“Anything that’s not on fire. No Baked Alaska!”
He grew solemn. “You know, Cadence your thing with fire. You can’t take vengeance on a thing. Fire, wind, day and night. They are just dumb things.”
She listened but, deep down, she didn’t buy it. Fire was the enemy. A monster that stalked her. If she could, if she had the courage, she would one day confront that monster.
Os kept on talking. “OK, the fun’s over. At stake here is nothing less than the fate of each of the guests, good Professor Tolkien excepted, bless his soul. That means you, Cadence. You cannot stay. The more you seek to help Ara, the greater your danger. You must leave tomorrow.”
“All right, I’ll go. Just as soon as you finish the translations. There aren’t many pages left. Don’t you want to know what happens to Ara?”
“I’ve learned to be cautious about seeking our fates. But so be it. And for you, no wondering around alone in the subways. If something bad happens before I finish, you must leave immediately. Agreed?”
“Check.”
BOOK III
We lack the word for it, the lost tale that takes us into a deepening place where no steps can be retraced.
The human word is but a battered timbale, beating out patterns fit for making bears dance.
O! for a Muse of Fire!
Chapter 30
DETERIORATION
From Silicon Blog, Timespan:
Loss is the handmaiden of human archives. Ancient documents come and go. In the end, like most things, all are doomed. The culprit isn’t a dark overseer or a conspiracy. It’s water, the great solvent that allows us to exist, and which dissolves all.
Other natural forces, of course, also intervene to destroy our archives. Fire, earthquake, mold and insects do their fair share.
Our digital information is eroding from cosmic rays, solar flares, and quantum indeterminacy far faster than stone carvings fade. This is not to mention technical obsolescence and the stranding of vast content in archaic hardware and unlockable digital codes.
Alongside these, human folly is never to be underestimated. Things just get lost. Or consider that the greatest library ever assembled, containing originals from the hand of Aristotle and other giants of intellect and art, was at Alexandria in Egypt. It was put to the torch by an overzealous bishop. There you go.
All we have from the past is a declining base of information. The point of the lesson is humility. Never trust a history to be the only story.
Chapter 31
INKLINGS VIII
The sounds of greetings and bustling, overcoats thrown aside, and chairs pulled up.
“Tollers! You return looking hale and refreshed. Was it absence from our witticisms that was so good to you?”
“Yes, that and more. Since you ask, I do feel invigorated since my little adventure to America. Relieved and unburdened, I should say. Able to look forward and see farther all at once.”
“Well, we missed you. Our topic last week was the de-foresting in the highlands. Another old-growth grove once protected on an estate. All under the axe.”
“But first, a toast to your safe return.”
Cries of “Hear, hear!” An amiable clanking of beer glasses.
“Alas, to trees, men are infernal. They fulminate and pollute and heat the world. They hack away whole forests. For this, why should trees see men as better than orc-kind?”
“You may think that a tragedy, as one of many you have seen, but is not the loss, once perceived, at least the affirmation that it was? What if it never existed at all?”
“Ansel, your mind is a wind-up toy, all whirrs and wheels but not sure where it’s going.”
“I’ll go with Ansel. Better than knowing and have no whirrs to get there!”
Groans around the table.
“You should listen to Tollers and Jack. They never stop testing the boundaries between the real and what you Victorians call the Realm of Faerie, the mind-state of imagined worlds. They would say there’s just one step, onto a road, perhaps through a hidden gate, and you’re there. Have I got that right?”
“Pretty much. There are indeed many worlds. This one is ours. But it’s all a tale and tales change backwards and forwards. Life is an interweaving of tales lived, thought, told, heard, scoffed, and believed. A summing up. Or a hiving off. Ah, but here’s the thing damnable and divine. It’s in the seams that the truth lies. That which intricately binds it all together in ways we can’t imagine how to imagine. That’s the wonder. That someone, something, somehow knows and tells our tales. We hope so, but we can’t be sure. So we have to tell them ourselves, all the time. Backward and forward and reassembled. Unravel a tale and much more may be lost and gained than just some quaint fiction. There is no end, and all tales are one, and people should never forget this.”
“Unless the worst of fates overtakes a tale.”
“And what might that be?”
“Erasure.”
A moment of silence.
“I suppose you’re right. Life comes and goes. Death is common to all, and our fate is to be stalwart before it. But elimination from the very Tree of Tales?”
“As if you never existed?”
“You’re right, that is a terrible fate for a story.”
“Tollers, you’re quiet for one who prides himself on retrieving stories.”
“Yes, well, I’ve seen forces that would inflict such a cruelty and seek, as you put it, to erase a tale and its heroine.”
“I thought you didn’t find many true heroines in your discovered mythology?”
“Aye, but there was one, and she may yet survive if my strategy works.”
“And what is that?”
“Let her, and her tale, hide for long awhile.” “But who will bear witness for her, if not you?” “That role was denied to me by forces I shall not speak of here. But you are right, nothing exists except by witness. And to a great tale we all bear witness, and the meter of truth is told in our hearts. Who then is the last and the first witness, between which all else bounces?”
“Bounce that extra pint over here.” “So are you going to complete your other writings?” “I doubt it. My major books are done. Even those would have been fated to oblivion had Stan Unwin, my editor — you’ve all met him — had not given his ten year old son the first manuscript. Raynor gave it a jolly good review. There’s a bit of seams and joinery for you. Anyway, there are other steps to take, perhaps the children for the father. Perhaps for others.” “But what about this mysterious cache of writings?” “My work on those documents of antiquity, delivered to me in the night long ago, has ceased. I long suspected their most recent history, that they were the very documents buried away by S.I.S. before the war. My doorstep was but one stop in the long, desperate journey of these fragments. Now they have traveled on. I’ve rid myself of them. They are across the sea, in America. They exist and they have a destiny, but not one in which I play a further role. They are the lost tale we just spoke of, whose heroine some would erase forever. And yet … by the valiant hand of some witness as yet unknown, that heroine may still survive. I hope so.”