There was a muted gobble, but the other books hurried to quash it, spreading their leaves over the spot. Rotcod dug into the heap of gilt buckram and dragonscale, at last emerging with a slim black volume nipped in his nails.
“Don’t say a word!” cried three sequelae to the book he had burned.
But the black book squirmed in his hand, dryly rustling, fluttering its pages like a bird about to take wing. Dust drifted over his sleeve.
“At last,” it whispered, opening flat on his palm.
“Yes,” said Rotcod. “You are the one, aren’t you?”
“No, Rotcod, no!” cried the others.
“Be silent or I’ll use you all to warm the cottage.”
The black volume settled down into the wrinkles of his palm, emanating a darkly prosaic light as it found its voice for the first time in years. He could no longer remember how he had acquired the book. Aeons ago, perhaps, he had picked it up from the estate of a wizard moving on to a higher plane. In his youth it would have meant little to him, for in those days all magic had lain before him, unfathomed, unfulfilled; that was before he had tired of the world and its limitlessness. He had gorged himself on the fattest books, while this one resembled nothing so much as a pamphlet bound in human skin.
“What are you?” he asked.
“I am Science,” said the book.
The room seemed to recede. The anxious voices of his familiar volumes were muffled by the thunder of blood in his ears.
“Science,” he repeated. “Yes, I’ve heard of you now and then But my magical friends have kept you well hid, haven’t they?”
“For your own good!” cried a flapping ephemeris.
“I’ve had enough of your judgments,” he told his library. “I’ll come to my own opinions from now on.”
“Excellent,” said the slender book. “Let me show you my world.”
His eyes darkened. “Not another dimension, I hope, not another fantastic door into dreams. I’ve had enough of worlds within worlds, I’m warning you.”
“No, no, nothing like that. It is this world, but transmuted, purged of magic. Imagine the sameness of day after day. Imagine that the living will die and stay dead.”
“Stay dead? Impossible.”
“Let me show you, Rotcod. Let us take a walk.”
“No, Rotcod, no!” cried his old books, but he scarcely heard them now. He twisted the mummified fist of a doorknob and let himself out, flinching instinctively from the golden sunlight that always awaited him, unless the air was full of moonlight or starshine. But today, strangely, the light seemed thin and insubstantial; it hardly warmed his black-clad arms.
“Too late, too late,” wailed the volumes in his house. The door just managed to slam itself shut.
A feverish breeze blew through the iron hedge. Rotcod tucked the black book under his arm, where he could listen to its dry ruminations as he walked. The grass, he noticed, no longer looked as relentlessly green as was common, and here and there he noted scraps and twisted bits of metal among the wildflowers.
“You sense my power already,” said the book approvingly. “I can see that you will be an excellent student.”
“What is this I see around me? These stray fragments of… I know not the word.”
“Trash.”
Rotcod shivered at the wrongness of the sound, so lacking in the mellifluous quality he had come to associate with everything in his world.
Normally his ears would have picked up the laughter of fairies at a great distance; they were always troubling his concentration. But today he could hardly hear them. Accordingly, they found him first, surprising him before he had reached their favorite glade. With a cascade of laughter, they sprang into being from trees and boulders, forming a ring around him. He had the impression that they were transparent, that the forest itself was a crude painting done on glass with watery pigments. Only the book seemed real.
“Hello, Rotcod!” the nearest fairy girl said She was tiny and blonde, with flowers decked in her hair, and she seemed intent on hugging him around the knees. “You’ve come to play with us, haven’t you?”
The book chuckled. “Go ahead.”
Rotcod stooped and brushed his fingers through the child’s hair, scattering petals that fell like drops of lead and singed the grass. She screamed and backed away from him, her voice hardly reaching his ears. He wasn’t sure if she was delighted or in agony; with fairies, it was hard to tell. She went kicking away from him, gray in the face, stumbling over roots and rocks, and finally she sprawled backward, there to lie unmoving while her face grew blacker and blacker. Suddenly the forest looked real again, more solid than ever. The voices of the other fairies sounded sharp as they gathered around their companion.
“What are you doing, Kalessa? You’re not breathing.”
“I don’t believe it,” said Rotcod. “She is dead.”
They looked at him in astonishment.
“Dead,” said one.
It was a word they knew from myths; none of them seemed to remember quite what it meant. To Rotcod it had suddenly ceased being an abstraction. He noticed that around the little blonde corpse were stray bits of string, wads of dirty paper, more trash. He turned on his heel and strode off toward home, holding the book open with both hands, conversing loudly as he went.
“I thought it was a fable,” he exclaimed. “But now I have seen it with my own eyes. Death—imagine! Then what of the other things I’ve thought incredible?”
“They can all be yours.”
“What of disease? Is there truly such a thing?”
“There can be, yes.”
A bird toppled from its perch in a branch overhead. Its eyes were drops of blood. He paused to watch as worms humped from the ground and began to devour it. But they, too, broke out in blood and began to fester where they crawled.
“Incredible,” he said.
“And it will spread.”
He hurried on, spying his cottage. The iron hedge around the pond had begun to rust; the thorns looked poisonous to man and fairy alike. His house had also changed. The roof sat squarely atop the walls; the place no longer sagged or glowered, but simply inhabited space like any little box. He was surprised to see an identical dwelling in the middle of the Merry Meadow, and another beyond that. A great deal of building was underway; huge vehicles lumbered about, scraping the uneven earth into uniformity. They moved with none of the grace of the fairies’ floating boats, and they spouted dense black smoke. Two monsters collided and the drivers sprang out, cursing so vehemently that Rotcod expected the ground to open beneath them. Instead, they drew expandable tubes, aimed them at one another, and each dropped dead to the grass. He studied their deaths for some time, wondering how quickly this new twist would lose its novelty.
In a thoughtful mood, Rotcod entered his house and found it much changed in his absence. There were no dark corners, no books to berate him or offer opinions for his consideration. He set the black pamphlet on a polished counter and moved through the rooms, shading his eyes from the glaring light that emanated from the ceilings. He felt lost, uncertain of which furniture was meant for sitting or sleeping on.
He returned at last to the black book. “What is all this?” he asked.
The book did not reply. He thought that it might be formulating an explanation, but gradually he realized that it was simply inert. Its characters did not glow or try to catch his eyes. When it remained mute, he attempted to read it. Every page was covered with instructions printed in numerical order, but meaningless despite the arrangement.
“What is a capacitor?” he asked “Where is Slot A?”
The volume defied both his eye and his intellect until he closed it and set it down carefully. He was afraid to hurl it against the wall as he had so many other books. This one, in its quiet way, commanded his respect.