What we know of the past is enough to be afraid, enough to build our world, this world, our good and golden world, around preventing a repeat of the mistakes that destroyed the world before.
The contrary situation is untenable. If we did not exist, “we” meaning the Service, meaning the State and its many mechanisms. If we eased off, as some argue we should, if people were allowed to experiment, to push at the boundaries. If we unplugged the captures and burned down the Record, closed the doors of the Service and ushered its officers gently into retirement. We know what would happen. We know. What happened out there would happen here; what happened back then would happen now. And just saying that, just imagining it, just speculating, you get a shiver of what that would mean, what it would feel like. You can see the shimmer of that terrible prospect on the horizon.
And so the preservation of reality’s integrity is the paramount duty of the good citizenry and of this government alike. Imagine what kind of mad society would be organized otherwise.
I shake my head a little, out here on Crane’s landing, and blink myself back into the moment. Into reality unfolding. “So listen, Ms. Aster. Do you have a way of getting into the apartment?”
“How about a key? Will a key do?”
There is something grimly tragic about a Golden State apartment with no outdoor space: no balcony, no patio, nowhere to go and feel the blessing of sunshine on your cheeks. Crane’s U City apartment is grim and dark, a second-story bat’s nest, three narrow rooms connected by a carpeted hallway. Out the two small windows there’s a sorry view of Ellendale Place, stray sheets of Authority and hamburger wrappers tumbling down the street, the roots of aspen trees warping the sidewalk stones into strange shapes, like children hiding under a rug.
I wander through Crane’s apartment slowly, following no particular rhythm or route, developing a picture of the man’s life from the dull shapes and muted colors of his habitat: from the pair of beat-up shoes at the door, apparently the only pair he owned besides the pair he died in; from the three faded family photographs, tacked up unframed, brother and sister and mom faintly smiling, squinting into the sun on the pier; from the tiny kitchen table with the one chair, the coffee maker with two-day-old grounds still thick and gritty in the filter. The fridge is mostly beer, the garbage mostly takeout containers.
No speculation required. This was the home of a bachelor who worked long days at hard, sunburnt labor, who came home to piss and sleep and shower and get ready to go back to work.
Paige is pursuing her own slow perusal of the apartment, and she has her Day Book out to take down in carbon all these lonely details I’m absorbing: she’s taking inventory, creating a list of flat facts to refer to later. One armchair, one floor lamp, one cup at the kitchen table. One bookshelf, squat and brown.
I take a closer look at the books and find all the usual stuff: a volume of Maps and Legends, a copy of Recent Reference and one of What Things Are Made Of, this year’s edition of Flat Facts for Everyday Use. All of the various State-issued volumes produced by the Publishing Arm, the constant effort to ensure that we all know the same things, that we all know everything; Common knowledge is a bulwark. All of the books look basically brand new, as pristine as when the State published them; Crane, I figure, was lacking in either the time or the inclination to do a lot of reading. Probably both.
Not surprisingly, the man has hardly got any novels at all—although there is, prominently displayed on the top shelf, a copy of Past Is Prologue. I lay two fingers reverently on the wide scarlet spine. I’ve read it—you’ve read it—everybody’s read the big book, most of us many more times than once. But I slip Crane’s copy off the shelf nevertheless and flip through it slowly, feeling its words under my fingertips, giving myself the gift of its serenity. I fight an urge to just sink down to the floor and read the thing, pick a spot at random in the long and beautiful history of the first days and years of the Golden State, of our seven heroic founders and the obstacles they overcame and the gifts they left in their passing. Before I put it back I find one of its many black pages and place my hand down on it flat, feeling that power. Black pages; invisible truths; redacted facts about the time before, unknown and unknowable.
Man, this novel, I think, as I slide it reluctantly back into place on Crane’s top shelf. So fucking good.
“Anything?” Ms. Paige says, from the other side of the room, and I say, “Nope,” and then, “Wait. Yes.”
Because the thing is, all of the man’s books are like his copy of Past Is Prologue, showing little evidence of ever having been read, except for one, and when I bend down with a grunt and slip it off the shelf, I’m surprised to learn what it is: the fucking dictionary.
I turn it over in my hand. The Everyday Citizen’s Dictionary, one of the little hardback jobbers with the cheap paper sleeve.
I tilt back the brim of my pinhole and look closer. The Everyday Citizen’s Dictionary is what it sounds like, a quick and dirty lexicon for basic use, and judging by the wear on the spine there’s no question that Crane has used it heavily. I feel like I know Mose Crane just a little bit better than I did a second ago, and I like him a little bit more too, because this book has been read, and it’s great, it’s fucking terrific, because who reads the dictionary? It
