Earthquake ©

by Linda B. Abrams

As Remsen watched, the trees shed their clothes and birds peppered the sky, leaving behind stark branches, like the wasted arms of men sharp against the clouds, reaching for something, something. His mule quivered, breaking her monotonous stride to skitter sideways then back, like a broken habit.

He sang to the birds, warbling low in his throat, sang of peace, and calm, and of the perfect balance of the natural world. As always when he sang to the birds, he imagined what it must be like, a land-locked man, to travel through the air, to soar, to give into the lightness and be purely borne. He dismissed his heretical musings; man was not meant to fly. From the Holy Books from before Collapse, he knew man had once flown in silvery tubes, flashing through the air. But that was secret evil knowledge, rightfully so, known only by the handful of men who kept the Books. As he intoned the chant against Science, against Change, his fingers twitched, like the skein feathers at the very tip of the hawk's wing.

Small animals scurried across the path before and behind him. He saw a red fox, rabbits, moles, and a cougar, three pheasant, putting aside the fact they were meals for each other as some primal force moved them, pushed them from behind. Earthquake, he thought. The animals always knew when an earthquake was building in the plates and shelves of the earth. He looked around. There was no shelter out here on the Trail but, then, there was no shelter anywhere. Not from quakes, nor from little else. He dug the solid heels of his boots into the mule's sides.

"Dang you, mule. Het!"

It did no good. The mule had but one pattern in her head: follow the trail from Neor to Banny, from Banny to Neor. Go forward. Head down. Eat, sleep. The quake warning sent up on secret wavelengths to animals had disrupted the pattern, registering in some dim limbic part of her brain.

He dropped from the mule's back to the rough gravel below, grasped the harness leads and walked ahead, the mule following, wide eyes yellow and jumpy.

University had been his home for 32 years, first as a Scribe, then as a Keeper, right from Middle School. An accidentally uncovered ancient Book had delivered him from the Neor tenement city where he lived with his mother and two sisters. He'd wrapped the fragile book in oilcloth and carried it to Banny, over this same 30 Trail, a foot journey of six days. Now, at 49, he was a Senior Keeper, an Elder of the University of History, a Holder of the Truth.

The mule sat. Just like that: dropped her rear end to the ground, immobile. There was no point in trying to budge the beast, he knew. Just let her sit there. When the quake came, mule'd move sure enough.

He uncoiled the harness leads and loosely wrapped them around a thick tree trunk black with moisture. In this part of the country, six hours out of Neor, the trail had not quite reached the granite slashes in the mountains, and trees marched closely up to the gravel path barely wide enough for two laden carts.

He sat under a tree, stiff legs stretched out before him. Just last week, the Dean said he needed to think about getting off the Trail, think of his age, think about spending more time spreading the Word. He'd rejected the advice. The Trail was his life. He'd die on the Trail if need be, the History was that important. Praise History.

It had been a troubling trip, though. Neor perched at the far south of the country called Meridian, a land that stretched far to the north, through mountains and forests, some of which remained covered by snow twelve months of the year, and for which University was both the governmental and spiritual capital. The troubles in Neor were growing, the Bandits ranging more widely, more violently, but this was not what disturbed him the most.

To the south of Neor lay Ander, a country of alchemists who would destroy the world with their Science. Remsen feared for the planet as a result of the alchemists' efforts. How many readings of History did it take for man to learn his lessons? He quietly intoned the prayer of the Keepers, the litany of Peace, the call for vigilance against Change. Whispers of the heretical findings of the Alchemists were showing up in previously unspoiled places. In Neor, he'd been slipped a report by one of his spies. Through the use of chemicals, and some other magic which he could not comprehend, the Alchemists had determined the 30 Trail, his Trail, was not 1500 years old, as his studies had shown, but almost 4000 years old! Four thousand years old, imagine He blew air sharply through his nose, a sound combining personal indignation and scorn. Startled, the mule shifted position on the trail bed.

The collapse had come 400 years ago, a day undocumented, but revealed in pieces of history from before-time. Civilization, 1,580 years old, had burned itself to a cinder, imploded upon itself. And now, the Alchemists were going to do it to them again. Would mankind see the year 1981, he wondered. Anger and anxiety brewed inside him. Man had destroyed himself once, could he not learn from that mistake? He had devoted his entire life to the idea that, yes, he could. And that his single-minded quest for knowledge of the past would carry mankind into a long and peaceful future. Yet he was one man, unshakable in his belief of possibility of an unchanged future, isolated in one small country among the hundreds, maybe thousands, of countries that dotted the globe.

Despair at his impotence built within him. He had so many minds to mold, and so little time. Before hopelessness could fully settle upon him, the earth gave a violent heave. He heard the mule's screaming brays and he pressed his body to the soil beneath the tree, clinging to the face of the earth with all his might.

-*-

The silence behind the oaks was as still as held breath. He brushed the dirt from his clothing, standing shaken and weak in the middle of the trail, a soft misting of air cool on his face. In a single continuous swoop from the sky, the birds returned to the trees, resuming their chattering conversation. In the heaviness of his fear, he found no voice to sing with them, no peons to raise to the sky.

The earthquake had lasted more than two minutes, the longest he'd ever experienced. He knew he was at the fringes of the earth's destruction. Neor had eight or nine quakes a year, but he never got used to them.

He suddenly realized the mule was nowhere to be seen.

"Rebecca Smith!" He yelled into the forest. "Rebecca Smith, get yerself back here!" He had little hope of the mule's responding on its own. She'd probably run to another spot and, once the quake ended, promptly parked herself solidly back down on the ground.

"Damn dim mule." He muttered. The practicalities of lost transportation diverted his fear. He hefted his packs to his shoulder, slipped his arms through the harness and settled the weight on his shoulders. He eyed the forest carefully, walking up and down the perimeter of the Trail until, at last, he spotted the trampled underbrush where Rebecca Smith had broken into the dark grey-green shadows of the woods. He entered the forest, the canopy laid out by the leaves and the birds above him a black moving lace.

-*-

The farther he got from the Trail, the greater the wrath of the earthquake appeared. As the day dimmed with evening, the land became canted, crazy, haphazard. Four hours of walking, stepping over uprooted trees, sinking up to his calves in loamy ground, he lost Rebecca Smith's trail. He backtracked for a while, but it was too dark to see clearly.

As he lay out his sleeping roll, he reminded himself it would not be proper to return without the mule. She was one of life's domestic creatures, honored, as all of man's burden carriers were, by two names. Although he'd been given only one name, like all men, signifying his superiority over the animals, he did not feel superior on this evening. He felt hungry and tired. And very alone.

-*-

The landscape of his dream was barren and smoldering, a blackened vista of destruction. In it he walked on what no longer looked like a street, but he knew somehow, it was. There was a gravity in his belly and his skin pebbled with gooseflesh.

The bone knob moon with its scatter of ashy markings looked to have lowered to the ground, and been soiled, and fled, up there, between the forks of two oak limbs. He walked the street, or what he felt was the street, and there, at the end, was a building, intact, luminously grey, pearly in the moonlight.

Two large wooden doors, mahogany, he thought, dark and burnished. He reached, grasped the cool dream smoothness of the handle and drew its heaviness to him. Through the doors he floated, and into a vestibule, an aisle. On each side of the aisle, pews. The pews were filled with the backs of the heads of young men, each row marching onward, forward, to the altar of history.

And there, upon the rostrum, was him, himself. Tall, he was, broad shouldered and strong, lit from within by a righteous truth, extolling to the legion of brown haired heads, nodding along with them, urging them to nod, just as he did back at University.

"Agree!" Nod. "Agree!" Nod.

His voice from the front of the room was clear and ringing, filled to brimming with conviction. "History! We must live in our past to live in our future!" Nods, again the nods, some virulent, emphatic.

"Damn Change! Damn the alchemy! Nod! The future is not Science! The future is the Past! Nod! Amen! Nod!"

Nod, nod with your entire body, he willed them silently from the podium, and from the back of the great room. Nod! Yes!

He was suffused with the rightness, the absolute perfection of holy commitment.

"History!" His voice rang from his own dream throat, echoed the voice from the front of the room. The he in front gazed back at the he behind. Then turned to minister the unction of Past on the historical plank of burned and hardened wood that graced every altar in Neor, the precious salvaged remnants of the collapse.

As he watched the back of his head up there in the front of the room, the brow hair parted and there were eyes, dull brown eyes, glazed and unseeing, yet piercing him. And from the backs of the heads of the men in the pews, eyes, flat and empty also peered. And still nodding from habit, they also saw him. And they turned as one, to face the him in front of the room with their behind-eyes, and they presented to him a sea of round faces, blank, featureless, as white and cool as a clean moon on a hot night. He felt his mouth go slack and his heart pause.

"What have I done?" His heart cried. "What have I done?" What mistake had informed his life to leave a sea of blank faced men, looking only back? This is not what he meant! Not what he intended! History is a lesson, a road to the future, not the road itself. Had he really been so blind? How many had he also blinded through his years of teaching, of lecturing?

Had he really ... and the voice of his soul stilled as from a small door to the left of the altar opened and issued forth a visage of Evil: a Scientist, his alchemist's hat tall and dark dotted with pinpoints of secret light, a rod extending his arm proportionate to the height of his body. And from it's tip issued strokes of red lightening that spread through the room. A crack of heat, a flash of light, a cool arc from the tip of his wand to the plank of hallowed wood and showers of sparks proceeded a cloud of dust. Where once there was history, there was no more.

The shoulders of the pew-bound men became vague, like the outlines of clouds and there, where the rough broadcloth of their shirts should have been was now a deep blackness, sparkling with stars, with swirls of a cosmic stew, twisting gasses and they rose toward the ceiling, insubstantial and light. And the he in front of the room, fading too, transparent almost, screamed to the ceiling, roared almost, roared a deep indignant denial, and the roof collapsed upon him, showers of plaster and dust, stones, rafters and beams and upon the alchemist they fell and then silence, settling, and there was nothing left but him, still solid, alone with himself, the man at the altar, glowing in his suit of stars. And then he, too, was gone.

He backed through the vestibule, through the door, stood shakily on the top stone step and looked out over the land. He was utterly alone, all else destroyed. Had he done this? Had his singular righteous denial of Change destroyed both the Past and Science? Yet he was but one man.

An arrowhead of birds drifted overhead, high in the air. In the shimmering night of evening, they appeared silvery, rigid winged, and fast, he thought, rapid, how rapidly they flew. He blinked and they once again became birds, hawks, crawling across the sky. His fingers uncurled, and twitched.

-*-

He awakened bathed in the light of a bruised moon. He brought his hand to his forehead, and it felt cool and smooth and reminded him of his substance. He felt the knotted root of the oak tree under which he slept hard in the small of his back.

A dream, he thought. A dream. But are not dreams visions? But what of it? What was the substance of such a dream? He turned to his side and wedged his elbow beneath him, then straightening, he sat. Above him the limbs of the oak were reaching towards the sky, still reaching, still questing, the same as yesterday.

Was it just yesterday when he, Remsen, he, the Senior Keeper of all Truth, was so placidly sitting his mule, going onward, forward. Or was it backwards? His soul followed the limbs of the trees, aching for understanding. As he went about his morning prayers, rote in their familiarity and filled with a rhythmic chanting, a bending from the waist, his mind wandered back to the dream, to the mystery. Even as he sat beneath the tree for his ritual reading of a Holy Scroll, carefully copied by an apprentice Scribe from one of the Books from before the Collapse (amen, nod) his attention was mere habit. The words had somehow gone flat.

-*-

He picked up Rebecca Smith's trail when the sun was almost at its highest point. Beams of light through the forest pierced the mulch below, captured the spores freed by the fall of his heavy boots. He figured he was almost to the epicenter of the quake and marveled at the caprice of nature, that she would fling entire trees into the air, and they would land, upside down, roots straining for earth in the sky.

He heard a laughing bray and there she was: Rebecca Smith, still looking fresh and solid after two days' wandering. She stood next to a great rent in the earth, bounded by planks of smooth surfaced grey stone, tossed upon the ground like a child's wooden blocks. Some were as tall as he, and when touched, felt cold and just slightly rough. In some were regular grooves, cut by some force he could not imagine.

He traveled his hands down Rebecca Smith's legs, across her flanks, checking for bruises or breaks, but she was whole and contented. And yet his eyes paid scant attention to what he was doing, so strange and compelling were the grey blocks. He tied the mule firmly to a tree, leaving her to munch on pale green ferns as he made his way across the city of stones.

He squatted near an odd artifact, a circular object, fully two arm stretches wide, impossibly heavy and dense, cool and smooth, greened by moss on one side and under, where it was exposed in its leaning against a stone, was silvery and shiny. His heart skipped. Man made. He had heard of such remnants of pre-Collapse, buried deep within the earth, somehow protected from the cataclysm of the air on fire. But never had he seen one, or spoken with someone who had. There were only the clues in the few precious Holy Books of History. Metal. Not the simply foundered tools they used at University, oh no, huge formed metal, poured into casts, liquid, and cooled and polished by other pieces of metal.

But this! He never imagined! The metal was so smooth and shining, he could watch himself watch himself, see the rippled cheeks and full brown beard, the hand he reached out with, brushing the wonder of the surface. In the middle of the disk, almost obscured by the rock upon which it rested, was another circle, this one hollow. Just a thick tube that went round, with spokes emanating from its center. His breath feeling like a thin burning flame, he stood away from the disk. Might there be more artifacts here? Might this be some hidden repository, unsettled by the shifting of the earth?

To the left of the disk, about a hundred yards away, was a hole in the ground. It was distinguished by its almost perfect roundness, like that of the disk, contrasting with the harsh geometry of the stones.

He knelt at its edge and was drawn by its soft darkness. He rubbed his hand inside the lip. Smooth coolness. Metal, more metal. The hole was a shaft, lined with metal and disappearing into the earth, the light swallowed whole. His fingertips traced the edge of it, about ten inches down, as his knees shuffled around it. Directly across from where he started, he encountered two thick metal poles aimed down into the shaft and, across them, a crosspiece. A ladder. A ladder.

He ran over the broken land to where the mule still contentedly rummaged in the fern. From the largest pack on her flank, he dug out a lantern, and a flask of extra oil. The oil was precious, to be used sparingly, but he didn't know how long he would be in the hole in the ground. A coil of rope and a bag of dried food completed his supplies. Before he turned away, he spoke softly to the mule.

"Rebecca Smith, I go now on a journey. If I see you not again, speak kindly of me, as I will of you." He spread some oats on the ground and untied her lead. At least she'll be able to find water if he didn't return, he thought. The mule, unblinking, nosed the oats.

-*-

The long journey down the shaft ended in a room. A room lined with metal, what riches! What repository of history this must be! The room was small and smelled faintly of oil, and of the new earth that had tumbled down the hole and collected in small piles at his feet. He cleared his throat and was startled by the strength of the echo, his cough coming back to him then behind him then surrounding him.

A heavy door, also metal, bisected one wall. On its face was the same type of tubular circle as that on the back of the disk above. He put the lantern on the floor next to his rope and supply bag and grasped the circle. He pulled, but the circle would not budge. He planted his feet firmly against the base of the wall and pulled until the blood rushed in his ears and his heart threatened to explode in his chest. To get so far, so close, then to not be able to breech the crypt!

He stood back from the door, studying the circle. There was something, something he had read. His mind turned the problem over and over. There was something. He grasped the circle and twisted. It moved! He twisted more, hand over hand twelve revolutions and from around the edge of the door came a hissing, a rush of air - in or out? He couldn't tell. He lay his face against the opened seam and sniffed. Nothing. He felt his beard tugged toward the crack. The air must be drawing inward, he thought.

He pulled on the door. The current got a little stronger, but not unpleasant, sort of like a good healthy autumn breeze playing in the trees. And then it diminished and he was able to pull the door back all the way. The door was at least ten palm-widths thick. From its weight, he supposed it was not only covered with the silvery metal, but metal through-and-through, or metal over that dense looking grey rock from above.

Excitement thickened his chest, coagulated his throat. He was sure this was a crypt of pre-Collapse history, untouched through the four hundred years of man's slow crawling growth up from the ashes of destruction. What secrets this crypt can tell. Could he discover the secret of what had happened in 1490, what had led up to the day when the crypt was sealed from the bitter burning air? And what hope this would give mankind, this knowledge of the past! What glorious knowledge this could be. Man would learn the mistakes, the fatal shifting in the course of history and, therefore, be able to avoid it, be able to extend himself on into the eons, uninterrupted in peace. But how could he do that, he thought, if all the knowledge was kept secret, available only to a few University men? His confusion was profound, and he knew there were many questions yet to come, and, hopefully, answers.

He expanded his chest. The air now smelled faintly of decay, a forest-bottom smell, but not rancid, not unpleasant, just old, very, very old. He gathered up his possessions and walked boldly into the hallway.

-*-

His legs were tired. The long hallway tipped downward slightly. In the ceiling about twenty paces apart, were small caged depressions, in the center of which were round white globes. He guessed they were some illumination device. At the end of the hall, finally, was another door. In one fluid, confident movement, he turned the circle, and this door, too, cracked open, sucked in air, more strongly, then acquiesced, then swung open, outward, at his tugging and pulling.

As he extended his lantern into the opening, his breath caught in his throat. It was a huge room, high ceilings and perfectly square. Openings bare of doors spilled from each of the three walls, the door he had just walked through split the forth wall. Furniture, soft and smooth looking, upholstered in a shiny brown material, was scattered about, flanked by insubstantial tables. The smell of dusty age was stronger in here, but, again, not unpleasant to his nose. It smells like the holy library, he thought, and was once again elevated by the profound import of having found this room, this house under the ground.

One alcove off the main room was a kitchen of sorts. He did not recognize the shining boxes and surfaces, but there was a sink and what looked like a stove, yet seemed to have no firebox, nor any open burners. Two large doors, light, with a glossy whitish finish, opened into a room much like the pantry at the University's domestic building where the scholar and scribes lived, the Keepers, and the Dean. Row upon row of shelves, packed with colorful square containers and shiny curved vessels. Large cylindrical containers, brown along the sides and silvery on the top, lined the floor.

The second room was a pallet room, but unlike any pallet room he had ever seen. Opulent and soft, it glowed dimly in the light of his lantern. In a cubicle off the pallet room was a bathing room. Or he supposed it was a bathing room. The furnishings, although odd, seemed shaped and suited to that purpose. In another cubicle was clothing, hanging from strange bent metal hangers, each of which fitted neatly into the shoulders of light jackets and heavy ones, and other vestments, the nature and utility of which were a mystery.

He passed through the main room again, to the last dark opening. The secrets must be in this room, he thought. He had seen no Books, no artifacts, in the whole of the vast, strange house below the ground. His lips traced the shape of his hopes. In here. His lantern broached the darkness.

-*-

 

The powdery remains of the man, or at least he supposed it was a man, draped the chair tucked partially under the big desk. Three walls were lined with books, neatly tucked into shelves, hundreds of books, maybe thousands. His legs felt weak, unable to support his body. He dropped to an upholstered bench, bent forward and rested his head in his hands, the heels of his palms pressed against his eyes. He quieted his mind a moment.

The Books, praise history. The Books. Never had there been so many Books, never. In 400 years of collecting the remnants of civilization, there were perhaps one hundred and fifty books in all of Neor, and those were fragile things, handled infrequently, transcribed onto parchment scrolls under the bent backs of Scribes. But this. Richness beyond imagination. He stood shakily and approached the shelves reverently. His eyes caressed the spines of the books.

The Secret Sharer, Conrad, The Scarlet Letter, N. Hawthorne, Peter Taylor, Price Reynolds, The Med, Eudora Welty, Robert Graves, The Sun Also Rises, Theodore White, Madame Bovary, The Illiad, I Claudius. The words rolled silently in his head. The words meant little, but they had weight and shape and form of their own. He tried one out loud, "Kristin Lavransdatter." What exotic sound! His voice, uttering secret words silent for 400 years, striking a wall, a room of metal, deep under the ground.

He turned to the corpse. And who was this? What man had such riches? And how did he come to be here? He leaned over the desk. On the smooth, burnished surface was a metal implement. A hand grip, a smooth cylinder of metal, blue and cold. It had the look of a weapon, menacing. Next to it was a large-paged book, opened, a writing implement, but not a writing stick, resting in the spine. Spiky letters filled the left-hand page and half of the right. He gently reached for the book and lifted it to him. The man's writing. The regular labor of a Scribe.

-*-

 

He sat in a soft, reddish chair in the study, his lantern on the table, the book balanced on his knee. Its cover was tooled leather, burgundy and rich, smooth. He brushed it with his fingertips, and, breathing deeply, opened it to the first page.

"It is December 25, 2030. I have buried myself in my

shelter, while the world burns."

Remsen paused. 2030? The number must represent something other than a year. Perhaps a time. He read the line again. It was in the format of a date: month, day, year. But it was only 1980, now, today. Had he traveled into some future? And the man had two names. Only domestic animals had two names.

He walked to the bookshelf. The Prince of Tides. He opened the cover, "Copyright 1986 by Pat Conroy." The Book of Lights. "Copyright 1981 by Chiam Potok." He pulled out another, "The Selling of the President." He took it to the chair with him and, tentatively, turned the cover back, and the first few pages, "Copyright 1969, by Joemac, Incorporated." He idly fluttered the pages, his mind accepting and rejecting theory after theory. There was really only one explanation. He had discovered a repository, not of his history, not of his collapse, but of another,

long before it.

He pressed the fingertips of his left hand to his temple. He must not judge too quickly, he must just read. He quieted his mind and once again lifted the journal to his knees.

"I have buried myself in my shelter while the world burns. I, James Hodges, set the world aflame. My family is above. My beloved wife Cloice, and my two darling girls: Melissa, nine, and Charlene. Charlene, fifteen and just flowering, a soft bud of a girl, opening up to womanhood. Lovely, my Charlene is a lovely girl. Was. I must get used to the past. Cloice refused to bring herself and the girls to the shelter. Is my own fault, I cried wolf so many times they ceased to heed my warning. I tried to force them, but Cloice's father prevailed, and time grew short, only a few hours of darkness in which to steal away, secretly. I may be the last man alive on earth."

Remsen's eyes misted with tears. A dull pain nestled up under his collarbone. To think that one was the last man on earth. And Cloice. He ran his finger across the page, retracing the sharp formation of letters, "My beloved wife Cloice ..." He glanced over at the worldly remains of James Hodges, then bent his head once more to the pages.

"I doubt that any man will ever see these pages. The destruction above is too vast, total. On the short-wave I heard the progress of destruction, one city after another, gone, winked out, silent. I followed the holocaust across the world on the map before my desk."

Remsen grasped his lantern and held it high. There, above the desk was the huge map, broad expanses of blue and ochre, beige, with heavy black lines. He set aside the journal and examined the map more closely. There was a single feature not part of the map: a small straight silver stick with a red knob at the top. It pierced a country called New York, a sliver of a finger width away from a dot beside which was the name New York City. Instinctively, he knew James Hodges had marked the location of his warren, his home beneath the earth.

He gazed upon the vastness of the world. Mexico, Florida, Pakistan, Hong Kong, China. So this, this many colored quilt, is what mankind was before the collapse. The words were melodious, as foreign and exotic as those marching across the spines of the books. So much new, so much unknown. None were familiar from his memorization of the ancient texts, the Holy Books: Brazil, Australia, and there, New Zealand. Zealand, a forceful word, a strong word. He imagined this world, teeming with men, a world ablaze with cities and his heart felt spare. To have lost all this, to have destroyed all this.

Beside the world map was a smaller one, apparently a close up of the pinpointed area, because there was New York, and there. His breathing stilled. There, beside a thick red line, was a shield, blue and red, in which was the number 30. He traced the red line from the village called New York, to another village called Albany. Banny. Trail 30. The alchemists were, perhaps right. Four thousand years old, the remnants of the names tumbling down through thousands of years. New York, Neor. Through his time, and James Hodges' times and how many times, over and over, the rising from the burning earth, the imploding, the rising, over and over. Was this then, this disappointment, this hopelessness, the hardest thing to bear?

He returned to the chair, resumed his reading.

-*-

Through twenty-five pages, he followed the lonely journey of James Hodges, and at the top of each page, the number 2030, neatly inscribed, became more and more a certainty of a recorded year in his mind. His finger paused on the pristine page. He glanced at the books lining the chamber and re-read the last paragraph.

"I have collected the best and brightest works of mankind, and assembled them here in this room, in this chamber. I have carefully treated each with a preservative. And, at my demise, the helium, the inert gas, will fill the living chamber to keep whole this legacy." Remsen paused. The wind from the opening of the seal must have been the exchange of gases, helium for oxygen. "If there is some being reading this journal, I beg you, understand you are in the presence of the best and brightest of mankind in the twenty-first century of our Lord. Carefully wrought historical tomes, illustrated texts of biology, physics ... of science, the most sterling and fine users of the English language who have wrought wondrous literature, the brave and adventuresome speculators of the future, flights of fancy, gardens of delight, use them well. Share them."

He had devoted his life to keeping the Books from mankind. A Keeper, a hoarder, a holder of secrets. He had been ignoring a knot of hunger in his belly. He now laid aside the journal and retreated to the main room, drawing a small cloth-wrapped package of beef jerky from his pack. As he chewed the salty meat, he walked to the pallet room. He had noticed some pictures standing, attentive, on an upright chest.

The largest of the pictures was of four people: a woman, man, and two younger women, girls. He paused only momentarily to consider what marvelous painter must have captured such complete, such glossy images, so taken was he with the small family, captured forever from the shoulders up, in a shiny silver frame. James Hodges wore a thoughtful look on his face; this was a serious man, a thinker, and from the fine lines which furrowed his brows and drew down the edges of his mouth, a man who bore much responsibility, many burden. The women were lovely, fair complected with blonde hair haloing their faces, a nimbus of light and softness. Cloice, Melissa, Charlene, he thought. What horrors did you see, there, above, which James only imagined? Another picture of the smallest one, Melissa, he remembered, with what looked like a miniature version of the rangy wild wolves that abided in the mountains, laughter dancing across her young face. A close up of Cloice's face, soft and feathered as if viewed through a mist.

Exhausted, he reclined on the soft pallet. He kept his head turned towards the chest, gazing at the family of James Hodges and he slept amidst a stew of confusing and shattered dreams.-*-

"January 25, 2031. It is a new year. I have spent a month here in the safety of my crypt. With only one belly to feed, and one set of lungs to satisfy, the food, water and air will last over 30 years. How could I possibly exist that long in silence, the loneliness so severe every minute is a chant against self-destruction? I try to remember my home, my family, and all I can command, the only image I can bid rise is that of snow falling in the courtyard before my house, and, in my imagination, of ashes upon that snow. I fear I have already left the past behind. And without that, what am I?"

Indeed, Remsen thought, what is any man without his past? His dream of two nights ago leapt back into his mind and he felt a glimpse of understanding, of the division between science and history, the chasm man created in a whole universe, each separate and righteously zealous against the other. Man would never progress sundered so. Compromise, he thought.

"I fear I am losing my mind to the loneliness." The page fell over and onto the others like the heavy petal of a rich flower. More days of James Hodges' life visited Remsen's mind and the pages, one by one, turned in upon themselves.

He browsed the library, selecting a few books to place in his satchel, not for the University, he resolved, but for all. He wanted young people to marvel at the magic of The Once and Future King. He wanted young men's minds to burn in arguing the philosophies and politics of Kant, of Lenin. He wanted some to dream, along with Ray Bradbury. History, a biology text, there would not be enough room to carry all he wanted to. But he'd find a way to reseal the chamber, and he would return, or those after him, to spread the riches of such words. He lifted a volume of Shakespeare's comedies, and read out ringing, to the body of James Hodges, "How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here we will sit and let the sounds of music creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night become the touches of sweet harmony." He tucked the volume in his bag.

He came to know James Hodges through his library, his possessions, the small intimate secrets tucked into drawers and closets. He breathed the man. Yet, there was some part of him missing from his understanding. What part did he play in the world, what burdens did he carry? His most read books in the library were clear. The Selling of the President, one of the books he had laid beside the chair, was well-worn and soiled. The book puzzled Remsen, a troubling story, a dark tale of fiction. One page describes something called a commercial, a political announcement, evidently broadcast over some invisible wire in the air, seen and heard by millions of people. While pictures of wounded soldiers and indigenous peoples flashed on a type of screen, the villain of the story, RN, spoke of an honorable end to the war in Vietnam.

-*-

For the past few days, Remsen had become heavy, gravid in his knowledge. He read voraciously of the library, glancing from time to time at the journal, the last few pages unturned. He had climbed above-ground several times to check on Rebecca Smith, and to empty his packs of foodstores so he could fill them with Books. He had been here, in this house underground, for eight days. It was time to leave.

In the dim light from his lantern, he again rested the journal on his knees. He did not want to read of the last days of this strange man, this man who had preserved such a rich legacy for mankind.

The implement on the desk was a gun, James Hodges had written, a weapon with which he would end his life, end his suffering, after he wrote the final words in his journal, his handwriting tight and crouched, the sharp spikes of his letters worn down smoothly, rounded, hunched over.

"On this side lay Scylla, while on that, Charybdis in her terrible whirlpool was sucking down the sea. I predict that whatever man reads this will be faced with his own Scylla and Charybdis, his own dreadful alternatives. And may feel his choice has no impact except on himself. This is dreadfully untrue. Each thing that each man does, from laborer to President, affects many men, and those many men, in turn, each affect many more men, and so on and so on, rippling through time. I have made my own choice. I have murdered the world. I can only leave behind this legacy of knowledge, this history of words, in the hopes that it will help some future man influence a brighter and better future for Earth.

 

James Emerson Hodges

President of the United States of America"

January 25, 2031