Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The makeshift cross was nailed home with a resounding certainty. Ferris stood back, mallet in hand. “Would anyone like to say a few words?” he said softly.

“May Gregg Thurliss rot in his grave and twice as fast in Hell,” Nancy said. She spat tobacco juice over the freshly turned earth. “It was his hubris that led us out here to die on the frontier.”

“Nancy, that’s not-”

“May he wander these hills as a specter for seventy times seventy days longer than he led us,” Corbin growled, interrupting. “May the injuns dig him up and use his bones to line their sewer pits.”

“I really think-”

“May his name be an insult for generations to come in English and injun…” Currie began.

“I meant something from the Good Book,” Ferris cried. “Something like you’d hear in a church.”

It was the perfect dead drop for money and drugs–deep in the cemetery where the ground had gotten rough and no one would notice turned-over earth. Cunningham looked for the marker, which Debs had chosen as much for the unusual name as the remote location.

“Here lies Nikolai Ilyich Tyicov, beloved son, 1951-1980,” he read. The tombstone bore the crazy three-beamed Orthodox cross, probably the only one in the cemetery. No chance of screwing it up if they had to send some snot-nosed junkie over as a patsy.

It didn’t take long to turn the earth over to reveal the latest shipment laid out on the lid of the coffin: bundles of drugs and money in plastic baggies. Cunningham bent down to scoop them up.

A pale, bony hand punched out of the lid and seized his lapel as he did so.

In the region of the Illustrious North, where the rule of the Son of Heaven was not yet universally acknowledged, many arrived seeking to gain favor with the imperial court through the subjugation of rebels and barbarians.

One such traveler was Nfashō, a man of modest birth who had once enjoyed a position of considerable influence thanks to his silver tongue and gift for unabashed toadying. A change in daimyo had gone ill for him; the nephew of the deceased lord was a coarse man with no need for flattering courtiers.

In order to make a name for himself and to provide another comfortable position with another daimyo–or perhaps even the Son of Heaven himself–Nfashō spent his savings to outfit an expedition to the Illustrious North. He hoped that by hiring skillful yet disgraced men at arms, he could reap glory for himself against the barbarians with little cost.

He was wrong.

“You know the procedure,” the adjunct sighed. “Any emotional reaction outside the rig’s parameters must be approved by court order. You agreed to this when you joined Special Crimes and had the rig installed.”

“And you know that you’ve said that every time I’ve applied for a writ over the last four years,” Ritchie said. His rig allowed a slight twinge of annoyance, but no more. The designers obviously felt that a little annoyance could be beneficial to police work, but too much was detrimental to performance.

“Well, now that we have those pleasantries out of the way,” the adjunct said, “confirm your biometrics to get your court-ordered emotional writ.”

Ritchie swabbed his thumb with the provided sanitizing gel and authenticated. He felt a brief jolt as his neural rig synced with the Corrections server. Different cases received different writs, or none at all, but Ritchie always applied. It was better to feel something outside the rig’s confining range than nothing at all, and retirement was a long way away.

The court order flashed on the inside of his retina: official judicial approval, sixth circuit court: Writ of Intensity.

The flood of emotion was so overpowering it forced Ritchie to his knees.

“Ha!” Carver said, his lips thick with mead and meat. “Many a starry-eyed dreamer has sought out to reclaim the Ntishan Throne, and they’ve all failed. The Empire was a long time ago, and we’re all too different and too mistrustful after a thousand years of war.”

“So people say,” Melly said evenly.

“Tell me then, how are you different from all the others? How do you propose that someone without title, property, or wealth–and a woman no less–will succeed where men with ample measures of all three have failed?”

“I won’t,” Melly replied. “They’ll lift me up on their shoulders and beg me to take the throne.”

The old general gave a bawdy laugh. “Just like St. Honorius, huh? And why, pray tell, would they do that?”

“To protect themselves from a far greater threat of course.”

“And what might that be?”

“Why, you of course.”

“It’s homework,” Aileen said, snatching the paper back. “We’re supposed to take a crack at Loussac’s Number.”

Gale cocked a pierced eyebrow. “What’s that supposed to mean? Have pity on your poor art major roommate, Ail.”

“Pierre Loussac,” Aileen huffed, “was one of the great mathematical minds of the last century. When they found him dead at his desk in 1987, he was holding a piece of paper that said ‘28,114.’”

“Good for him,” said Gale. “So your assignment is to do the same and die with that number in your hand?”

“That number is one of the great unsolved mysteries in mathematics,” Aileen said. “It’s not prime, it’s not one of a hundred other kinds of special numbers that make art majors’ heads pop like overripe grapes. My assignment it to come up with a reason behind Loussac’s Number.”

“Good to see they’ve got their standards nice and high.”

“I’ll fail. So will everybody else. And that’s exactly the point.”

People moaned about how much things had changed, but Petra had been around for a while. Were pharmaceuticals really all that different these days? They still gave them made-up, optimistic sounding names: Purpure, Shineol, Welaire, Atatrea.

It didn’t matter how the prescriptions were bought and paid for, either; that may have changed, but people still wanted their drugs for longer than their pharmacist was willing to let them. People were still willing to pay for the privilege of experiencing side-effects that made it easier to take life one day at a time.

Petra chuckled as she typed, recalling how things had been done when she was a girl. Paying dealers strung out on their own product in a dirty alley and getting stolen pills that had been cut with laundry detergent…no more. People had been suspicious of a 16-year-old girl with a pharmacy in her medicine cabinet; people saw a 70-year-old woman with pill bottles all over the place, they didn’t even blink.

And of course distribution was so much easier these days.

“Prescription Atatrea available in 5, 10, and 15 pill packs,” Petra typed. “100, 200, and 400mg doses.” She hit enter and sat back, smiling. A little feigned arthritis, a lonely old doctor not above being charmed, and she had pills to sell without ever having to touch a bill or step into anything dirtier than the local post office.

The Caliph, further, cautioned me thus: “I have always known you to be a good man, Abu Abd, wise and reverent to Allāh. I will therefore interpret your words in that context, and send you from here to recover your wits. However, should you ever speak of this in my presence again, or should I learn that you have mentioned it to another living soul, I shall be forced to intervene.”

I was thus confronted with a dilemma: the information that I had uncovered through my research was such great importance that I could not consign it to the flames of memory and time. But to broach the topic again, even to reveal it to my heirs, was to invite the appearance of apostasy and a terrible retribution upon myself and my family. I had to record the information in such a way that it could not be traced to me, and yet would be of use to some future scholar.

My solution was to gather together a group of sages and learned men with whom I often discussed astronomy, and put to them the following question: “How can one write a hymn of praise to Allāh such that it will survive and be readable in ten thousand years’ time?”

One suggested I carve it in a stone. “But what if the carving is worn off by sand or water?” I replied. “And how do we know the men ten thousand years hence will be able to read our script?”

A second recommended that I write the message in pictograms and bury it in the furthest reaches of the dry and desolate Rub’ al Khali, with its location inscribed, also in pictograms, in secret places throughout the Caliphate. My response: “But an item buried may be exposed or moved by the shifting of wind and sand, and pictograms are simple enough to be misunderstood and the information thereby lost.

The third sage suggested that I encode the message in an oral legend, an adventure story, which in its structure would include both the message and the key to decoding it. “But,” said I, “the tongues of men are easily corrupted. How are we to know that the story will endure as written when spoken by one man, let alone generations?”

Finally, one of the sages spoke to me thus: “It seems that we can devise no solution that will satisfy you, Abu Abd. Will you tell us your own solution?” I had been listening carefully and within moments proposed my own plan, which all present applauded as remarkably prescient.

Only time will tell if they are correct.

“The thing is, people expect the kind of efficiency they get at Stubb’s Coffee here,” Maria said. Nevermind that we have a quarter of the staff and none of their fancy custom gizmos.”

“So, how do we compete exactly?” Bob said, suddenly fearful for his nascent job. “There’s a Stubb’s right down the street and two on the SMU campus.”

“There are enough people who make it a point to ‘buy local’ that we have a little bit of an edge,” Maria said. “We also have nicer furniture which Steve–the boss–was able to pick up for a song when Southern Michigan renovated their law school.”

“Oh, okay.”

“It is your job to maintain this image. Do not under any circumstances let the customers find out that we buy from the same suppliers as Stubb’s. Always offer to sell them fair trade coffee, which costs three times as much. And if someone comes in here asking to hang a flier, you hang it unless it’s advertising a personal appearance by the Grand Wizard of the triple-K. You got me?”

“People need to know this,” Holly cried, leafing through the moldering, yellowed slips of paper.”

“Hah,” Cecil croaked. “They’ve done just fine not knowing up until now, and they’ll do fine not knowing from here on out.”

“But don’t you see?” Holly continued. “You’re the very last one alive. You have to be! The last known veteran died in 2011, it was in all the papers.”

“I saw that,” Cecil said. “Or I should say that my granddaughter read it to me. Hell of a thing, that, even if he only shot down a zeppelin and watched the Huns sink their own goddamn ships instead of being in the trenches with me, where the action was.”

“Don’t you want anyone to know that?”

“Why, so they can give me a medal? So I’ll get a state funeral with an oration by the bloody Queen? Better men than me fought and died, and better men than me survived and told their stories. I’ll not be caught fumbling after my own little slice of fame just for having the good luck to outlive every bleeding one of ’em!”