Clarkesworld Issue 36 Read online

  “You said it had self-volition. And that it spoke to you. So what other conclusion should I draw?”

  “And if you’re wrong?” I said and hated how near to sullen I sounded.

  “Then I’ll throw the damn books in the furnace myself. But I’m not wrong. The only question is, how do you convince it to talk to you?”

  “It is not necessary,” said a new voice, and even if it had not spoken in Latin, I would have known it to be White Charles, for it was a new voice in the most fundamental sense of the word, harsh and dull and not in the slightest human. It had spoken from inside the boiler room; Achitophel Bates turned and pushed the door all the way open and I saw why.

  White Charles had abandoned its first body and built itself a second one out of newspaper and scrap lumber and an assortment of Achitophel Bates’ tools. Where I had gathered only impressions of that first body, I saw this one all too clearly, slumped and strange, as if it could not quite remember what a human body felt like. Its hands were enormous, with screwdrivers and socket wrenches for fingers, its head no more than a suggestion, a lump between the hulking shoulders.

  I thought, distantly and quite calmly, that if it did intend evil, we were all doomed.

  But, “Audivi,” it said. I heard. “You do not wish to command me?“

  “No,” I said. And then I realized that by speaking in English, the language in which White Charles had been given the name it hated, I was belying myself. I groped after my Latin; I read it fluently, but had not had to attempt composition since I graduated from Brockstone School. “I do not,” I said finally, haltingly — although at least in these circumstances I had an excuse for my habitual hesitations and stammers. “I want no one to be hurt.” Clumsy, but my meaning should be clear.

  There was a silence long enough that I began to believe that self-assessment had been rankest hubris, but then White Charles said, “I do not want to hurt.“

  I thought, suddenly and painfully, of the creature in Mary Shelley’s novel, which had not done evil until it was taught that evil was all it could expect, and which had yet been so horrible of aspect and origin that it was never offered anything else. Certainly, White Charles was horrible — the ghost of a Hand of Glory — but that horribleness was not the fault of the intelligence which animated its scavenged bodies. Like Frankenstein’s creature, it had not asked for the parody of life it had been given, and although, whatever my sins, I was not Victor Frankenstein, I had an obligation not to perpetuate evil for its own sake.

  “What do you want?” I asked it, as I had asked it before, but this time I asked in awkward Latin, and this time White Charles stood and answered me, if not face to face — for indeed it did not exactly have a face — openly. “I want freedom.” It made a strange gesture with the massive armatures of its hands and said, “I want freedom from this.” Iste. This itself, and very emphatically.

  “The body?” I said, guessing both at its meaning and at the right word.

  “It is not correct,” said White Charles.

  “I don’t understand.“

  “That a ghost of a Hand of Glory should exist. It is not correct. It is not right. I do not want to be this thing.“

  “What is it saying?” Achitophel Bates said in an undertone.

  “It says it wants to be free of being what it is,” I said, which was a syntactic nightmare but — I thought — substantially accurate.

  “It wants you to kill it? That’s awfully convenient.”

  The irony and skepticism in his voice made me flinch, but I swallowed hard and said, “It understands English. If I were lying, it would know.” And I looked, rather desperately, to White Charles.

  “Verax,” it said. And then slowly, and as if it were actually painful to it, “Truthful.”

  “But how can you want that?” Achitophel Bates demanded, almost angrily. “How can you want to die?”

  “I was not meant to live,” White Charles said in Latin, and I translated. “I am not a living thing enslaved, but a dead thing . . .” Another of its strange gestures, which I thought perhaps meant it could not find a word to express its meaning. “A dead thing called into life to be a slave. It is not the same.“

  “Frankenstein’s creature was a new life created out of death,” I said, half to myself, “but that’s a poet’s conceit.”

  “Sum mors vetus,” said White Charles. I am old death. “I am death that was never alive.“

  “The ghost of a Hand of Glory,” I said. “Not even the ghost of the man whose hand was cut off.”

  “You understand,” said White Charles.

  “The ghost of a book,” I said, and only then realized that I was still carrying the entire unwieldy stack of books from Miss Parrington’s crate.

  “So that means we’re burning the books after all?” Fiske said doubtfully.

  “No,” I said, purely on instinct, and was echoed by White Charles’ clamorous voice. There was silence for a moment, as Fiske and Hobden carefully did not ask the next obvious question, and Achitophel Bates stood with his arms folded, waiting to see what I would do.

  “He brought you out of the book,” I said, thinking of that paper body, of the name the creature bore and hated. Then I remembered something else and fell into English because I could not think of the Latin words quickly enough. “No. He called you out of the book. Called you and bound you and feared you so greatly that no binding could ever be enough.”

  “He bound me to murder at his command,” said White Charles, “and he was not wrong to fear what I would do if the binding failed.“

  I did not, I decided, want to know anything more about the antiquarian or his death. I found my Latin again and said, “If you were called out of the book, you must go back into the book.“

  White Charles said again, “You understand,” and although its voice was not expressive, I thought the emotion in it was relief.

  Achitophel Bates was still angry, although I could not tell whether his anger was directed at me or at White Charles or at something else entirely. But he came with us to the rotunda, as did Fiske and Hobden, and watched disapprovingly as I opened the antiquarian’s books and used them to lay out a rough circle, with the Carolus Albinus in the center. White Charles also watched, its low-slung head turning minutely to follow my progress.

  My circle was somewhat cramped because of the Foucault’s pendulum, but this was the largest open space in the museum that did not also contain a host of valuable objects. It would have to do.

  Abruptly, Achitophel Bates blocked my path. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  “More or less,” I said. “Education is, er, not without value.”

  “I never said it was. But my experience has been that the value is in the man, not in what he knows.”

  I was assailed by examples confirming his contention. Learned men — learned persons, I corrected myself, thinking of my colleague Miss Coburn — were just as prone to be selfish, short-sighted, and stupid as anyone else. Or even more so, as the evidence of White Charles itself suggested. It took a learned man to make such a terrible and complicated mistake.

  “. . . I do know what I’m doing. And I, er . . . that is, it’s the right thing to do.”

  “I want freedom,” White Charles said thunderously from the other side of the circle, and Achitophel Bates raised his hands in a gesture of surrender.

  “That word it keeps using. Libertas. Is that liberty?”

  “Yes.”

  “All right,” said Achitophel Bates. “I guess from where he’s standing, liberty and death are the same thing. Not like Patrick Henry.”

  “It, er, is dead. The state it’s in . . . there isn’t a word for it, but it isn’t alive. ‘Awake’ is closer. Maybe.”

  Achitophel Bates was frowning, but it seemed more concentration than anger. “Well, I can’t argue a creature has free will and then argue it can’t choose for itself. As long as you’re sure what you’re doing is going to do what it wants.”

  “As sure as
I can be,” I said.

  He looked at me searchingly, but seemed to accept that I was telling the truth. “All right,” he said and stepped aside.

  I picked up the de Winter and closed it to create a door in the circle and said in Latin, “Step inside.“

  White Charles did not hesitate. Its groaning, grinding body shambled past me to stand over the book in the center of the circle. I stepped into the circle myself, then opened the de Winter again and put it back in its place. I knelt in front of White Charles and opened the Albinus at random. It fell open, as books will, to a page that had been often consulted, adorned in this instance with a Vermeulen woodcut of a grave-robber — not inappropriate in a ghoulish Sortes Vergilianae fashion. I reminded myself not to wonder how the antiquarian had come by his materials.

  I looked up at White Charles. It was still horrific in aspect, a crude approximation of the human form built by something that did not wish to be human, but I was no longer frightened of it. Achitophel Bates was right. When given the chance, it did not choose evil.

  The longest part of my preprations had been working out the Latin; while awkwardness did not matter, imprecision might matter a great deal, and the consequences of using the wrong word could be rather worse than fatal. My words were inelegant, but I knew their meaning was correct.

  “You were called from this book,” I said in simple, careful Latin, “and now I call you back to it. Relinquish this unnatural existence. Rest.” And, although even now I cringed from touching the creature, I reached out and guided one of its screwdriver-fingers to touch the page.

  Around the circle, one by one, the books snapped shut.

  The edifice that was White Charles was perfectly still for a moment; I saw — or thought I saw — something depart from it, and it went from being a constructed body to being simply an amalgamation of metal and wood. It swayed and sagged, and at the same time I realized what was going to happen, the entire thing came down on my head.

  I regained consciousness on the sofa in the Curators’ Lounge with the doubled bulldog visages of Hobden and Fiske staring down at me.

  “You all right there, Mr. Booth?” said one. And I still could not tell one from the other.

  “I, er . . . did it work?”

  “As best any of us can tell,” said the other.

  Everything hurt. My right wrist was made of broken glass. My head was pounding; I felt that if I could observe it from the outside, I would see my temples pulsing like the gills of a fish. “Oh God, the books!”

  I started to get up, but sagged and failed halfway.

  “D’you reckon you ought to have a doctor, Mr. Booth? You’ve got a lump on your forehead like a goose-egg, and you’re not a good color.”

  “I’m never a good color,” I said. “But we can’t leave the books in the rotunda — not to mention the, er, the tools and whatnot. It must be nearly dawn.”

  “Just past it,” said one of them. “But don’t worry. We took care of that part. Although Bates said he’d have a word with you later about his tools.”

  “I put the books back where you found them,” said the other, who therefore had to be Fiske. “Including the fancy one in His Nibs’ office. I may have got some of the others wrong.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. I could not bear it any longer; I reached out with my left hand, caught the material of his sleeve. “Are you Fiske?”

  “Yessir,” he said, though he and Hobden exchanged alarmed glances.

  I squinted to focus, first on his face, then on Hobden’s. They were not identical lead soldiers, after all; they were men. And when finally, reluctantly, I met their eyes, first one and then the other, both frowning and worried, at last I saw. Fiske’s eyes were brown. Hobden’s eyes were blue. And around those eyes, dark and pale, their faces resolved. Nothing changed, for indeed there was nothing in them that needed changing, but I saw them.

  But I looked away quickly, before they could see me in return.

  About the Author

  Sarah Monette was born and raised in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the secret cities of the Manhattan Project. She studied English and Classics in college, and has gone on to get her M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature. Sarah's novels are published by Ace Books; she also has a collaboration with Elizabeth Bear, A Companion to Wolves, from Tor. Her short stories have appeared in lots of different places, including Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Alchemy, Weird Tales, and Strange Horizons. She collect books, and her husband collects computer parts, so their living space is the constantly contested border betwen these two imperial ambitions.

  “Non-Zero Probabilities”

  by N. K. Jemisin

  In the mornings, Adele girds herself for the trip to work as a warrior for battle. First she prays, both to the Christian god of her Irish ancestors and to the orishas of her African ancestors — the latter she is less familiar with, but getting to know. Then she takes a bath with herbs, including dried chickory and allspice, from a mixture given to her by the woman at the local botanica. (She doesn’t know Spanish well, but she’s getting to know that too. Today’s word is suerte.) Then, smelling vaguely of coffee and pumpkin pie, she layers on armor: the Saint Christopher medal her mother sent her, for protection on journeys. The hair-clasp she was wearing when she broke up with Larry, which she regards as the best decision of her life. On especially dangerous days, she wears the panties in which she experienced her first self-induced orgasm post-Larry. They’re a bit ragged after too many commercial laundromat washings, but still more or less sound. (She washes them by hand now, with Woollite, and lays them flat to dry.)

  Then she starts the trip to work. She doesn’t bike, though she owns one. A next-door neighbor broke an arm when her bike’s front wheel came off in mid-pedal. Could’ve been anything. Just an accident. But still.

  So Adele sets out, swinging her arms, enjoying the day if it’s sunny, wrestling with her shitty umbrella if it’s rainy. (She no longer opens the umbrella indoors.) Keeping a careful eye out for those who may not be as well-protected. It takes two to tango, but only one to seriously fuck up some shit, as they say in her ‘hood. And lo and behold, just three blocks into her trip there is a horrible crash and the ground shakes and car alarms go off and there are screams and people start running. Smoke billows, full of acrid ozone and a taste like dirty blood. When Adele reaches the corner, tensed and ready to flee, she beholds the Franklin Avenue shuttle train, a tiny thing that runs on an elevated track for some portions of its brief run, lying sprawled over Atlantic Avenue like a beached aluminum whale. It has jumped its track, fallen thirty feet to the ground below, and probably killed everyone inside or under or near it.

  Adele goes to help, of course, but even as she and other good Samaritans pull bodies and screaming wounded from the wreckage, she cannot help but feel a measure of contempt. It is a cover, her anger; easier to feel that than horror at the shattered limbs, the truncated lives. She feels a bit ashamed too, but holds onto the anger because it makes a better shield.

  They should have known better. The probability of a train derailment was infinitesimal. That meant it was only a matter of time.

  Her neighbor — the other one, across the hall — helped her figure it out, long before the math geeks finished crunching their numbers.

  “Watch,” he’d said, and laid a deck of cards facedown on her coffee table. (There was coffee in the cups, with a generous dollop of Bailey’s. He was a nice-enough guy that Adele felt comfortable offering this.) He shuffled it with the blurring speed of an expert, cut the deck, shuffled again, then picked up the whole deck and spread it, still facedown. “Pick a card.”

  Adele picked. The Joker.

  “Only two of those in the deck,” he said, then shuffled and spread again. “Pick another.”

  She did, and got the other Joker.

  “Coincidence,” she said. (This had been months ago, when she was still skeptical.)

  He shook his head and set the deck of cards aside. From his p
ocket he took a pair of dice. (He was nice enough to invite inside, but he was still that kind of guy.) “Check it,” he said, and tossed them onto her table. Snake eyes. He scooped them up, shook them, tossed again. Two more ones. A third toss brought up double sixes; at this, Adele had pointed in triumph. But the fourth toss was snake eyes again.

  “These aren’t weighted, if you’re wondering,” he said. “Nobody filed the edges or anything. I got these from the bodega up the street, from a pile of shit the old man was tossing out to make more room for food shelves. Brand new, straight out of the package.”

  “Might be a bad set,” Adele said.

  “Might be. But the cards ain’t bad, nor your fingers.” He leaned forward, his eyes intent despite the pleasant haze that the Bailey’s had brought on. “Snake eyes three tosses out of four? And the fourth a double six. That ain’t supposed to happen even in a rigged game. Now check this out.”

  Carefully he crossed the fingers of his free hand. Then he tossed the dice again, six throws this time. The snakes still came up twice, but so did other numbers. Fours and threes and twos and fives. Only one double-six.

  “That’s batshit, man,” said Adele.

  “Yeah. But it works.”

  He was right. And so Adele had resolved to read up on gods of luck and to avoid breaking mirrors. And to see if she could find a four-leafed clover in the weed patch down the block. (They sell some in Chinatown, but she’s heard they’re knockoffs.) She’s hunted through the patch several times in the past few months, once for several hours. Nothing so far, but she remains optimistic.

  It’s only New York, that’s the really crazy thing. Yonkers? Fine. Jersey? Ditto. Long Island? Well, that’s still Long Island. But past East New York everything is fine.

  The news channels had been the first to figure out that particular wrinkle, but the religions really went to town with it. Some of them have been waiting for the End Times for the last thousand years; Adele can’t really blame them for getting all excited. She does blame them for their spin on it, though. There have to be bigger “dens of iniquity” in the world. Delhi has poor people coming out of its ears, Moscow’s mobbed up, Bangkok is pedophile heaven. She’s heard there are still some sundown towns in the Pacific Northwest. Everybody hates on New York.