The Last Book in the Universe (2 page)

 

 

I
GO
, “L
IAR
!
Books are in libraries. Or they used to be.”

The man called Ryter starts to say something and then he stops, like I've given him something important to think about. “Interesting,” he says. “You're aware that the things called ‘books' used to be stored in libraries. That was long before you were born, so how did you know?”

I shrug and say, “I heard, is all. When I was a little kid. About how things used to be before the Shake.”

“And you remember everything you hear?”

“Pretty much,” I say. “Doesn't everybody?”

The old gummy chuckles. “Not hardly. Most of 'em, they've had their brains softened by needle probes and they can't really retain much. Long-term memory is a thing of the past, no pun intended. The only ones left who can remember books are a few old geezers like me. And, apparently, you.”

Now that I think about it, I know what he's talking about. I've always had a lot of old stuff in my head that everybody else seems to have forgotten.

“What else do you remember?” Ryter asks.

“What do you care?”

The gummy gives me a look, like he wants to memorize me or something. “Remembering things is very important to a writer. Before you can put it down on paper, you have to remember what happened.”

“Put what down on paper? What are you spewing, huh?”

He takes a piece of paper from the pile of stuff he's trying to hide in the crate. The paper is covered with small black marks. I hold it up close to my eyes, to see if there's anything hidden there, inside the paper, but to me the marks look like the footprints of bugs.

“I used to use a voicewriter like everybody else, but it got ripped off,” Ryter explains. “So I went back to basics. I write down each word by hand, like they did in the backtimes. Primitive, but it works.”

I go, “But what's the point? What are you putting inside your ‘book'?”

Ryter looks at me for a while before he says, “Sorry, son, but that's between me and myself. I can tell you this much: My book is the work of a lifetime.”

“You're wasting your time,” I tell him. “Nobody reads books anymore.”

Ryter nods sadly. “I know. But someday that may change. And if and when it does, they'll want stories — experiences — that don't come out of a mindprobe needle. People will want to read books again, someday.”

“‘They'?” I go. “Who do you mean?”

“Those who will be alive at some future date,” he says.

Those who will be alive at some future date.
I don't know why, but the way he says it gives me a shiver. Because I'd never thought about the future. You want to be down with the Bangers, you can't think about the future. There's only room for the right here, and the want-it-now. The future is like the moon. You never expect to go there, or think about what it might be like. What's the point if you can't touch it or steal it or shoot it into your brain?

“What's your story, son?” Ryter asks, like he really wants to know.

I go, “I don't have a story.”

Almost before I get the words out, he's shaking his head, like he knew what I was going to say and can't wait to disagree. “Everybody has a story,” he insists. “There are things about your life that are specific only to you. Secret things you know.”

When he says “secret things,” a chill goes up from the base of my spine to the top of my head and makes my brain feel numb and frosty. Because there's certain things I can't stand to remember and the last thing I want to do is share them with some old gummy.

“You're zoomed,” I tell him. “Crazy as a cockroach. And I'm out of here.”

Before I go he makes me take his stuff. The mini-stove, the alarm-clock vidscreen, all his junk.

“You'll need this,” he says. “I know how it works with the gangs.”

So I take his crummy stuff. I rip the old geez off. I feel weird and sort of sick about it, but it doesn't matter, because I'll never see him again. And if you can't see something, it doesn't really exist, right?

Right?

 

 

O
N THE WAY BACK
to my cube I get sighted by a proov, which scares me halfway dead.

I'm cutting through this old falling-down place they call the Maximall, which used to be full of trade stalls in the backtimes. They say every stall was piled high with jewelry and fancy clothes and mysterious gizmos and lots of shiny things nobody really remembers anymore. They say there were stalls with ten thousand different kinds of choxbars instead of just the one. Probably that's a lie about the choxbars, but I'd like to believe it. There are still a few traders at the Maxi, but they're protected by bristlebars and cutwire, and the teks will beat you with stunstiks if you haven't got anything worth trading.

I'm keeping my distance when a takvee pulls up to one of the stalls. “Takvee” is slang for Tactical Urban Vehicle, the heavily armored, cyber-driven vans that proovs use to get around the Urb. If you're paying attention, you already know a proov is a genetically improved human being. They're the people who own the world, or at least the part of it they call Eden.

You can always tell a proov because they're all tall and beautiful and healthy-looking. The other way to tell a proov is how they look at you if you're a normal. A proov can't help shuddering inside when he sees a normal. We give them the creeps. We're a reminder of what human beings are like when they're not born perfect, and I guess if you're a proov, the very idea of imperfection makes you want to throw up.

Anyhow, a bunch of teks — that's short for Technical Security Guards — get out of the takvee. Six of them, all talking to each other in their implanted headsets. When they take up positions and give the all-clear, the takvee doors fold down, and out comes this proov. A female dressed in a shimmering white gown that you can almost see through but not quite. She's got beautiful gray sky–colored eyes, and perfect skin, and short hair that sort of glows, like the sun is always shining on her.

I'm staring at her. You can't help it with a proov. It makes me ache inside and feel scummy on the outside, like I should hide myself from her perfect eyes. But I don't hide — there's no place to go — and for some reason she notices me. Her hand goes up to her face and she touches her perfect ear. Communicating to the teks on her implant.

I'm thinking, run, boy, they're going to jolt you into a coma just for looking. But suddenly there's a tek close behind and I can't get away.

“Halt!” he goes, and I do. Like most teks, he's wearing a protective face mask, so I can't see his expression. Is he going to jolt me with his stunstik or what? I'm bracing myself for the buzz and hoping it won't set off spasms when he goes, “Follow me.”

What he does is, he takes me to the proov. Which is like unheard of, a proov allowing a normal to approach. But that's what happens. And I can see the proov girl is young, maybe my age. Proovs don't wrinkle much, because of their genetically improved skin, but you can still tell whether they're young or old, if you get close enough. And this one is definitely young, maybe fourteen or fifteen. And her teeth are white, not yellow like normal teeth. I wonder if all proovs have white teeth. So perfectly white.

“Do you have a name?” she asks me.

I want to say, What do you think, just because we're not perfect, we don't have names? But all I can manage to get out of my choked-up throat is, “Spaz.”

“Spaz,” she says. Like she's tasting it on her tongue, and isn't sure if she likes it. “How odd. All of you seem to have such strange and interesting names down here in the latches.” Then she points to one of the teks and goes, “Provide for him,” and just like that she turns away and strides into the trade stall as if she's already forgotten that I exist.

Another tek pokes me in the back with a stunstik. The charge is set low so it doesn't knock me down or anything. “Stop staring, you!” he orders me. “Your eyes are dirty!”

There's nothing wrong with my eyes, but I do what he asks and stop looking at the beautiful proov while she goes trading. And the tek hands me a small plastic bag with edibles inside. Protein bars and carboshakes and choxbars and stuff like that. The way he does it makes me think the proov girl does this all the time: hands out goodies to normals, to make herself feel even more perfect than she already is.

I should hate her for that, for the way she feels, but I don't. I can't. You can't hate a proov when you're near one, because you want to be like them, you
ache
to be like them. You want to be perfect, too, and you know if you were improved you'd act just like they do, and feel what they feel, and glide through the world with sky-colored eyes and hair like sunlight, and nothing dirty or broken could ever touch you.

Then, when you'd had your little adventure in the big bad dangerous Urb, you'd go home to Eden and live happily ever after.

Me, I go home to the Crypts.

 

My cube is small and dingy, with a chunk of foam on the floor, not a real bed, but it's way better than not having a place to sleep or just hang, even if the door doesn't lock from the inside.

That's a rule in the Crypts: no door locks, because the Bangers want to be able to enter anytime they feel like it. They take what they want, too, but for some reason they let me keep an old 3D, which is better than nothing. Nobody but me cares about watching 3Ds anymore, because why waste your time with a crummy hologram movie when you can boot up one of the brand-new mindprobes and see the whole show inside your head, like you were really there?

Anyhow, I toss the gummy's stuff in a corner and turn on the machine and start watching this 3D I've seen like ten thousand times. The one where Coley Riggins has to fight his way across the solar system, planet by planet, to rescue this gorgeous female who thinks he's dead, so she's going to marry this other guy, which would be a big mistake because the other guy is the one who keeps trying to kill poor Coley. You've probably seen it, if they still have the old 3Ds when you read this. If not, trust me, it's a really cool story, and usually I can get right into it and have fun pretending I'm as big and strong and good-looking as Coley Riggins, but today I can't concentrate on it. Instead, I keep thinking about the old geez, and what he said about those who will be alive at some future date.

For some reason the idea of “future” gets inside my head and won't let go. Future. That's like a time that doesn't exist yet. A world full of people who haven't been born yet, doing things that nobody's thought of yet.

Also I keep flashing on the proov girl with the sky-colored eyes, like somehow she's all mixed up with what happened in the stacks. Even though I know she doesn't have any connection to the old gummy they call Ryter.

I eat some of the stuff the proov girl gave me, which is better than the tasteless protein chunks you get from a food chute, but I can't stop thinking about Ryter, and how he said,
There are things about your life that are specific only to you. Secret things
.

What I don't understand is, how did he know? Does it have anything to do with that pile of scratch marks he calls a “book”?

There's one thing I do know: Sooner or later I'll have to go back to the stacks and find out.

 

 

I'
M SOUND ASLEEP
when the Bully Bangers invade my cube.

“Spaz! Spaz boy! Wake up!”

The Bangers are kicking through my stuff, checking out the goodies. One of them is pawing the edibles the proov girl gave me when Billy Bizmo smacks him. “Leave it!” Billy says, grinning at me. “You with us, Spaz boy? You with us or against us?”

“I'm with you,” I say, trying to get my brain in gear.

I'd been deep inside this crazy, confusing dream about Coley Riggins rescuing the proov girl, or maybe the proov girl was rescuing him. Doesn't matter. What matters is paying attention to Billy Bizmo, because you never know what Billy is really thinking, and that's just one of about a thousand different things that makes him dangerous. Billy with his sharp, crooked nose, and curly hair like tufts of rusty iron, and his ratty yellow teeth, and the pale scars on his neck and jaw where somebody tried to kill him once and missed. Somebody no longer among the living, guaranteed.

“This junk come from the stacks?” he asks me, even though he already knows the answer. “That's all he had, the one they call Ryter? You sure he's not hiding nothing rich? Nothing special?”

“He's just an old gummy,” I say. “That's all he had.”

I can't believe I'm lying to Billy Bizmo, boss man of the Bangers. What do I care about the old man or his stupid pile of papers? But it's too late to take back the lie, and anyhow Billy seems more interested in the edibles.

“Explain,” he says, holding up a carboshake.

So I tell him about the proov girl. How she came to the Maxi with her teks and told them to provide for me.

“Provide for you?” Billy says, fingering the scars on his neck as he mulls it over. “Why you, boy? Why you in particular?”

I shrug. “I was there, I guess.”

“You mean this proov girl was looking for a charity case?”

“I dunno what a charity case is, Billy.”

“Never mind. What did you say to her? Tell me exactly what you said.”

“She asked me what they call me. I told her.”

“And that's it? Your name?”

“That's it.”

Billy crouches so he can study my eyes and see if I'm lying. That always makes me feel like I'm lying even when I'm telling the truth, which I am about the proov girl. The thing that makes Billy scary isn't his size, because he's not that much bigger than me. It's in his eyes. Sometimes his eyes are bright and interested and that makes you want to please him, and then he blinks and his eyes are dead and you're scared he wants to make you dead, too, just for the cool of it. Just because he can.

“Hmmm,” he goes. “I've heard about this proov girl. She's a slummer. You know what a slummer is, Spaz? Huh?”

“No,” I admit.

“A slummer is a proov who likes to mix with the rest of us. Gives 'em a thrill they can't find in Eden. You know what happens to a normal who gets mixed up with a proov, if the rest of the proovs find out?”

“No.”

Billy makes a slicing sign across his throat. The idea seems to amuse him. “Forbidden, Spaz boy. They'll splash you. They'll cut your red. They'll blow you into particles. So keep away from the proov girl. You see her again, run like your life depends on it. Because it does. Do you believe me?”

“Yes.”

“Good boy. Always believe Billy. That's rule number one. And what's rule number two?”

“Always obey Billy,” I say.

“Excellent! Third rule?”

“Always speak true to Billy.”

“Fantastic!” He's acting delighted with me, but I don't know if it's for real or a game he's playing. “Not bad for a spaz boy! Keep it up, kid! Follow Billy's rules and you may live to be as old as that gummy you ripped off.” He hands me the proov girl's carboshake. “Go on,” he says. “Enjoy. Have a taste of Eden.”

A moment later they're gone and I'm alone in my cube. For some reason I'm shaking. No, not for some reason. Because I lied to Billy Bizmo. I broke his rules. If he finds out, he might decide to have me canceled, or he might decide to let me live but ban me from the Crypts. “Disfavor,” they call it, which means you're on the curb, fending for yourself without protection or shelter.

Death or disfavor. I don't know which is worse, and I don't want to find out.