‘The unspoken holocaust’, we called it, as we huddled in tents that clung to the skin of the desert. We were as thick as thieves, he and I, whispering our secret again and again. “Human,” he would say, until the words meant nothing and the charred midnight air snatched them away.
Three days ago, an ancient bus knocked its way over potholes and hard rock, depositing us at last in the village of Deir el-Bahri. It was there we received a second letter, this one even more dishevelled, the number of stamps seeming to have taken to heart God’s commandment to be fruitful and multiply. Mister Nassar opened it, fingers shaking, but his face turned strange as he read the Arabic within.
For a second time, he took my hand and I wondered at the calluses on his finger, the rough texture of them, the way the pads were paler than the coffee-coloured knuckles. They were beautiful, those hands, the skin of them.
“It is my brother,” he said. “He must speak with us.”
We boarded the bus for a second time, proffered bills to the surprised driver, who made a sign and ushered us aboard. The ride to Cairo was long and, try as I might to question my companion, he would reveal nothing of our new mission and what might await us.
His brother could have been a twin. They had the same deep-set eyes, the same nervous manner about them. But whereas the one had the tongue of a linguist, the other spoke only in halting English, stumbling over words until he and his brother turned to a guttural Arabic, with only occasional breaks for breathless translation.
He led us into the university science complex where the smell of formaldehyde drifted in clouds from behind shut office doors. A rattling elevator brought us to the bottommost level and there, following him as Theseus followed his ball of yarn through the subterranean system of tunnels, we saw a machine—a great beast of a thing, a wonder of modern mechanical genius. I don’t pretend to understand most of what the second Nassar told us, only that he had been shocked by the discovery as much as we had, and that there was a way—perhaps—for something to be done….
What would you do, colleagues, with the weight of that knowledge hanging upon you? What would you do if you were offered a chance to set it right? The press of a button and that slaughter of innocents prevented? Would you have the strength of will to silence Aristotle, to let the words which shaped civilisation go unremembered, unpreserved, reduced to whispers and empty air? Would you preserve instead the genetic code of that dead, forgotten mass of bodies? For they are dead, those slaughtered children, flayed for the libraries, flayed so that we might—
They are dead. A plague could have taken them and history would not have cared one jot. They would still be dead today.
But it was not a plague. It was men. Men who desired books, who knew these things must last, that it meant more than those hundred thousand lives….
The pyramids were built on such sacrifices. Who are we to say?
The three of us—myself and the twin Nassars—took wine that night, though I had never seen my companion drink a drop in all our time, despite everything. We swallowed morbid thoughts with every draught, drank down our fears, our apprehensions. But as the sun sent pale fingers of light creeping through the window, across the table and its scattered papers, its empty bottle, I hailed a taxi to the airport and left Mister Nassar and his brother to their grim duty.
We had come to something there, a decision.
Members of the Academy, colleagues, I know much of what I say is doubtful and I can already hear the murmurs of my detractors. You do not believe me and I do not blame you. It is a horrid business.
But you need not believe me; you need not ever publish these findings; you need do nothing but wait.
We decided, you see, the three of us there with our forbidden bottle. We decided.
The second Mister Nassar and his machine—that damned machine. I cannot say how it will work, only that he has promised—sworn—that it will. That the past could be unwritten if we so choose.
And we did.
I stand before you, not to accept laurels for my findings. I stand here in shame, for a terrible thing will happen soon.
This is a vigil, you see.
Soon, even as I speak, the button will be pushed and we shall face a brave new world, a tabula rasa, with the guilt of sins wiped clean. What the world will look like, I cannot say. I cannot imagine a universe without those learned men, those sages—the words of Aristotle and Plato like a light for us in the darkness. Their words, written for us, on the skins of children. It is a terrible thing we have done, and I do not know if Mankind will be the better for it.
But I saw their bones and I have flayed myself of every pretension, every mark of civilisation, of academic certainty and distance. We live in a world in which a life must be measured against more than the length of a page—mustn’t it? Mustn’t it?
That is why what follows must happen.
They are dead.
The children are dead.
And so, colleagues, I ask that we wait, together. The button has been pushed. The world is changing. It will only be a moment now.
THE OLD 44TH
By Randy Stafford
By day, Randy Stafford practices the dark arts of tax collection for his master and counsels his minions in the same. At night, after the anguished cries have faded from his ears, he cowers in his Minnesota domicile, comforted by his wife and an extensive collection of books and DVDs. He writes many a book review for Amazon. Every few years, he writes some poetry and, besides being an American Academy of Poets award winner in his long-ago-vanished college days, he has published poetry in National Review Online and 2001: A Science Fiction Poetry Anthology, and book reviews in Leading Edge.
IRON FOOTFALLS
By Julio Toro San Martin
Julio Toro San Martin resides and writes in Toronto, Canada.
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days…
I said to Dawn: Be sudden–to Eve: Be soon;
With thy young skiey blossoms heap me over
From this tremendous Lover!…
Halts by me that footfall;
Is my gloom, after all,
Shade of His hand, outstretched caressingly?