At Night


                In books lies the soul of the whole Past Time,
                the articulate, audible voice of the Past,
                when the body and material substance of it has
                altogether vanished like a dream



She couldn't sleep.

Studying the patterns on the ceiling above her, she
quietly lay on her bed. She turned towards the window,
momentarily mesmerized by the moon in the heavens above.
The skies were cloudless, stars sparkling against the
eternal darkness.

The girl sighed, a little bit saddened, perhaps, by a
sensation of insignificance.

She sat on the edge of her bed, still looking out the
window, listening.

Silence.

Another sigh.

Getting up, she slowly walked towards the lone bookshelf
in her room, and knelt next to it. She had precious few
books, and she treasured each and every one of them. Some
had been handed down to her, others, she had found by
herself.

Her fingers delicately caressed the spines, feeling the
texture of the worn bindings, tracing the faded names
carved on the surface. She had read almost all of them,
at least the ones which she could understand, and was
capable of reciting entire paragraphs of a few.

    "My vanity and my nostalgia have made up an impossible
     scene. So be it (I tell myself), but tomorrow I will
     have also died, and our times will become blurred, and
     the chronology will be lost in an orb of symbols, and
     somehow it will be fair to say that I have brought you
     this book, and that you have accepted it"

She unshelved three books, and placed them down besides
her. Reaching towards the back of the bookcase, she
pulled out a large, dark brown volume, and laid it on her
lap.

Of her collection, it was this book which she valued the
most, her greatest prize, her closest friend, and,
ironically, one of her most fearsome enemies.

Discovered during one of her expeditions, it was the lone
survivor amongst the dust filled crystal prison in which
it had slept for over a thousand years. Why had this
particular tome endured she would never know, but it was
the only book left in the vast ruins of the building she
had found.

She had never told anyone about it, and it had taken her
a lot of hard work to decipher the ancient language it
was written in. Thankfully, she had other books in the
same tongue whose contents had been translated, becoming
thus her very own Rosetta stones.

At first it had been an exceedingly difficult task, but,
far from discouraging her, the girl's fascination
grew. How could it not?

The book spoke to her of things she never dreamed could
have existed, of people who lived in strange and
extraordinary places she had never even heard of, of sea
animals of impossible shapes, it spoke of numbers and
stars, of times so ancient it was impossible to count the
number of centuries which had passed, of birds and
paintings and vast oceans and things so small she could
not even imagine the scales involved, of how the
telescope she had received for her birthday worked, and
how she could fix the bothersome blur caused by the
slight spherical aberration. It spoke to her of this and
much, much more.

And yet, in spite of all these wonderful things, the book
sometimes made her very scared, for it cared not about
the ulterior use of the knowledge it conveyed. And thus,
with equal insouciance, it spoke of Man's unrelenting
greed for power, it spoke about war and destruction and
death, it spoke of the weapons and machinery which had
ultimately led to humanity's terrible downfall.

Sometimes she had thought about destroying the book, or
perhaps just throwing the offending pages into the fire,
but she couldn't do that either. She knew it was not the
words which mattered, but the hearts and minds of those
who read them. This she understood, and was indeed all
the wiser for it, but it still didn't help her much. And
thus, once again, she simply leafed through the pages a
few minutes, and hid the book in the back of its shelf,
hoping she would one day know what to do with her silent
companion.

She returned to her bed and laid down, again looking at
the ceiling. She couldn't stop thinking about the
book. It had been number thirteen of a larger collection,
and she couldn't help but wonder what the entire
encyclopaedia must have been like, the extraordinary
amount of information it must have contained.

Before finally falling asleep, a thought which had
crossed her mind many times before came back in her
incipient soporiferousness. Number thirteen, so
close. She couldn't help but wonder that, perhaps amongst
the thousand pages in volume twelve, she might have
learned about the brave princess whom she had been named
after, of whom only a name had survived throughout the
countless ages: Nausicaa.


_________________________________
marco@chinook.physics.utoronto.ca
Gunnm: Broken Angel
http://128.100.80.13/marco/alita.html