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He had pinched his lips between two thin fingers and reiterated several times that he could only guess, he was no expert.
Exasperating man.
“What doyou know, Mr. Bidewell?” Gi
“Call me Conan, please,” Bidewell encouraged. “My fatherwas Mr. Bidewell.”
“And how old was hewhen you were born?”
“Two hundred and fifty-one,” Bidewell said.
“And how old are you?”
“One thousand two hundred and fifty-three.”
“Years?”
“Of course.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Improbable,” Bidewell corrected, pushing up his small glasses and lifting the spine of another book close to his pale blue eyes. “Many things are conceivable, but impossible. Many more are conceivable, yet not probable. A very few are inconceivable—to us—yet still possible.” He hummed to himself.
“Moving stacks does wonders. Look what we have found, dear Gi
This print is tiny, and my eyes are not what they used to be.”
He held out the book.
Gi
She remembered when Bidewell had first lightly clasped her fingers, welcoming her to the warehouse and provoking—at once—a shudder and an odd sense of comfort.
“What sort of fault?” she asked.
“Anything, really—a typo, misspelling, lacunae, rivering. We must note the fault—but we must not make any corrections, or try to hide the apparent defects. They could be more important than thou canst know, young lady, to that Citie. Whatever and wherever that Citie may be.”
Another week passed, and Gi
Bidewell’s warehouse was home to over 300,000 books. Gi
These two were black and white. The smaller, a young male just out of kittenhood, silently padded up to her as she sorted and read, and rubbed against her ankles until she picked him up, placed him on her lap,
and stroked him. Warm and loose-rubbery beneath soft fur, with a blaze on his chest and one white paw, he purred approval until she stopped, then leaned up on her chest and tapped her chin with a wide paw. She felt a light pinch.
He would not share any of her sandwich when she offered a bite, but instead, as a kind of hint or example, lay at the foot of her bed that night an intact but very dead mouse. All the cats were independent, and seldom responded to her chit-chits and here-kitties, but during the long nights, she would find one or two or sometimes three on the end of her cot, feet curled under, eyes slitty, watching her with warm, rumbling contentment. They seemed to approve of Bidewell’s new visitor. The cats, of course, were essential to the safety of the warehouse. Bidewell did not consider mouse-nibble edits at all helpful.
Time passed a little quicker after she met the cats. Curled one after another on her lap, they even made up for Bidewell’s suggested reading list: he put aside, near her worktable, a stack of books on mathematics, physics, and several texts on Hindu mythology. Three of the books on physics seemed more advanced than she thought science had progressed so far, discussing faster-than-light travel as if it were a fact, for example, or detailing five-dimensional slices and cross sections of fates in space-time. Next to these he placed five books with mostly blank pages—which he referred to as “culls.” Gi
Whatever mysterious things happened in libraries and bookstores and among the stacked boxes in publishers’ warehouses, it seemed that the mostly blank books were least interesting to Bidewell. “They are at best nulls, voids, spaces between keys. At worst, they are distractions. You may use them for your diary or as notebooks,” he said, and then glanced at the other stack. “Those are for your education, such as it must be, and limited as we are.”
“Are theydefective, too?” she asked. “Should I look for the errors and mark them?”
“No,” Bidewell said. “Their errors are natural, and unavoidable—the errors of ignorance and youth.”
Gi
She was hardly a prisoner, yet no matter how often she approached the door that led outside, she could not bring herself to pass through. The tension in her head and chest became unbearable, yearning and fear swirling until her stomach knotted. She could not go outside again—not yet.
“Why are you keeping me here?” she cried one morning, as Bidewell carted in another load of boxes filled with books. “I’m sick of it! Just you and these cats!”
Bidewell snapped back, “I do not keep you here. Wherever you go, I’m sure you will find your way home—by the long route. That isyour talent. The cats might miss you.” And then he walked off, knees snicking, and shut the white warehouse door with its oiled groan of counter-weights and pulleys. Gi
“You’ve got everything you want,” she accused.
The cat’s tail thumped a sealed box. He stood on his haunches and vigorously scratched the cardboard, leaving a catly symbol, like an X with an exclamation mark. Then he marched off, tail high and twitching. Sometimes he even nibbled the corners of the books on the worktable. Bidewell didn’t seem to mind. With the appearance of the girl at his wire gate, Conan Arthur Bidewell had experienced three sharp emotions: irritation, exhilaration, and fear—the last, at his age, almost indistinguishable from joy. The air was thick with change. The girl’s appearance was after all no more miraculous than the condensation of a drop of rain from a moisture-laden cloud.
Yet now he knew: the work of many lonely years was coming to fruition. Why notjoy, along with the inevitable palpitations of coming danger?
For too many decades, far too many, he had been lost in his books, charting the statistics of improbable change. What could be more desperate or more futile? Waiting for the sum-ru