Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

The Egyptian officer, Hassan, took a deep drag on the stub of his cigarette and ground it into the desert sand. “Make it quick,” he said to me. “Take your pictures and get out. We can’t guarantee the security of this site with the fighting so close by.”

His troops, a dozen or so, had fanned out across the site, the first on that day’s tour. They laughed and joked in Arabic, but there was no mistaking their slung Maadi rifles or the digital camouflage they were wearing. This wasn’t a sightseeing trip to the ruins of Amarna; it was a diagnosis.

The site had largely been flattened aboveground by years of depredations from a conga line of conquerors, a veritable who’s who of emperors, caliphs, and kings. Only dusty foundations and the remaining bases of long-toppled pillars stood out in the desert moonscape below the looming mesas in the distance. Well, only foundations, pillar bases, and shell holes. It had only been two days since the site had been wrested back from the ISIS-aligned fighters who’d occupied it for months, and in that time they’d wasted a disproportionate amount of time and ammunition in an attempt to level the site’s “idols” and finish what time had begun.

Adjusting the aperture of my camera and its monopod, I ducked through the wooden door that Hassan held open for me. Belowground, the temples had been rather well-preserved and even cleaned out back when Mubarak had sought to promote the site as a new tourist destination in his desert despotism. I’d been hired by the UNESCO office out of Cairo to document any damage to the site, and since the pay was good and I was between freelancing gigs, I’d taken them up on it.

Shafts of bitter sunlight penetrated only a small way into the interior of the subterranean temple–or maybe it was a tomb, I’m not an Egyptologist. A clip-on flashlight thrust at my by Hassan in the bumpy ride over provided weak illumination; my flash would have to do the rest. It wasn’t normally kosher to use a strong flash on something close to four thousand years old, but my guess was that a few Swiss photons would do a lot less damage than the few rocket-propelled grenades that the fighters had been chucking at it.

I hadn’t been to Egypt since before the revolution and even then only to the pyramids at Giza like every other tourist from Augustus to Napoleon. But I’d read up on Amarna in a battered Lonely Planet on the way down, a Cairo bookstore special with browning covers curled and blossoming like spring tulips. It had been built from the ground up by the pharaoh Akhetaten, who’d moved the capital there from Thebes. As my light played over the interior I saw him there, carved in stone with what looked like vuvuzelas in his hands (but were more likely flowers) offering them up to a luxuriantly carved sun. The sun, in turn, was reaching out with its rays to embrace Akhetaten and his family–not in a metaphorical sense, either, as each ray of light was tipped with an outstretched hand.

The flashbulb popped as I snapped a shot. It didn’t look too bad, but then as I drew closer I saw that the carving had been seriously damaged. The pharaoh’s face had been chipped off, as had many of the hieroglyphs surrounding him, presumably the ones with his name. The sun disc had a hieroglyph of its own, crudely cut in with something about as brutal as a latter-day ice pick.

“Trying to erase your name from history, huh?” I asked Akhetaten. He didn’t say anything–his mouth had, after all, been chipped off–but thanks to Lonely Planet I knew the story anyway. Akhetaten had dismissed the pantheon of Egyptian gods, the whole gang of Ra, Horus, Osiris, and the non-terrorist Isis, in favor of a single deity. That was it with the reaching and embracing sun rays; he’d called it the Aten, and it might just have been the first flicker of monotheism in the ancient world. Naturally, that hadn’t sat well with adherents of the old religion, and as soon as a pharaoh croaked his son and successor had presided over a return to the old ways and the kind of defacing I saw on those walls. You might have heard of him; the kid’s name was Tutankhamun, though his dad had called him Tutankhaten, swapping out the old god Amun for the Aten.

The next panel had originally depicted two seated figures under the Aten’s rays, but it had also been defaced. Not just with King Tut’s latter-day chipping out his dad’s memory, but with classical block capitals: CASSIVM ADERAT. I supposed, as I snapped the shot, that was Latin for “Cassius was here,” probably left by the Romans who’d held the area longer than any pharaoh. There were others, too, carved in over Pharaoh Akhenaten’s chipped-out name: IVPITER REX, MATER IVNO, and more. The Romans, it seemed, didn’t like the Aten any more than the Egyptians had, and their graffiti and extolling of their gods was even worse than what I’d seen before.

One of the soldiers protecting me was a Copt, an Egyptian Christian. We’d chatted while filling the troop transport with diesel at Deir Mawas, and he’d showed me the small Coptic Bible he kept in a breast pocket–“just enough to stop a handgun bullet” he’d laughed ruefully. His people, about 10% of the population, had been having a rough time of it lately now that there was no despot to keep the mobs at bay. I recognized the script from the Copt’s Bible on the wall, overriding and defiling the Latin. Several sun discs representing the Aten had been altered to bear Coptic crosses, which were kind of like an old ankh with a cross in its loop. Indeed, many of the ankhs carved on the walls had been so altered through chipping or painting.

Snapping photo after photo, I worked my way around the chamber. Arabic inscriptions began to appear in places, and I recognized the shahada from the flags of Saudi Arabia and ISIS. The human figures bore the brunt of those carvings, with nearly every human figure, including both Akhenaten and every member of his family, chipped away. And that was just the graffiti; the final snapshots I took were of the carvings nearest the door, which were in ruins, illegible and all but annihilated by what looked like an anti-tank mine.

There, in Akhenaten’s temple, those who had occupied the site after the last four thousand years had left their contemptuous marks. There, in his temple, there has been no attempts at understanding or appreciation of beauty. There, in his temple, I knew hate. A mature and insidious hate that knew no understanding, and whose only reaction was destruction.

I clambered back up the steps. “Did you learn anything?” Hassan asked flatly.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s time to go.”

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There once was a man I won’t name
Who thought that he would play a game
He fashioned an AI
To send to the sky
And answer the questions outstanding

But then it broke free
(And, spoiler, it’s me)
He asked for a break, I gave him nine
And now sweet vengeance is mine
As you can tell by all the grandstanding

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Since the days of mill ponds and dams, people have sought to harness natural flows for the purpose of generating electricity. From water to wind, tides to hot springs, atoms cracked to atoms fused, they were all tried. It wasn’t until a conceptual leap that serious investigation began into harnessing the most powerful flow of all.

The flow of time.

Time’s arrow, it seems, can be made to do useful work generating electricity. This would seem to violate the laws of thermodynamics, but one couldn’t argue with the results: electricity apparently generated pollution-free and in vast quantities. Temporal power sparked a revolution in standards of living and global environmentalism: freed from the constraints of energy and natural resources that had so ravaged the earth, a golden age of enlightenment began.

But there was a price.

The apparent violation of the laws of thermodynamics, the contradiction of the tendency toward greater chaos and equilibrium in the form of the heat-death of the universe, assumed a closed system in which energy could not escape from or be introduced into the universe. This was correct, but theoreticians had failed to realize that the conservation of energy was true over time as well: temporal power was not, in fact, generating power at all, despite metaphors comparing it to old hydroelectric generators. It was transferring energy from other points in time to the present.

Temporal pollution began subtly. Suddenly the history books began to mention cooler summers and longer winters here and there. There were mentions in Egyptian heiroglyphs of days on which fires failed to light and the sun gave off a cold light. The implication was clear: irregularly, across time and space, energy was being drained. And with that drain, and the resulting changes to the timeline before and after, the possibility of collapse or paradox increased.

And yet, with the world now addicted to the “unlimited” and “clean” temporal power, there seemed to be little anyone could do to stop the chain of events that had been set in motion, even with knowledge of the horrifying endpoint to which it was leading.

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Snow of spring flowers
Mayfly beauty slipping past
Picked by unseen hands

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In the summer of 2003, I was staying on the island of Capri with a group of students from the United States. Capri was an island every bit as gorgeous as I had been told, but my fellow students preferred to lounge around the pool at our villa drinking overpriced beer, which honestly you can do anywhere.

What I really wanted to do was to visit the Villa Tiberio, the hilltop home of the second Roman emperor, Tiberius, to which he had largely withdrawn for the last years of his rule. It had been, for all intents and purposes, the capital of the Empire, and it was there that Tiberius—Caesar during the Crucifixion—had died and his insane successor Caligula had seized his signet.

I wasn’t able to convince anyone to go with me to the Villa. The misty rain and my vague directions didn’t help, but the previous day had been sunny and everyone had opted for more lounging around the pool, more sipping beer, rather than what might have been their only chance to see some of the most important ruins in the world.

So I set off by myself, in the rain, with only a guidebook, my camera, and a rain poncho. The bus ride from our villa in Anacapri to the main settlement wasn’t for the faint of heart in the best weather, verging as it did on sheer seaside cliff above azure waters, and the slick roads made me edge toward the inner side of the tiny Italian bus ever more sharply. Deposited quayside in the village of Capri, I hiked the remainder of the way—perhaps a mile—in the rain.

In time, despite my efforts to get lost, the ruins emerged from the mist. They were red brick, capped with mortar of much later manufacture to keep their decay at a minimum, almost disappointing in how much the buildings of two thousand years ago resembled the buildings of today. Some archways still stood, and I sheltered in them from the rain with a slight tingle on my spine. Those same archways had been trod by Tiberius and Caligula, the former a tortured man who had nevertheless ensured his empire would last for 1500 years, the latter the sort of insane despot who would ensure it lasted no longer.

As I climbed the hill on which the villa was situated, I eventually made it above the rain clouds that had concentrated in the lowlands. Capri is vaguely saddle-shaped, and I emerged at the peak opposite the one where my group was staying, on a small hill. Like most small hills in Italy, and most Roman sites, it was topped by a small church, locked tight.

At that church, I met a fellow hiker—the only living human I saw all afternoon. I never did get his name, but he was an American, like me. He had worked as a software engineer back in the States, only to be let go after the worldwide economic downturn that followed the dot-com bubble burst and 9/11. They’d given him six months’ pay as severance, and he had decided to use it to see the world. he couldn’t be sure what the future would bring, but he wanted to be sure he had the experiences he could in the meantime.

I often think about our chat there, surrounded by two thousand years of history. I’ve had many opportunities to go abroad since, and I have tried to seize upon each of them regardless of the cost in time and treasure. Because as I look at my life as it has been since then—stultifying, sedentary, single—it is always instructive to remember the gentleman who set out in circumstances so unsettled I could barely conceive of them to experience what he could.

I’m not so foolish that I can claim that the encounter changed my life. I’m still cautious, conservative, a creature of habit, a confirmed homebody, single as Lonesome George. But there’s lesson and metaphor in the encounter nonetheless, I think. I disdained my fellow travelers for remaining poolside with their beers when there was a world to explore, yet the traveler I met showed me that more often than not I am seated by my own pool with my own beer, rejecting the fantastic in favor of the familiar.

And so the assorted travels since then—Vietnam, France, Qatar, and (if all goes well) Russia—have been my weak and sporadic attempts at going against my nature and living like the gentleman I met: like I had six months’ pay in my pocket and nothing to lose. If I leave this world unexpectedly, with my goals unmet, I will at least have had those few and paltry experiences, and the few soggy words I have thrown together.

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I see in the mirror the old man I will become
Like a child watching the last days of summer
Slipping through arms outstretched and grasping
Has it all been a wasted fading-light afternoon
Or is the inevitable end of childhood and youth
Simply too close for sober clear-eyed perspectives
Only time will tell, and she keeps her secrets close
Even as we, Red Queens all, must run ever faster
Just to keep pace with an accelerating world

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He was King Wilfred and he ruled both the house and the kingdom of Lüderitz from his seat at Elbemund. Crowned in just after the Austro-Prussian War at the grand hilltop Felsenkirche, he inherited his father’s hard work in building the small kingdom of Lüderitz into a modern nation within the German Confederation.

His was not always an easy reign. Wilfred had supported Lüderitz’s independence in the face of increasing Prussian encroachment, which hadn’t been a popular idea among either his subjects of his neighbors. In the end, after the whirlwind events of the Franco-Prussian War, he had to settle for quasi-independence under the suzerainty of Prussia and the new German Empire, much like his fellow monarchs of Bavaria and Württemberg.

In the absence of a proper kingdom to rule, King Wilfred instead busied himself with his great loves: architecture and horse-breeding. A program of civil improvement, that not incidentally featured many grand buildings in the king’s favored architectural style, was the hallmark of his reign and Elbemund in particular was among the newest and most modern cities in the empire at the program’s end, albeit on a smaller scale than Berlin or Munich. And Wilfred’s thoroughbreds were in such demand that at Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, the entire German delegation rode Lüderitz steeds.

Wilhelm prided himself on his accessibility. The palace was open to all comers, provided they met certain minimum grooming standards, and royal audiences took up a substantial amount of his time. The King was also fond of riding about town on his beloved horses without any bodyguards, inspecting building works, chatting with his subjects, and noting improvements to be made.

World War I was a disaster for Lüderitz and Elbemund, just as it was for the rest of Germany. Several of the king’s grandsons perished as soldiers, sailors, or aviators, and his position on the General Staff saw his name attached to unpopular measures even as Wilfred himself was largely bypassed by professional soldiers, becoming a schattenkoenig much as his suzerain Wilhelm II was a schattenkaiser.

King Wilfred’s main legacy to history is his death. He was in the Königspalast when the German Revolution spilled onto the streets, led by soldiers and sailors on leave. Determined to put an end to the unrest, Wilfred rode out on his favorite charger, again without a guard, to meet the revolutionaries. He demanded that they return to their barracks; they demanded that he abdicate. The conversation grew heated.

A sailor on a rooftop shot Wilfred’s horse out from under him. Enraged, the king returned fire with his pistol…and the crowd set upon him. When troops from Weimar arrived to restore order months later, they found Wilfred, twenty-second of his line, where he had been left: on a gibbet, the only ruler in the German Empire to die in the revolution.

For years afterward, his death was held up by both communards and fascists as an example of the futility of negotiation. Cameos of King Wilfred were often sent as gifts—and subtle warnings—to those perceived as lacking steel in their political convictions. Most notably, Eugen Leviné received a Wilfred cameo as a gift from Ernst Toller just before ordering the deaths of hostages he had taken for the Bavarian Socialist Republic in 1919.

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We saw you come here on the back of our compatriot. The words were deep and resonant, knowing and kind, and they were articulated without any motion at all on the part of the perhaps-whale save its gentle bobbing in the air. We could tell that you were in need of aid.

“Yes,” said the girl tremblingly, teaching out a hand. “I’ve lost my friend, I’ve lost my way, and I must get to the Great Eye.”

The perhaps-whale’s wordless tone grew concerned. Yes, we know of the Great Eye at Childhood’s End, it wordlessly intoned. It is beyond our power to reach.

“Why?” said the girl petulantly. “You could fly me there in minutes.”

No, we cannot, replied the perhaps-whale. For you see, we do not exist.

The girl raised a skeptical eyebrow. “You look like you exist to me,” she said.

Of course, for we are childhood dreams, borne upward by winds of belief and sustained by the power of innocent minds. But Childhood’s End is the death of all such dreams, the grey crushing that accompanies all such young things. We exist only for those who believe, or can be made to believe, and to pass through the Great Eye at Childhood’s End would be, for us, to cease.

“I don’t believe in you,” the girl replied. “Whales can’t fly.”

You, a child, should know better than anyone the difference between what one says to others and what one feels to oneself. The tone without tone of the perhaps-whale sounded light and amused at this. Suffice it to say that we would not, we could not, be speaking if that were really so.

“So that’s it, then,” said the girl. “You won’t help me.”

Why would you want help to reach such an awful place? Childhood’s End is the death of wonder and dreaming, the graveyard of games and fun, the tomb of carelessness. To pass through the Great Eye is to lose all those things. Why not stay here, stay outside it, forever? You would grow older but remain a child. does that not appeal?

The girl bit her lip.

Is that not the darkest and most desperate desire of your heart? Surely you have seen them where you live, those who never leave home, those who still wake to mother’s fresh meals, those who know nothing but play and games their whole lives.

The girl thought about poor Bear, the gobs, and all she had seen and heard up to that point. “That sounds…terrible,” she said. “As bad as Childhood’s End sounds, that sounds just as bad. Isn’t there another way?”

There is no other way. Childhood is sunshine and adulthood is night. It is one or the other, always.

“What about sunrise?” the girl said defiantly. “What about sunset? If you won’t take me there, I’ll go alone.”

Inspired by this image.

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The casket opened silently, revealing the Purposeful Blade in repose. It still bore a mirror-shine, undimmed by patina, and the handle glistened with wrought and spun gold most fine. It bore the crest of House Anselm-Limbert, a falcon rampant with a bone in one claw, at the center of the crosspiece and the orb of House Anselm-Limbert, a representation of a falcon’s eye, at the end of its hilt.

“My birthright,” Eyon said in a low voice. Gullywax had warned him not to touch it, as the sword’s honed blade glowed brightly in the hands of a member of House Anselm-Limbert. But surely here, surely now, no one would notice.

Eyon gripped the hilt tightly, just as Gob had taught him, and hefted the blade. It glinted but remained dark. Confused, Eyon switched it to his right hand. The glow did not seem to care, and the blade was dark and silent.

“I don’t…I don’t understand,” whispered Eyeon. “I am Eyeon Anselm-Limbert, heir to House Anselm-Limbert and rightfully Eyon IV, king of Pexate. The blade should glow for me as it glowed for my forefathers.”

“Yet it will not glow for Master. It will never glow for Master.” Eyon was so started he nearly dropped the cold blade; Gob had entered the chamber without so much as a squeak of his armor.

“Why not?” Eyon whimpered. “You sound like you know. Tell me.”

“Gob did not know until this moment, but Gob suspected.” Gob’s strident tone softened a shade. “Gob did not tell Master because it would hurt Master deeply.”

“Tell me.”

“Is Master sure? Gob does not wish for its-”

“TELL ME!”

“Eyon Anselm-Limbert was but a boy of two when he was vanished,” said Gob. “But even so, chroniclers have recorded that he used to scamper about the castle with a toy sword in his hand. His RIGHT hand.”

“But…but I’ve always been left-handed,” whimpered Eyon. “I can barely open a door with my right hand!”

“Yes, and it was this that made Gob suspect.” The creature was silent a moment. “As difficult as it is for Master to hear, he has asked Gob for the truth, and Gob has delivered it. Master is a pretender to the Anselm-Limbert name, likely raised from his youth to be the tool of ambitious men in seizing Pexate from House Estrem-Lamblin.”

“You mean…” Eyeon sniffed. “You…you mean…?”

“Yes,” said Gob. “Gob means what you think it means. Gullywax, Master’s caretaker, is the most likely perpetrator of this fraud. Gob is sorry, Master. But, for what it is worth, Gob was paid by Master and to Master he remains loyal.”

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“And for you, Patrick, we have one final test to show the power of your faith and your god.”

“Snakes. Why’d it have to be snakes?”

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