The Librarian gasps. “No!” She runs to the clock and tries to wrestle it from the wall. As she yanks on it she wails, “No! No! No!” But she does allow Amelia to gently move her aside.
“Look,” says Amelia.
The Librarian has changed to Pele, Pele of the mobile face, the warm, beautiful brown eyes.
“Thank you,” she says.
Sometimes Pele prepares for the invasion.
Invisibly, in particles, they scout the terrain of Terra Nova, Planet X. It breaks down in this way:
1.It is empty, ready for us, with no life, but able to accept life, or with life that will not interfere with ours, or
2.They are ready for us, or something like us. The branches:
1.Annihilation
2.Rejection
3.Acceptance/modification
4.Surrender
Of these four, Pele fancies most number three. Except: what are they save identity?
Yet identity undergoes constant modification.
This is a special kind of hell. She decides to enjoy a thousand amazing sunsets to refresh herself.
Pele wonders how to say what is happening. “Time passes?” “Spacetime moves?” “We flash, and flash again, in long instants, out of darkness, and into light?”
They play, and play again, in endless iterations.
The running of the ship, the thought-ship? Inflections wash through it each moment, Earth-based inflections of thought wrought from the hard thrash of human dreams, human longing. So they are all dancing-ship stories. That’s all they are: stories. Pele’s unique slice of older-time gives her wry perspective. She can be outside the story. She stubbornly refuses to surrender. It-is-not-real, she thinks, seeing them all at play, leaping from bloody mayhem to the estranging magic of Through Fairy Halls, and, often, lying spent and weeping on a riverbank after being swept up in the billions of dark stories that comprise their heritage.
It takes all her strength and more, drawn from a rich stew of inspiring works, to pull them back from self-annihilation. For what choice is there, they collectively feel, after being soaked in the deep evil that humans do, but to remove themselves from the picture?
Whether or not they are right, she hurls tales of goodness, blazing thunderbolts, into their minds. They wake bright-faced, with a jolt, ready for the new day. She doesn’t exactly dust her hands in self-satisfaction, but she does try not to wonder too hard if she’s done the right thing. Who is she to shield them from grief; from sorrow, from deep reflection, or from growth?
She just tries to keep them from hurting one another, and from hurting them or herself. What else can she do?
She tries to be older and wiser. She absorbs old movies; re-views Casablanca as a lesson about how one bestows grace through artful lies concocted on the run, new tales to make things go right. These are lessons she missed while on Earth. She spoke from stalwart truth, never mind what pain it caused. How can one make these calculations, though, when in the midst of chaos, which is where she lives, in a constantly re-invented throng of young entities who cannot understand literatures truly until they have gained in wisdom? And who cannot gain wisdom except through sorrow, which she does not wish to thrust upon them? Sorrow generally bestows cynicism, and she is back in the same old revolution, lifted up and down until they die except
They cannot die.
We are scattered into particles. We are a speeding cloud, intent.
It is a word at last, the word that’s been there all along, our Kansas home:
Courage! With a Brooklyn accent.
Whatever, wherever, that is.
“Courage,” we shout. Our brave chests expand, our heads a single thought, shooting for we know not what, re-organized by new information every instant, but shooting forward, now, at last, to Planet.
We will find ways to infuse any matter we find. We will organize and blend, we will crush and release.
For we are the mighty, the awful, the terrifying power of life itself. We are infinitely tiny, infinitely large.
Our words describe the states that we create; the states create us, and a bond sings through it all.
Courage!
We crash onto every wave-hushed shore, every cold rocky outpost, every object that will hold us, with equal, eager, organizing force, programs of life, and flower, for a brief instant of stability, everywhere at once, a wide delight of life itself. We pass the instant of death, the deep drag of dread and sadness, the roiling, drowning crush of force upon force. We rush up the beaches, we drift to the high peaks, we burrow, nest, burst, and sing.
And leave ourselves, that dream of us, behind, and continue.
An instant from far here to far there, like the instant dividing life from death, but skipping that, as it must be skipped.
This is the story of how a bunch of kids kidnapped a physicist who was also a librarian so that they could get to a new planet, one far outside of our solar system. It sounds like a fairy tale because it might be. It is really very simple.
We cross a roaring creek on a rickety bridge, fishing pole on our shoulder, in a deep mountain chasm, heading home in an evening of cold, settling mist, alone.
Yet heading somewhere.
A tentative confidence sparkles, a stand of tiny pink Galax that Pele does not pick. She hikes upward through an early spring forest of re-awakened earth, its moist smell of leaf-loam and the rush of the new-born creek fed by high snowmelt a cool, moist blessing, as is the fact of day, where trees hide most of the sky and those tempting, empty stars. She comes across it again and again in her solitary hikes, and each time kneels and contemplates it with renewed, deep, solitary wonder: it and her. A different life, with a different story, but a story nonetheless.
Life, in all that lifelessness.
After a thousand such flash-lives filled with wonder, bursting into time, she returns to here, knows it to be real, and for the first time, Pele does not recoil.
Why did she do it? Why did she let them go?
Was it hubris—wanting
