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Living on a far-distant planet, Doctor Mormeck works for strange beings that might or might not be angels by conducting surveillance across a hundred thousand alt-Earths. Complicating things are a transdimensional race of intelligent komodos wreaking chaos throughout the worlds. When an avatar of Mormeck is sent to a war-torn winter city to investigate a mysterious Presence, the doctor will become embroiled an ever-widening conflict.
Archive is here, Journals of Mormeck, and first entry is here.
Perhaps Gabriel can sense my discontent, because soon after my last entry, he came to me with a smile and an outstretched hand (tipped with sharp nails almost like claws).
“You want to know more,” he said. “I can tell. You are growing bored watching one lighthouse on a backwater alt-earth.”
“Mountains don’t get bored,” I replied.
Gabriel’s curved smile grew until it seemed about to split his face in two. “Nonetheless…”
The avatar I sent with Gabriel was half-komodo, in honor of my lost avatar somewhere in the winter city. This seemed to make Gabriel twitchy, but I didn’t care. He led me deep into the laboratory, to the library, which I’d never entered before. We passed many doors and passageways I found curious, from which sounds or smells emanated that required further investigation…but Gabriel kept an iron grip on my left arm the entire time, guiding me along at a brisk pace.
We entered the library, which houses a legion of titles brought back from thousands of alt-Earths, so many that I could not read them all in a thousand years. An angel’s library is not like a human’s library, and I still do not know who collected them, or why they were collected. Outside of the space was a hologram of a famous old library from an alt-Earth, with shelves and shelves in a golden light.
But within the pure white dome of the angels’ library lay cases and cases. Huge mounds or middens of battered light brown cases with handles, like on satchels or suitcases. No apparent organizing principle to how they had been scattered and dumped, although each case had a title scrawled across the top, like Books That Started Wars or Versions of the Torah or Books That Never Existed or Books That Only Existed Once or Books About Cats or Versions of The Voynich Manuscript.
The cases contained what most humans would recognize as the glass sample slides that scientists place in front of the lens of a microscope, except somewhat thicker and thus containing more of a sample between the two plates. In running my fingers over one row of them in an open cases I found the slides oddly warm to the touch; they pulsed a little bit.
I had seen too many normal human libraries in my surveillance. “This isn’t a library,” I said. “How would I read the books?”
He smirked and placed what looked like a tiny eye-dropper in my hand. “The front of the slides are made of living tissue. Insert the dropper, extract a sample of the liquid and place it on your tongue.”
He undid the latch on a case titled “Literature of Tlon”, delicately pulled a slide from its place. There was a purplish stain captured within and it lazily squished and sloshed within its trap. “This is a book,” Gabriel said. “Read it. Read all of them if you like.”
Then he left.
I didn’t at first like reading in this way, not that I was much used to reading anyway. I was always on surveillance and what I usually absorbed was visual in nature. I had learned what the angels needed me to learn through modules absorbed through the skin, so that there was no process of discovery. It simply existed in my mind where before it had not. I had, of course, had my avatars read various physical books from time to time, whatever they left around in the unrestricted parts of the library, so I knew the experience and had been transported by reading, too, a half dozen times…and in a way, I was eager. I think in that moment I believed that reading books might bring me closer to Marty. She loved books. She loved them so much I wanted to be a book she read.
So I jabbed the dropper into the membrane of the slide and it went right in and I retrieved some of the purple liquid, placed a drop on my tongue, and sat in an old rocking chair in the corner of the room while I “read” the book…ignoring a nearby bloodstain on the floor.
It was more like listening to great music than reading, in that the liquid form of the book took up a space in one’s mind that bypassed the editor housed there. It bypassed the entry phase of reading, during which you are aware of, say, being in a rocking chair in a strange room, and that itch on your left hand, and those nagging problems in your life…all of those moments before a book sweeps you away into its own world, its own dream. That was gone, and I was just fully within the book, appreciating it exactly as it was meant to be appreciated, to the point of complete and utter immersion. It wasn’t like watching a movie, not at all, it was still like reading, with that sensual appreciation of each word on the tip of the tongue, that moment of frisson when a sentence goes somewhere unexpected but brilliant, rewiring your brain, the mind creating the sensory experience, better than any hallucination or even my favorite thing on my favorite iteration of an alt-Earth. It was an ecstasy and a reverie that created pleasure I’d never experienced before.
When I finished that first book, with its landscapes of a fantastical place that on one Earth at least actually existed, I must admit to becoming an addict. I placed the next on my tongue, and the next. I scrabbled my way to case after case on those mounds in that domed room. I absorbed so many I lost count, and the reality of the rocking chair in which I sat during these expeditions seemed like some odd way-station in a sanitized virtual reality before my return to the world in my head.
I experienced so many lives and so many places. I read the books of those who had died obscure across all alt-Earths and those who had been famous, those who had died young and those who had died old. So much by so many. By so few. By all. And multiplied by the variations, so that here a short story writer who had never completed that tantalizingly titled novel had indeed finished and instead of being shot by Nazis during World War II had lived into old and somber age, to write even more novels, each more amazing and heart-breaking than the last. And here a woman who died in the Far East unknown, her writings burned by her husband before any could be published, was more important than the Emperor. And here the novelist who had turned away from his muse regained it on some other alt-Earth and rather than a hack he was a miniaturist, creating absurd yet haunting portraits of eccentric people. And here, too, that suicide in a river had never happened and what had come to her when she’d stopped in mid-stream and reconsidered was like a concerto bursting out of my very heart.
I only became aware of the tears running down my face after about the thousandth book I placed upon my tongue. It was an expansion of a story called “The Dead” that in only four alt-Earths had become the ending of a novel, and that novel was better than anything the writer had done in life on any of the other Earths.
Now I know that Gabriel meant to bury me in those books, thought he was burying me in facts, knowledge, information. But instead he was steeping me in emotion, giving me the full experience of what reading meant to Marty. Fiction, philosophy, biographies, histories, biology…
By the end, I wasn’t drowned in any of it, not really. Instead, there was calm and peace at the core of me.
And yet an odd sensation, this incredibly strange feeling, enveloped me, and I realized that my avatar was weeping not just from sorrow at realizing I was all alone but also overwhelming elation and the epiphany that I was not alone…and that no matter Gabriel’s purpose, my readings had not just moved me—they had moved me so I was not afterwards in the position I had been in before. I was no longer in the same location relative to the universes, to myself, to the angels, to human beings, to my avatar, to Marty, to anything. And for this I secretly thank Gabriel even as I despise him even more.
And I realize now that I must take a risk. The mountain must talk to Marty.
To every Marty.
Award-winning writer Jeff VanderMeer's final novel in his Ambergris Cycle, Finch, has just been published in the the UK from Atlantic's Corvus imprint. His writer guide Booklife and associated Booklifenow website focus on sustainable creativity. Forthcoming books include The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities and The Steampunk Bible. His short fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Library of America's American Fantastic Tales, and several year's best anthologies. He writes nonfiction for The Washington Post Book World, Omnivoracious, The New York Times Book Review, the B&N Review, and many others. If you like the blog, please consider