“But you set every letter and print each page by hand?”
“I do.”
“And everything else too?”
I take a large sip of tea. “Not everything. I have a maker build the printing press and the movable type. But, yeah, I’ve typeset, pressed, and bound every single copy of my books.”
“But …” She seems as if she might explode. “I still don’t understand how!”
If there is one thing that has defined writers throughout history, it’s our endless capacity for procrastination. I need to finish my book soon—in a matter of weeks—but the thought of Fish becoming my apprentice excites me more than anything has in decades.
“Fish,” I say, “if you’ll let me, I’d love to show you.”
Across her face, as broad as a gulperfish, a smile.
Fish is a sponge, and that’s not meant as a joke. If I show her something once, she remembers it forever. And she’s not using her neural. When she’s with me, she shuts it off. She says she wants to know what it feels like to be a writer.
In the past I’ve waited until I’ve finished my book before typesetting it, but besides the obvious issue of time, this project delights me too much. We remove the beds from the bungalow’s spare room and I have the maker set up the large printing press there. Its wood and iron frame smells delightfully ancient. The wall underneath the room’s tall windows becomes our workspace. And though Fish had never seen cursive handwriting before mine, it takes her less than a day to memorize the patterns, even accounting for my awful penmanship, and before Ardabaab’s pink sun has set she’s transcribed twenty pages of my scribbled words into her own neat hand using a fountain pen she’s had the maker craft for her.
“Yvalu and Ubalo are stellar in love with each other,” she says.
“Yes, they are.”
“Have you been in love, Reuth?” “A few times.”
“What’s it like?”
I pause to consider. There are a thousand answers and none of them true. “What’s your favorite thing in all the universe?”
She answers instantly: “Watching from my undersea bedroom the way the fish change colors as the sun rises.”
I have a vision of Fish beside her window, eyes glowing in the morning light, watching Ardabaab’s abundant sea life swim by. It makes me smile. “Being in love is like seeing that beauty every moment in the one who you love. But it also hurts like hell, because love always fades, and life after love is gray and lifeless.”
“Oh,” Fish says, hanging her head. “Oh.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, shaking my head. I feel like a schmuck. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
“No,” she says, raising her head. “I’s not afraid of truth. I want to know everything.”
And I want to tell her. I want to tell her how it’s not the big things you miss, but the small ones, like the peck on your cheek your daughter gives you before bed, or how your wife left pieces of stale bread on the windowsill so she could watch the sparrows come and eat them. I want to tell her how much their deaths still hurt, even now, all these decades later, how I still dream of my wife sleeping next to me and how I always wake up gasping. Instead I say, “You’ve got time enough for that,” and walk over to inspect her work.
On her pad, beside my transcribed words, she’s drawn a woman with wavy dark hair, large curious eyes, a glittering gem in her nose, the same gem Ubalo had crossed light-years to fetch.
“That’s Yvalu?”
“You recognize her?” she says.
“This is fantastic, Fish.”
“You think?”
“Fish, I have another idea. Do you want to illustrate my book?” “Hill-a-straight?” Wiki-less, she seems confused.
“I want you to draw pictures of some scenes. We could have the maker convert them to lithographs and we can print them alongside the text.”
“But I’m not any good.”
“No, you’re not good. You’re amazing. With your permission, I’d like to use this picture of Yvalu on the cover so it’s the first thing people see.”
She stares at me, her violet eyes boring into mine. Then she breaks eye contact. “But,” she says, almost a whisper. “Who will see it?”
I feel a pang of dread. Another fact she’s gleaned from my wiki is that my readership has steadily declined over the years, so that the last person to request one of my printed books was an Earth antiquities dealer on Bora, who carefully sealed my book in plastic and placed it in storage, where it would serve as an example to future generations of what paper books had been like. As far as I could tell, the dealer had no intention of ever reading it. That was twelve Solar years ago.
Fish turns back to me. “Reuth, I’d love to hill-a-straight your book.”
And at this we both laugh.
We get to work. Each day, Fish comes by just after sunrise and we use the mornings to set type. It’s a laborious, slow process, but I love every aspect of it. I show her the right way to hold the composing stick, why she should let the slug rattle a bit, and how to use leads to add spacing between each line of type. I show her how to swipe her thumb to keep the type in place as she adds each letter, and I explain why it’s imperative to have snug lines and why it’s wise to start and end each line with em quads.
We press a few test signatures, adjusting here, correcting there, as our hands and faces become stained with ink. In the afternoons, after a break and a light lunch, Fish retreats to the corner to ponder my novel and draw new scenes, while I churn out more pages on my pad. Fish loves everything about the process and laughs easily, even when we make mistakes. And her joy is contagious. I haven’t been this happy in a long time, and
