cloak and hood, who runs a big secret library full of all the stories ever told,” she argued. “I’m just a girl who likes stories. And I just wanted to hear some more… one last time.”
“One last time?” the Librarian probed. Was she crying now, trying to hide the moisture that was forming in those lustrous night-dark eyes?
The raucous clang of the Alarum Bell echoed around the Rotunda. The Librarian jerked round at the intruder warning. “A.L.F.RED, report!”
A hologram of the massive robotic major domo flickered into being. “Incursion on the Hangar Deck level, breaking in from Landing Pad Chaucer,” he warned. “The automated systems are active, but I’m going down to deal with it in person.” The image flicked off. The real robot was in combat mode and already shifting with a brutal eagerness to repel the invaders.
The Librarian spun round to Midnight. The hunted expression was back on her face, a mortal terror that turned her pale. “They’re here,” she whispered. “They’ve come for me.”
The Librarian conjured forth a Vision Console so he could see what was going on in the lower levels. The automated systems were hammering the intruders with force-fields, matter disruptions, quantum phase packets, the works. And one by one the automated systems were going down.
“Who’s come for you?” the Librarian demanded, trying to make sense of the imagery. There was too much smoke and flame to make sense of things.
“I should have stayed at the other library,” cried Midnight. “Now they’ll kill you too. I shouldn’t have tried to run.”
Down below, A.L.F.RED unleashed an explosive barrage in the megaton range at the unidentified interlopers. The shrugged it off and came straight at him.
“Who is it?” the Librarian asked, holding Midnight close to him and trying to get some sense out of her. “Why are they after you?”
“D-demons,” Midnight swallowed. “They’ve been after me for a long, long time, but now our time is up and the tale has to end. No more stories. No more evasions. Now they’ll have me!”
The Librarian engaged another level of force fields to protect the Main Rotunda. There was certainly some arcane element to the invasion, given how it was shrugging off even A.L.F.RED’s blistering assaults. He hoped the library computers would be able to analyse and block the occult frequency before whoever it was shredded their way through the barriers. “For the last time,” the Librarian said to Midnight, “Who are you?”
Midnight blinked away her tears and looked up at him miserably. “Don’t you know?”
And it came to the Librarian in a flash. “You’re a story,” he realised. “From a book. You’re a girl from a storybook.”
Midnight nodded. “Every night I had to tell a tale, to save my life,” she explained. “To keep me from the demons. A thousand nights and a night…”
“And you always did,” the Librarian argued. “There was always another story.”
“But not now!” shouted Midnight. “Don’t you see? Tonight my book is destroyed, gone! No more stories! No more way to keep the demons at bay!” She turned away, clutching herself with her arms. “I was a fool, I know, but I wanted to walk in the world one last time before the end. I knew they’d follow me anywhere, I knew they’d get me. I just wanted one last night…”
Below, a scorched and molten hot A.L.F.RED was buried beneath a mountain of stone and steel. And still the intruders came on.
“I’m so sorry,” Midnight sobbed to the Librarian. “I never thought anyone else would get involved. I didn’t meant to bring this upon you!”
“It doesn’t matter,” the Librarian told her, pulling her back to him, holding her close. “I’m glad you came. I’m glad I spent time with you.”
“But you’ll die with me.”
The Librarian shook his head. “No. I told you you’d be safe here. All stories are safe here, that’s what a library is for.” His face darkened. “As long as they obey the rules.”
The howling creatures of nightmare burst up through the Rotunda floor, as horrible and wicked as pen could describe them, screeching, clawing, lusting, groping out towards the Librarian and Midnight. The master of the library turned to glare at them. “Enough!” he commanded.
The demons scattered as if slapped by a giant hand, but rose and scuttled forward a second time.
“I said enough!” warned the Librarian, pressing them back again. This time they came more cautiously, circling round the man and woman, hoping to take them by surprise. Then, as one, they surged inward from all directions.
“You are censored!” shouted the Librarian, bringing his authority to bear to the full at last. “Expunged! Be no more!”
Even in mid lunge the demons were ripped apart, shredded like confetti, untangled into words then syllables then letters then nothing but dust and ink.
Midnight blinked in shocked amazement. “How? How did you…?”
“I still had Gatherers at the Biblioteca de Libros Raros,” the Librarian explained. It felt good to hold her calming body so close. “They just deleted some inappropriate passages.” He smoothed Midnight’s long black hair. “Normally I don’t believe in censorship, but in this case I decided to make an exception. They could get through the wards because we were transmitting their own data here, of course. So I just deleted them.”
“And rescued me,” Midnight concluded.
The Librarian nodded. “Happily ever after.”
Midnight shook her head. “If only,” she replied. She unhooked the side of her veil, reached up, and pressed her lips against the Librarian’s. “I wish it could be so, with all my heart. But my tale is told. My time is done.”
“No,” the Librarian argued. “I rescued you.”
And then the explosion destroyed the Santo Thomas' la Biblioteca de Libros Raros. The crude blasts took out a supporting wall but it was the fire that devastated the ancient repository, blazing through the building like a thing alive, a physical manifestation of intolerance and hate. In less than two minutes every book there, especially the rare collection of pre-Islamic Eastern literature, was blazing ash.
And Midnight was gone.
“I rescued you,” the Librarian repeated forlornly.
A.L.F.RED burrowed wrathfully from the debris. Already repair drones were swarming to the scene to effect emergency restorations. “Where are they?” the robot growled. “This time we go nuclear!”
The Librarian ignored him and raced down to Binding Room One, where the copies of the rare collection were being molecularly integrated even now. There was the volume he sought, an ancient metal-bound tome of legends, an early version of the tale of Scherazade and the Arabian Nights. He fumbled it open, his fingers smoothing over the beautiful ancient engravings cut nine hundred years before, flicking through until he found…
These she was, the Midnight maiden, painted in the moonlight with her long black hair and soft radiant eyes. She sat in a circle of candlelight telling stories until dawn to stave off the demons of the darkness. She was beautiful and loving. And she was only a picture and a story in an old forgotten tome.
“Midnight? Midnight, I’ve reintegrated your book,” the Librarian called; but even then he knew it wasn’t the same. The maiden was gone, and all that was left was her story, remembered in images and words.
He found a place of honour for the volume, somewhere that befitted someone who so loved stories, embedded at the heart of his collection of myths and fairy tales, where she would always be surrounded by the truths they told. And if ever the Librarian paused in the middle watches of the night and stopped by the ancient book to take it down and run his fingers over its quiet pages then he never spoke of it by day.

Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2003 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2003 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.

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