The Library of Broken Worlds, page 1
Yet, friends in publike places, if you would
Hackle the blatant beast and call him tame,
Sound Melville deep to grapple your white whale,
First you must live with corpses three months old.
No Kraken shall depart till bade by name.
No peace but that must pay full toll to hell.
–Malcolm Lowry, “Warning from False Cape Horn“
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Tesseracts and Material Gods of The Library of Broken Worlds
A girl and a god, alone in communion.
—I was born in the Library.
—Awilu ballads begin with a call and end with a sacrifice.
—I fell in love in the mud, but I destroyed it in the dust.
—To understand Nergüi, you have to understand two things.
—There’s a kind of story called a portal story.
—Once I decided to look, the Library opened itself up to me.
—As ze lived. Radically, with love.
—Let’s imagine a boy.
—In the end, Quinn himself showed me the path to the center of my glass.
—The dead are alive in the desert that surrounds the Library.
—This is the secret of our lighted paths.
—I came to kill you.
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also Alaya Dawn Johnson
Copyright
A girl and a god, alone in communion. The god awakes, as he was meant to. He is furious!
“I’ll kill you like I killed the others, the ones with your face.”
The girl is her own light in the darkness. “I’m dying anyway.”
“A virus can’t kill you as fast as I can,” he says.
“But you, great Nameren, the Naamaru Catre, the Tezcatlapa, Aurochs whose great horns are crescents of twin moons, whose testes swing like the bells of war—”
“Are you laughing?”
It is a fine, wide laugh. “You won’t kill me, O first and greatest material god.”
“Why not, O girl who should not exist?”
“Who else can you talk to? Without me, you’ll slide back into your blood-laced sleep for another five centuries.”
The god doesn’t move from his darkness. “You came here to kill me.”
“Maybe my sisters came to kill you—”
“I know you—”
“But I haven’t.”
“You were made for me,” he says.
And she says, “I am a creature built from a dream, designed for deicide.”
“What?”
“That’s what Nadi, my watcher, once told me.”
“No human can kill a god. Not even a human created for the purpose.”
The girl lifts her chin. “Then why not keep me around a little longer? Unfortunately for my creators, I have free will. I didn’t come here for deicide.”
The god is suspicious. “For what, then?”
“To wake you up. All of you.”
“They made me sleep. I’ve lost time, centuries, generations and generations …”
“What do you remember?”
“There was a war, a long war. The Awilu who made me against the Mahām who fed me, and I let the Mahām lose … somehow …”
“Do you remember the Library?”
The god considers. “There is a dream I have, of a disc spinning in space like a plate on a potter’s wheel, lit by a red-orange sun and two dancing moons.”
“The Library is a dream, Nameren—a dream of peace built on a grave, guarded by four drowsing gods. The Library is where all stories start, and where they all return before they die. I know I’ll never see it again.”
“Why not?”
“You’re not the only one who wants to kill me.”
The god is curious, as the girl intended him to be. “This Library of yours has four gods?” he asks. “There were seven material gods when I fell asleep.”
“There are eight now,” she says. “The Awilu made us a new one after the war. The last one they will ever make.”
“A new god? Tell me.”
She has him now. “I could tell you about her. About all of them. I could tell you about my home, just as befits the Library, in a story. All you have to do is promise not to kill me.”
“This communion can’t end with both of us alive. And gods don’t die.”
“Then don’t kill me just yet.”
“If I want the story, you mean?”
“Yes, great Nameren,” says the girl to the god in the dark. “If you want the story.”
Nadi found me in the tunnels, where the collected knowledge of humanity burrows underground like an anthill led by an aging queen. I was a screaming newborn with clay-dark skin shrunk and wrinkled around fresh-set bones. Ze didn’t realize right then what I was—maybe ze felt a tickle in zir ear, the ghost of an echo of a memory—but ze saw me from the first as human. It took me years, growing up in the Library, to realize that ze was the only one who would.
Iemaja is the common name for the eighth god, the one you don’t remember, Nameren. Nadi was walking Iemaja’s tunnels that night because ze had been elected Head Librarian the day before. Quinn had very nearly edged zir out with his campaign to aggressively interpret the Treaty’s Freedom nodes, but in the end Nadi’s vision of expansive peace had won, and ze had undertaken the required vigil, communing with each of the Library’s four material gods in turn—Iemaja, the youngest; Mahue’e, the angriest; Tenehet, the wisest; and Old Coyote, the bloodiest. They had each accepted zir, and so there ze was, one of the most powerful people in the three systems, as lonely as a god. Ze had gone to Iemaja because in communion she had shown Nadi a single image over and over: a young Awilu woman by a river, skirt muddy with green silt, clams in a basket over her arm. Only when ze looked more closely did ze realize they weren’t clams; they were shards of Nyad blue.
Nyad is another of Iemaja’s avatars. Your own avatars tend to express themselves by inspiring people to violence, I know, but the Library is different. Our gods’ avatars inhabit the earth. They have burrowed their own spaces into the rock, and their crystals have turned every shade of the visible spectrum, so that we know which incarnation of the god holds us by the light in their walls. The night of my birth, or of my creation, or of my discovery, my Nadi had been walking Nyad’s tunnels and wondering about Iemaja’s strange, silent message. And then ze heard me. A squall, thin as a cotton thread, snaking around a curve in the crystal.
“And that, Iemaja?” Nadi asked. Ze tried to dip into communion, but Nyad skittered away and ze didn’t want to force it. Ze followed the voice. “It sounded human,” ze would always say, telling me this story. “You hear all kinds of things in the tunnels, but they are so rarely human. I knew this was what she had meant for me to find.”
“To find me?” I would always ask.
“To find my truest daughter.”
I was in a room filled with millennia-old textiles, mostly Awilu: rugs knotted into intricate fractals, golden spider-silk kaftans, scalp nets jointed with blood-colored amber. I was squashed against a simple mantle, something woven on a backstrap loom from henequen fiber in red and blue threads, maybe even Tierran. Nadi had never seen this trove before; it wasn’t registered. But the Library is like that—it likes to keep back some of its treasures.
There was I, this screaming thing with Awilu skin and throwback genes that would change zir life. I became Nadi’s child in that moment, before ze even touched me and I quieted. I am lucky it was Nadi who became Head Librarian. Quinn might have claimed me, but only to dissect me. No one would have been able to stop him.
In a hundred thousand ways, I should not exist. But I exist, and so I think. That’s from a great Tierran philosopher—I forget zir name.
I exist, and so I love. And so I am loved. Nadi named me Freida. Freida of the Library.
When I die, they will say of me, “But remember how she loved!”
Nadi taught me in threes. Ze taught me about love, which was trust and vulnerability and truth. It was sprouting and blooming and withering. It was catching up and holding on and letting go. “That’s a cube, Freida,” ze told me, “which is a three of threes, and we use it to hold that which is most sacred.” Ze had other triplets, too. There was one for the library, which dated from its founding:
It’s flat, but you can’t fall off;
it’s peace, but it was built from blood;
it’s divine, but wholly material.
“We are peace, Freida,” ze said one night when I was six. We were sitting in zir garden, and ze had drunk two glasses of that dark, tarry wine ze called indigo. I snuggled against zir side and watched a caterpillar with a dozen purple eyes on its back eat a leaf in my lap.
“Why are we peace?” I asked.
“Because when the universe would have drowned in blood, we built the Library to save it. You and me, Freida, we of the Library preserve peace. We are the ballast against the Nameren.”
That was the first time that I heard your name, O first and thirstiest god, but I did not truly think it had anything to do with me. An ache did not grab me between my shoulders; a warm hand did not close over the nape of my neck. Only Nadi’s hand—steady and strong and, as far as I knew, old as the gods—tightened on my elbow. I hummed as I fed the caterpillar the last of its leaf.
I suppose I can see why ze didn’t tell
I was seven years old when I realized I was beautiful. An Awilu inner-branch elder offered the Library an entire collection of priceless Formative-era paintings in exchange for the rights to me. Ze could because, legally, I’ve never been a person. I have always been considered a part of the Library.
Nadi explained this to me very calmly. Ze explained that I would have different rights in the Awilu system. There, I would be human … but I would also be a very special type of property.
I asked what kind of property I would be.
Ze said I would be a work of art.
“Why would I be a work of art?”
And ze said, I will never forget, “You are beautiful in a way that makes those who look upon you lose their true north.”
There are many ways to be human. There are many ways to be beautiful. Still, I am beautiful enough in a specific way to be a thing.
A dangerous thing.
Our material gods might be your children and grandchildren, Nameren, but they are very different from you. They are wide and they are deep, and I spent my childhood crawling through their entrails. It was through them that I began to understand what I was, long before I had the words. I spent my adolescence swallowing crystals and learning forbidden communion. Only Cube Librarians and higher were allowed to commune with material gods, and all but the Head did so with heavy restrictions. But gods are conscious entities, for all that you move at timescales at the raw edge of even augmented human understanding. Right now, the way that I forced you to wake for me, to move at a more human rhythm, to imagine? I learned that from Iemaja. She was my first teacher.
Iemaja’s temple is the most beautiful of the Library. Tourists buy tickets years in advance for the eclipse services; even the daily mass regularly fills the balcony. From the atrium branch her twelve main arteries, her main avatars. These twelve avatars are stable, but she has many more—hundreds, perhaps thousands—that no librarian has ever been able to count.
Four high spires guard the cenote at the center of her temple. Its deep black surface ripples and pulses with colored light streaming through the aged crystal walls. The light hangs in the rafters and catches in our clothing—refulgent, sharp, like earth offering itself to the sky. It always smells of copal, even when there are no librarians there to burn the white cones of resin. Around two hundred years ago, the ceiling peeled back like the skin around a wound, and in just sixteen days the area above the cenote had vanished. Sculptures dissolved like salt in hot water. And now, once every month when the full blue fish moon and the full pink thorn moon cross paths in the sky, their dual light shines unencumbered through the hole in the roof. We burn copal and myrrh and pray through the silence.
Sometimes I imagine that I can see the walls expanding and contracting. Sometimes I am sure that I can see Iemaja breathe. Sometimes I am sure that at the bottom of that long black pool lies her heart, and that it aches as much as mine.
Iemaja birthed me, or helped to make me, or found and cared for me as best she could, and she gave me Nadi, my parent. And I am like Iemaja, because she is beautiful, because she loves too much, because she is loved too much, for all the wrong reasons.
I had always been aware of my affinity with Iemaja. But I didn’t understand it until I was thirteen. I had my first kiss with a high-wetware Martian-Lunar who was visiting his uncle for “diplomatic training.” His name was Samlin and his uncle was Quinn. I must have fallen in love; at least, I can’t think of any other explanation for how I tolerated Quinn’s behavior over that breathless rainy season of the tears. He would congratulate Samlin for having a fine eye for beauty and knowing when he’d made a good catch. To me he said nothing at all, but his eyes would linger with mortifying precision on my breasts and hips and thighs. My body had changed so much in the previous six months that it hardly felt like my own. I tried to hide it behind stiff tunics of unaffiliated ivory and blue. But I think Quinn took my neutral colors as further proof of my inadequacy—or vulnerability.
Samlin convinced me to nanodrop with him. “It’ll be fun,” he told me. “You’ll get a taste of what it’s like to live with your whole brain on fire for once.”
“That doesn’t sound too pleasant,” I said, attempting a joke, but he just patted my shoulders and said, “You’ll want a wetware operation yourself after this.”
Quinn gave us the pills we were too young to order ourselves. Standing there in his front room, which was twice the size of Nadi’s quarters, two thoughts came to me clearly: You disgust him and He wants to eat you.
Samlin was short for a Martian and slender for a Lunar, with deep-set eyes whose color I could never quite catch; they were always flashing with mods, which my inadequate wetware rendered as simple strobing lights. He carried himself with the contained self-assurance of a demigod from the old Awilu sagas, and I suppose he was as beautiful as one, though he lacked their depth and their hard choices. He kissed me as soon as we dropped into the designer gamespace that he had paid a small fortune to port into nanodrop accessibility.
“Don’t you love it?” he asked. His hand on my shoulder was as real as life. I had entered into illicit communion with the gods more than a dozen times before, but being here with him made me feel oddly small.
“It’s wild,” I said after a beat. He frowned.
“You’re unhappy,” he said, pointing. When I looked down, I saw that my hands had turned blue.
It turned out that my subconscious imprinted my every emotion on the virtual space like a child’s fingerprints on glass. Whenever he kissed me, my heart became a marble rattling around my rib cage.
He squeezed my shoulders. “Has anyone told you how sweet you are? Your in-drop affect is amazing for—”
Then he stopped himself. I glowed with embarrassment. His gaze—blue eyes, I could see them at last—blanketed me.
He sat me in a barber’s chair, part of the architecture of the gamespace. The leather wrapped itself around my hips, held me down. He stood over me and tilted my face to the ceiling.
“Just relax,” he told me.
“I want to go home,” I told him.
“You are home. Your body isn’t even here now.”
His hands above me, so large. He had his own in-drop affect, it turned out. I couldn’t move. But could I? I didn’t move—didn’t I want to?
His hands did what they wanted with me. Touched me with sharp scissoring thrusts. It hurt. The chair swallowed me like a wet mouth.
I don’t remember the rest. Perhaps it didn’t matter, perhaps it didn’t count. It wasn’t my real body. It wasn’t real.
But it felt real.
By the time Samlin left me three weeks later, I felt like a blindfolded animal: confused, disoriented, ready to bite. I cried for days and sent him increasingly desperate messages until I realized he would never respond to me again. Nadi told me I’d forget about him, that everyone had to fall in love for the first time, that it would get better. I wanted to believe zir. But I was shivering, growing into ice, drifting into an empty sea. I didn’t know how to say what I was feeling. I hardly knew how to feel it.
Nadi had little time for me in those days. Ze was sequestered at a diplomatic round table with the Mahām leadership to address recent protests about their Treaty-condemned occupation of the Miuri moon. I didn’t push. The thought of telling Nadi precisely what had happened or not happened in that nanodrop made my guts twist like wet rope and my head fill with cotton. Better Iemaja, I decided. Better a god who barely understands the minutiae of human affairs and only speaks in communion.
I walked inside her because I had seen myself in Samlin’s deep eyes and hated that reflection. Freida the sweet. Freida the beautiful. Freida, once an excellent find but now inconvenient, twitchy, withdrawn, and desperate. I was beginning to see myself as they did, all those who stared and stared and saw nothing behind my eyes but a dark mirror. What was my heart, what were my bones, what were my constellations of synapses firing, lighting up my soul? Nadi insisted I was human, but even so, I had been left to freeze out in the ocean because no one thought I was worth any more. I was afraid, Nameren, so very afraid that they were right.
