Ink and Bone

Stumbling back into his room at Ptolemy House was like falling through time, to a different life. A different Jess Brightwell, even though, in real terms, he hadn’t been gone that long. He turned up the glows and blinked at things that seemed familiar and strange together, as if they’d gone ever so slightly out of alignment with each other. Or he had.

The room smelt dusty. Not a surprise. He checked the window and saw that despite the seals, the fine reddish dust of Alexandria had piled up in a creamy pillow along the ledge. Must have been a sandstorm during their absence. He silently shook the bedding clear, kicked off his boots, and fell flat on his back on the yielding mattress. When he closed his eyes, he could have been anywhere. Back on the train, in another bed. With—

Don’t, idiot. He opened his eyes again. The room was spi

He’d just started to relax when he heard faint, mysterious hammering sounds from somewhere below. Thomas. Thomas and his bloody automata. Not that he didn’t admire them, but not now. Not when all he wanted was some sleep.

The rhythmic, distant tapping was going to drive him mad.

Jess launched himself out of bed and jammed his boots back on; they felt damp and unwelcome, but he couldn’t venture downstairs with bare feet. Alexandria wasn’t the desert, but enough desert creatures crawled their way into it to make it unwise. Scorpions, spiders, snakes … even slightly drunk, he didn’t feel like tempting fate.

Besides, there’d likely be metal scattered all over the floor, if Thomas was working.

Sure enough, as he stepped off the stairs and into the low-beamed room that had once been a storehouse, he stepped on something hard that bit into his boot. A jagged piece of cut metal. There were a variety of sizes of the things, scattered across the smooth floor. He kicked it free, and spotted Thomas’s shadow moving behind a drawn curtain. ‘Stop hammering,’ he said. ‘You’re giving me a headache.’

‘Jess?’ Thomas pulled the faded green curtain aside and beckoned to him. ‘I’m almost finished.’

‘With what?’

‘What I told you about. The device.’

‘Oh, the secret one,’ Jess said. He had the begi

‘You can sleep any time. Come. I want to show it to the Scholar tomorrow.’

‘Thomas—’

His friend didn’t give him much of a chance to refuse, and with that big hand around his arm, dragging him forward, there wasn’t much option besides a real fight that Jess didn’t have the energy to pursue. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll look.’

The thing standing in front of him was no automaton. No wind-up toy, not even as fine as the little bird that Thomas had given Morgan.

No, this was large, complex, and disturbingly industrial. Not pretty at all.

‘You saw the diagram,’ Thomas said. He sounded absolutely on fire with excitement, and as Jess tried to take it in, Thomas pushed him aside and started pointing things out. ‘This is the bed, where you place the individual metal letters that form lines, you see? You see how they lock together, with blank spaces between for words? And you slide each line down, from bottom to top, to form a page in reverse. This—’ He tapped a large bottle full of dark liquid that he’d engineered from something that had started life as Medica equipment. ‘This is the ink. It took me weeks to find the right formula, something that holds on the page, dries without smearing … here, let me show you.’

Jess stood back and watched as Thomas fixed a large white paper to the top of the machine, and flicked a control. Ink sprayed in a long, even line along the letters on the bottom, and then the whole top of the machine, with the paper, came crashing down. For an instant, Jess thought the whole thing had collapsed, but then the top snapped back up, with the white page still affixed.

Thomas turned the machine off, reached in, and pulled the sheet of paper out. He silently handed it to Jess.

It was a neatly lettered page full of the text of the Argonautica. A book written by Apollonius Rhodius more than two thousand years past.

‘But—’ Jess blinked and struggled to order his mind. Too much to drink. Not enough sleep. ‘Why would you do this? It’s a Codex volume. Anyone can read it.’

‘That’s not the point,’ Thomas said. ‘You can press any page you like. You can build a book of pressed pages, and you can keep it. Privately! No need for hand-copying or smuggled books!’

Jess handed the sheet back. The sharp, metallic smell of the ink was unpleasant, but it was more than that. He saw the outlines of something huge in his mind, and he didn’t like the shape of it, not at all. He tried to cover it with a light tone. ‘So, you want to take the food out of my family’s mouths? I’d hoped you thought more of me than that.’

‘Think of what the Library could do with this,’ Thomas said. He’d hardly even noticed Jess’s comment, so caught up was he with his own visions. ‘Supplement the Codex so that a citizen could order their own editions to keep in their homes. Duplicates of all the unique and rare volumes, limitless duplicates! And no risking fines or prison for owning them. Profits would go to the Library, for selling the pressed volumes. The Library started out preserving originals, and they kept the tradition, but there’s no need for it now. We can press duplicates. These are just … reproductions, that’s all. Cheap. Easy to make!’

‘Dangerous,’ Jess said. His brain was still struggling to take all the implications in, but he could feel the fear soaking in. ‘Thomas, it takes the place of blanks. It undercuts the entire system.’

Thomas brushed that right aside. ‘The system needs to change, we all said so. This makes it better. More able to adapt, and aren’t they concerned about the lack of trained Obscurists? And it will satisfy the Burners – what do they want? Books they can own. The Library not watching what they read. Freedom. This is freedom, in this ink. This page.’ He paused and said, ‘It would set Morgan free.’

He was right. Thomas was absolutely right about that, and that was what was so damned frightening. Jess didn’t even have the words for what it meant, and he just looked at Thomas, shaking his head. He knew he looked as if he didn’t understand, but he did. That was the whole problem.

‘You just said, out loud, that this thing is a gift to the Burners, Thomas. To heretics! Think about that!’

‘No, no, that’s not what I meant, I only meant that it will silence them, it will keep them from—’

‘That isn’t what the Curators will see,’ Jess said. ‘They’ll only see the threat.’

‘But—’ Thomas looked lost now, and so disappointed that Jess felt guilty. But not enough to change his mind, not by half. ‘But surely if it belongs strictly to the Library, it can be a great asset to them. Don’t you think so?’

‘I think it’s bloody brilliant. I think you’re a genius. But something like this, something so simple, and so huge – that can’t be controlled. All it will take is a spark, and everything’s on fire.’ Jess looked at the page in his hand. The ink was dry now, and what he saw in it was beautiful. Thomas was right, it would change everything, for ever, in the same way the idea and promise of the Library had altered the entire world, gathering together and protecting the knowledge of mankind against wars and persecution and every kind of shallow, mindless violence.

It made him weak at the knees, the blinding simplicity of it. The possibilities.

And it made him afraid.

‘Who have you shown this to?’ he asked. Thomas blinked. ‘Anyone else in the class?’

‘No. I like to have things finished before I show them. You’re the first.’