She opened her eyes.
It was time to dance. Richard offered his arm.
Off they went, waltzing across the moon, their shoes kicking up lunar dust with each step. The dance had been choreographed ages before they were born, taught to them with their letters, fed to them along with their juice and ice cream, and as they danced, as everyone at their wedding danced, and the weeping server was escorted out, and the acrid, acid sea crept higher and higher, there wasn’t the slightest deviation from what had been planned.
Secret Stories of Doors
SOFIA RHEI
Sofia Rhei (sofiarhei.com) has published more than thirty-five books, including the short fiction collection Everything is Made of Letters, Minotauro Celsius Award–winning novel Róndola, and Espérame en la última página, a ghost story about books. Her poetry has been awarded the Dwarf Stars Award and been short-listed for the Rhysling Award. She is currently working on a multi-utopian political satire about Europe, Newropia.
To Chús Arellano
The controversy around Sor Assumpció’s work is, indeed, one of the most interesting cases of soft apology of Satanism in the 18th century. The reason given by her advocates was the fact that the book perfectly followed the pattern of a cautionary tale, giving the appropriate piece of advice at every moment, and punishing the characters when they did make a bad choice, even if the possibility of a Christian redemption was always left open. The attacks were centered on the portrait of the friendly and charming figure of evil, arguing that such a fascinating and warm personality would attract, rather than repel, young or suggestible readers.
Joan Perucho had spent the night working, bent over his bench at home. He lived in a microscopic apartment in the Gracia district, and most of the cupboards were filled with writing machines, artisan presses, and homemade contraptions such as the paper eroder or the gelatine photocopier. He was creating happily, humming a tune, and barely noticing the lack of sleep.
Most of the Benedictine sister’s works were hidden by the Mother Superior when the Inquisition began the investigation. Some of the theatre plays were lost forever. Fortunately, the cautionary tales were already in circulation, though they became a risky business for the printer. He continued to sell Secret Stories of Doors under the counter, accepting the risk of prosecution if caught.
The alarm clock startled him. He had forgotten about it, absorbed in the process of dyeing a fake newspaper page with black tea, to make it look older.
Although the fire was rapidly controlled, two firemen lost their lives fighting the flames. The fire was caused by a coal brazier the doorman did not extinguish properly. One wall caught light, revealing that it was made of wood; behind it, the firemen found several hidden books and documents, probably banned during the years of the Inquisition. One of them was a cautionary tale by Sor Assumpció Ardebol, which scholars believed to have been lost forever. The repairs will take a week, during which time there will be no class at the school; parents have been advised to keep their children at home and await instructions.
He looked at the documents he had created and smiled, satisfied. This entry in the Encyclopaedia would be one of his biggest personal triumphs. Like the other millions who worked for the Barcelona-based World Encyclopaedia, with their ink-proof dark uniforms, he would have found daily life unbearable without his game of introducing made-up information into the general database. At the beginning, they were just details: a small quote, a fabricated minor character, a picturesque anecdote about a well-known public figure. Over the years, he had managed to introduce more significant apocrypha, giving birth to full, juicy fruit, and even branches and trees of misinformation.
He never kept a record of the fiction. That would be too dangerous, because the aerial police could spy on homes at any moment since the 1969 curtain ban. Joan hid the machines in the white cupboards and got ready for work.
He was about to step out of his apartment when a thin serpent, made of green paper, slithered under his door:
Don’t go to work. Go to Carrer de n’Arai instead.
He had heard about these kinds of messages. There was nothing specific written on them, no accusation or even mention of his illicit tinkering. He had heard about traps set by the aerial police: when someone was considered a suspect but there was no way to prove he had transgressed. Skipping work and visiting a suspect place, one of the outsiders’ escape enclaves, would be sufficient proof that he was guilty.
No, he must not alter his daily routine. He calmed down after that decision was made. He had been careful, very careful, about destroying the fake documents he had produced and scanned. And, as he liked to repeat in his head, as a leitmotif of a life devoted to falsification, it was very hard to prove that something reported once had not actually happened. Especially when most of the historical archives and newspaper libraries were located out of town, sometimes as far as Huesca or Castellón. Perucho used to enjoy those trips, particularly the silence. Aerial police were so abundant in the city that the humming helixes were a permanent noise like a roaring, metallic sea.
Perucho took a look through the window, but no one was there. No flying policeman was observing him from the other side of the regulation-sized clear window. But it felt as if they were always there. The threat of their appearance was almost as daunting as the appearance itself.
Perucho took a deep breath. He had been very careful. He always made sure not to stand out for any reason, neither over- nor underproducing. He studied the statistics and ensured that his productivity matched that of his peers. And, as most of his supervisors did not even understand Spanish or Catalan, he usually generated the false documents in one of those languages.
Of course there were rumors of people being led away by the police and never returning, though Perucho had never seen it happen. In fact, there were no specific rules about being strictly “accurate” and not being a little inventive. Everything was kind of vague and generic, leaving room for a certain lax interpretation of the regulations.
But the main reason for Perucho to ignore the warning and go to work as usual was his deep desire to do so. The project about the fictional Sor Assumpció Ardebol and her nonexistent Secret Stories of Doors was perhaps his best creation to date. These projects were his reason to live, the only possible free literary writing in a world where fiction was only allowed in commercial and sanctioned forms: indoctrination, role-model creation, and such.
Most days, Perucho walked from home to work, and he didn’t want to make an exception today. He tried not to walk faster or slower than normal and to keep to all his daily routines, such as stopping by the bakery to buy a small butifarra-filled roll for lunch.
Ten years before, the Global Government had decided to assign specific functions to several strategically placed cities. Barcelona was chosen to become the Capital of Knowledge. The World Encyclopaedia had been based there since the forties, so it was just a matter of increasing the space and personnel assigned to the task of gathering verifiable data, deciding what was important and what wasn’t worth a mention, and classifying it all.