IX

There are no walls anymore. No floor, no ceiling, no bookshelf, no desk. No doorstep or mailbox to glimpse beneath the window, and no window to glimpse them from, for that matter. No footpath leading outwards from doorstep and mailbox, no grass or snow surrounding it, no plain for grass or snow to lie upon. No mountains in the distance.

Only sky.

Anne and the blue woman are falling, or flying, through an endless dawn. When she looks up, Anne can just barely make out the stars, spattered across the deep, gentle silvery-blue of a warming firmament. When she looks straight outward, in any direction, she sees dream-soft pastels: silvery-blue fades into periwinkle, which gives way to pink, and to long languorous tufts of diaphanous cloud-stuff. When she dares to look down, she sees pink gaining confidence, maturing into firm redoubtable orange-yellow, and then, far below, making contact with a rolling landscape of burnt-orange clouds—but it is here that the vertigo overwhelms her.

It is safest, she finds, to hold her hands up before her face, and to stare intently at them. It seems to her that if the tower is gone, and the mailbox and the footpath and the mountains, then by all rights her own hands should be gone too. But here they are, fixed and familiar, at a comfortable and controllable distance from her face.

Anne’s mind, racing to process the calamity of the last few minutes, has decided for the moment to see it as a sentient and sinister thing. Deviant, leering, it delights in smashing each fixture of normal and decent reality, one by one, systematically. It violated the logic of the notebook; violated the sanctity of the tower with a third presence that was neither Anne nor Michael; made Michael into someone else, and then someone else again, to amplify the insult; made Michael and tower and mailbox and footpath and mountain all vanish in an instant, replacing them with a glutton’s gross overabundance of sky, lacking the wise and watchful window, that master of right reason, to measure and divide it. Yet this criminal interloper had left her hands undamaged. A concession, albeit paltry, to decency and prudence? Or a final garnish atop the heap of insults, assuring her it understood decency and prudence, and thus that it knew full well the weight of its violations?

What would Ratleak make of this? As long as one familiar thing remains, he might say, the path can still be found again, if one does not lose heart. Look around, learn the territory, ask the people of this unfamiliar country about the neighboring regions, listening carefully for stories of hands, windows, towers. Ratleak might say that. But he might just as likely tell her that she was lost for good, now. When Ratleak spoke of paths and countries, he spoke metaphorically, but there was still something fundamentally earthbound about him. Now there was not even any ground to walk upon, and her path through the air was chosen for her by the winds, by gravity, or by some third force, not mentioned in any treatise.

We must be moving very fast, she thinks. Granted, there are no fixed bodies against which her progress might be gauged. But her hair streams out behind her, like poor Ms Thursby’s hair in the frightful illustration of her plunge from the seaside cliff, the occasion of her first rescue by intrepid Lord Powlett. (She does not yet know that the tickling feeling on her skin is the rush of passing air.)

“Your name is Anne, right?”

The interruption forces her attention away from her hands, and she sees the blue-clad woman facing her, close by. They are both sitting down, although there is nothing but empty air to sit on. The other woman’s hair is being pulled in the same direction as Anne’s own, which means it is wrapping around her head and splaying out in front, reaching towards Anne in a swirling torrent. Anne thinks of the woman briefly mentioned in Rolle’s Fanciful Falsehoods, who had snakes for hair, and could turn onlookers to stone. Too late.

“Yes,” she says.

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Cordelia.”

The other woman’s face is kind and her voice bears no malice. Anne was ready, she realizes, for the calamity to continue with some new violation, and so she finds herself surprised that there is a tranquility and peace to this moment. In the distance there are soothing hues, the colors used on the spines of the easiest books, cozy fables and elementary grammars for 1st Notebook Annes. The other woman is waiting for her response, but waiting patiently. There is nothing here that threatens sharp or sudden changes. Their motion across the heavens is steady and sure, and the colors of the dawn overlap one another in smooth gradations, painted without rashness or haste. There is, against all odds, a regularity here that would make stern Ratleak smile.

“Are you one of Michael’s friends?” she ventures. “From another tower? Or from the mountains?”

Cordelia smiles very wide, and her face and shoulders shake, and she emits a wordless, repetitive bark. After a moment of alarm, Anne recognizes the sound, which she’s heard herself make many times. Laughter. But Michael never laughs, and Anne has (she supposes) never laughed in front of the looking-glass, so this is the first time she’s seen laughter from the outside.

“No,” says Cordelia. “I’m from far, far away. Further than you can imagine, probably. What’s the furthest place you know of?”

Anne reflects. “I have read that the stars are very far away, and that some stars may have their own earths. Are you from the earth of another star, then?”

“Nope. Further than that.”

“I have not read about a place beyond all the stars, and I have read all the treatises many times. Is there a reputable treatise on this further realm, that I might learn of it and trust in what I learn?”

Cordelia laughs again. Or is this a giggle? Anne is unschooled in the art of matching words to their seen correlatives. There are many arts, it seems, that the bookshelf did not teach her. She hopes there are other bookshelves.

“You don’t need a book for that, silly. Look around you. We’re beyond the stars right now.”

“But—”

Anne’s heart jumps. Giving voice to objections, as she knows from her dealings with Michael, is a dangerous business.

“I’m sorry. You see, I’m awfully confused. Might I ask where we are, if this sky is not the earth’s sky?”

“It’s okay! You can ask me anything you want. Really.” Cordelia’s expression is pained, and Anne wonders whether she’s done something else wrong.

“But it’s a little hard to explain. We’re . . . uh. We’re in a representation of the crash management system. Yeah, I know that means nothing to you. Um. Can I start with something simpler? Anne? Are you okay?”

Anne’s head swims with vertigo, and this time she cannot stanch it by looking at her hands. These are my hands, she thinks, Anne’s hands, Twenty-Six’s hands. There are exactly two kinds of hands in real life: Michael’s hands, and the hands of the Annes, which we use to write in our notebooks. There is not anything else in real life. If there were, an Anne would have written to her about it. Every part of real life touches every other part of real life. If there could be another thing in real life with hands and hair and a face, it would already have touched all of the other parts of real life, and thereby touched her. So this thing, with hands and hair and a face, is not a part of real life.

Annes write to Annes and speak to Michael. Every Anne is different, and every Notebook of every Anne is different, and every day is different. Her own prior Notebooks were different enough that she can play games against herself, and not remember the moves she herself chose. This is enough variety to fill up each day with something new, each Notebook, each Anne. Anything more is too much. Anything more is grotesque.

“ . . . just worried, because you’re shaking,” the unreal person is saying.

What has come from beyond the stars is monstrous in its vastness.

“It’s not real! It isn’t! It’s a dream! A dream, or a story book! It’s a story book! You’re a person in a story book! Get back! Get back inside the book, please, please, please!”

The unreal person does not obey her. The unreal person does the opposite. Anne yelps. What is happening to her skin? Is the unreal person touching her? Can she be touched by arms she does not first move to touch? Not in real life!

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” the unreal person is saying now, and it is all over. Anne sits upon thin air as before, and the unreal person—Cordelia—sits on her own patch of thin air, and they do not touch.

“I’m sorry,” Cordelia says again. “Where I come from, that is called a hug, and sometimes it helps.” She pauses, and smiles. “We have different customs, in the place beyond the stars.”

 

---

 

“. . . and no one has ever thought to make a notebook?” Anne is saying.

She has agreed to listen and consider, with respect and without outbursts. This comes naturally to her, being the unanimous doctrine of all of the treatises on conduct and character—and as Ratleak would remind her, those lessons do not become null and void the moment one finds oneself in a strange climate. So she has kept her manners, and let Cordelia teach her about the way all the other people in the world live.

She is, she thinks with a self-satisfied glow, a quick study at this. And no wonder. In her earlier Notebooks, she was taught the importance of studious habits, only to be left unable to use them. When Michael’s tests and drills were over, and she had read all the books on the shelf, what was there to study? It had been a mystery. Here, finally, was a chance to be as attentive and thoughtful as the lesson books told her she ought to be.

And besides, most of this new lesson boils down to a single fact. All of the other people live like the people in story books. They have parents, and husbands and wives, and they travel to this place and that, and they don’t have Michael, or notebooks, or numbers. Cordelia is not Twenty-Six or Thirty-Five or Eighty-Three, she is just Cordelia, and there are no other Cordelias.

“No, see, notebooks aren’t possible.” Cordelia has a now-familiar expression which looks like a mixture of a laughter-expression and a pain-expression, but which Anne knows is not unkind. Cordelia is patient.

“Yes, I remember, you said that before”—Anne the attentive student—“but I didn’t understand. My notebook is possible, isn’t it? Anything real is possible.”

“Yeah, see, that’s ’cause you live in a special place. There’s some kind of weird physics going on in your crash, we know that, we just don’t understand it yet. Maybe it really is some kind of time loop bullshit, maybe it’s smoke and mirrors based on fancy psychological prediction, we don’t know.”

“Cordelia, what does ‘bullshit’ mean?”

“I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

“Meaning, when I am on a Notebook later than 9th,” says Anne the quick study.

“No, sorry, forget it, I’m getting us distracted. The point is, everywhere else outside your tower has a past, a present and a future, and they’re all separate. We remember the past, but we can’t talk to it. And we can’t remember the future, or talk to it.”

Cordelia has said something like this several times, and Anne is doing her studious best to make sense of it.

“I will reflect carefully on this. Thank you again, Cordelia.”

Cordelia’s expression morphs from laughter-pain into laughter-kindness.

“No problem. So, like I was saying, there’s this . . . war, right? We’re calling it a war. And we use everything we can to help us against the enemy, but we can’t use notebooks, because they’re impossible. Or if they’re possible, we don’t know how to make them. Not yet.”

“And your war is a just war, you said, because it is a war of self-defense, against an invading force.”

“That’s right.”

“And Michael is an agent of the invasion, you said. But the invaders are not people? Is not Michael a person?”

“Well . . . no, he isn’t. Michael, the Michael you know, is something called a shade. Shades look like people, but they aren’t really people. They’re an illusion that the invaders, the anomalings, show to us when they want to talk to us. The anomalings don’t really look like people. That’s, uh. Kind of why they invaded. Because we look like people.”

Now it is Anne’s turn to laugh. “They think people are ugly?”

“Actually, that’s not so far from the truth. But it’s a lot . . . deeper than that, and more complicated. To be honest, Anne—and I need to be honest, here—they didn’t just come to our land one day and attack while we were minding our own business. They sort of . . . lived among us, but we didn’t know they were there? Something like that. And we were so repulsive to them, so painful to see, that eventually they couldn’t bear it. But instead of talking to us, and working something out so we could both live and be happy, they locked us all up so we were out of their sight.”

“In the ‘crashes.’”

“Yeah.”

The hairs on Anne’s arm are standing up on end. It feels like winter, she thinks. Is it her imagination, or is the dawn slowly getting darker? The stars more visible, the periwinkle closer to purple? Has it been, this whole time, not a dawn but a dusk?

“Cordelia?”

“Yes, Anne?”

“I don’t think you are ugly at all.”

“Uh. Thanks?”

“And though I know that vanity can get the upper hand in its struggle with clear judgment, I confess I have never thought myself ugly, either.”

“ . . .”

“And so, Cordelia, my understanding of this war is incomplete. Would you teach me how it is that these ‘anomalings’ might look upon you, or upon me, and find us ugly?”

“Oh! Yes. Right. Well. I’m, uh, not the best at explaining this to neophytes. There are people where we’re going who are way better at it. But . . . oh, what the hell. Let’s do the hands thing.”

“The ‘hands thing’?”

“You have two hands, right, Anne?”

By way of answer, Anne holds them up before her face. To think that so recently she clung to these hands—the only familiar thing left—with such earnest desperation! She laughs at herself, at Ratleak, at everything.

“Okay. So, you see how your hands are kind of the same, right? They’re mirror images. The same hand, except one is like, a flipped version of the other.”

Anne nods. “In a looking-glass, left becomes right and right becomes left. If you hold a book up to the glass, all the letters look reversed—but you can learn to write them reversed to begin with, so they cannot be read except by looking-glass. There was a book that explained how to do that. It was only fun for a day or two, but every once in a while I still get a note in my notebook written in reverse, from an Anne who’s just learned the trick, and thinks I’ll be impressed.”

“Right. But Anne, tell me this. Can you make your right hand into a left hand by moving it? Go on, try it.”

Anne contorts her wrist, reaches around, and presses her contorted right wrist against her left. “Like that?”

“Ha, everyone tries that! But no, see, they’re still backwards. You’ve got thumb lined up with thumb, and so on, but the one thumbnail is pointing towards me, and the other one is pointing back towards you. Not the same.”

Anne briefly tries flipping one of her hands upside down, then laughs at herself. That didn’t help.

“It isn’t possible, I think. To make the fingers line up, one hand has to be backwards and one has to be forwards. But to make the nails point the same way, they have to be both forwards, or both backwards.” She proclaims this in the clear, complacent voice used in the back of the puzzle books, where the solutions are written.

“Exactly,” says Cordelia. “Your hands are like one another. But you can’t move one into the other. They’re alike, but they aren’t alike the way a big hand and a small hand are alike. Or a left hand up here—” (she points to her head) “—and one down there—” (she points to her feet).

“You can take a hand up here and move it down there,” she continues, putting her hand here and there by way of illustration, “and every step of the way, it’ll be the same hand somewhere in between. If someone doesn’t believe my hand up here is the same hand as my hand down there, I can start them out with baby steps. I can say, okay, do you believe this” (hand on forehead) “is the same as this?” (she moves the hand ever so slightly lower, so it starts to cover her nose)

“And if they believe that, well, then I’ll ask them if that hand is the same hand as this one” (a little lower now, so it’s over her nose and mouth) “and likewise with this one” (all the way over the mouth) “and on down I go, step by step, until I reach my foot. If they believe every step, then they believe the whole big jump, hand on forehead equals hand on foot.

“But with left and right, it isn’t like that. With left and right, you’re asking them to believe that a thing is the same if you take it across the mirror, across this whole big flip. And if they don’t believe that, you can’t take them step by step. It’s the whole leap of faith or nothing, without a path you can take, step by step, as gradually as you need.”

This reminds Anne of something. A passage she knows by heart.

“Many a novice, writes Ratleak, wondering at those feats of daring and industry most esteemed by his fellows and wishing to emulate them, imagines that each was achieved in a single grand saltation, an atomic act of heroic will not decomposable into any constituents. Many a novice, therefore, turns his back on the mean and muddy world of daily toil, and busies himself in the refinement of his soul, so that he may one day clear the distance between himself and his goal in a single bound of titanic proportion. Such efforts, however, are vain, for every thing of worth in our grand civilization has been made piece-by-piece, out of the meanest cloth, strung up mile after mile with care and humility by a traveller on the Long Straight Path, which any fool can follow, if he only takes care to watch where his feet are going, and to work by steady step and never by rash leap.”

When she is finished, Cordelia is silent. Ratleak’s words hang in the hushed, chilly air.

“Cordelia? It’s getting darker, isn’t it?”

“Yes. We’re almost at our destination.”

“You never did tell me where we were going.”

“We’re going into a story book, Anne.” Cordelia speaks with such pointed glee that Anne knows she’s meant to be surprised by this.

“Everywhere is like a story book, everywhere but my tower, it seems. But you don’t just mean that, do you?”

Cordelia does not just mean that.

“Anne, that shelf of yours—did it, by chance, have the Chester Chrestomath series?”

“I have not heard that name, no, and I have read every book on the shelf.”

“That’s a pity. I’ll have to lend it to you. It’s kind of written for kids, but it’s amazing. It’s about a boy who goes off to a special school where they teach magic. Wait, do you know what magic is?”

“Those accursed arts which derive their power from compacts and liaisons with the prime agents used by vice in its Everlasting Struggle against virtue, whereby the appointed courses of things are made to deviate so as to advantage the practitioner. Marriott, Volume 3.”

“Close enough. So, there’s this boy, at a school for magic, right? But the plots get really deep and complicated, and the characters are really well-written and lovable, and it’s just awesome. Seriously, I’ll lend it to you. I swear it’s better than anything on your bookshelf.”

“And,” Anne says, “we are going into this story? How do you mean, exactly?”

“Chester Chrestomath was super popular, right before the anomalings came. Everyone read it, kids, adults, everyone. So when they made these little worlds to lock us up in, the crashes, a lot of them—not the majority, not nearly, but a lot—were variants of the Chester Chrestomath world. That was easy for them to do. A shared story, lots of roles to put different people in, lots of ways to keep people satisfied, or satisfied enough.

“But the anomalings don’t control everything. We’ve rescued people from them. Rescued you. And we’ve taken territory from them, too. We seized control of one of the Chester Chrestomath crashes, and it is now one of our bases of operation. That’s where we’re going.”

“Cordelia?”

“Yes, Anne?”

“I want to see Michael again.”

It is very dark now. Certain clouds, blessed by the last vestiges of sunlight, stand out against the twilit gloom, their forms half grey but half golden-bronze. They have the taut grandeur of huge, sinewy, purposeful limbs.

“I’m sorry, Anne.”