The Library at Mount Char Part 46

"I'd never do that. Not to you."

"Then how?"

"Different universe, remember? I had to set up a relay before your cell phone would work. Remember how the first couple of times you tried to make a call, nothing happened?"

"Oh." He paused. "You're not mad?"

"Nothing to be mad about."

"I sort of conspired to murder you. That's nothing?"

She shook her head. "Nope. On some level you knew it couldn't work."

"How do you mean?"

She tapped the base of her skull. "No itch."

"Ah." Steve thought to himself for a few seconds. He and Naga exchanged a look. Finally he nodded. "Yeah," he said softly. "OK." Then, to her, "Can I get you a drink? There's something I want to talk to you about."

"Sure." A drink sounds really good. "What's on your mind?"

"Well, the first thing is, I wanted to talk to you about that wish."

"You know what you want?" She tried to keep the eagerness out of her voice. Maybe he's coming around after all!

"Yeah. I thought of something. You remember me talking about my dog? The c.o.c.ker spaniel?"

"Er..."

"That first night, back at the bar."

"Oh," she lied. "Of course."

"Can you find him? Make sure he's OK? His name is Petey."

"Yeah, sure. I can do that. But Steve, that's nothing. If you have-"

He gave her a very earnest look. "You promise?"

"Sure. I promise. I'm not much good with dogs, but I'll figure something out."

Steve sat back, nodded. "Thank you, Carolyn. I really appreciate that."

He fell silent. After a long pause she pulled at the air, a get-on-with-it gesture. "Steve?"

"Mmm. Sorry. How do I put this?" He pursed his lips. "Look, first, I want to tell you that I thought a lot about what you told me the other night. What happened to you. How you got to be...whatever you are."

"I told you, I'm just a libr-"

He held up his hand. "Whatever. Just know, I'm making a real effort to put myself in your place. To understand why you do the things you do. Like, that's all I've really done since then."

There was something in his tone that she didn't like. "Oh? And now you have...opinions?"

He ran his fingers through his hair. "In terms of what you did? To David and Margaret? No. I personally try to stay away from stuff like that, the kicking of a.s.s and so forth. On the other hand, no one's ever nailed me to a desk. So, really, who am I to judge?"

Ice cubes clinked in a gla.s.s. In her heart, something unclenched. "Thank you."

"But I do have an opinion about something else."

"What's that?"

"About what it did to you."

"What do you mean?"

"Well...for instance, most people I know wouldn't get bored and tune out of a conversation where someone was deciding whether or not to drop a nuclear bomb on them. Even if they were pretty sure they'd live through it, they'd be curious to hear how the conversation turned out." He shook his head. "Not you, though. It did not rise to your threshold of interest."

"I'm not sure what you're getting at."

"At first I thought you were f.u.c.king crazy. Maybe you are, by whatever standard the doctors have, but now I don't think crazy is the right word."

"What, then?" Her lips felt numb, as if she'd been given some sort of toxin.

"I can't think of a word for it. It's like you're living at a different scale than the rest of us. Normal things-fear, hope, compa.s.sion-just don't register with you."

"That's...OK. Maybe. There might be something to that." Her tone was guarded. He didn't mean her any harm, she'd know if he did, but there was something there, something...

"It has to be that way," he said. "I mean, really. How else could you have survived? But, the thing is, it cuts both ways."

"Steve, you're going to have to spell it out for me."

"Yeah, OK. I'm trying to." He poured half an inch of Everclear into her gla.s.s, then filled the rest with orange juice. He emptied the rest of the bottle into a steel stock pot. "Letting it breathe," he said. He walked over and handed her the gla.s.s.

She sipped her drink, made a face.

"Don't like it?"

"It's pretty strong." She drank it anyway.

"Yeah." He touched his cup to his lips, then set it aside. "Like I said, I've been watching the news a lot lately. Are you aware that there have been some agricultural problems? With this new sun you put up?"

"What sort of problems?"

"Well...most of the plants are dying. Almost all of them, really. Trees, gra.s.s, wheat, rice, the Amazon Basin...pretty much everything. That has some people a little concerned."

"About plants?" She was honestly confused. Americans were constantly killing one another. Every time you turned around there was another war. "Why would they care about plants?"

"The thing is, pretty soon there isn't going to be any food left."

"Oh! Right. Well, that's easy. There are plenty of molds and fungi and whatnot that will grow under the black sun. I've got books. When I get around to it I'll make a translation, and-"

"That's really nice, and I know people will appreciate it. But the problem is getting to be kind of urgent."

She s.h.i.+fted uncomfortably. "I'll see if I can block out some time next week."

"CNN is running a series of special reports on how to get nutritional value from stuff you wouldn't normally think of as food," Steve said. "Making stew out of shoe leather. Recipes for your house pets. Things like that."

"Hmm. Come to think of it, the store was out of guacamole."

"Did you notice the price on the Everclear?"

"Not really."

"Seven thousand dollars a bottle is a little higher than usual," he said. "Probably the only reason you could find it at all is that it's as much an industrial chemical as a food product. I don't think anyone except high school kids actually drinks the stuff. They only do it because they don't know any better."

"Now that you mention it, the shelves did seem kind of bare."

"I bet." He made a concentrating face. "The other day I saw something on the news that made me think of your deer. Isha and..."

"Asha."

"Right. The other week this kid, sixteen or so, got caught poaching deer on a rich guy's estate. That's a capital crime now. They caught him red-handed. Literally. He was sucking the marrow out of a doe's femur bone. His defense was that the deer were going to starve to death anyway, so why shouldn't someone get some nutrition out of them? I kind of saw his point."

Carolyn flashed on a morning she had spent nibbling dew-drenched clover with Asha, watching the spring dawn. This brought a flicker of...something...but she pushed it down.

Steve was watching her intently.

"What happened?" she asked. Her voice was perfectly normal.

Steve was silent a long moment before he answered, softly. "They hanged the kid anyway. Afterwards there were more riots. Like I said, it's kind of an everyday thing now."

"Oh." She drained her gla.s.s.

"Another drink?" His voice was stronger.

"Sure."

He walked back into the kitchen and opened the second bottle. He fixed her drink-a full inch of liquor this time-then poured the rest of that bottle into the stock pot with the first.

"Anyway. There's some other problems besides the famine. Earthquakes are the biggie. There's a new one almost every day. There's not much left of San Francisco. Tokyo is gone. Mexico City isn't far behind. And apparently there's some kind of volcano under Yellowstone that's rumbling. Nothing has really happened with it yet, but the geologists seem worried." He met her eyes. "They say it's got to do with this place."

"The Library?"

"Yeah. Apparently the pyramid thingy over Garrison Oaks is heavy. They say it's got the same ma.s.s as the moon, or something? It's s.h.i.+fting tectonic plates around?" He took a sip of her drink before he handed it to her. "You hadn't heard any of this?"

She shook her head.

"Yeah," Steve said. "I figured. Keeping an eye on your Father's enemies, right? And catching up on all these other-what did you call them?"

"Catalogs," she said. "I've been consolidating the catalogs. Strategizing. And laying the groundwork for some contingencies. Just in case."

"Sure," Steve said. "Sure. You're careful. You've got a lot on your mind. That's the world you live in, the world you know."

"Yeah." She ran her fingers through her hair, stressed. "Look, Steve, about the earthquakes and the famine and all that-I'll figure something out. But there's more going on here than you know. Q-33 North is in motion, and I can't find him. If Liesel or maybe Barry O'Shea decided to make a move against me now, it would be bad for-"

"Bad for everyone. All of us. Regular people. I get that too. And these are legitimately large problems. I do not doubt you for even a single second." He drummed his fingers against the marble tabletop. "But it leaves me with a problem of my own."

"What's that?"

"I talked this over with Erwin. And the rest of them too, the president and the Army guys, but Erwin was the only one who seemed to really get it."

"Get what?"

"How I can't get through to you." He held his hands out to her gently, palms up. "I've said it every way I know how, and it's like you don't even hear me. I was talking to Erwin about it and he said it's because we don't have a common vocabulary."

Carolyn's eyes narrowed. "My English is pretty good."

"That's what I said too, but that's not what he meant. He told me about how when he got back from the war, everyone kept telling him to let it go, to find something that made him happy and do that. He said he heard the words, said they even made sense, but he just couldn't relate to them. Then he said there was this kid, this kid he helped somehow. And that was the thing that made him understand it was possible to move on. And after that the words made sense."

"Dashaen," she said. "I remember him."

"So then I started thinking about how you must have had to shut down, inside. You had to be cold, didn't you? To get through things like a little kid getting her head split open with an ax, and people being roasted alive."

Carolyn didn't answer.

"Cold. Yeah." Steve was peering at her again. "But you're not frozen through. Not quite. There's that one little thing left, isn't there? The heart coal. That's it, isn't it? The very last thing."

After a long moment she surrendered the barest possible sliver of a nod.

"I thought so. Yeah. That's going to be the only way anyone can reach you, isn't it? The only possible way for you to...wake up. To not be cold anymore."

She didn't answer.

Steve nodded to himself, then smiled.

Something about that smile was different. What's changed?

"You never came right out and said, but I think I've guessed what it is. The heart coal, I mean." Still smiling, he stood and walked over to the stock pot.

It took her a moment, but then she got it. He's at peace, she realized. That's what's different about him. It's the first time I've ever seen him look really happy.

Standing at the counter, still smiling, he picked up the orange juice. "Another drink?"

"No." Her voice was hoa.r.s.e. "What are you doing?"

"I'm so glad you asked. Thank you for cooperating with my segue. Sure you don't want another drink?"

She shook her head.