Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt Read online

  The color drained from Chaney’s face, and it took on a pallor that was almost ghastly in the lurid light.

  “He believed,” I continued, “he really believed that mind equates to morality, intelligence to compassion. And what did he find after a lifetime? A civilization that had conquered the stars, but not its own passions and stupidities.”

  A tall young waiter presented himself. We ordered port and pasta.

  “You don’t really know there’s a war going on out there,” Chaney objected.

  “Hostility, then. Secrecy on a massive scale, as this must be, has ominous implications. Dickinson would have saved us all with a vision of order and reason…”

  The gray eyes met mine. They were filled with pain. Two adolescent girls in the next booth were giggling. The wine came.

  “What has the Decline and Fall to do with it?”

  “It became his Bible. He was chilled to the bone by it. You should read it, but with caution. It’s capable of strangling the soul. Dickinson was a rationalist. He recognized the ultimate truth in the Roman tragedy: that once expansion has stopped, decay is constant and irreversible. Every failure of reason or virtue loses more ground.

  “I haven’t been able to find his book on Gibbon, but I know what he’ll say: that Gibbon was not writing only of the Romans, nor of the British of his own time. He was writing about us. Hutch, take a look around. Tell me we’re not sliding toward a dark age. Think how that knowledge must have affected him.”

  We drank silently for a few minutes. Time locked in place, and we sat unmoving, the world frozen around us.

  “Did I tell you,” I said at last, “that I found the reference for his inscription? He must have had great respect for you.” I opened the book to the conclusion, and turned it for him to read:

  The forum of the Roman people, where they assembled to enact their laws, and elect their magistrates, is now enclosed for the cultivation of potherbs, or thrown open for the reception of swine and buffaloes.

  Chaney stared disconsolately at me. “It’s all so hard to believe.”

  “A man can survive a loss of faith in the Almighty,” I said, “provided he does not also lose faith in himself. That was Dickinson’s real tragedy. He came to believe exclusively in radiotelescopes, the way some people do in religions.”

  The food, when it came, went untasted, “What are you going to do, Harry?”

  “About the Procyon text? About the probability that we have quarrelsome neighbors? I’m not afraid of that kind of information; all it means is that where you find intelligence, you will probably find stupidity. Anyway, it’s time Dickinson got credit for his discovery.” And, I thought, maybe it’ll even mean a footnote for me.

  I lifted my glass in a mock toast, but Chaney did not respond. We faced each other in an uncomfortable tableau. “What’s wrong?” I asked. “Thinking about Dickinson?”

  “That too.” The candle glinted in his eyes. “Harry, do you think they have a SETI project?”

  “Possibly. Why?”

  “I was wondering if your aliens know we’re here. This restaurant isn’t much further from Sirius than Procyon is. Maybe you better eat up.”

  THE FORT MOXIE BRANCH

  A few minutes into the blackout, the window in the single dormer at the top of Will Potter’s house began to glow. I watched it from across Route 11, through a screen of box elders, and through the snow which had been falling all afternoon and was now getting heavier. It was smeary and insubstantial, not the way a bedroom light would look, but as though something luminous floated in the dark interior.

  Will Potter was dead. We’d put him in the graveyard on the other side of the expressway three years before. The property had lain empty since, a two-story frame dating from about the turn of the century.

  The town had gone quiet with the blackout. Somewhere a dog barked, and a garage door banged down. Ed Kiernan’s station wagon rumbled past, headed out toward Cavalier. The streetlights were out, as was the traffic signal down at Twelfth.

  As far as I was concerned, the power could have stayed off.

  It was trash night. I was hauling out cartons filled with copies of Independence Square, and I was on my way down the outside staircase when everything had gone dark.

  The really odd thing about the light over at Potter’s was that it seemed to be spreading. It had crept outside; the dormer began to burn with a steady, cold, blue-white flame. It flowed gradually down the slope of the roof, slipped over, the drainpipe, and turned the corner of the porch. Just barely, in the illumination, I could make out the skewed screens and broken stone steps.

  It would have taken something unusual to get my attention that night. I was piling the boxes atop one another, and some of the books had spilled into the street: my name glittered on the bindings. It was a big piece of my life. Five years and a quarter million words and, in the end, most of my life’s savings to get it printed. It had been painful, and I was glad to be rid of it.

  So I was standing on the curb, feeling sorry for myself while snow whispered out of a sagging sky.

  The Tastee-Freez, Hal’s Lumber, the Amoco at the corner of Nineteenth and Bannister, were all dark and silent. Toward the center of town, blinkers and headlights misted in the storm.

  It was a still, somehow motionless, night. The flakes were blue in the pale glow surrounding the house. They fell onto the gabled roof and spilled gently off the back.

  Cass Taylor’s station wagon plowed past, headed out of town. He waved.

  I barely noticed: the back end of Potter’s house had begun to balloon out. I watched it, fascinated, knowing it to be an illusion, yet still half-expecting it to explode.

  The house began to change in other ways.

  Roof and corner lines wavered. New walls dropped into place. The dormer suddenly ascended, and the top of the house with it. A third floor, complete with lighted windows and a garret, appeared out of the snow. In one of the illuminated rooms, someone moved.

  Parapets rose, and an oculus formed in the center of the garret. A bay window pushed out of the lower level, near the front. An arch and portico replaced the porch. Spruce trees materialized, and Potter’s old post light, which had never worked, blinked on.

  The box elders were bleak and stark in the foreground.

  I stood, worrying about my eyesight, holding onto a carton, feeling the snow against my face and throat. Nothing moved on Route 11.

  I was still standing there when the power returned: the streetlights, the electric sign over Hal’s office, the security lights at the Amoco, gunshots from a TV, the sudden inexplicable rasp of an electric drill. And, at the same moment, the apparition clicked off.

  I could have gone to bed. I could have hauled out the rest of those goddamned books, attributed everything to my imagination, and gone to bed. I’m glad I didn’t.

  The snow cover in Potter’s backyard was undisturbed. It was more than a foot deep beneath the half-inch or so that had fallen that day. I struggled through it to find the key he’d always kept wedged beneath a loose hasp near the cellar stairs.

  I used it to let myself in through the storage room at the rear of the house. And I should admit that I had a bad moment when the door shut behind me, and I stood among the rakes and shovels and boxes of nails. Too many late TV movies. Too much Stephen King.

  I’d been here before. Years earlier, when I’d thought that teaching would support me until I was able to earn a living as a novelist, I’d picked up some extra money by tutoring Potter’s boys. But that was a long time ago.

  I’d brought a flashlight with me. I turned it on, and pushed through into the kitchen. It was warmer in there, but that was to be expected. Potter’s heirs were still trying to sell the place, and it gets too cold in North Dakota to simply shut off the heat altogether.

  Cabinets were open and bare; the range had been disconnected from its gas mooring and dragged into the center of the room. A church calendar hung behind a door. It displayed March 1986: the month of Pott
er’s death.

  In the dining room, a battered table and three wooden chairs were pushed against one wall. A couple of boxes lay in a corner.

  With a bang, the heater came on.

  I was startled. A fan cut in, and warm air rushed across my ankles.

  I took a deep breath and played the beam toward the living room. I was thinking how different a house looks without its furnishings, how utterly strange and unfamiliar, when I realized I wasn’t alone. Whether it was a movement outside the circle of light, or a sudden indrawn breath, or the creak of a board, I couldn’t have said. But I knew. “Who’s there?” I asked. The words hung in the dark.

  “Mr. Wickham?” It was a woman.

  “Hello,” I said. “I, uh, I saw lights and thought—”

  “Of course.” She was standing back near the kitchen, silhouetted against outside light. I wondered how she could have got there. “You were correct to be concerned. But it’s quite all right.” She was somewhat on the gray side of middle age, attractive, well-pressed, the sort you would expect to encounter at a bridge, party. Her eyes, which were on a level with mine, watched me with good humor. “My name is Coela.” She extended her right hand. Gold bracelets clinked.

  “I’m happy to meet you,” I tried to look as though nothing unusual had occurred. “How did you know my name?”

  She touched my hand, the one holding the flashlight, and pushed it gently aside so she could pass, “Please follow me,” she said, “Be careful. Don’t fall over anything.”

  We climbed the stairs to the second floor, and went into the rear bedroom. “Through here,” she said, opening a door that should have revealed a closet. Instead, I was looking into a brightly illuminated space that couldn’t possibly be there. It was filled with books, paintings, and tapestries, leather furniture, and polished tables. A fireplace crackled cheerfully beneath a portrait of a monk. A piano played softly. Chopin, I thought.

  “This room won’t fit,” I said, stupidly. The thick quality of my voice startled me.

  “No,” she agreed. “We’re attached to the property, but we’re quite independent.” We stepped inside. Carpets were thick underfoot. Where the floors were exposed, they were lustrous parquet. Vaulted windows looked out over Potter’s backyard, and Em Pyle’s house next door. Coela watched me thoughtfully. “Welcome, Mr. Wickham,” she said. Her eyes glittered with pride. “Welcome to the Fort Moxie branch of the John of Singletary Memorial Library.”

  I looked around for a chair and, finding one near a window, lowered myself into it. The falling snow was dark, as though no illumination from within the glass touched it. “I don’t think I understand this,” I said.

  “I suppose it is something of a shock.”

  Her amusement was obvious, and sufficiently infectious that I loosened up somewhat. “Are you the librarian?”

  She nodded.

  “Nobody in Fort Moxie knows you’re here. What good is a library no one knows about?”

  “That’s a valid question,” she admitted. “We have a limited membership.”

  I glanced around. All the books looked liked Bibles. They were different sizes and shapes, but all were bound in leather. Furthermore, titles and authors were printed in identical silver script. But I saw nothing in English. The shelves near me were packed with books whose lettering appeared to be Russian. A volume lay open on a table at my right hand. It was in Latin. I picked it up and held it so I could read the title: Historiae, V-XII. Tacitus. “Okay,” I said. “It must be limited. Hardly anybody in Fort Moxie reads Latin or Russian.” I held up the Tacitus. “I doubt even Father Cramer could handle this.”

  Em Pyle, the next door neighbor, had come out onto his front steps. He called his dog, Preach, as he did most nights at this time. There was no response, and he looked up and down Nineteenth Street, into his own backyard, and right through me. I couldn’t believe he didn’t react.

  “Coela, who are you exactly? What’s going on here?”

  She nodded, in the way that people do when they agree that you have a problem. “Perhaps,” she said, “you should look around, Mr. Wickham. Then it might be easier to talk.”

  She retired to a desk, and immersed herself in a sheaf of papers, leaving me to fend for myself.

  Beyond the Russian shelves, I found Japanese or Chinese titles. I couldn’t tell which. And Arabic. And German. French. Greek. More Oriental.

  English titles were in the rear. They were divided into American and British sections. Dickens, Cowper, and Shakespeare on one side; Holmes, Dreiser, and Steinbeck on the other.

  And almost immediately, the sense of apprehension that had hung over me from the beginning of this business sharpened. I didn’t know why. Certainly, the familiar names in a familiar setting should have eased my disquiet.

  I picked up Melville’s Agatha and flipped through the pages. They had the texture of fine rice paper, and the leather binding lent a sense of timelessness to the book. I thought about the cheap cardboard that Crossbow had provided for Independence Square. My God, this was the way to get published.

  Immediately beside it was The Complete Works of James McCorbin. Who the hell was James McCorbin? There were two novels and eight short stories. None of the titles was familiar, and the book contained no biographical information.

  In fact, most of the writers were people I’d never heard of. Kemerie Baxter. Wynn Gomez. Michael Kaspar. There was nothing unusual about that, of course. Library shelves are always filled with obscure authors. But the lush binding, and the obvious care expended on these books, changed the rules.

  I took down Hemingway’s Watch by Night. I stared a long time at the title. The prose was vintage Hemingway. The crisp, clear bullet sentences and the factual, journalistic style were unmistakable. Even the setting: Italy, 1944.

  Henry James was represented by Brandenberg. There was no sign of The Ambassadors, or The Portrait of a Lady, or Washington Square. In fact, there was neither Moby Dick, nor Billy Budd. Nor The Sun Also Rises nor A Farewell to Arms. Thoreau wasn’t represented at all. I saw no sign of Fenimore Cooper or Mark Twain. (What kind of library had no copy of Huck Finn?)

  I carried Watch by Night back to the desk where Coela was working. “This is not a Hemingway book,” I said, lobbing it onto the pile of papers in front of her. She winced. “The rest of them are bogus too. What the hell’s going on?”

  “I can understand that you might be a little confused, Mr. Wickham,” she said, a trifle nervously. “I’m never sure quite how to explain.”

  “Please try your best,” I said.

  She frowned. “I’m part of a cultural salvage group. We try to ensure that things of permanent value don’t, ah, get lost.”

  She pushed her chair back, and gazed steadily at me. Somewhere in back, a clock ticked ponderously. “The book you picked up when you first came in was—” she paused, “—mislaid almost two thousand years ago.”

  “The Tacitus?”

  “The Histories Five Through Twelve. We also have his Annals.”

  “Who are you?”

  She shook her head. “A kindred spirit,” she said.

  “Seriously.”

  “I’m being quite serious, Mr. Wickham. What you see around you is a treasure of incomparable value that, without our efforts, would no longer exist.”

  We stared at each other for a few moments. “Are you saying,” I asked, “that these are all lost masterpieces by people like Tacitus? That this”—I pointed at Watch by Night—“is a bona fide Hemingway?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  We faced one another across the desktop. “There’s a Melville back there too. And a Thomas Wolfe.”

  “Yes.” Her eyes were bright with pleasure. “All of them.”

  I took another long look around. Thousands of volumes filled the shelves, packed tight, reaching to the ceiling. Others were stacked on tables; a few were tossed almost haphazardly on chairs. Half a dozen stood between Trojan horse bookends on Coela’s desk.

  “It’s
not possible,” I said, finding the air suddenly close and oppressive. “How? How could it happen?”

  “Quite easily,” she said. “Melville, as a case in point, became discouraged. He was a customs inspector at the time Agatha first came to our attention. I went all the way to London, specifically to allow him to examine my baggage on the way back. In 1875, that was no easy journey, I can assure you.” She waved off my objection. “Well, that’s an exaggeration, of course. I took advantage of the trip to conduct some business with Matthew Arnold and—Well: I’m name-dropping now. Forgive me. But think about having Melville go through your luggage.” Her laughter echoed through the room. “I was quite young. Too young to understand his work, really. But I’d read Moby Dick, and some of his poetry. If I’d known him then the way I do now, I don’t think I could have kept my feet.” She bit her lower lip and shook her head, and for a moment I thought she might indeed pass out.

  “And he gave you the manuscript? Simply because you asked for it?”

  “No. Because I knew it for what it was. And he understood why I wanted it.”

  “And why do you want it? You have buried it here.”

  She ignored the question.

  “You never asked about the library’s name.”

  “The John of—”

  “—Singletary—”

  “—Memorial. Okay. Who’s John of Singletary?”

  “That’s his portrait, facing the main entrance.” It was a large oil of an introspective monk. His hands were buried in dark brown robes, and he was flanked by a scroll and a crucifix. “He was perhaps the most brilliant sociologist who ever lived.”

  “I never heard of him.”

  “That’s no surprise. His work was eventually ruled profane by his superiors, and either burned or stored away somewhere. We’ve never been sure. But we were able to obtain copies of most of it.” She was out of her seat now, standing with her back to the portrait. “What is significant is that he defined the state toward which he felt the human community should be advancing. He set the parameters and the goals for which the men and women whose works populate this library have been striving: the precise degree of balance between order and freedom; the extent of one’s obligation to external authority; the ethical and emotional relationships that should exist between human beings. And so on. Taken in all, he produced a schematic for civilized life, a set of instructions, if you will.”