The Library on the Edge of the Night | Part 1

The first installment of the fiction by Chris Hawkins. For the second installment, read here.

Part 1

i.

The drills thrummed and the sound shuddered, soft yet ever-present, in the pits of Tallis’s ears. This aspect of life on Eleison was going to take a fair bit of acclimatising, but people could acclimatise to pretty much anything if they had to deal with it every day. It had been conveniently absent from the briefing video they’d been obliged to watch all 90 minutes of during the tunnel-flight here. How anyone had ever managed to find 90 minutes’ worth of things to say about Eleison was anyone’s guess, but by the end Tallis felt almost able to call themself an expert on the gloomy little planet. Hard to believe this was once considered an exciting frontier of exploration. People had pretty soon decided that there wasn’t much else worth exploring in the vast empty stretch of space beyond, which people called the Night, and attention had moved elsewhere.  What little interest was left would probably only last as long as the palladium deposits did.

Consulting the map on their shard, they continued to navigate their way through the lines of near identical ugly pre-fab buildings. The kind that only ever came in varying shades of baby vomit and that most colonies divested themselves of within half a century at most.  Eleison was one of the only colonies of its age Tallis knew of that seemed never to have moved on from this stage. Even other unterraformed one-city planets usually tried for a little bit of creativity and variety but Eleison seemed content to stand as a living embodiment of factory settings with a layout that felt like it was designed by a bored accountant on a slow day. This place existed just to do its job and nothing much more than that.  Not for the first time, Tallis groaned inwardly and forced themself to remember that they were lucky to still be employed by the Librarians’ Guild at all after the unfortunate Charlotte Brontë incident. This posting was just something they were going to have to endure for a while. 

The ‘city’ was housed within a small cluster of geodesic bubbles in a barren desert, with a few isolated farmsteads and stations scattered under their own domes further out. Still following the map, Tallis left the large central dome and entered one of the smaller middle ones where the library allegedly was located along with some admin buildings. They turned a corner and were obliged to stop and blink. In front of them was a small, red brick building that reminded them of schoolhouses that sometimes cropped up in ancient picture books. The incongruity of such an archaic structure sandwiched between the ruthlessly modern offices continued to nonplus Tallis until they drew close enough to realise the weather-beaten brickwork was in fact painted on, the quaint little slanted roof was actually just a couple of banners somebody had rigged up over the top, and even the bell tower, if they weren’t mistaken, was cardboard.

A bird-framed woman with a cardigan and a strong local accent unlocked the side door for them after they knocked.

“Well, if you aren’t a bit of manna from heaven for this poor old place,” she observed, appraising them for a second or so longer than was comfortable. “Come in, come sit, the kettle’s not long boiled”.

Rosalyn, as they established her name to be in short order, led Tallis to the impressively tiny staffroom that had somehow made space for a coffee table, a couple of armchairs and counter with the aforementioned kettle, as well as a flash-heater, and water symphonizer. Tea was soon poured, pretty good tea it was as well — “There’s a farm a couple of miles over the western ridge,” Rosalyn informed them — and the pair of them sat in sporadic conversation for around half an hour. Rosalyn was quite adamant about not doing anything remotely adjacent to work until the exact start of their shift — “I get paid from 9.30 and en’t giving anyway any extra minutes of my time for free than I need to,” — and indeed, the moment the clock on the wall ticked over to from 9.39 to 9.30, she made the laborious transfer from the chair to her feet with a groan of “Righto, hands back to cranks, I ‘spose.”

The library proper consisted of one room. Not large by any means but by those same means not tiny. There was enough space for a garish children’s section to dominate one corner and for Fiction, Non-fiction, Computers, Study Tables, Comfy Seating, and the Staff Desk to all occupy the remaining floorspace with no sections encroaching upon each other too obnoxiously.  Tallis noted that the pod-computers were about 15 years behind current models, as opposed to 5-8 years you generally saw in the Core World libraries, and that much of the furniture had the tired look of being held together only by boredom. Rosalyn took Tallis through the fire safety briefing, which entailed her vaguely gesturing to the emergency exits on either side of the room, and then plonked down into one of the two roller-chairs behind the staff desk and activated the adjacent computer’s holoscreen.

“Not many outgoing holds today,” she muttered as Tallis alighted in the other chair and switched on their own screen. “But there's some return crates from yesterday still need doing.”

She fetched these, and they began the process of discharging the contents until, at 10, the front doors automatically unlocked and slid apart, an automated voice, which Tallis was pretty sure was just Rosalyn, announcing that the library was indeed open.

Three individuals who had been waiting outside plodded in, two making their way to different sections of the shelves and the third, a middle-aged woman, approaching the desk where she enquired after the title Daffodil Lies by Geraldine Saltnook.

Rosalyn tapped the request into the keyboard and narrowed her eyes at the screen, “Not on the shelf here, sorry, Enid, but it’s in the system. I’ll put in a request and it might get here in about a month.”

The lady made an inscrutable nod of something between acknowledgement and thanks before shuffling away.

 “Can’t we just print her a copy from the catalogue?” Tallis asked, once she was safely off the premises.

Rosalyn brayed with laughter. “Lord have mercy! You think we get the kind of funding out here? Maybe on – sorry, where was it you’re from?”

“Bunyip.”

“Oh, Bunyip, really? My mum was from Banshee, you know. And I’ve got an aunt on Wendigo. At least I think I do. Haven’t checked in in a while to see if she’s still alive. But where was I now?”

Rosalyn was thoughtful for a few long moments.

“‘Maybe on…’?” Tallis supplied.

“Ah yes. Maybe on Bunyip the libraries get the kind of funding where they can just print fresh books willy-nilly, but not out here. We make do with what we’ve got on the shelves. If you want anything else you have to wait for someone to bring it in. We have arrangements with the Haulage Guild, and the business ships, and what few Spacetrotter vessels come this way. Might take a while for a book to get here but in the end they always do.”

“And people don’t just download ebooks onto their shards?”

Rosalyn laughed again. “The cloud catalogues our branch has access to en’t that much more extensive than what’s here. Licencing fees, you see. And in anyhow, we’ve never gone in much for reading books on our shards here. Couldn’t tell you why”.

They sorted through the remainder of the return crates, whilst Tallis further explained, in something of a rush, how their family were from Oni but had moved to Bunyip around the time of their sixth birthday for their mother’s work, and that Tallis been to all the moons of Mythica since then, though to Vetala only very briefly, before scooting a couple of planets over to attend the University of Hadiqa on Gaia and eventually returning to Bunyip to join the Librarians’ Guild in absence of any other opportunities.

“Seem to have trouble staying still, don’t ya?” was Rosalyn’s only comment on all this. But it was a fair observation.

Nothing much else of any note occurred for the rest of the shift, with only a trickle of further users coming and going. It was easy but dull, and Tallis felt neither sorrow nor relief when the time came for Rosalyn to shoo out the remaining hangers on and lock the place up.

“Be seeing ya tomorrow, Fidget,” said Rosalyn outside once they’d shut the side door. And she strode away from the library without any further comments. Tallis waited a moment or so to give her some time to get a good distance ahead, and then left in the same direction. The days were short at this time of year on Eleison and it was already night-time. The two moons, Doreen and Edna, named for the original Exploratory Guild survey leader’s mothers, promenaded through the eastern sky together. Speckles of stars behind plastered the space around them, including the two brighter specks that must be Agapison and Alexon, the other planets of the Kyrie system. In the western sky, of course, there was nothing. Just the Night. The expansive dark corner of the universe that Eleison and her siblings kept watch over. Tallis didn’t like to look at it, if they could help it. It reminded them of too many things.

Without any rush, they meandered to the flat they’d been allotted. One of several identical cubes, divided into 4 smaller identical cubes, clustered together beehive-style between and opposite several other identical beehive buildings on the same street. They dropped their work bag on the floor of their box bedroom and slumped onto the mattress, checking their shard.

Jephi had still not replied to the last message Tallis had sent her. They had sent it just before boarding the ship on Bunyip. Four days by Central Core Time. Then again, Jephi hadn’t been responding to Tallis’s attempts to engage her even when they were on the same planet. They’d thought their forced relocation millions of miles across space might have prompted her to break her communicatory embargo, but it appeared Tallis had once again neglected to account for Jephi’s skill with stubbornness. Not that Tallis was free from guilt in that respect. That was part of the problem. When stubborn and stubborn were put together, it rarely yielded good results. Tallis switched the shard off with a finger-snap, and slipped a couple of noise-filters into their ears to help reduce the thrum. Sleep ended up slipping over them sooner than they’d expected.

ii.

The next few weeks at the library came in a procession of tricky to distinguish days. Tallis would arrive for work, drink tea with Rosalyn until the shift began, then attempt to keep as busy as they could until the shift ended. All in all, it was much like the work Tallis had been used to doing for the last handful of years. Just reduced. Slower moving, maybe. Eielson Library’s user-base was small but loyal, and perhaps not even that small relative to the population. One elderly woman visited faithfully each day they were open, pushing her hover-walker towards the desk one excruciating pace at the time before enquiring in a sandpaper voice “Have you got the Post please?”, whereupon Tallis would dutifully handover what they’d ascertained to be the more objectionable of the two local newspapers.

On their second Wednesday, an entire class of children descended upon the junior non-fiction section and relieved them of every book they had relating to the Rediscovery of Earth. The weekly knitting club had their usual meeting on the Saturday, allowing Tallis to overhear all the worthwhile latest gossip. Baby Sing-Along sessions ran once a week, usually led by Rosalyn who was able to deliver a surprisingly moving rendition of Humpty Dumpty. It ran by a rhythm, as most libraries did, and Tallis was nowhere near as out of their depth as they’d expected when they got this assignment. In fact, they didn’t think their shoulders had even been so high above water. Not that that meant they felt right here. Not yet. And there was still no answer from Jephi.

 iii.

In the wanderings they’d taken to on their off days, Tallis had discovered that the non-human population of the colony was limited to a kaliite by the name of Righteous Indignance and a wihumayk who insisted on being referred to as ‘George’. They together staffed the rather ramshackle Non-Human Embassy that idled in its own bubble on the most nondescript edge of the city. By a month or so in, it had become Tallis’s habit to drop in on them on a regular basis. Righteous Indignance’s fluency in Standardised Human Sign Language allowed for far more fluid conversations than they were used to with members of his species and George had a fondness for quoting human comedy broadcasts, and particularly filthy ones at that. Tallis was given to understand that a badly-timed joke in front of a senior member of the Diplomatic Guild was what had in fact prompted George’s assignment to this embassy.

They had just finished describing to Tallis a sketch from an antestella-era comedy duo called ‘Mitchell and Webb’, curling a sensory feather in mirth and hooting as they did so, when Righteous Indignance asked, quite unprompted, “Do you have a codependent bond with any person, Tallis?” His sign for Tallis was a pinch to the side of the head plus a complicated flick of digits to indicate the purple streak in their hair. Tallis was a tad taken aback but used to kaliites, a parthenogenetic species,  having trouble and curiosity when it came to the interpersonal relationships of other beings. 

“I, um, don’t…” they paused, “think so?”

George hooted raucously, “Weird way of saying ‘No’.”

“Well, it’s a difficult issue,” Tallis retorted. “I mean, am I still in a relationship if the other person hasn’t returned my messages in two months?”

“Oh, jeez, I’m not sure, let’s ask the audience, shall we?” said George, extending their front limb and grasper out to some imaginary spectators to their left. “Okay…yes…,” they made a show of flexing a feather, “yes, the votes are in and the audience have said No. It’s No. Definitely No.”

“Alright, alright.” Tallis chucked a piece of dried meat at George who speared it mid-air with the tusk on their rear limb and passed it down to their foot-mouth, still chuckling with hoots.

“Sometimes bonds can weather distance and lack of contact,” observed Righteous Indignance. “I still feel strongly bonded to many individuals I have not corresponded with for a long time. And they to me.”

Tallis grimaced. “Feeling bonded and being bonded aren’t always the same thing, though.”

“And even if you are still bonded, it might not be official,” added George. “You can end a relationship with people you still love and care about. Or have it ended for you.”

“Ah, yes, there are rites and ceremonies for the codependent bond, correct? Declarations that must be made to express the bond into existence and likewise be revoked? Regardless of the feelings?”

“You got it,” said George, making a clench-unclench gesture with their grasper that Tallis had taken to be the wihumayk equivalent of a thumbs up.

“Terminology and titles are important for species like mine and George’s,” nodded Tallis. “Well,” they amended, “to different degrees depending on the culture and individual, I guess. And then there’s asexual people and aromantic people, and that’s not cultural, that’s like part of their intrinsic personal makeup. Sorry to ramble. We’re a broad church is what I’m getting at. Well humans are at least.”

“It’s the same with us,” George assured them. 

Humanity had encountered a number of other beings since arriving at Gaia. And, despite the extreme difference in physiology, wihumayks were probably the most similar in how they conceptually approached and processed existence. Kaliites by contrast were slightly more like humans physically, in that they had something not dissimilar to hands and eyes, but had a trickier time finding common ground with them on what being a sapient-being entailed. Righteous Indignance’s sincere interest in understanding alien cultures, added to his language skills, was at least doing some good work to alleviate the awkwardness in this instance. It was easier than talking to a Sing-Ribbon at any rate. Tallis had only done so a handful of times and each of them had left them with a slight headache.

“What was the last thing the person with whom you share or shared this codependent bond with said to you, Tallis?” asked Righteous Indignance after a pause.

Tallis silently signed the exact words in SHSL.

The kaliite blinked two of his eyes. “I have not learned the meaning of some of those words, I regret.”

Tallis smirked and spoke the phrase aloud, allowing the cognitive translators they all wore to interpret for them, prompting a gesture of shock  from Righteous Indignance and another hoot from George.

“Yep,” they said, “you’re definitely single.” 

iv.

A little after noon, on a particularly slow day in the library, the doors swished, and a bearded man in a flat cap plodded in, his gaze fixed on a far corner of the room.

“Hello,” said Tallis, as brightly as the tedium of the day allowed. The man paid them no attention and tramped onward. “Or not, I guess,” they added in a mumble.

Rosalyn glanced up and her eyes suddenly widened. “Oh no, Mr Phillips,” she said, rising to her feet. “Back outside now.”

“Just gonna look at some books. Not hurting no one,” muttered the man, still walking towards the shelves.

Rosalyn bent down, briefly rummaged under the desk, and stood up again holding what looked like an oversized cattle-prod that she wheeled with both hands. “I know full well that you've read the letter, Mr Phillips. You know you’ve still got another month to go before your ban’s up.”

Mr Phillips finally stopped, but stood his ground, eyeing the device. “Bloody ridiculous it is. Violation of my human rights.”

“I’m going to count to 3, Mr Phillips,” Rosalyn said, walking out from behind the desk and stopping a few feet from him as the cattle-prod crackled with electricity, “I’m sure neither of us want you to still be here when I get there.”

Mr Phillips did not move. After a beat, Rosalyn took another step forward.

“Alright, alright Lord, have mercy,” he said, turning and stomping out the way he’d come. “Be writing to the Governor about this, I will though. Disproportionate treatment of a citizen it is. Disproportionate.” 

Rosalyn glared after him until he was safely out of the building, then returned to the desk, stowing the weapon away and continuing to frown at the stationary order form she’d previously been embroiled in.

Mr Phillips’ exit was followed not long after by the arrival of a sturdy individual, no more than an inch or so above 5 feet tall, who strode with a confident gate up to the desk. They had a thick plastering of curly hair, blonde on one side and brown on the other, and the logo of the Haulage Guild pinned to their chest. A placid hover trolley, containing several crates of books, followed behind as they lent over the desk before Rosalyn.

“Y’alright there, Ros?”

Rosalyn looked up, and genuinely beamed. “Olli,” she exclaimed, “Lord have mercy, gotta have been past a year, right? Where the heck have you been?”

“Ah more places than you want to hear me list off,” chuckled the hauler, “I’m a slave to my contracts after all. Lucky for you one of ‘em finally brought me back this way.”

“And what delights have you brought the people of Eleison?” asked Rosalyn.

“The usual; flash-meals, work-clothes for the miners, some tacky shit for your shops to sell.”

“Oh what bounties we have rained on us. Praise be to the benevolent guilds.”

Tallis snorted, prompting Olli to acknowledge them for the first time with a grin and a hauler’s salute.

“But more importantly,” they continued, “I had room to bring along a few books from Quetzalcoatl that I think you’ve been waiting on for a while. And, try not to love me too much, I even managed to wrangle a stopover at Itis, and picked up a few there, just because I’m nice.” 

“You’re pure palladium, Olli, you really are,” said Rosalyn, her voice still its usual dry self but somehow faintly sunnier than Tallis had yet heard.

“Tried reading a couple of these wihumayk books,” said Olli as they lifted the crates onto the desk, “couldn’t make head nor tail of the writing, truth be told.”

“They’ll be for George at the embassy, I expect,” said Tallis inspecting the small pile of oddly shaped volumes and judging the topmost, by its cover image, to be a translation of a Billy Conolly work. George’s taste tended to be pretty ancient.

“This here’s Tallis, Olli,” Rosalyn put in. “They’re new. Well, -ish. Settling in pretty good, I’d say.”

“Ah, I thought you must be,” said Olli, pulling a package wrapped in yellow paper from the last crate, “this here’ll be for you then.” And they dropped it in front of Tallis. It looked a little battered and, now Tallis looked closer, was patterned with faint blue butterflies. “Picked that up on Itis too. Seems to have been going around the houses a bit to get here, coming all the way from Bunyip I think.”

Tallis turned the parcel over and read the address neatly inscribed across the front:

‘Tallis Okino, Eleison Library, Eleison.’

Even before seeing Jephi’s handwriting, Tallis had recognised her style in the wrapping.  They thanked Olli and stowed it in their bag in the staff room, passing the rest of the shift in a distracted haze. Back at the flat, sat cross-legged on the bed, they differed for a long while before swallowing and tearing the parcel open, prepared for the worst but having no idea what they expected the worst to be.

 A teddy bear fell out. Small, fluffy, pink, and even more battered than the parcel that had contained it, the bear laid on its side on the bed, staring towards the wall with bland cuteness.

“Sa-, Sakura?” asked Tallis with a surprise that was immediately replaced by embarrassment over talking out loud to a stuffed animal. But, stupid as it was, they knew this bear. Would know her anywhere. How often had they seen her comfortably arranged on Jephi’s bed or shelf? Maybe, she wasn’t as shiny and pretty as the day five years ago that Tallis had miraculously won her in that fun fair game. But this was still the same Sakura Bear.  She’d smelt of cherries back then. Jephi had nearly gone to pieces over how cute she was. It had been a real clincher for their first date. Tallis just looked at the bear for somewhere near a minute before noticing there was a small card wedged in-between her front paws.  They hesitated again, uncertain if they wanted to see what was written on that card. Then curiosity slammed trepidation to the side and Tallis snatched it up. The card read:

‘Please do not message or otherwise contact me again.

Will not be replying.

All the best,

Jephi.’