Interzone 244 Jan - Feb 2013 Read online

  “Ibrahim,” Achimwene said, acknowledging the alte-zachen man as he approached. Ibrahim was perched on top of his cart, the boy Ismail by his side. The cart was pulled by a solitary horse, an old grey being who blinked at Achimwene patiently. The cart was already filled, with adaptoplant furniture, scrap plastic and metal, boxes of discarded house wares and, lying carelessly on its side, a discarded stone bust of Albert Einstein.

  “Achimwene,” Ibrahim said, smiling. “How is the weather?”

  “Fair to middling,” Achimwene said, and they both laughed, comfortable in the near-daily ritual.

  This is Achimwene: he was not the most imposing of people, did not draw the eye in a crowd. He was slight of frame, and somewhat stooped, and wore old-fashioned glasses to correct a minor fault of vision. His hair was once thickly curled but not much of it was left now, and he was mostly, sad to say, bald. He had a soft mouth and patient, trusting eyes, with fine lines of disappointment at their corners. His name meant ‘brother’ in Chichewa, a language dominant in Malawi, though he was of the Joneses of Central Station, and the brother of Miriam Jones, of Mama Jones’ Shebeen on Neve Sha’anan Street. Every morning he rose early, bathed hurriedly, and went out into the streets in time to catch the rising sun and the alte-zachen man. Now he rubbed his hands together, as if cold, and said, in his soft, quiet voice, “Do you have anything for me today, Ibrahim?”

  Ibrahim ran his hand over his own bald pate and smiled. Sometimes the answer was a simple “No.” Sometimes it came with a hesitant “Perhaps…”

  Today it was a “Yes,” and Achimwene raised his eyes, to him or to the heavens, and said, “Show me?”

  “Ismail,” Ibrahim said, and the boy, who sat beside him wordless until then, climbed down from the cart with a quick, confident grin and went to the back of the cart. “It’s heavy!” he complained. Achimwene hurried to his side and helped him bring down a heavy box.

  He looked at it.

  “Open it,” Ibrahim said. “Are these any good to you?”

  Achimwene knelt by the side of the box. His fingers reached for it, traced an opening. Slowly, he pulled the flaps of the box apart. Savouring the moment that light would fall down on the box’s contents, and the smell of those precious, fragile things inside would rise, released, into the air, and tickle his nose. There was no other smell like it in the world, the smell of old and weathered paper.

  The box opened. He looked inside.

  Books. Not the endless scrolls of text and images, moving and static, nor full-immersion narratives he understood other people to experience, in what he called, in his obsolete tongue, the networks, and others called, simply, the Conversation. Not those, to which he, anyway, had no access. Nor were they books as decorations, physical objects hand-crafted by artisans, vellum-bound, gold-tooled, typeset by hand and sold at a premium.

  No.

  He looked at the things in the box, these fragile, worn, faded, thin, cheap paper-bound books. They smelled of dust, and mould, and age. They smelled, faintly, of pee, and tobacco, and spilled coffee. They smelled like things which had lived.

  They smelled like history.

  With careful fingers he took a book out and held it, gently turning the pages. It was all but priceless. His breath, as they often said in those very same books, caught in his throat.

  It was a Ringo.

  A genuine Ringo.

  The cover of this fragile paperback showed a leather-faced gunman against a desert-red background. Ringo, it said, in giant letters, and below, the fictitious author’s name, Jeff McNamara. Finally, the individual title of the book, one of many in that long running Western series. This one was On The Road To Kansas City.

  Were they all like this?

  Of course, there had never been a ‘Jeff McNamara’. Ringo was a series of Hebrew-language Westerns, all written pseudonymously by starving young writers in a bygone Tel Aviv, who contributed besides it similar tales of space adventures, sexual titillation or soppy romance, as the occasion (and the publisher’s cheque book) had called for. Achimwene rifled carefully through the rest of the books. All paperbacks, printed on cheap, thin pulp paper centuries before. How had they been preserved? Some of these he had only ever seen mentioned in auction catalogues; their existence, here, now, was nothing short of a miracle. There was a nurse romance; a murder mystery; a World War Two adventure; an erotic tale whose lurid cover made Achimwene blush. They were impossible, they could not possibly exist. “Where did you find them?” he said.

  Ibrahim shrugged. “An opened Century Vault,” he said.

  Achimwene exhaled a sigh. He had heard of such things – subterranean safe-rooms, built in some long-ago war of the Jews, pockets of reinforced concrete shelters caught like bubbles all under the city surface. But he had never expected…

  “Are there…many of them?” he said.

  Ibrahim smiled. “Many,” he said. Then, taking pity on Achimwene, said, “Many vaults, but most are inaccessible. Every now and then, construction work uncovers one… The owners called me, for they viewed much of it as rubbish. What, after all, would a modern person want with one of these?” and he gestured at the box, saying, “I saved them for you. The rest of the stuff is back in the Junkyard, but this was the only box of books.”

  “I can pay,” Achimwene said. “I mean, I will work something out, I will borrow – ” the thought stuck like a bone in his throat (as they said in those books) “ – I will borrow from my sister.”

  But Ibrahim, to Achimwene’s delight and incomprehension, waved him aside with a laugh. “Pay me the usual,” he said. “After all, it is only a box, and this is mere paper. It cost me nothing, and I have made my profit already. What extra value you place on it surely is a value of your own.”

  “But they are precious!” Achimwene said, shocked. “Collectors would pay…” Imagination failed him. Ibrahim smiled, and his smile was gentle. “You are the only collector I know,” he said. “Can you afford what you think they’re worth?”

  “No,” Achimwene said – whispered.

  “Then pay only what I ask,” Ibrahim said and, with a shake of his head, as at the folly of his fellow man, steered the horse into action. The patient beast beat its flank with its tail, shooing away flies, and ambled onwards. The boy, Ismail, remained there a moment longer, staring at the books. “Lots of old junk in the Vaults!” he said. He spread his arms wide to describe them. “I was there, I saw it! These…books?” He shot an uncertain look at Achimwene, then ploughed on: “And big flat square things called televisions, that we took for plastic scrap, and old guns, lots of old guns! But the Jews took those – why do you think they buried those things?” The boy’s eyes, vat-grown haunting greens, stared at Achimwene. “So much junk,” the boy said, at last, with a note of finality, and then, laughing, ran after the cart, jumping up on it with youthful ease.

  Achimwene stared at the cart until it disappeared around the bend. Then, with the tenderness of a father picking up a new-born infant, he picked up the box of books and carried them the short way to his alcove.

  * *

  Achimwene’s life was about to change, but he did not yet know it. He spent the rest of the morning happily cataloguing, preserving and shelving the ancient books. Each lurid cover delighted him. He handled the books with only the tips of his fingers, turning the pages carefully, reverently. There were many faiths in Central Station, from Elronism to St Cohen to followers of Ogko, mixed amidst the larger populations – Jews to the north, Muslims to the south, a hundred offshoots of Christianity dotted all about like potted plants – but only Achimwene’s faith called for this. The worship of old, obsolete books. The worship, he liked to think, of history itself.

  He spent the morning quite happily, therefore, with only one customer. For Achimwene was not alone in his – obsession? Fervour?

  Others were like him. Mostly men, and mostly, like himself, broken in some fundamental fashion. They came from all over, pilgrims taking hesitant steps through the unfamiliar st
reets of the old neighbourhood, reaching at last Achimwene’s alcove, a shop which had no name. They needed no sign. They simply knew.

  There was an Armenian priest from Jerusalem who came once a month, a devotee of Hebrew pulps so obscure even Achimwene struggled with the conversation – romance chapbooks printed in twenty or thirty stapled pages at a time, filled with Zionist fervour and lovers’ longings, so rare and fragile few remained in the world. There was a rare woman, whose name was Nur, who came from Damascus once a year, and whose speciality was the works of obscure poet and science fiction writer Lior Tirosh. There was a man from Haifa who collected erotica, and a man from the Galilee collecting mysteries.

  “Achimwene? Shalom!”

  Achimwene straightened in his chair. He had sat at his desk for some half an hour, typing, on what was his pride and joy, a rare collectors’ item: a genuine, Hebrew typewriter. It was his peace and his escape, in the quiet times, to sit at his desk and pen, in the words of those old, vanished pulp writers, similarly exciting narratives of derring-do, rescues, and escapes.

  “Shalom, Gideon,” he said, sighing a little. The man, who hovered at the door, now came fully inside. He was a stooped figure, with long white hair, twinkling eyes, and a bottle of cheap arak held, like an offering, in one hand.

  “Got glasses?”

  “Sure…”

  Achimwene brought out two glasses, neither too clean, and put them on the desk. The man, Gideon, motioned with his head at the typewriter. “Writing again?” he said.

  “You know,” Achimwene said.

  Hebrew was the language of his birth. The Joneses were once Nigerian immigrants. Some said they had come over on work visas, and stayed. Others that they had escaped some long-forgotten civil war, had crossed the border illegally from Egypt, and stayed. One way or the other, the Joneses, like the Chongs, had lived in Central Station for generations.

  Gideon opened the bottle, poured them both a drink. “Water?” Achimwene said.

  Gideon shook his head. Achimwene sighed again and Gideon raised the glass, the liquid clear. “L’chaim,” he said.

  They clinked glasses. Achimwene drank, the arak burning his throat, the anis flavour tickling his nose. Made him think of his sister’s shebeen. Said, “So, nu? What’s new with you, Gideon?”

  He’d decided, suddenly and with aching clarity, that he wouldn’t share the new haul with Gideon. Would keep them to himself, a private secret, for just a little while longer. Later, perhaps, he’d sell one or two. But not yet. For the moment, they were his, and his alone.

  They chatted, whiling away an hour or two. Two men old before their time, in a dark alcove, sipping arak, reminiscing of books found and lost, of bargains struck and the ones that got away. At last Gideon left, having purchased a minor Western, in what is termed, in those circles, Good Condition – that is, it was falling apart. Achimwene breathed out a sigh of relief, his head swimming from the arak, and returned to his typewriter. He punched an experimental heh, then a nun. He began to type.

  * *

  The g.

  The girl.

  The girl was in trouble.

  A crowd surrounded her. Excitable, their faces twisted in the light of their torches. They held stones, blades. They shouted a word, a name, like a curse. The girl looked at them, her delicate face frightened.

  “Won’t someone save me?” she cried. “A hero, a – ”

  * *

  Achimwene frowned in irritation for, from the outside, a commotion was rising, the noise disturbing his concentration. He listened, but the noise only grew louder and, with a sigh of irritation, he pulled himself upwards and went to the door.

  Perhaps this is how lives change. A momentary decision, the toss of a coin. He could have returned to his desk, completed his sentence, or chosen to tidy up the shelves, or make a cup of coffee. He chose to open the door instead.

  They are dangerous things, doors, Ogko had once said. You never knew what you’d find on the other side of one.

  Achimwene opened the door and stepped outside.

  * *

  The g.

  The girl.

  The girl was in trouble.

  This much Achimwene saw, though for the moment, the why of it escaped him.

  This is what he saw:

  The crowd was composed of people Achimwene knew. Neighbours, cousins, acquaintances. He thought he saw young Yan there, and his fiancé, Youssou (who was Achimwene’s second cousin); the greengrocer from around the corner; some adaptoplant dwellers he knew by sight if not name; and others. They were just people. They were of Central Station.

  The girl wasn’t.

  Achimwene had never seen her before. She was slight of frame. She walked with a strange gait, as though unaccustomed to the gravity. Her face was narrow, indeed delicate. Her hair had been done in some otherworldly fashion, it was woven into dreadlocks that moved slowly, even sluggishly, above her head, and an ancient name rose in Achimwene’s mind.

  Medusa.

  The girl’s panicked eyes turned, looking. For just a moment, they found his. But her look did not (as Medusa’s was said to) turn him to stone.

  She turned away.

  The crowd surrounded her in a semi-circle. Her back was to Achimwene. The crowd – the word mob flashed through Achimwene’s mind uneasily – was excited, restless. Some held stones in their hands, but uncertainly, as though they were not sure why, or what they were meant to do with them. A mood of ugly energy animated them. And now Achimwene could hear a shouted word, a name, rising and falling in different intonations as the girl turned, and turned, helplessly seeking escape.

  “Shambleau!”

  The word sent a shiver down Achimwene’s back (a sensation he had often read about in the pulps, yet seldom if ever experienced in real life). It have rise to vague, menacing images, desolate Martian landscapes, isolated kibbutzim on the Martian tundra, red sunsets, the colour of blood.

  “Strigoi!”

  And there it was, that other word, a word conjuring, as though from thin air, images of brooding mountains, dark castles, bat-shaped shadows fleeting on the winds against a blood-red, setting sun… Images of an ageless Count, of teeth elongating in a hungry skull, sinking to touch skin, to drain blood…

  “Shambleau!”

  “Get back! Get back to where you came from!”

  “Leave her alone!”

  The cry pierced the night. The mob milled, confused. The voice like a blade had cut through the day and the girl, startled and surprised, turned this way and that, searching for the source of that voice.

  Who said it?

  Who dared the wrath of the mob?

  With a sense of reality cleaving in half, Achimwene, almost with a slight frisson, a delicious shiver of recognition, realised that it was he, himself, who had spoken.

  Had, indeed, stepped forward from his door, a little hunched figure facing this mob of relatives and acquaintances and, even, perhaps, a few friends. “Leave her alone,” he said again, savouring the words, and for once, perhaps for the first time in his life, people listened to him. A silence had descended. The girl, caught between her tormentors and this mysterious new figure, seemed uncertain.

  “Oh, it’s Achimwene,” someone said, and somebody else suddenly, crudely laughed, breaking the silence.

  “She’s Shambleau,” someone else said, and the first speaker (he couldn’t quite see who it was) said, “Well, she’d be no harm to him.”

  That crude laughter again and then, as if by some unspoken agreement, or command, the crowd began, slowly, to disperse.

  Achimwene found that his heart was beating fast; that his palms sweated; that his eyes developed a sudden itch. He felt like sneezing. The girl, slowly, floated over to him. They were of the same height. She looked into his eyes. Her eyes were a deep clear blue, vat-grown. They regarded each other as the rest of the mob dispersed. Soon they were left alone, in that quiet street, with Achimwene’s back to the door of his shop.

  She regarde
d him quizzically; her lips moved without sound, her eyes flicked up and down, scanning him. She looked confused, then shocked. She took a step back.

  “No, wait!” he said.

  “You are…you are not…”

  He realised she had been trying to communicate with him. His silence had baffled her. Repelled her, most likely. He was a cripple. He said, “I have no node.”

  “How is that…possible?”

  He laughed, though there was no humour in it. “It is not that unusual, here, on Earth,” he said.

  “You know I am not – ” she said, and hesitated, and he said, “From here? I guessed. You are from Mars?”

  A smile twisted her lips, for just a moment. “The asteroids,” she admitted.

  “What is it like, in space?” Excitement animated him. She shrugged. “Olsem difren,” she said, in the pidgin of the asteroids.

  The same, but different.

  They stared at each other, two strangers, her vat-grown eyes against his natural-birth ones. “My name is Achimwene,” he said.

  “Oh.”

  “And you are?”

  That same half-smile twisting her lips. He could tell she was bewildered by him. Repelled. Something inside him fluttered, like a caged bird dying of lack of oxygen.

  “Carmel,” she said, softly. “My name is Carmel.”

  He nodded. The bird was free, it was beating its wings inside him. “Would you like to come in?” he said. He gestured at his shop. The door, still standing half open.

  Decisions splitting quantum universes… She bit her lip. There was no blood. He noticed her canines, then. Long and sharp. Unease took him again. Truth in the old stories? A Shambleau? Here?

  “A cup of tea?” he said, desperately.

  She nodded, distractedly. She was still trying to speak to him, he realised. She could not understand why he wasn’t replying.