Uncanny magazine issue f.., p.4
Uncanny Magazine Issue Four, page 4
Section 4: Taming
Do you remember when you first became a witch? When you unbound your hair or began braiding it in ever–more elaborate and intricate knots, each twist and curl a precisely–placed word in the spell you’d been rehearsing silently all your life, but never had the courage to speak aloud? Do you remember when you abandoned your family—left your wife, your mother, your uncle, your sister, and the twins with their crooked smiles and lightning scorched eyes? When you stopped shaving your legs or started for the first time? When your stretched lips bared your teeth instead of grinning and you learned to run under the moon?
Or was it when you first started to bleed or you finally stopped? When you woke with fire inside you, setting your whole body aglow. Did your bones crack and turn inside your skin? Did you step off a cliff, in front of a train, or from a building when you first learned you could fly? Did they burn you in the road, dig you up, cut out your heart when they learned? Did they hang you and spit on you and drive nails through your feet and into the ground to keep you in your place?
Whatever the truth of it may be, keep it in your mind and in your heart when you embark upon the taming of your house, if that is the method you choose. Open your skin so the house may see these truths written on your bones. Hold them like a sliver of glass on your tongue to remind yourself not to speak. Be still and be silent. Stitch your eyes closed, sit upon the ground with your palms up, your hands open, your hair undone. Learn to hold your breath for seven days.
Do not go to the house. Let the house come to you.
When you tame your house, you are not merely catching a wild thing. You are calling to the house beneath the house and letting it know that it is safe to be whatever it has most yearned to be beneath its skin.
When your house reveals itself to you at last, do not judge it. It is not for you to choose who your house needs to be.
A hut may learn to grow chicken legs and run away to be by your side. A bungalow may be a castle beneath its bricks and aluminum siding. A townhouse may sever itself from its neighbors (a most unpleasant and painful process) and go walkabout, grow a root cellar, sprout towers and bowling alleys, ballrooms and carriage–ways. A mansion may shed its three–car garage and go about wearing its basement game room on its head for all to see. Do. Not. Judge.
A house may be many things before it settles into its final form. Think of these early days as a courtship period. Discuss the weather, local sports teams, your favorite song. Do not bring out paint chips or flooring samples. Do not bring up window treatments, dry rot, or the need for new grout. Do not mention the cracks in her walkway, the creak in his fifth step, the draft that always creeps in through their upstairs window, no matter how tightly it is closed.
Find things that are mutually agreeable. Learn your common ground. You may be surprised and delighted to discover you would both dearly love a feeder in the backyard, filled with peanuts to attract blue jays.
The house is not your antagonist in this process. It is also not your friend. You are each working toward an abstract point in your future, one that may never come to pass. Gain its trust, let it win yours. Accept that you will break its heart one day and be open to having yours broken in return. Prove yourself worthy and make it do the same. Become responsible for one another, because that it what taming something means.
You and your house will be wrapped around each other’s hearts from the moment you walk in the door; the threshold is the bride and vice versa. The house may let you live inside it, but it will live inside you as well: an infinite series of nesting dolls, witch inside house inside witch, growing smaller and smaller until where one begins and the other ends is virtually indistinguishable, even on a sub–atomic level.
Section 5: Breeding and Growing
This method is not recommended.
Many a witch has made the mistake of believing growing or breeding a house to be simply a matter of degrees of separation based on our other methods, a more advanced form of building or taming. They are not the same at all.
Houses are capricious things. Breeding introduces variables on multiple levels, some not immediately (or ever) observable. The most obvious variables (read risks) are recessive genes for weak foundations, a tendency to flooding, or being picked up by tornados and transported to magical lands. Your house may have to live with chronic pain or under the constant threat of an early death due to some great grand-ancestor you weren’t aware of.
Furthermore, breeding a house takes a strong constitution, and the utmost hard–heartedness from a witch. Consider carefully—could you drive iron nails through the skin of a child you held in your arms, even if it was for their own good? Could you lathe its uneven surfaces, replace windows cracked and shingles warped, siding gone out of fashion? Will you be able, when push comes to shove, to look your house in the eye and make these changes, thereby letting your child know you think of it as anything other than perfect?
Another point to consider for the witch who wishes to breed a house: the temperament of a house may not be assumed based on the pedigree of its parents. Carelessly bred houses have been known to turn on their occupants, splinter, snag, or shift at inopportune times. Stairs have been known to loosen when you are only halfway down, your arms full of laundry and unable to see where your foot will land next. Doors have been known to slam before you are all the way through. In some extreme cases, floorboards have been known to give way completely, dropping an unsuspecting witch into a previously non–existent basement level and swallowing them whole.
Genetics are a crapshoot and nature is only half the battle where raising houses is concerned. Remember: a house may be coaxed to lie with a chicken; an egg may be persuaded to grow rooms within the delicacy of its shell, but walking like a chicken and roosting like a house does not a Baba Yaga’s hut make.
The factors mentioned above are only the risks that are most obvious on the surface of the thing. Even savvy witches rarely take into account the feelings of the breeding stock when embarking on the endeavor of bringing a brand new house into the world. There is the potential for resentment or even outright loathing. Termites poured down a chimney, shattered dormer windows, and entire floors thrown off level as tempers rise. Worse still is the opposite reaction, deep and abiding passion growing between the two donor houses. A wild and torrential love affair can be every bit as destructive as a relationship built on mutual hate, if not more so.
There is, of course, the possibility of splicing, grafting, cloning, and in–vitro fertilization. The less said about these, the better. The unwary witch will soon learn that science is every bit as volatile as magic, with results just as disastrous. For a relevant example, see the case of the Stuartville Coven Frankenhouse, which went on a rampage, killing three members of the coven and six innocent civilians before it was brought to heel, unable to reconcile the disparate parts of itself—split–level, shotgun, and ranch—and maddened by the resulting pain.
Which brings us to the option of growth, which is equally inadvisable. There was a witch in Cambridge, MA, let us call her Jane Scribe, who cut off the tip of her finger and buried it deep in the soil. She coaxed the most amazing shapes out of the resultant tree, and her house was a thing of beauty to behold. However, it was only once she had grown delicate arches, spiraling staircases, fantastic chandeliers, and countless rooms like a many–chambered heart that she realized the folly of her ways.
You see, her finger remained a part of her body, even severed, and her body had no desire to be a house. For as long as she dwelt between the walls she had grown, she suffered fits of claustrophobia, agoraphobia, and mind/body disassociation.
Often, on turning a corner, she would come face–to–face with herself, her haunted visage peering out at her from an odd angle between one wall at the next. She was prone to uncontrollable shuddering after even a simple stroll from bedroom to bathroom, haunted by the sensation of her own bare feet walking over her own bare skin. Jane is the primary reason we undertook the third volume in our Practical Guide Series, in specific, the section on Banishment and Dissolution.
Conclusion
In the end, every witch will decide for themselves upon the method of home acquisition that is right for them. As with most matters in life, it is up to the gut, the blood and sinew and bones of a person, not the head. Whichever method you choose, proceed with caution and discretion. Remember: witches have been burned, shot, hanged, and mutilated for lesser offenses than home ownership throughout the course of human history.
Last but not least, don’t forget to visit our website for additional safety tips. And don’t forget to purchase our companion volumes should something go wrong with your new home, which it inevitably will.
© 2015 A.C. Wise
A.C. Wise is the author of numerous short stories appearing in publications such as Clarkesworld, Shimmer, Apex, and the Year’s Best Weird Fiction Vol. 1, among others. In addition to her fiction, she co-edits Unlikely Story, and blogs for SF Signal. Her first short story collection is forthcoming from Lethe Press in 2015. Find her online at www.acwise.net and @ac_wise on Twitter.
Restore the Heart into Love
by John Chu
Fans whirred, forcing hot air laced with beef and star anise into the hibernation pod. The scent was supposed to comfort Max as he warmed up. Instead, it made him homesick. It was another reminder that by the time the Byzantium Library returned to Earth, centuries would have passed.
Max tugged the latch to his left. The fans spun down as the pod’s hatch clicked open. He pushed himself out, leaving the beef and star anise behind. His hands slapped curved walls, propelling him down the ship’s main tunnel. The cold sliced through his overalls and stopped his breath. He was supposed to wait until both he and the ship had warmed up before he left the pod, but he never did. The ship only woke him when its systems needed repair. He’d rather be cold and protect the ship’s archive than be warm and see the archive corrupted.
A terminal jutted out from the wall near the intersection of two tunnels. Adjustable arms mounted the keyboard and display onto the wall. Max rotated to match their orientation. He clipped the carabiners attached to the runners on his overalls into holds on either side of the keyboard. The flat, smooth keyboard configured itself to Max’s preferred layout, QWERTY with a section on the left for Chinese handwriting recognition.
He called up the ship’s logs. The display filled with failures to access the archive. The ship had only managed to generate correct data by combining the corrupted data with redundant error correction bits. Max grimaced. He hated replacing readers. In zero–gravity, their mounting screws floated away from him, getting lost in thickets of cables. All the failures had come from the same part of the archive. The problem had to be a faulty reader rather than in the media.
When his team had designed the archive, they had had good reasons for storing the archive in organic polymer dye–based media. It had a high data density. It couldn’t be over–written. It was immune to alpha particles and cosmic rays. The only reason to read back data at all was to check that the dye remained stable. In theory, it ought to last the length of the trip, but demonstrating that before launch was impractical. Instead, the ship continuously read the archive, checking whether the error correction bits it generated from the data matched the stored error correction bits. As long as the medium remained stable, the two sets of bits had to match. So far, the dye was proving itself more reliable than the readers. The crew had plenty of spare readers though and could repair faulty ones.
The faulty reader lay embedded inside a curved wall in a tributary tunnel. Max grabbed a handhold, stopping in front of the reader’s access panel. The replacement reader floated beside him, tethered by a runner to his overalls. He pried off the access panel. The smell of rotten fruit enveloped him as he reached in. He stopped. The reader was fine. The organic dye wasn’t. It was engineered to decompose into compounds reminiscent of overripe fruit spoiling when it broke down. He slammed the panel back into the wall.
The ship had an alternate archive grade medium. It rendered data in the crystalline and amorphous states of chalcogenide glass. His team had planned to maintain a copy of the archive in each medium, but they didn’t have the funding to build a ship that large. Instead, the Byzantium Library had just the one copy. Max had chosen to use the proven technology, the organic dye, then stuffed the ship with as much blank chalcogenide glass as they could, just in case.
Anchored to a terminal, Max directed the ship to burn the error corrected data into the chalcogenide glass. The list of affected documents streamed up his display. They were all cataloged as traditional Chinese. That was odd. His team had taken care to stripe batches of organic dye across multiple collections. A faulty batch should have affected small portions of many collections, not a large portion of one.
His rib cage locked. For a moment, the ship seemed to darken. Max forced air into his lungs and shook off his fog.
Taiwan had been invaded not too long before the Byzantium Library launched. The project had smuggled their documents out as they did with much of the archive. Those though were among the last. Maybe that was why they all ended up in one dye lot. Any other reason was too depressing to contemplate.
The Byzantium Library project archived the sum of human knowledge, but that hadn’t been its original mission. When Max first joined the project, it’d been focused on deep haul space travel. The mission evolved over time. When the ideology purges started, the project’s researchers stashed away in secret the novels and songs they held dear but didn’t meet the prevailing standards of purity. By the time purges had erupted into the wars that forced them to launch ahead of schedule, they all called the ship the Byzantium Library. Their mission was now to return to Earth everything it chose to forget.
They’d flown into space to avoid the partisanship that had infected the Earth. This failure in the archive though looked like one last hit by China on Taiwan. Max burned the entire traditional Chinese collection onto chalcogenide glass, just in case.
He snuggled inside his hibernation pod. When he locked its hatch down, his world darkened and cooled. Maybe when he revived again, he’d be home.
The summer after his freshman year, Max returned home with his dormmate’s carpet. Too many shoes and too many spilt beers had taken their toll, and his dormmate hadn’t noticed. It was almost the fall semester again before he got around to renting a carpet cleaner.
He pushed the cracked glass coffee table, a scratched couch and several ottomans aside to make space in the living room. The rug was a square of gray smog over the sky blue of the living room carpet.
Thick steam from the carpet cleaner and the harsh pine scent of the cleaning solution warred against the substantial, comfortable smell of beef simmering in the kitchen. He had cleaned the carpet twice before it was plausibly white again. If he hadn’t run out of cleaning solution, he would have cleaned it a third time. The cleaner had whined so loudly, Max didn’t hear his Mom shouting for him until he’d finished.
“Yes, Mom?”
Mom entered the living room. To customers at his parents’ restaurant, she was the kind bookkeeper and cook who gave them free batches of her special hot sauce whenever they asked. To Max, Mom was the woman who patted his hand and told him he could do better next time when he missed a perfect score on his College Board exams by only five questions. He held his breath ready to parse whatever Mom said.
His brow crinkled. Wash… you… no, your friend’s carpet… afterwards… also wash… our… no, ours… how about. That seemed relatively straight forward. He exhaled.
“The cleaning carpet’s water” wouldn’t win any prizes, but it got the message across. Or so he thought. Mom grabbed the cleaning attachment out of his hands. She turned the cleaner back on.
Mom wasn’t screaming just to be heard over the carpet cleaner. She was angry at him. He tried to work out what he heard over the din. You think… you that grr, so amazing. Up big learn… oh, go to college… do not need… listen… you… mom. You think… you… compared to… mom good… no, better than mom. I not up big learn… damn it, go to college… you think… I am… Max gave up. What was left was one of those four character allusions to classical Chinese that any twelve–year–old Chinese kid understood, but left him bewildered.
Max stared back at Mom, trying to puzzle out meaning from her words. Are you a machine? That couldn’t be right. It had to be yet another idiom he didn’t understand. She must have asked if he had another machine.
The disappointment that crossed her face wasn’t “Oh well, I’ll clean the carpet some other time.” It was more like “I have no son.” She turned around, then strode out of the room. Her sobbing was faint, but his stomach dropped with each cry.
The following week at school, he registered for his first Chinese class.
Floating containers of Meals Ready to Eat and spare parts jostled against each other, held back by webbing that bulged out from curved walls and sealed every alcove. The wall panels that no longer fit precisely rattled in sympathy with fans that groaned on and off as Max drifted through each section of tunnel. The noise drowned out his chattering teeth. The beef and star anise smell drifted out of each tunnel vent rather than being confined to his pod. He’d fix that before hibernating again.
The ship needed him more often these past few decades. Readers failed and had to be replaced. Connectors shook themselves loose and cables cracked over time. He repaired his crew mates’ pods and woke to find they had repaired his. Too often, grinding noises came from vibrating pods warm to the touch. All he could do was keep those corpses frozen to bring home. The hibernation system had killed most of the Byzantium Library’s small crew by the time those still alive had successfully diagnosed and fixed it. He had to push that away and focus on the archive though to complete the mission.
The archive was holding up well. That one dye lot had been the only large scale failure so far and Max had copied all of the affected data to chalcogenide glass in time. He’d never been prouder of his team. Their legacy lived on in the Byzantium Library. The ship wasn’t perfect. The last few times he woke, it seemed barely functioning. The archive, however, had remained intact.
Do you remember when you first became a witch? When you unbound your hair or began braiding it in ever–more elaborate and intricate knots, each twist and curl a precisely–placed word in the spell you’d been rehearsing silently all your life, but never had the courage to speak aloud? Do you remember when you abandoned your family—left your wife, your mother, your uncle, your sister, and the twins with their crooked smiles and lightning scorched eyes? When you stopped shaving your legs or started for the first time? When your stretched lips bared your teeth instead of grinning and you learned to run under the moon?
Or was it when you first started to bleed or you finally stopped? When you woke with fire inside you, setting your whole body aglow. Did your bones crack and turn inside your skin? Did you step off a cliff, in front of a train, or from a building when you first learned you could fly? Did they burn you in the road, dig you up, cut out your heart when they learned? Did they hang you and spit on you and drive nails through your feet and into the ground to keep you in your place?
Whatever the truth of it may be, keep it in your mind and in your heart when you embark upon the taming of your house, if that is the method you choose. Open your skin so the house may see these truths written on your bones. Hold them like a sliver of glass on your tongue to remind yourself not to speak. Be still and be silent. Stitch your eyes closed, sit upon the ground with your palms up, your hands open, your hair undone. Learn to hold your breath for seven days.
Do not go to the house. Let the house come to you.
When you tame your house, you are not merely catching a wild thing. You are calling to the house beneath the house and letting it know that it is safe to be whatever it has most yearned to be beneath its skin.
When your house reveals itself to you at last, do not judge it. It is not for you to choose who your house needs to be.
A hut may learn to grow chicken legs and run away to be by your side. A bungalow may be a castle beneath its bricks and aluminum siding. A townhouse may sever itself from its neighbors (a most unpleasant and painful process) and go walkabout, grow a root cellar, sprout towers and bowling alleys, ballrooms and carriage–ways. A mansion may shed its three–car garage and go about wearing its basement game room on its head for all to see. Do. Not. Judge.
A house may be many things before it settles into its final form. Think of these early days as a courtship period. Discuss the weather, local sports teams, your favorite song. Do not bring out paint chips or flooring samples. Do not bring up window treatments, dry rot, or the need for new grout. Do not mention the cracks in her walkway, the creak in his fifth step, the draft that always creeps in through their upstairs window, no matter how tightly it is closed.
Find things that are mutually agreeable. Learn your common ground. You may be surprised and delighted to discover you would both dearly love a feeder in the backyard, filled with peanuts to attract blue jays.
The house is not your antagonist in this process. It is also not your friend. You are each working toward an abstract point in your future, one that may never come to pass. Gain its trust, let it win yours. Accept that you will break its heart one day and be open to having yours broken in return. Prove yourself worthy and make it do the same. Become responsible for one another, because that it what taming something means.
You and your house will be wrapped around each other’s hearts from the moment you walk in the door; the threshold is the bride and vice versa. The house may let you live inside it, but it will live inside you as well: an infinite series of nesting dolls, witch inside house inside witch, growing smaller and smaller until where one begins and the other ends is virtually indistinguishable, even on a sub–atomic level.
Section 5: Breeding and Growing
This method is not recommended.
Many a witch has made the mistake of believing growing or breeding a house to be simply a matter of degrees of separation based on our other methods, a more advanced form of building or taming. They are not the same at all.
Houses are capricious things. Breeding introduces variables on multiple levels, some not immediately (or ever) observable. The most obvious variables (read risks) are recessive genes for weak foundations, a tendency to flooding, or being picked up by tornados and transported to magical lands. Your house may have to live with chronic pain or under the constant threat of an early death due to some great grand-ancestor you weren’t aware of.
Furthermore, breeding a house takes a strong constitution, and the utmost hard–heartedness from a witch. Consider carefully—could you drive iron nails through the skin of a child you held in your arms, even if it was for their own good? Could you lathe its uneven surfaces, replace windows cracked and shingles warped, siding gone out of fashion? Will you be able, when push comes to shove, to look your house in the eye and make these changes, thereby letting your child know you think of it as anything other than perfect?
Another point to consider for the witch who wishes to breed a house: the temperament of a house may not be assumed based on the pedigree of its parents. Carelessly bred houses have been known to turn on their occupants, splinter, snag, or shift at inopportune times. Stairs have been known to loosen when you are only halfway down, your arms full of laundry and unable to see where your foot will land next. Doors have been known to slam before you are all the way through. In some extreme cases, floorboards have been known to give way completely, dropping an unsuspecting witch into a previously non–existent basement level and swallowing them whole.
Genetics are a crapshoot and nature is only half the battle where raising houses is concerned. Remember: a house may be coaxed to lie with a chicken; an egg may be persuaded to grow rooms within the delicacy of its shell, but walking like a chicken and roosting like a house does not a Baba Yaga’s hut make.
The factors mentioned above are only the risks that are most obvious on the surface of the thing. Even savvy witches rarely take into account the feelings of the breeding stock when embarking on the endeavor of bringing a brand new house into the world. There is the potential for resentment or even outright loathing. Termites poured down a chimney, shattered dormer windows, and entire floors thrown off level as tempers rise. Worse still is the opposite reaction, deep and abiding passion growing between the two donor houses. A wild and torrential love affair can be every bit as destructive as a relationship built on mutual hate, if not more so.
There is, of course, the possibility of splicing, grafting, cloning, and in–vitro fertilization. The less said about these, the better. The unwary witch will soon learn that science is every bit as volatile as magic, with results just as disastrous. For a relevant example, see the case of the Stuartville Coven Frankenhouse, which went on a rampage, killing three members of the coven and six innocent civilians before it was brought to heel, unable to reconcile the disparate parts of itself—split–level, shotgun, and ranch—and maddened by the resulting pain.
Which brings us to the option of growth, which is equally inadvisable. There was a witch in Cambridge, MA, let us call her Jane Scribe, who cut off the tip of her finger and buried it deep in the soil. She coaxed the most amazing shapes out of the resultant tree, and her house was a thing of beauty to behold. However, it was only once she had grown delicate arches, spiraling staircases, fantastic chandeliers, and countless rooms like a many–chambered heart that she realized the folly of her ways.
You see, her finger remained a part of her body, even severed, and her body had no desire to be a house. For as long as she dwelt between the walls she had grown, she suffered fits of claustrophobia, agoraphobia, and mind/body disassociation.
Often, on turning a corner, she would come face–to–face with herself, her haunted visage peering out at her from an odd angle between one wall at the next. She was prone to uncontrollable shuddering after even a simple stroll from bedroom to bathroom, haunted by the sensation of her own bare feet walking over her own bare skin. Jane is the primary reason we undertook the third volume in our Practical Guide Series, in specific, the section on Banishment and Dissolution.
Conclusion
In the end, every witch will decide for themselves upon the method of home acquisition that is right for them. As with most matters in life, it is up to the gut, the blood and sinew and bones of a person, not the head. Whichever method you choose, proceed with caution and discretion. Remember: witches have been burned, shot, hanged, and mutilated for lesser offenses than home ownership throughout the course of human history.
Last but not least, don’t forget to visit our website for additional safety tips. And don’t forget to purchase our companion volumes should something go wrong with your new home, which it inevitably will.
© 2015 A.C. Wise
A.C. Wise is the author of numerous short stories appearing in publications such as Clarkesworld, Shimmer, Apex, and the Year’s Best Weird Fiction Vol. 1, among others. In addition to her fiction, she co-edits Unlikely Story, and blogs for SF Signal. Her first short story collection is forthcoming from Lethe Press in 2015. Find her online at www.acwise.net and @ac_wise on Twitter.
Restore the Heart into Love
by John Chu
Fans whirred, forcing hot air laced with beef and star anise into the hibernation pod. The scent was supposed to comfort Max as he warmed up. Instead, it made him homesick. It was another reminder that by the time the Byzantium Library returned to Earth, centuries would have passed.
Max tugged the latch to his left. The fans spun down as the pod’s hatch clicked open. He pushed himself out, leaving the beef and star anise behind. His hands slapped curved walls, propelling him down the ship’s main tunnel. The cold sliced through his overalls and stopped his breath. He was supposed to wait until both he and the ship had warmed up before he left the pod, but he never did. The ship only woke him when its systems needed repair. He’d rather be cold and protect the ship’s archive than be warm and see the archive corrupted.
A terminal jutted out from the wall near the intersection of two tunnels. Adjustable arms mounted the keyboard and display onto the wall. Max rotated to match their orientation. He clipped the carabiners attached to the runners on his overalls into holds on either side of the keyboard. The flat, smooth keyboard configured itself to Max’s preferred layout, QWERTY with a section on the left for Chinese handwriting recognition.
He called up the ship’s logs. The display filled with failures to access the archive. The ship had only managed to generate correct data by combining the corrupted data with redundant error correction bits. Max grimaced. He hated replacing readers. In zero–gravity, their mounting screws floated away from him, getting lost in thickets of cables. All the failures had come from the same part of the archive. The problem had to be a faulty reader rather than in the media.
When his team had designed the archive, they had had good reasons for storing the archive in organic polymer dye–based media. It had a high data density. It couldn’t be over–written. It was immune to alpha particles and cosmic rays. The only reason to read back data at all was to check that the dye remained stable. In theory, it ought to last the length of the trip, but demonstrating that before launch was impractical. Instead, the ship continuously read the archive, checking whether the error correction bits it generated from the data matched the stored error correction bits. As long as the medium remained stable, the two sets of bits had to match. So far, the dye was proving itself more reliable than the readers. The crew had plenty of spare readers though and could repair faulty ones.
The faulty reader lay embedded inside a curved wall in a tributary tunnel. Max grabbed a handhold, stopping in front of the reader’s access panel. The replacement reader floated beside him, tethered by a runner to his overalls. He pried off the access panel. The smell of rotten fruit enveloped him as he reached in. He stopped. The reader was fine. The organic dye wasn’t. It was engineered to decompose into compounds reminiscent of overripe fruit spoiling when it broke down. He slammed the panel back into the wall.
The ship had an alternate archive grade medium. It rendered data in the crystalline and amorphous states of chalcogenide glass. His team had planned to maintain a copy of the archive in each medium, but they didn’t have the funding to build a ship that large. Instead, the Byzantium Library had just the one copy. Max had chosen to use the proven technology, the organic dye, then stuffed the ship with as much blank chalcogenide glass as they could, just in case.
Anchored to a terminal, Max directed the ship to burn the error corrected data into the chalcogenide glass. The list of affected documents streamed up his display. They were all cataloged as traditional Chinese. That was odd. His team had taken care to stripe batches of organic dye across multiple collections. A faulty batch should have affected small portions of many collections, not a large portion of one.
His rib cage locked. For a moment, the ship seemed to darken. Max forced air into his lungs and shook off his fog.
Taiwan had been invaded not too long before the Byzantium Library launched. The project had smuggled their documents out as they did with much of the archive. Those though were among the last. Maybe that was why they all ended up in one dye lot. Any other reason was too depressing to contemplate.
The Byzantium Library project archived the sum of human knowledge, but that hadn’t been its original mission. When Max first joined the project, it’d been focused on deep haul space travel. The mission evolved over time. When the ideology purges started, the project’s researchers stashed away in secret the novels and songs they held dear but didn’t meet the prevailing standards of purity. By the time purges had erupted into the wars that forced them to launch ahead of schedule, they all called the ship the Byzantium Library. Their mission was now to return to Earth everything it chose to forget.
They’d flown into space to avoid the partisanship that had infected the Earth. This failure in the archive though looked like one last hit by China on Taiwan. Max burned the entire traditional Chinese collection onto chalcogenide glass, just in case.
He snuggled inside his hibernation pod. When he locked its hatch down, his world darkened and cooled. Maybe when he revived again, he’d be home.
The summer after his freshman year, Max returned home with his dormmate’s carpet. Too many shoes and too many spilt beers had taken their toll, and his dormmate hadn’t noticed. It was almost the fall semester again before he got around to renting a carpet cleaner.
He pushed the cracked glass coffee table, a scratched couch and several ottomans aside to make space in the living room. The rug was a square of gray smog over the sky blue of the living room carpet.
Thick steam from the carpet cleaner and the harsh pine scent of the cleaning solution warred against the substantial, comfortable smell of beef simmering in the kitchen. He had cleaned the carpet twice before it was plausibly white again. If he hadn’t run out of cleaning solution, he would have cleaned it a third time. The cleaner had whined so loudly, Max didn’t hear his Mom shouting for him until he’d finished.
“Yes, Mom?”
Mom entered the living room. To customers at his parents’ restaurant, she was the kind bookkeeper and cook who gave them free batches of her special hot sauce whenever they asked. To Max, Mom was the woman who patted his hand and told him he could do better next time when he missed a perfect score on his College Board exams by only five questions. He held his breath ready to parse whatever Mom said.
His brow crinkled. Wash… you… no, your friend’s carpet… afterwards… also wash… our… no, ours… how about. That seemed relatively straight forward. He exhaled.
“The cleaning carpet’s water” wouldn’t win any prizes, but it got the message across. Or so he thought. Mom grabbed the cleaning attachment out of his hands. She turned the cleaner back on.
Mom wasn’t screaming just to be heard over the carpet cleaner. She was angry at him. He tried to work out what he heard over the din. You think… you that grr, so amazing. Up big learn… oh, go to college… do not need… listen… you… mom. You think… you… compared to… mom good… no, better than mom. I not up big learn… damn it, go to college… you think… I am… Max gave up. What was left was one of those four character allusions to classical Chinese that any twelve–year–old Chinese kid understood, but left him bewildered.
Max stared back at Mom, trying to puzzle out meaning from her words. Are you a machine? That couldn’t be right. It had to be yet another idiom he didn’t understand. She must have asked if he had another machine.
The disappointment that crossed her face wasn’t “Oh well, I’ll clean the carpet some other time.” It was more like “I have no son.” She turned around, then strode out of the room. Her sobbing was faint, but his stomach dropped with each cry.
The following week at school, he registered for his first Chinese class.
Floating containers of Meals Ready to Eat and spare parts jostled against each other, held back by webbing that bulged out from curved walls and sealed every alcove. The wall panels that no longer fit precisely rattled in sympathy with fans that groaned on and off as Max drifted through each section of tunnel. The noise drowned out his chattering teeth. The beef and star anise smell drifted out of each tunnel vent rather than being confined to his pod. He’d fix that before hibernating again.
The ship needed him more often these past few decades. Readers failed and had to be replaced. Connectors shook themselves loose and cables cracked over time. He repaired his crew mates’ pods and woke to find they had repaired his. Too often, grinding noises came from vibrating pods warm to the touch. All he could do was keep those corpses frozen to bring home. The hibernation system had killed most of the Byzantium Library’s small crew by the time those still alive had successfully diagnosed and fixed it. He had to push that away and focus on the archive though to complete the mission.
The archive was holding up well. That one dye lot had been the only large scale failure so far and Max had copied all of the affected data to chalcogenide glass in time. He’d never been prouder of his team. Their legacy lived on in the Byzantium Library. The ship wasn’t perfect. The last few times he woke, it seemed barely functioning. The archive, however, had remained intact.
