Nightingales, clear springs, the great rose-trees.
Magic. Some good, some bad, but uncaring of humans, rather like space.
Alcubierre eats Casimir Vacuums for breakfast, rips them out of a field with her big yellow teeth and chomps on them. The edges of the vacuums stick out of the sides of her mouth like gold straw and tiny blue flowers and move up and down as she chomps and snorts.
They are one speck of pollen on a single stamen of one small blue flower that bobs up and down in her mouth.
The Librarian carries a wooden clock.
It is chiefly oak. Framed by an oaken octagon a bit smaller than the main octagonal structure that holds the clock’s mechanics and chimes, the face is protected by a glass door ten inches in diameter that one can open with a small latch. The hours are Roman numerals, painted on a cream-colored metal face. In black, swirling copperplate, a single word: Excelsior.
It has a smaller glass door, below, that one can open to start the pendulum swinging.
The Librarian carries it cradled in her left arm, like a baby. Therefore, it does not tick, for the pendulum drops against the back of its compartment.
The hands of the clock are silver, their deliciously narrow, elongated arrows a final flourish, pointing at the hour, the minute, and the infinite in-betweens.
A key rattles inside its small, latched drawer at the bottom of the pendulum when she walks, and the three square holes in the face’s clock emit faint light. Sometimes she unlatches the drawer, opens it, and examines the key closely, with a look of wonder on her face. Then she returns it to its drawer and re-latches the tiny brass hook.
Every so often, she opens the door of the clock’s face, tilts her head, smiles, and moves first the long arrow to a place that seems random, and then the small hand. She beams at the clock, shuts the door, and goes about her business. She never inserts the key. She never winds the clock.
If she has to do something requiring the use of her left hand, she sets the clock carefully in a safe place and immediately retrieves it when done. She straps it in beside her when she sleeps.
This seems a burdensome practice, but it gives her pleasure. Laying bets regarding various aspects of what she does with the clock have become popular. It gives us something to do.
In one of the vacuums—there are many—I grew this voice that says we. I don’t know how, though I am trying to tell you.
I might have grown it when I was Nancy Drew, in her blue roadster, driving through dark space, past planets. One … two … three … ten thousand … it took a long time. Then there were white farmhouses just off a dusty dirt road, hidden behind summer trees, their big heads tossing in the hot wind as if they had something haughty to say.
Inside one house with open windows a planet mobile rotated in the breeze. A girl with long black braids, lying on a double wedding ring quilt made by her grandmother, pointed to them and said, “Strike Hypatia off the list. And Dulcinea, too.” They disappeared from the mobile, and others appeared.
I sped into the brain of the little girl and it was all myth, science, clockwork, precise, wires, pulses, blood, AI, luminous, expanding, nova, pressure, big bang, dust, and me, driving past on country lane in a blue roadster, hair streaming violently far, far, far out behind me, pushed by my own speed, seeing white snowball bushes in the front yard, and a cherry tree, and a woman gathering billowing white sheets from a clothesline, and a girl inside analyzing planetary composition.
You can see why I can’t tell you exactly how it happened.
Pele looks like Pele, except that her eyes are different. She won’t look at anyone. She does smile a lot. She calls herself The Librarian and says she would like to help us.
This is when the clock shows up. You know about that already.
We can’t really blame her for acting this way. She had many areas of expertise when we stole the Moku, like all the other adults on the ship, but she was uniquely special, so we stole her too.
She knew how to make our horse.
She thinks that she chose to help us by staying with us and saved all the other adults by sending them back to Earth. She thinks she is our savior.
We let her think that because whenever she realizes that we have control, she acts in ways that are not helpful to us.
For instance, when the prince arrives to kiss her (and is the prince us, and what we did? it seems possible) she pushes him down, kicks him in the side three times (once or twice is not enough, while four or more is overdoing it), and strides off down a long, winding road, over hill and dale, hands in her pockets, whistling, looking at everything with a keen and watchful eye.
She walks through rain, hail, sleet, and snow, singing about it, all bundled up, sometimes an old woman, sometimes a young maiden, and then through summer meadows that climb the flanks of mountains, her clock in a bag that she throws over her shoulder. She wears loose, purple linen pants with large pockets, which she fills with things that seem useless.
She sees beautiful, glowing stones by the side of the path—one gray, one gold, and one rainbowed with layers of minerals. She picks them up and examines each, a large smile on her face. She puts them in her right-hand pants pocket.
To us they look like dull old rocks, but then somehow, like magic, we see them through her eyes, and know what they are. The stones and the power of stones are stories. She is gathering all the stories everyone has ever told, and our stories, and keeping them safe
