Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

It was Nisus and Euryalus . The characters were out of the Aeneid . “Homosexual love,” she said.

“But he wanted these withheld,” I objected. “There’s a difference between works that have been lost, and those a writer wishes to destroy. You published these against his will.”

“Oh, no, Mr. Wickham. We never do that. To begin with, if Shakespeare had wanted these plays destroyed, he could have handled that detail quite easily. He desired only that they not be published in his lifetime. Everything you see here,” she included the entire library with a sweeping, feminine gesture, “was given to us voluntarily. We have very strict regulations on that score. And we do things strictly by the book.

“In some cases, by the way, we perform an additional service. We are able, in a small way, to reassure those great artists who have not been properly recognized in their own lifetimes. I wish you could have seen Melville.”

“You could be wrong, you know.”

Her nostrils widened slightly. “About what?”

“Maybe books that get lost deserve to be lost.”

“Some do.” Her tone hardened. “None of those is here. We exercise full editorial judgment.”

“We close at midnight,” she said, appearing suddenly behind me while I was absorbed in the Wells novel, Starflight . I could read the implication in her tone: Never to open again. Not in Fort Moxie. Not for you.

I returned Wells and moved quickly along, pulling books from the shelves with a sense of urgency. I glanced through Mendinhal , an unfinished epic by Byron, dated 1824, the year of his death. I caught individually brilliant lines, and tried to commit some of them to memory, and proceeded on to Blake, to Fielding, to Chaucer! At a little after eleven, I came across four Conan Doyle stories: “The Adventure of the Grim Footman”; ”The Branmoor Club”; “The Jezail Bullet”; “The Sumatran Clipper.” My God, what would the Sherlockians of the world not give to have those?

I hurried on with increasing desperation, as though I could somehow gather the contents into myself, and make them available to a waiting world: God and Country , by Thomas Wolfe; fresh cartoons by James Thurber, recovered from beneath wallpaper in a vacation home he’d rented in Atlantic City in 1947; plays by Odets and O’Neill; short stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Terry Carr. Here was More Dangerous Visions . And there Mary Shelley’s Morgan .

As I whirled through the rice-paper pages, balancing the eerie moonlit lines of A. E. Housman with the calibrated shafts of Mencken, I envied them. Envied them all.

And I was angry.

“You have no right,” I said at last, when Coela came to stand by my side, indicating that my time was up.

“No right to withhold all this?” There was a note of sympathy in her voice.

“Not only that,” I said. “Who are you to set yourself up to make such judgments? To say what is great and what pedestrian?”

To my surprise, she did not take offense. “I’ve asked myself that question many times. We do the best we can.” We were moving toward the door. “We have quite a lot of experience, you understand.”

The lights dimmed. “Why are you really doing this? It’s not for us, is it?”

“Not exclusively. What your species produces belongs to all.” Her smile broadened. “Surely you would not wish to keep your finest creations to yourselves?”

“Your people have access to them now?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Back home everyone has access. As soon as a new book is cataloged here, it is made available to everybody.”

“Except us.”

“We will not do everything for you, Mr. Wickham.” She drew close, and I could almost feel her heartbeat.

“Do you have any idea what it would mean to our people to recover all this?”

“I’m sorry. For the moment, there’s really nothing I can do.”

She opened the door for me, the one that led into the back bedroom. I stepped through it. She followed. “Use your flashlight,” she said.

We walked through the long hallway and down the stairs to the living room. She had something to say to me, but seemed strangely reluctant to continue the conversation. And somewhere in the darkness of Will Potter’s place, between the magic doorway in the back of the upstairs closet, and the broken stone steps off the porch, I understood! And when we paused on the concrete beside the darkened post light, and turned to face each other, my pulse was pounding. “It’s no accident that this place became visible tonight, is it?”

She said nothing.

“Nor that only I saw it. I mean, there wouldn’t be a point to putting your universal library in Fort Moxie unless you wanted something. Right?”

“I said this was the Fort Moxie branch . The central library is located on Saint Simons Island.” The brittleness of the last few moments melted without warning. “But no, you’re right, of course.”

“You want Independence Square , don’t you? You want to put my book in there with Thomas Wolfe and Shakespeare and Homer. Right?”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s right. You’ve created a powerful psychological drama, Mr. Wickham. You’ve captured the microcosm of Fort Moxie and produced a portrait of small town America that has captured the imagination of the Board. And, I might add, of our membership. You will be interested, by the way, in knowing that one of your major characters caused the blackout tonight.”

“Jack Gilbert,” I said. “How’d it happen?”

“Can you guess?”

“An argument with his wife, somehow or other.” Gilbert, who had a different name, of course, in Independence Square , had a long history of inept philandering.

“Yes. Afterward, he took the pickup and ran it into the streetlight at Eleventh and Foster. Shorted out everything over an area of forty square blocks. It’s right out of the book.”

“Yes,” I said.

“But he’ll never know he’s in it. Nor will any of the other peopleyou’ve immortalized. Only you know. And only you would ever know, were it not for us.” She stood facing me. The snow had stopped, and the clouds had cleared away. The stars were hard and bright in her eyes. “We think it unlikely that you will be recognized in your own lifetime.We could be wrong. We were wrong about Faulkner.” Her lips crinkled into a smile. “But it is my honor to invite you to contribute your work to the library.”

I froze. It was really happening. Emerson. Hemingway. Wickham. I loved it. And yet, there was something terribly wrong about it all. “Coela,” I asked. “Have you ever been refused?”

“Yes,” she said cautiously. “Occasionally it happens. We couldn’t convince Cather of the value of Ogden’s Bequest . Charlotte and Emily Bronte both rejected us, to the world’s loss. And Tolstoy. Tolstoy had a wonderful novel from his youth which he considered, well, anti-Christian.”

“And among the unknowns? Has anyone just walked away?”

“No,” she said. “Never. In such a case, the consequences would be especially tragic.” Sensing where the conversation was leading, she’d begun to speak in a quicker tempo, at a slightly higher pitch. “A new genius, who would sink into the sea of history, as Byron says, ‘without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.’ Is that what you are considering?”

“You have no right to keep all this to yourself.”

She nodded. “I should remind you, Mr. Wickham, that without the intervention of the library, these works would not exist at all.”

I stared past her shoulder, down the dark street.