Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt Page 5

  “The human condition,” I said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “He did all this, and no one knows him.”

  “We know him, Mr. Wickham.” She paused. I found myself glancing from her to the solemn figure in the portrait. “You asked why we wanted Agatha. The answer is that it is lovely, that it is very powerful. We simply will not allow it to be lost.”

  “But who will ever get to see it here? You’re talking about a novel that, as far as anyone is concerned, doesn’t exist. I have a friend in North Carolina who’d give every nickel he owns to see this book. If it’s legitimate.”

  “We will make it available. In time. This library will eventually be yours.”

  A wave of exhilaration washed over me. “Thank you,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “That may have been misleading. I didn’t mean right now. And I didn’t mean you.”

  “When?”

  “When the human race fulfills the requirements of John of Singletary. When you have, in other words, achieved a true global community, all of this will be our gift to you.”

  A gust of wind rattled the windows.

  “That’s a considerable way off,” I said.

  “We must take the long view.”

  “Easy for you to say. We have a lot of problems. Some of this might be just what we need to get through.”

  “This was once yours, Mr. Wickham. Your people have not always recognized value. We are providing a second chance. I’d expect you to be grateful.”

  I turned away from her. “Most of this baffles me,” I said. “Who’s James McCorbin? You’ve got his Complete Works back there with Melville and the others. Who is he?”

  “A master of the short story. One of your contemporaries, but I’m afraid he writes in a style and with a complexity that will go unappreciated during his lifetime.”

  “You’re telling me he’s too good to get published?” I was aghast.

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Wickham, you live in an exceedingly commercial era. Your editors understand that they cannot sell champagne to beer drinkers. They buy what sells.”

  “And that’s also true of the others? Kemerie Baxter? Gomez? Parker?”

  “I’m afraid so. It’s quite common, in fact. Baxter is an essayist of the first order. Unlike the other two, he has been published, but by a small university press, in an edition that sank quickly out of sight. Gomez has written three exquisite novels, but has since given up, despite our encouragement. Parker is a poet. If you know anything about the markets for poetry, I need say no more.”

  We wandered together through the library She pointed to lost works by Sophocles and Aeschylus, to missing epics of the Homeric cycle, to shelves full of Indian poetry and Roman drama. “On the upper level,” she said, raising her eyes to the ceiling, “are the songs and tales of artists whose native tongues had no written form. They have been translated into our own language. In most cases we were able to preserve their creators’ names.

  “And now I have a surprise.” We had reached the British section. She took down a book and handed it to me. William Shakespeare. “His Zenobia,” she said, her voice hushed. “Written at the height of his career.”

  I was silent for a time. “And why was it never performed?”

  “Because it’s a savage attack on Elizabeth. Even he might well have lost his head. We have a major epic by Virgil that was withheld for much the same reason. In fact, that’s why the Russian section is so large. They’ve been producing magnificent novels in the tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoyevski for years, but they’re far too prudent to offer them for publication.”

  There were two other Shakespearean plays. “Adam and Eve was heretical by the standards of the day,” Coela explained. “And here’s another that would have raised a few eyebrows.” She smiled.

  It was Nisus and Euryalus. The characters were out of the Aeneid. “Homosexual love,” she said.

  “But he wanted these withheld,” I objected. “There’s a difference between works that have been lost, and those a writer wishes to destroy. You published these against his will.”

  “Oh, no, Mr. Wickham. We never do that. To begin with, if Shakespeare had wanted these plays destroyed, he could have handled that detail quite easily. He desired only that they not be published in his lifetime. Everything you see here,” she included the entire library with a sweeping, feminine gesture, “was given to us voluntarily. We have very strict regulations on that score. And we do things strictly by the book.

  “In some cases, by the way we perform an additional service. We are able, in a small way, to reassure those great artists who have not been properly recognized in their own lifetimes. I wish you could have seen Melville.”

  “You could be wrong, you know.”

  Her nostrils widened slightly. “About what?”

  “Maybe books that get lost deserve to be lost.”

  “Some do.” Her tone hardened. “None of those is here. We exercise full editorial judgment.”

  “We close at midnight,” she said, appearing suddenly behind me while I was absorbed in the Wells novel, Starflight. I could read the implication in her tone: Never to open again. Not in Fort Moxie. Not for you.

  I returned Wells and moved quickly along, pulling books from the shelves with a sense of urgency. I glanced through Mendinhal, an unfinished epic by Byron, dated 1824, the year of his death. I caught individually brilliant lines, and tried to commit some of them to memory, and proceeded on to Blake, to Fielding, to Chaucer! At a little after eleven, I came across four Conan Doyle stories: “The Adventure of the Grim Footman”; “The Branmoor Club”; “The Jezail Bullet”; “The Sumatran Clipper.” My God, what would the Sherlockians of the world not give to have those?

  I hurried on with increasing desperation, as though I could somehow gather the contents into myself, and make them available to a waiting world: God and Country, by Thomas Wolfe; fresh cartoons by James Thurber, recovered from beneath wallpaper in a vacation home he’d rented in Atlantic City in 1947; plays by Odets and O’Neill; short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Terry Carr. Here was More Dangerous Visions. And there Mary Shelley’s Morgan.

  As I whirled through the rice-paper pages, balancing the eerie moonlit lines of A. E. Housman with the calibrated shafts of Mencken, I envied them. Envied them all.

  And I was angry.

  “You have no right,” I said at last, when Coela came to stand by my side, indicating that my time was up.

  “No right to withhold all this?” There was a note of sympathy in her voice.

  “Not only that,” I said. “Who are you to set yourself up to make such judgments? To say what is great and what pedestrian?”

  To my surprise, she did not take offense. “I’ve asked myself that question many times. We do the best we can.” We were moving toward the door. “We have quite a lot of experience, you understand.”

  The lights dimmed. “Why are you really doing this? It’s not for us, is it?”

  “Not exclusively. What your species produces belongs to all.” Her smile broadened. “Surely you would not wish to keep your finest creations to yourselves?”

  “Your people have access to them now?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Back home everyone has access. As soon as a new book is cataloged here, it is made available to everybody.”

  “Except us.”

  “We will not do everything for you, Mr. Wickham.” She drew close, and I could almost feel her heartbeat.

  “Do you have any idea what it would mean to our people to recover all this?”

  “I’m sorry. For the moment, there’s really nothing I can do.”

  She opened the door for me, the one that led into the back bedroom. I stepped through it. She followed. “Use your flashlight,” she said.

  We walked through the long hallway and down the stairs to the living room. She had something to say to me, but seemed strangely reluctant to continue the conversation. And somewhere in the darkness of
Will Potter’s place, between the magic doorway in the back of the upstairs closet, and the broken stone steps off the porch, I understood! And when we paused on the concrete beside the darkened post light, and turned to face each other, my pulse was pounding. “It’s no accident that this place became visible tonight, is it?”

  She said nothing.

  “Nor that only I saw it. I mean, there wouldn’t be a point to putting your universal library in Fort Moxie unless you wanted something. Right?”

  “I said this was the Fort Moxie branch. The central library is located on Saint Simons Island.” The brittleness of the last few moments melted without warning. “But no, you’re right, of course.”

  “You want Independence Square, don’t you? You want to put my book in there with Thomas Wolfe and Shakespeare and Homer. Right?”

  “Yes,” she said. “That’s right. You’ve created a powerful psychological drama, Mr. Wickham. You’ve captured the microcosm of Fort Moxie and produced a portrait of small town America that has captured the imagination of the Board. And, I might add, of our membership. You will be interested, by the way, in knowing that one of your major characters caused the blackout tonight.”

  “Jack Gilbert,” I said. “How’d it happen?”

  “Can you guess?”

  “An argument with his wife, somehow or other.” Gilbert, who had a different name, of course, in Independence Square, had a long history of inept philandering.

  “Yes. Afterward, he took the pickup and ran it into the streetlight at Eleventh and Foster. Shorted out everything over an area of forty square blocks. It’s right out of the book.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “But hell never know he’s in it. Nor will any of the other people you’ve immortalized. Only you know. And only you would ever know, were it not for us.” She stood facing me. The snow had stopped, and the clouds had cleared away. The stars were hard and bright in her eyes. “We think it unlikely that you will be recognized in your own lifetime. We could be wrong. We were wrong about Faulkner.” Her lips crinkled into a smile. “But it is my honor to invite you to contribute your work to the library.”

  I froze. It was really happening. Emerson. Hemingway. Wickham. I loved it. And yet, there was something terribly wrong about it all. “Coela,” I asked. “Have you ever been refused?”

  “Yes,” she said cautiously. “Occasionally it happens. We couldn’t convince Cather of the value of Ogden’s Bequest. Charlotte and Emily Bronte both rejected us, to the world’s loss. And Tolstoy. Tolstoy had a wonderful novel from his youth which he considered, well, anti-Christian.”

  “And among the unknowns? Has anyone just walked away?”

  “No,” she said. “Never. In such a case, the consequences would be especially tragic.” Sensing where the conversation was leading, she’d begun to speak in a quicker tempo, at a slightly higher pitch. “A new genius, who would sink into the sea of history, as Byron says, ‘without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.’ Is that what you are considering?”

  “You have no right to keep all this to yourself.”

  She nodded. “I should remind you, Mr. Wickham, that without the intervention of the library, these works would not exist at all.”

  I stared past her shoulder, down the dark street.

  “Are you then,” she said at last, drawing the last word out, “refusing?”

  “This belongs to us,” I said. “It is ours. We’ve produced everything back there!”

  She looked solemnly at me. “I almost anticipated, feared, this kind of response. It may have been implicit in your book. Will you grant us permission to add Independence Square to the library?”

  Breathing was hard. “I must regretfully say no.”

  “I am sorry to hear it. I—You should understand that there will be no second offer.”

  I said nothing.

  “Then I fear we have no further business to transact.”

  At home, I carried the boxes back up to my living room. After all, if it’s that damned good, there has to be a market for it. Somewhere.

  And if she’s right about rampant commercialism? Well, what the hell.

  I pulled one of the copies out, and put it on the shelf, between Walt Whitman and Thomas Wolfe.

  Where it belongs.

  NOTHING EVER HAPPENS IN ROCK CITY

  Sorry I’m late tonight, Peg, Had to make a trip up to the observatory at closing time. They’re having some kind of party up there and they needed a quick delivery. Ordinarily I would’ve sent Harry but Virginia hasn’t been feeling good so I told him to go home and I went up myself.

  No, not much was happening. They all seemed pretty loud, but other than that it wasn’t very much. Nothing much ever happens in Rock City.

  Oh, yeah, Jamie’s home. Got his degree but no job. Bill tells me he’s decided to be a lawyer. He wants to send him to one of those eastern schools but he’s not really convinced that Jamie’s serious. You know how that’s been going. Me, I think it’d be just as well. We got enough lawyers around here as it is.

  What else? I heard today that Doris is expecting again. Now there’s a woman doesn’t know when to quit. Frank said he’s been trying to talk her into getting her tubes tied. But she’s kind of skittish. Women are like that, I guess.

  No offense.

  Oh yeah, it was a pretty good day. We moved a lot of the malt. That new stuff I thought we’d never get rid of. There was a family get-together over at Clyde’s. You know how they are. Must be sixty, seventy people over there for the weekend. All Germans. Putting it down by the barrel.

  Jake was in today. They’re getting complaints about underage kids again. I told him it ain’t happening in our place. And it ain’t. We’re careful about that. Don’t allow it. Not only because it ain’t legal, either. I told him, it’s not right for kids to be drinking and they can count on us to do what we can.

  We had people in and out all day today. We sold as much stuff off the whiskey aisle as we did all week. We won’t have any trouble making the mortgage this month.

  What else? Nothing I can think of. This is a quiet town. Janet was in. Ticketed somebody doing ninety on the state road. Took his license, she said. Guy’s wife had to drive him home. I’d’ve liked to’ve been there.

  She told me there was a murder over in Castle County. I’m not sure about the details. Another one of those things where somebody’s boyfriend got tired of a crying kid. That ought to be death penalty. Automatic.

  What’s that? What was going on at the observatory?

  I don’t know. They had some VIP’s visiting. We sold a couple bottles of rum to one of them this morning. Old guy, gray hair, stooped, kind of slow. Looked like he was always thinking about something else. Talked funny too. You know, foreign. Maybe Brit. Aussie. Something like that.

  They’re doing some kind of convention up there. Some of them are staying over at the hotel, according to Hap. Anyhow, we get this call about a quarter to nine, you know, just before we lock the doors. It’s Harvey. They want eight bottles of our best champagne. Cold. Can we deliver?

  Harvey told me once they always keep a bottle in the refrigerator up there. But with all these people in town I guess one bottle wasn’t enough.

  Well, to start with, we don’t have eight bottles of our best champagne on ice. Or off. I mean how much of that stuff do we sell? But sure, I tell him. I’ll bring it up as soon as we close.

  I mean, you know Harvey. He won’t know the difference. And I can hear all this noise in the background. The paper said they were supposed to be doing some kind of business meeting but all I can hear is screaming and laughing. And I swear somebody was shooting off a noisemaker.

  Oh, by the way, did I tell you Ag was by today? She wants to get together for a little pinochle next week. I figure Sunday works pretty good. When you get a chance, give her a call, okay?

  And Morrie’s moping around. He won’t talk about it but I guess Mary’s ditched him again. You think he’d get tired taking all that
from that crazy woman. Don’t know what he wants. Ain’t happy when he’s with her and miserable when he isn’t.

  Oh, here’s something you’ll be interested in. Axel dropped a bottle of chianti today. I mean it went off in the back of the store like an explosion. I felt sorry for him except that it made a hell of a mess. He’s getting more wobbly every day. I’m not sure we should be selling him anything now. At his age. But I don’t have the heart to stop him. I’ve thought about talking to Janet. But that only puts it on her. I don’t know what I’m going to do about that. Eventually I guess I’ll have to do something.

  What about the observatory? Oh yeah. Well, there’s really nothing to tell. I took some Hebert’s and some Coela Valley. Four of each. Packed ’em in ice and put ’em in the cooler.

  So when I get there all these lights are on inside and people are yelling and carrying on. I never saw anything like it. It was like they’d already been into something. I mean Harvey and his friends are not people who know how to have a good time. But this other crew—.

  Anyway Harvey said thanks and I wiped his card and he said do I want to stay a while? I mean they were into the bubbly before I could set it down.

  So I say no thanks I have to drive back down the mountain and the last thing I need is a couple drinks. But I ask what’s all the fuss and he takes me over to a computer screen which has graphics, big spikes and cones and God knows what else, all over it, but you can’t begin to tell what it is, and he says Look at that.

  I look and I don’t see nothing except spikes and cones. So then he shows me how one pattern repeats itself. He says how it’s one-point-something seconds long and it shows up three or four different places on the screen. Then he brings up another series and we do the same thing again. None of it means anything, as far as I can see.