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[Image: “Light the Fuse,” from ms.leisure’s Flickr photostream]
After a vast number of dreaming trips back and forth across the barrier, a number so large that it required understanding (and counting in) the seven dimensions of number which he’d discovered, The Librarian had grown bored. Not by the ideas themselves, the tiny glittering fragments of consciousness which his mission called on him to collect and preserve: no. He simply missed what he as Gabriel Naude — as humans everywhere, always — had found in art: visions of himself.
So he’d traced the very idea of himself back through multiple dimensions of time as well as space — and also multiple dimensions of Ifth and Oofth (as one story had called them). As Gabe1 he had acquired the idea of a “librarian” — a curator of all human culture, preserving it across the boundaries of time and the universe — from Eldon and Adrienne Lane.
He’d then traced the idea even further backwards, this time in Eldon and Adrienne’s various dimensions, and discovered that they’d first learned of it, separately, from a story they’d read on their computers.
He’d found and affixed himself to the author of that story…
And there the lacy silver chain had broken. The author of the story which Eldon Lane and Adrienne Burghar had read, separately, had written some other things, before and after the time in question, and lived to a good age, and died happy, loved, and fulfilled. But as long as The Librarian stayed in that writer’s time- and space-line, as far as he could tell the writer never even imagined the story, let alone wrote it. The Librarian could find himself only in the Lanes’ world, and they in turn had found him in a story written by an author who had never written such a story.
The Librarian existed — alive, awake, conscious — in a universe in which he could not exist. Before, he’d grown bored with a universe of inexhaustible and perhaps infinite possibility. But this, this was impossible. It made no sense. And so The Librarian’s boredom ended, as boredom sometimes does: with a concussive, all too conclusive bang.
—-
Because he had to — because he saw no point in continuing to pound his unimaginable head on an impenetrable wall — The Librarian returned to what he could do. What he could not do would have to wait. He remembered Gabriel Naude’s best ideas and solutions to problems coming to him, unbidden, only as long as Gabe did not bid them come. Maybe this was like that. Maybe The Librarian, like Gabe1 before him, just had to do and to think elsewhere and elsewhen in order to summon inspiration to the here and now…
So he resumed not just harvesting the grainy clouds of creativity from the human minds of the now deep past, but returning periodically to his own side of the barrier to categorize and arrange the harvest.
He’d become adept at spotting redundancy in the parsecs-wide cloud of clouds of ideas he’d collected — spotting the redundancy, and trimming it back. When a work’s ideas were used in adaptations and sequels, in satires and parodies, in forgeries and knockoffs, in retellings and as-told-tos from other points of view, those shared ideas didn’t really need to be “shelved” multiple times. He could keep one copy of each sliver of an idea, and simply connect to that copy from innumerable others. All the redundant duplicates could be simply lopped off, although the removal was less like a cutting and more like a flinging-with-a-fingertip, a flicking. Each duplicate, when so eliminated, spun away from the cloud of ideas, out into the vast spaces-and-times of space, eventually drifting, slowing, and then winking out altogether.
The connections, The Librarian came to believe: among the connections from one idea to another to a third, fourth, fifth and so on — that was where works of art lived. Not in the ideas themselves. He thought of how many times Gabriel Naude had looked at and admired the myriad shapes and colors of leaves on forest trees, on tended boxwood hedges: the way they caught the light at a particular time of day, from a particular angle, and differently from one latitude and longitude to another. Then autumn would come — or insects, or disease — and there would stand the bare tree or bush… and there would go Gabriel Naude, no longer interested. The Librarian now thought that Gabriel Naude had been rather stupid in at least that respect, ignorant of the truth to which The Librarian had come: the trunk, and the limbs, and the branches and the twigs — they were what made Tree A something other than Tree B, C, or D. The connectors, the connections themselves and not the things-connected, bore the entire weight of a given tree’s identity.
Maybe he wasn’t The Librarian after all. Maybe he was The Horticulturist, The Gardener, The Topiarist. Not a curator of objects — of ideas, or even clouds of ideas — but a geographer of the pathways from object to object…
The Librarian slept.
—-
In this dream, The Librarian existed as Gabriel Naude. Gabe seemed to be some kind of professional athlete here. He stood in a narrow, confined structure, an alleyway almost, with steep walls to either side. His body was turned parallel to those two walls, and his head was turned so that he faced over one shoulder. In his left hand — Gabe had been left-handed, The Librarian recalled from his observing consciousness — he held a solid, heavy ball. He extended his arm behind him, and whirled it overhead, releasing the ball a split-second after his arm passed the vertical plane. The ball shot off in a flat, straight line up the alleyway, shrinking to a dot and then disappearing. Unseen spectators applauded.
He repeated the action, over and over. Position your body. Turn your head. Look up the alley, and focus on something you can’t even see. Whip your arm from behind, up, barely over and then suddenly let go, watch the ball dwindle. Do not acknowledge the applause, the cheers. Just re-arrange your body, its extremities and senses, throw the ball, again and again the same…
Suddenly The Librarian came to. As in the middle of the night when you sort-of awake from a pleasant, absorbing dream to run to the bathroom, and hurry right back to the bed and pillow and bedcovers, not daring to open your eyes fully — to wake up too much — but rushing to assume the same pose and get your eyes closed and fall asleep right away, hoping to resume the dream where you’d left off: just so, did The Librarian wake up just enough to blunder back through the barrier, thence to lunge sleepily back to Eldon and Adrienne Lane’s youth and from there to the mysterious author’s timeline… yes, here… now go back just a little bit further, to here, here, the author lying in bed, closing his eyes, drifting off, his breathing becoming regular and measured, his eyes beginning to dance beneath the eyelids…
The Librarian himself drifted off again, just as the cloud of silver particles began to swirl around the author’s head.
—-
It was not the same dream. (It is never the same dream.) In this dream, The Librarian was not Gabe Naude. Neither The Librarian nor Gabe Naude was present. Instead, there stood the author, alone. (The Librarian’s distant consciousness recognized him: the haunted eyes, the easy grin, the silvered hair and beard.) He stood not in an alleyway but at the intersection of at least a half-dozen — maybe twelve, or maybe sixty — different roadways. It was night, and he was alone. And it was dark, so dark. Overhead wheeled every single star in the old Milky Way galaxy, but even that many pinpoints of light failed to illuminate the landscape…
And then the author did something very surprising: he lit a fuse.
It looked like a fuse, anyhow. It superficially resembled one of those long black cords, as in a stereotypical war-and-adventure film, leading to a barrel of black powder or brace of dynamite. This one, though, did not lie along the ground but was suspended overhead, stretching into the invisible distance. The author struck a match, and held it to the end of the line. The fuse — the line — immediately lit up, along its whole length. The author did not flinch or duck, and The Librarian somehow knew that no explosive threatened to blow, near or far. The only thing in the distance was, well, more distance. More road. And more eerily phosporescent fuse.
The author turned his body a little bit — slightly rotated on an invisible vertical axis, somehow without moving his feet — and reached out as if to ignite a second black cord suddenly extending along the shoulder of the next roadway in turn. It didn’t work. He looked down at his hand; it was empty. He turned the hand over a couple of times, this way and that, as though half-expecting to find something under it. Nothing. The roadway remained dark.
The author surprised him again then: he snapped his fingers of that hand (his left, as it happened). He paused. Snapped them a second time. Paused again. (Waiting?) A third, more insistently. A fourth: urgency. Raised them as though to snap again—
—and suddenly, without warning, turned and faced The Librarian. Aware, dimly, that the author’s left hand remained upraised, The Librarian gazed into the author’s eyes. They seemed to not quite recognize him, but also to know something about him that The Librarian himself did not know, and seemed to ask him a question which… The author snapped his fingers again, and there was the flare of a match. He grinned at The Librarian, and turned to the fuse—
—-
The author’s alarm clock went off, abruptly awakening both him and The Librarian. The silvery soft nimbus of particles swirling around each of their heads shifted, ever so slightly, shifted and then settled into place. But just before the author hurried from his bedroom in the pre-dawn darkness, The Librarian could not be sure, but he thought… was that a little sparking light there, down and to the right, suddenly clinging to the cloud around the author’s head?
A new idea?
Not the author’s own?
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Didn’t I say “whew” at the end of an earlier chapter? This is one of the shorter ones,
but it was an absolute bear to write. I just hope it’s clear!
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