Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

“I need to sit down,” said Perucho.

El bombín and Perucho remained silent for a while after Rosa left.

“She is in charge of the most delicate and poetic books. A passionate reader, and so full of curiosity for life…”

“But… but why all this effort just to save me… All this must have cost a fabulous amount of…”

“Just to save you? No. To save literature itself, Perucho. You are not the only one ‘spicing up’ the Encyclopaedia, even if, may I add, you are one of the best. Some of your other colleagues, whom you will meet, such as our beloved Mr. Cunqueiro, and Marcel Aymé, who is one of the supervisors of the French-language area… Others develop their creational worlds in academia, such as the famous Professor…”

“Torrente Ballester!” Perucho interrupted. “I’ve always had a suspicion about his fonts. Some of his themes are too beautiful to be true.”

El bombín sighed.

“As if beauty had to be forcibly different from truth… I’m afraid such are the times we find ourselves in.”

“Estos bueyes tenemos y con ellos tenemos que arar.”

There was a long silence.

“Perucho,” el bombín said, “the history of the last decades was not exactly as they… as we … have officially been told. The powers that be have made their own ‘not exactly true’ additions to the Encyclopaedia; not as delightful as yours, I should add. As a well-read man, may I assume you are familiar with the name Herbert George Wells?”

Perucho was surprised. He was expecting great revelations about politics, economics…

“Yes, he was an English writer.”

“What if I were to tell you that he shaped the world as we know it?”

“Well… I’d be very surprised.”

“In 1935 he wrote a novel…”

The word novel sounded so beautiful to Perucho. It contained all the freedom and power from the past art.

“ The Shape of Things to Come ,” el bombín continued. “It was a cautionary tale, but not of the classic sort, which provides advice merely for the individual. No, this story was about a whole society and depicted a dark future, the consequence of misguided group behavior. The book was moderately successful, but in general was considered an extravagant experiment. Why would a serious writer waste his time depicting hypothetical futures?”

Perucho smiled. That kind of book sounded very appealing to him, but maybe he was not the typical reader.

“Three years later, a man called Orson Welles made a radio broadcast. He loved the work of this writer with a similar surname to his, and planned a practical joke for Halloween. He was a perfectionist, so he enlisted colleagues in different radio stations in Britain, Europe, and even Russia to create the maximum impact. He wanted to demonstrate to his bosses the immense power of the radio.”

“But Todos los Santos, 1938…That was the day of the coup d’état in the old US and Britain…,” Perucho interrupted.

“Exactly. Except that in the beginning there was no putsch, just a fake radio transmission about one.”

Perucho felt overwhelmed.

“This doesn’t make any sense. The overthrow of the government was real. It had far-reaching consequences…”

“After the radio show, people were scared. Many abandoned the cities. Chaos reigned everywhere. The point was proven: radio had power. But at the moment Orson Welles wanted to explain to the world that it had all been just a practical joke, communications were cut everywhere. One of the radical political parties had seized the opportunity and performed a real coup d’état.

“No one knew what to do. Within a few hours, hastily arranged clandestine meetings took place. Soon, rich oligarchies realized that the new order was far more convenient for them. And the ambitious new leaders arrested Orson Welles. He gave them the book he had drawn inspiration from.”

“Are you telling me the shape of the world came from a novel and a radio show?”

“It wasn’t that simple. Many agents and interests were involved. But yes, in the end, they thought H. G. Wells’s plans were ideal. Why bother to design a new way forward when one had already been mapped out?”

“But you said Wells’s novel was a cautionary tale, not a social proposal…”

“They took it as a handbook. And it worked. They made both Wells and Welles work for them during the early years, and then set them free as reward for their ‘cooperation.’ ”

“Forced cooperation…”

El bombín nodded.

“Let me get this straight,” said Perucho. “Are you telling me that a fable and a joke gave rise to this economic system, to our whole society? The same society that has banned fiction itself?”

“They limit new creations precisely because they know the impact stories can have.

“Orson Welles was the creator of the regime’s propaganda machines for many years, and he did an amazingly good job under several pen names, such as Kane. Nobody knows what he did after that, maybe he just spent the rest of his life on an island, smoking cigars and fathering children. But we do know what H. G. Wells did. He became an entrepreneur and made big money. After all, he knew all the internal mechanisms of power. And with the help of his friend G. K. Chesterton he built a secret institution destined to protect the creators who, like yourself, my dear Perucho, find a way to continue writing fiction in the most adverse of conditions.”

Perucho glanced at the machines, this big workshop dedicated to falsification.

“All this came from Wells’s funds?” he said, assimilating the new information.

They stood in silence while Perucho observed the ancient tórculos , the amanuensis, the papersmiths. He had so many questions… But he was so overwhelmed by the situation that he needed a moment to order his thoughts.

“I need to go for a walk,” he said.

El bombín nodded, and gave him the keys of the secret door.

“You can return whenever you wish.”

Perucho walked for a long time. The whole city looked different, more intriguing and seductive once he knew the secret Barcelona was hiding. If one clandestine enterprise was working beneath the visible, how many other amazing projects could be living in the shadows?

He arrived at Els Encants and looked among the piles of old books, abandoned and rejected by so many hands before, lying between used clothes and old crocks, and he bought three of them. He could never resist.

The following day, he went to work as usual.

And the next one, too.

The routine slowly regained its familiar rhythm. And then, on the Thursday, el bombín came by his workplace.

“Perucho,” he said, angrily, “this box is not aligned with the margins. Start again.”

The editor looked at him, astonished. The man was the best actor he had ever seen.

“Yes, sir.”

That same afternoon, Perucho returned to the narrow streets and found the secret door. He opened it with his key. He found Rosa there, who was very happy to see him.

“And now… What? What can I expect? Will my life… change?”

Rosa smiled.

“Not necessarily. We have discovered, through the years, that the simplest way to pursue undercover writing is to do exactly as you are doing: not have any cover at all.”

“Then… after all this… I am supposed to go to work tomorrow like any other day, as if this never happened?”

“Yes. Exactly as if this place, all these amazing machines and creators, and our little conversation, were nothing more than… a work of fiction.”

Greg Egan (gregegan.net) has published more than sixty short stories and thirteen novels, and has won the Hugo and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards. His recent publications include the novellas Perihelion Summer from Tor.com and Dispersion from Subterranean Press.