Guiltily, I let myself into the attic. A footprint hadn’t been set in that room for cycles. What neglected treasures were there to find in this dusty wonderland? The book was on the shelf where I remembered it. It was very big and heavy and, hugging it to my chest, I almost dropped it. On the front were the words “Scientific Figments: Volume 1.” With my tongue between my lips, I flipped to my bookmark on Page 49. Unlike most modern literature which focused on military history, inside, this book was full of exciting adventures and riveting tales of galactic proportions. Some readers may have been startled by the depictions of grotesque aliens or doomsday scenarios. But I knew that because, as the name implied, none of it was real and it could not hurt me. And besides, there are few things more startling than the graphic imagery of some of the deadliest battles in history.
After just a few minutes, I was completely enraptured and the whole world around me disappeared, sending me into a new one. I had no idea how old the book was; the pages all kind of stuck together when I flipped through. I had to pry them apart—like a treasure chest—to uncover the juicy story that lay between. Certainly, nothing like it could exist anymore which is probably why it sat forgotten in the attic for so long. The book had been retired in favor of changing societal tastes. Science had been out of fashion for who knows how long.
Pressing the button, she had launched the vessel—along with its three brave passengers—skyward. At a distant altitude, it soared the skies like a golden galleon. The ship’s bow broke through the atmosphere, which I perceived to be a protective barrier made of something, plastic maybe? It must have been pretty strong and tight to keep all the air and stuff in. Once free, the ship would stay in the sky, close to home, and watch the planet from above. What would it be like to endlessly circle the planet? Endlessly, I thought. After I reached “the end”, I looked back at the shelf, seeking other stories. After a while, fearful of being discovered, I closed the book, loosely placed it back in its sleeve, and still with more difficulty lifted the book and placed it back on the shelf.
As I left the spare room, a little out of breath, my mother came upon me and I started once more.
Marie: Is everything all right, dear?
Enriko: Yes, mom.
I affected a casual air, but my heart was beating, my palms sweating. I settled down in a favorite spot in the small backyard and, my knees drawn up to my chin, thought about the story. What was the story of the world about?
We Notares are not very good at understanding. In neither comprehension nor compassion. We never have been. We were only able to build fires, not let them guide our vision or discovery. There was a time before guns, before war, before conflict, before hate. The greatest part of Notare existence was spent in such a time. Over the dying embers of the campfire, on a moonless night, we used the fire to watch the stars and read our books.
There have been many great achievements throughout the history of our species. But to me, the greatest marvel would have to be The Grand Dorian Archive and its associated Museum (an institution devoted to the specialties of the Twelve Muses). Of that legendary repository, the most that survives today is a dank and forgotten cellar of the Southern Wing, the Archive’s annex, once a temple and later reconsecrated to knowledge. A few moldering shelves may be its only physical remains. Yet this place was once the brain and glory of the greatest city on the planet, the first and only, true research institution in the history of the world. The scholars of the library studied the entire universe and its order. In order to alleviate its opposite: Chaos. Science and scholarship had come of age. Genius flourished there. The Grand Dorian Archive is where we once collected, seriously and systematically, the knowledge of the world.
The many Kings of Doria who succeeded were serious about learning. For centuries, they supported research and maintained in the Archive a working environment for the best minds of our age. It contained ten large research halls, each devoted to a separate subject; fountains and colonnades; botanical gardens; a zoo; dissecting rooms; an observatory; and a great dining hall where, at leisure, was conducted the critical discussion of ideas.
The heart of the Archive—and indeed my favorite part—was its collection of books. The organizers combed all the cultures and languages of the world. They sent agents abroad to buy up libraries. Commercial ships docking in Doria were searched by the police—not for contraband, but for books. The scrolls were borrowed, copied and then returned to their owners. Accurate numbers are difficult to estimate, but it seems probable that the Archive contained half a million volumes, each a handwritten papyrus scroll. What happened to all those books? Well, the classical civilization that created them disintegrated, and the Archive itself was deliberately destroyed. Only a small fraction of its works survived, along with a few pathetic scattered fragments. And how tantalizing those bits and pieces are! What great mysteries of the world are answered in such volumes? What are we made of? How did we get here? What controls the planet? What is our place in the universe?
If we multiply by a hundred thousand our sense of loss of the answers to these questions, we begin to appreciate the grandeur of the achievement of ancient civilization and the tragedy of its destruction. We have yet to surpass the science known to the ancient world. And there are irreparable gaps in our historical knowledge. Imagine what mysteries about our past could be solved with a borrower’s card to the Grand Dorian Archive. We know of a three-volume history of the world, now lost. The first volume dealt with the interval from the creation of the universe to the Great Flood, a period taken to be 432,000 cycles or about a hundred times longer than any religious text. I wonder what was in it.
“What is the world’s story about?” I asked myself as a child. And even still as an adult, I ask myself “What way will the world go? How does it end and, while we’re at it, what’s the story about?” I believe that there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened and inspired us, so that we live in our own Scientific Figments serial of continuing thought and wonder.
Notares are caught—in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and, perhaps in a lesser respect, in their kindness and generosity too—in a latticework of evil and good. I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence. Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners. There is no other story. Someone, after they have brushed off the dust and chips of their life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well—or ill?
An ancient philosopher, during the Great Locrian War, tells a story of how Kroisus, the richest and most-favored emperor of his time, asked Solanine the Aeolian a leading question. He would not have asked it if he had not been worried about the answer. “Who,” he asked, “is the luckiest person in the world?” He must have been eaten with doubt and hungry for reassurance. Solanine told him of three lucky people in old times. And Kroisus more than likely did not listen, so anxious was he about himself. And when Solanine did not mention him, Kroisus was forced to say, “Do you not consider me lucky?”
Solanine did not hesitate in his answer. “How can I tell?” he said. “You aren’t dead yet.”
And this answer must have haunted Kroisus dismally as his luck disappeared, and his wealth and his kingdom. And as he was being burned on a tall fire, on the top of the Grand Dorian Archive, he may have thought of it and perhaps wished he had not asked or not been answered.
And in our time, when someone dies—if they have had wealth and influence and power and all the vestments that arouse envy, and after the living take stock of the dead man’s property and his eminence and works and monuments—the question is still there: Was his life good or was it evil?—which is another way of putting Kroisus’ question. Envies are gone, and the measuring stick is: “Was he loved, or was he hated? Is his death felt as a loss or does a kind of joy come of it?”
In uncertainty, I am certain that underneath their topmost layers of frailty people want to be good and want to be loved. Indeed, most of their vices are attempted short cuts to love. When someone comes to die, no matter what their talents and influence and genius, if they die unloved their life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror. It seems to me that if you or I must choose between two courses of thought or action, we should remember our dying and try so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.
We have only one story. All novels, all poetry—all left anyway—are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that good must constantly respawn, while evil, while iniquity, is immortal. Virtue has always a new fresh young face, while vice is venerable as nothing else in the world is.
Marie: Enriko, what have you been up to?
Asked my mother, walking by with laundry for the clothesline.
Enriko: Nothing, Mom. Just thinking.
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