Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The note was addressed to me in the most unambiguous way. Full first name, which no one save my grandmother used. My full middle name, which no one but my mother used, and then only when pissed off. It had the proper ZIP+4 code to ensure the letter reached its intended destination; honestly, who uses those unless they want to be sure that their letter gets exactly where they want it to go as fast as humanly possible?

In other words, there was no question that the letter was meant for me, expressly. Which made the contents of the letter all the more puzzling:

We have Alia Mayflower, and will kill her if you do not contact us. Meet us on the corner of Fifth and Main by ten o’clock tomorrow wearing a red shirt as a sign of your acceptance.

I didn’t know any Alia Mayflower. I’d never seen that name before in my life.

A later census reveals an unusually exact number for the Formocci in the Empire: 11,632. Surviving court documents and imperial correspondence indicate that a number of important government, military, and trade posts were held by men with the distinctive -ci and -su Formocci suffixes on their names.

The next census, though, does not mention a single Formocci. Their suffixes abruptly disappear from court records as well, and later copies of earlier works that mentioned them, even in passing, appear to have been edited.

Historians still debate the meaning of this sudden and inexplicable disappearance. Many have pointed out that the disappearance of the Formocci was soon followed by the disastrous period in Imperial history known as the Barracks Anarchy, when dozens of claimants to the throne nearly destroyed the Empire through civil war. It could be that the sudden loss of experienced Formocci politicians left a power vacuum for eager claimants to fill. Some have even speculated that the Formocci were the power behind the Imperial throne, and that in their absence weak and incompetent emperors were vulnerable to coups.

But the question remains: what happened to the Formocci? Long-ago chroniclers, writing after the fall of the Empire, speculated that they had bargained the collective souls of their race for power and disappeared bodily when infernal agents came to collect. Today, though, the prevailing scholarly opinion can be summed up in a single word: genocide.

Tsupor Developments was one of the large luxury housing complexes that had sprung up after the fall of communism to cater to the crowds of nouveau-riche. The buildings weren’t to code and were stuffed full of nasty things that would turn a Westerner’s stomach, but they had all the outward trappings and there was a waiting list just to be considered for a spot.

Arranged in a grid along streets named after famous pre-communist heroes, the townhouse that Mina was looking for was listed as Rodyic 19.4. Rodyic street, named after the local prince who had fallen in battle against the Turks, building 19, number 4.

She looked up after absentmindedly walking for some time from the transit station. The buildings ended at 18; there was nothing but a pile of rubble where 19 ought to have been.

“It’s what we’re calling an improved McMemen technique,” Siston said. “Users are affected for longer periods of time and more strongly. It’s more difficult to snap them out of the trance state, and the problem of blackouts has been solved.”

“Solved how?” Friedman groused. “That’s been the millstone around the program’s neck for years. The assets always suspect something because of the memory gaps unless we take them into custody and implant false memories the old-fashioned and expensive way, with psychologists and bright lights.”

“That’s the beauty of improved McMemen,” replied Siston. “In addition to the orders and situational training, it implants…well, the technical term sucks so the boys have been calling it a ‘seed crystal memory.'”

Friedman glared. “What kind of new age hippie crap is that?”

“Well, the human mind has an enormous capability for creativity–just look at dreams. The technique utilizes that mechanism to construct artificial memories using the asset’s own building blocks. The ‘seed crystal’ provides the raw materials and a rough structure–say, a short camping trip–and within that framework the asset’s subconscious will construct a totally realistic and totally individual memory. They’ll remember it all down to the raccoons stealing their marshmallows.”

“Ridiculous,” Friedman said. “They’d remember a pink elephant or something crazy like that.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” Siston said, grinning. “After all, this whole conversation was implanted in your mind the same way.”

They made their way through the “edutitaL” exhibit, with Roger reading the artist’s description from the book as Laurie looked at each artwork.

“What about the empty syringes floating in a bathtub full of urine?” Laurie said.

Roger flipped to the proper page in the exhibit guide. “An indictment of the totalitarianism inherent in unregulated commercial broadcasting.”

“The pile of dead flies on an old record covered in plastic wrap?”

“An attempt to capture the zeitgeist of a morally bankrupt age in its most luxurious form.” Roger said. “Based on a true story.”

Laurie walked to the next one. “The mounted cat skeleton stuffed with gummy worms?”

“Meta-commentary on the failure of the ‘postmodern’ in the face of intercontinental commercialism,” Roger said. “Pretty straightforward, really.”

Sirkka Mäkinen-Korhonen had been a rising star at the University of Helsinki, completing a rigorous program of study and qualifying to enter the faculty as a full member before her 22nd birthday. In addition to groundbreaking work on the classification and molecular genetics of vascular plants in the Asteraceae (the daisy family), she was a well-regarded writer and poet. Mäkinen-Korhonen had the rare distinction of having work published in the university’s botany journal at the same time a series of poems appeared in its literary journal.

It wouldn’t be unfair to say that great things were expected of her.

Then, after she had worked at the university for six years, Mäkinen-Korhonen spent a summer at the university field station at Inari, in the north. There, Sirkka undertook a massive project to collect and classify Asteraceae native to Finland, as well as subspecies adapted to several nearby microclimates. It was expected to be three months’ work, resulting in the collection of some interesting specimens, an academic monograph, and another step on the inevitable road to a senior professorship and the departmental chair.

Instead, Sirkka Mäkinen-Korhonen never returned.

She insisted on prolonging her stay, first by taking a sabbatical. When her leave time ran out, she accepted a position overseeing the field station at substantially reduced pay and the loss of academic tenure and all promotions. Eventually, hit hard by a recession, the University of Helsinki closed the field station and reassigned its members to other areas. Mäkinen-Korhonen refused to leave, and was duly terminated from the university altogether. Using her savings, she purchased a small home on the shores of Lake Inari and arranged to have supplies delivered–and mail collected–for the nearest village once every few weeks.

In her hermitage, Sirkka apparently continued her study of daisies as well as her literary pursuits. Letters to family and former colleagues became more infrequent and more disjointed, jumbled masses of paeans to daisies in a variety of meters and styles mixed in with diatribes against the pace of modern life and invitations to join her in a life “outside the graph paper.”

Eventually, Sirkka began claiming that, through intense study, one could experience “asterism.” As far as anyone could discern, “asterism” was a sort of cosmic oneness achieved through daisies–one apparently recognized that the pattern of petals reflected stars in the night sky and the reflections in a polished gemstone, and thereby was able to tap into universal consciousness. Sirkka’s last, disjointed letters urged her friends and family to begin their study of daisies at once, lest they be left behind then all humanity eventually ascended to another plane through unity with flowers.

When the last supplies arrived at her cabin, the villagers found it deserted. A triangle made of three asterisks was painted on one of the walls, and every potted daisy in the house had been uprooted.

“We’re looking for two men: Claude Rityanne and Pierre Richat. Those may be aliases; we have reports of men matching their description all over the world, working in different capacities for different powers.”

“I can check the registry, detective, but I assure you we have no one by that name staying here,” the desk clerk said. Beneath the desk, be pressed the button installed for the very purpose of announcing police raids. “Perhaps if I were to leave the till open, strictly by accident, you might reconsider your search?”

“Bribery?” the detective laughed. “You’re lucky I don’t haul you before a federal judge for that. I can’t be bribed.”

“And more’s the pity,” a voice said from behind him. The detective gasped as his companion was impaled from behind with a sword, only to stare with fading, unbelieving eyes as a similar swordpoint burst through his own chest.

The man cleaned the blood off his weapon. “Dispose of the bodies in the Alergian part of town,” he said. “Let them spin their wheels for a while.”

“Yes sir, Mr. Richat,” said the clerk.

The colonel was seated at the teacher’s desk. He removed a well-worn Tokarev pistol from his holster and placed it on the desktop. “I am only going to ask you this once,” he said. “Was Captain N’Truri there?”

“I…I don’t know,” the private stammered. “There were so many people, and it was so confusing…”

“Was…Captain…N’Truri…there?” the colonel repeated, drawing out each word before clipping it off.

“I…I think…”

The colonel picked up the pistol and cocked it. “I’m not going to ask again.”

“Yes,” the private cried, anguished. “I saw Captain N’Truri at the site of the ambush. He was leading the troops that attacked us.”

“Ah,” the colonel said thoughtfully. “Thank you very much, private.” He raised his pistol and shot his man through the head.

“Get that mess cleaned up, and get me more troops. We’re going hunting.”

“Careful,” Sundel said, pointing to a blurry man-shape in a dark trenchcoat standing on a nearby corner. “Don’t speak to it.”

“Why not?” said Lute. Compared to some of the creatures oozing about openly, a blurry man-shape seemed almost mundane.

“It’s a Sentence Eater. It derives nutrition and pleasure from conversations; the more erudite the vocabulary and complex the syntax, the more nourishing the meal.”

“That doesn’t seem so bad,” said Lute, thinking of how one-sided Sundel’s conversations tended to be.

“Not at first, no,” Sundel replied. “The Sentence Eater will try to goad you into a philosophical discussion, and if you’re nourishing enough it will grab you and permeate between dimensions. You’ll get stuck in its larder in the null space between dimensions, forced to make intelligent conversation.”

“I think I know some people who would really enjoy that. University professors, mostly.”

Sundel scowled. “On pain of torture? And when your mind cracks, the Sentence Eater will give you over to one of its symbiotic roommates. Let’s just say that one of them is the Brain Eater and leave it at that.”

No one has seen the Aunorwi in over a hundred years. Decimated by disease, with strong cultural imperatives for isolation from outsiders, and never numbering more than about five thousand in a relatively small area, they were always vulnerable. Contact with European colonists had always been schizophrenic–minor trade and friendly hand signals mixed with violent assault for real or perceived offenses by both sides. There were some scattered efforts to initiate more peaceful contact, including an elaborate plan to raise a young Aunorwi to act as an intermediary that foundered when the subject died of typhoid. But no one was surprised when the Aunorwi stopped emerging from the dense wilderness that had housed them.

Editorial eulogies appeared in local newspapers, a nearby normal school renamed its newsletter “The Aunorwi,” ethnologists and linguists sparred over the few remaining scraps of speech and word list, endlessly debating how the Aunorwi may or may not have been related to other tribes. But they remained an academic pursuit, and an average inhabitant of their lands would be hard-pressed to name the people that had preceded them as stewards of the land.

That is, until a 40-year-old Aunorwi and her 75-year-old grandmother emerged from the wilderness near Janeston.