“And you know, Thea…” Northover finds he’s actually laughing. “You know what the biggest joke is? Haru didn’t even realise. He could read music quicker than I can read words, and play like Chopin and Chick Corea, and to him it was all just this lark of a thing he sometimes did with this mad old git up on the fortieth floor …

  “But he was growing older. Kids still do, you know, back on Lifeside. And one day he’s not there, and when he does next turn up, there’s this girl downstairs who’s apparently the most amazing thing in the history of everything, and I shout at him and tell him just how fucking brilliant he really is. I probably even used the phrase God-given talent, whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean. But anyway…”

  “Yes?”

  Northover sighs. This is the hard bit, even though he’s played it over a million times in his head. “They become a couple, and she soon gets pregnant, and she has a healthy baby, even though they seem ridiculously young. A kind of miracle. They’re so proud they even take the kid up to show me, and he plongs his little hands on my piano, and I wonder if he’ll come up one day to see old Northy, too. Given a few years, and assuming old Northy still alive, that is, which is less than likely. But that isn’t how it happens. The baby gets sick. It’s winter and there’s an epidemic of some new variant of the nano flu. Not to say there isn’t a cure. But the cure needs money—I mean, you know what these retrovirals cost better than anyone, Thea—which they simply don’t have. And this is why I should have kept my big old mouth shut, because Haru must have remembered what I yelled at him about his rare, exceptional musical ability. And he decides his baby’s only just starting on his life, and he’s had a good innings of eighteen or so years. And if there’s something he can do, some sacrifice he can make for his kid … So that’s what he does…”

  “You’re saying?”

  “Oh, come on, Thea! I know it’s not legal, either Lifeside or here. But we both know it goes on. Everything has its price, especially talent. And the dead have more than enough vanity and time, if not the application, to fancy themselves as brilliant musicians, just the same way they might want to ride an expensive thoroughbred, or fuck like Casanova, or paint like Picasso. So Haru sold himself, or the little bit that someone here wanted, and the baby survived and he didn’t. It’s not that unusual a story, Thea, in the great scheme of things. But it’s different, when it happens to someone you know, and you feel you’re to blame.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “Do you think that’s enough?”

  “Nothing’s ever enough. But do you really believe that whatever arm of the resistance you made contact with actually wanted me, Thea Lorentz, fully dead? What about the reprisals? What about the global outpouring of grief? What about all the inevitable, endless let’s-do-this-for-Thea bullshit? Don’t you think it would suit the interests of Farside itself far better to remove this awkward woman who makes unfashionable causes fashionable and brings attention to unwanted truths? Wouldn’t they prefer to extinguish Thea Lorentz and turn her into a pure symbol they can manipulate and market however they wish? Wouldn’t that make far better sense than whatever it was you thought you were doing?”

  The sea heaves. The whole night heaves with it.

  “If you want to kill me, Jon, you can do so now. But I don’t think you will. You can’t, can you? That’s where the true weakness of whoever conceived you and this plan lies. You had to be what you are, or were, to get this close to me. You had to have free will, or at least the illusion of it…”

  “What the hell are you saying?”

  “I’m sorry. You might think you’re Jon Northover—in fact, I’m sure you do—but you’re not. You’re not him really.”

  “That’s—”

  “No. Hear me out. You and I both know in our hearts that the real Jon Northover wouldn’t be here on Farside. He’d have seen through the things I’ve just explained to you, even if he had ever contemplated actively joining the resistance. But that isn’t it, either. Not really. I loved you, Jon Northover. Loved him. It’s gone, of course, but I’ve treasured the memories. Turned them and polished them, I suppose. Made them into something realer and clearer than ever existed. This afternoon, for instance. It was all too perfect. You haven’t changed, Jon. You haven’t changed at all. People, real people, either dead or living, they shift and they alter like ghosts in reflection, but you haven’t. You stepped out of my past, and there you were, and I’m so, so, sorry to have to tell you these things, for I fully believe that you’re a conscious entity that feels pain and doubt just like all the rest of us. But the real Jon Northover is most likely long dead. He’s probably lying in some mass grave. He’s just another lost statistic. He’s gone beyond all recovery, Jon, and I mourn for him deeply. All you are is something that’s been put together from my stolen memories. You’re too, too perfect.”

  “You’re just saying that. You don’t know.”

  “But I do. That’s the difference between us. One day, perhaps, chimeras such as you will share the same rights as the dead, not to mention the living. But that’s one campaign too far even for Thea Lorentz—at least, while she still has some control over her own consciousness. But I think you know, or at least you think you do, how to tune a piano. Do you know what inharmonicity is?”

  “Of course I do, Thea. It was me who told you about it. If the tone of a piano’s going to sound right, you can’t tune all the individual strings to exactly the correct pitch. You have to balance them out slightly to the sharp or the flat. Essentially, you tune a piano ever so marginally out of tune, because of the way the strings vibrate and react. Which is imperfectly … Which is … I mean … Which is…”

  He trails off. A flag flaps. The clouds hang ragged. Cold moonlight pours down like silver sleet. Thea’s face, when he brings himself to look at it, seems more beautiful than ever.

  * * *

  The trees of Farside are magnificent. Fireash and oak. Greenbloom and maple. Shot through with every colour of autumn as dawn blazes toward the white peaks of the Seven Mountains. He’s never seen such beauty as this. The tide’s further in today. Its salt smell, as he winds down the window and breathes it in, is somehow incredibly poignant. Then the road sweeps up from the coast. Away from the Westering Ocean. As the virtual Bentley takes a bridge over a gorge at a tyrescream, it dissolves in a roaring pulse of flame.

  A few machine parts twist jaggedly upward, but they settle as the wind bears away the sound and the smoke. Soon, there’s only sigh of the trees, and the hiss of a nearby waterfall. Then, there’s nothing at all.

  The Book Seller

  LAVIE TIDHAR

  Lavie Tidhar grew up on a kibbutz in Israel, has traveled widely in Africa and Asia, and has lived in London, the South Pacific island of Vanuatu, and Laos. He is the winner of the 2003 Clarke-Bradbury Prize (awarded by the European Space Agency), was the editor of Michael Marshall Smith: The Annotated Bibliography, and the anthologies A Dick & Jane Primer for Adults, The Apex Book of World SF, and The Apex Book of World SF 2. He is the author of the linked story collection HebrewPunk, the novella chapbooks An Occupation of Angels, Gorel and the Pot-Bellied God, Cloud Permutations, Jesus and the Eighfold Path, and, with Nir Yaniv, the novel The Tel Aviv Dossier. He is a prolific short story writer; his stories have appeared in Interzone, Clarkesworld, Apex, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Sci Fiction, Strange Horizons, Chizine, Postscripts, Fantasy, Nemonymous, Infinity Plus, Aeon, The Book of Dark Wisdom, Fortean Bureau, and elsewhere, and have been translated into seven languages. His latest novels include The Bookman and its sequels, Camera Obscura and The Great Game, Osama: A Novel, which won the World Fantasy Award as the year’s best novel in 2012, Martian Sands, and The Violent Century. After a spell in Tel Aviv, he’s currently living back in England.

  “The Book Seller” is another of his interconnected Central Station stories, set in a complex, evocative, multicultural future during a time when humanity—including part-human robots, AIs, cyborgs, and genetically engineered beings of all sorts—is spreading through the solar system. This one deals with a humble, introspective book dealer in Old Tel Aviv, whose shop is in the shadow of the immense Central Station, where spaceships come and go, and who gives shelter to a strigoi against the advice of everyone he knows, and the odd, ever-deepening relationship that develops between them.

  Achimwene loved Central Station. He loved the adaptoplant neighbourhoods sprouting over the old stone and concrete buildings, the budding of new apartments and the gradual fading and shearing of old ones, dried windows and walls flaking and falling down in the wind.

  Achimwene loved the calls of the alte-zachen, the rag-and-bone men, in their traditional passage across the narrow streets, collecting junk to carry to their immense junkyard-cum-temple on the hill in Jaffa to the south. He loved the smell of sheesha-pipes on the morning wind, and the smell of bitter coffee, loved the smell of fresh horse manure left behind by the alte-zachen’s patient, plodding horses.

  Nothing pleased Achimwene Haile Selassi Jones as much as the sight of the sun rising behind Central Station, the light slowly diffusing beyond and over the immense, hour-glass shape of the space port. Or almost nothing. For he had one overriding passion, at the time that we pick this thread, a passion which to him was both a job and a mission.

  Early morning light suffused Central Station and the old cobbled streets. It highlighted exhausted prostitutes and street-sweeping machines, the bobbing floating lanterns that, with dawn coming, were slowly drifting away, to be stored until nightfall. On the rooftops solar panels unfurled themselves, welcoming the sun. The air was still cool at this time. Soon it will be hot, the sun beating down, the aircon units turning on with a roar of cold air in shops and restaurants and crowded apartments all over the old neighbourhood.

  “Ibrahim,” Achimwene said, acknowledging the alte-zachen man as he approached. Ibrahim was perched on top of his cart, the boy Ismail by his side. The cart was pushed by a solitary horse, an old grey being who blinked at Achimwene patiently. The cart was already filled, with adaptoplant furniture, scrap plastic and metal, boxes of discarded house wares and, lying carelessly on its side, a discarded stone bust of Albert Einstein.

  “Achimwene,” Ibrahim said, smiling. “How is the weather?”

  “Fair to middling,” Achimwene said, and they both laughed, comfortable in the near-daily ritual.

  This is Achimwene: he was not the most imposing of people, did not draw the eye in a crowd. He was slight of frame, and somewhat stooped, and wore old-fashioned glasses to correct a minor fault of vision. His hair was once thickly curled but not much of it was left now, and he was mostly, sad to say, bald. He had a soft mouth and patient, trusting eyes, with fine lines of disappointment at their corners. His name meant “brother” in Chichewa, a language dominant in Malawi, though he was of the Joneses of Central Station, and the brother of Miriam Jones, of Mama Jones’ Shebeen on Neve Sha’anan Street. Every morning he rose early, bathed hurriedly, and went out into the streets in time to catch the rising sun and the alte-zachen man. Now he rubbed his hands together, as if cold, and said, in his soft, quiet voice, “Do you have anything for me today, Ibrahim?”

  Ibrahim ran his hand over his own bald pate and smiled. Sometimes the answer was a simple, “No.” Sometimes it came with a hesitant, “Perhaps…”

  Today it was a “Yes,” Ibrahim said, and Achimwene raised his eyes, to him or to the heavens, and said, “Show me?”

  “Ismail,” Ibrahim said, and the boy, who sat beside him wordless until then, climbed down from the cart with a quick, confident grin and went to the back of the cart. “It’s heavy!” he complained. Achimwene hurried to his side and helped him bring down a heavy box.

  He looked at it.

  “Open it,” Ibrahim said. “Are these any good to you?”

  Achimwene knelt by the side of the box. His fingers reached for it, traced an opening. Slowly, he pulled the flaps of the box apart. Savouring the moment that light would fall down on the box’s contents, and the smell of those precious, fragile things inside would rise, released, into the air, and tickle his nose. There was no other smell like it in the world, the smell of old and weathered paper.

  The box opened. He looked inside.

  Books. Not the endless scrolls of text and images, moving and static, nor full-immersion narratives he understood other people to experience, in what he called, in his obsolete tongue, the networks, and others called, simply, the Conversation. Not those, to which he, anyway, had no access. Nor were they books as decorations, physical objects hand-crafted by artisans, vellum-bound, gold-tooled, typeset by hand and sold at a premium.

  No.

  He looked at the things in the box, these fragile, worn, faded, thin, cheap paper-bound books. They smelled of dust, and mould, and age. They smelled, faintly, of pee, and tobacco, and spilled coffee. They smelled like things which had lived.

  They smelled like history.

  With careful fingers he took a book out and held it, gently turning the pages. It was all but priceless. His breath, as they often said in those very same books, caught in his throat.

  It was a Ringo.

  A genuine Ringo.

  The cover of this fragile paperback showed a leather-faced gunman against a desert-red background. RINGO, it said, it giant letters, and below, the fictitious author’s name, Jeff McNamara. Finally, the individual title of the book, one of many in that long running Western series. This one was On The Road To Kansas City.

  Were they all like this?

  Of course, there had never been a ‘Jeff McNamara.’ Ringo was a series of Hebrew-language Westerns, all written pseudonymously by starving young writers in a bygone Tel Aviv, who contributed besides it similar tales of space adventures, sexual titillation or soppy romance, as the occasion (and the publisher’s cheque book) had called for. Achimwene rifled carefully through the rest of the books. All paperbacks, printed on cheap, thin pulp paper centuries before. How had they been preserved? Some of these he had only ever seen mentioned in auction catalogues, their existence, here, now, was nothing short of a miracle. There was a nurse romance; a murder mystery; a World War Two adventure; an erotic tale whose lurid cover made Achimwene blush. They were impossible, they could not possibly exist. “Where did you find them?” he said.

  Ibrahim shrugged. “An opened Century Vault,” he said.

  Achimwene exhaled a sigh. He had heard of such things—subterranean safe-rooms, built in some long-ago war of the Jews, pockets of reinforced concrete shelters caught like bubbles all under the city surface. But he had never expected …

  “Are there … many of them?” he said.

  Ibrahim smiled. “Many,” he said. Then, taking pity on Achimwene, said, “Many vaults, but most are inaccessible. Every now and then, construction work uncovers one … the owners called me, for they viewed much of it as rubbish. What, after all, would a modern person want with one of these?” and he gestured at the box, saying, “I saved them for you. The rest of the stuff is back in the Junkyard, but this was the only box of books.”

  “I can pay,” Achimwene said. “I mean, I will work something out, I will borrow—” the thought stuck like a bone in his throat (as they said in those books)—“I will borrow from my sister.”

  But Ibrahim, to Achimwene’s delight and incomprehension, waved him aside with a laugh. “Pay me the usual,” he said. “After all, it is only a box, and this is mere paper. It cost me nothing, and I have made my profit already. What extra value you place on it surely is a value of your own.”

  “But they are precious!” Achimwene said, shocked. “Collectors would pay—” imagination failed him. Ibrahim smiled, and his smile was gentle. “You are the only collector I know,” he said. “Can you afford what you think they’re worth?”

  “No,” Achimwene said—whispered.

  “Then pay only what I ask,” Ibrahim said and, with a shake of his head, as at the folly of his fellow man, steered the horse into action. The patient beast beat its flank with its tail, shoeing away flies, and ambled onwards. The boy, Ismail, remained there a moment longer, staring at the books. “Lots of old junk in the Vaults!” he said. He spread his arms wide to describe them. “I was there, I saw it! These … books?” he shot an uncertain look at Achimwene, then ploughed on—“and big flat square things called televisions, that we took for plastic scrap, and old guns, lots of old guns! But the Jews took those—why do you think they buried those things?” the boy said. His eyes, vat-grown haunting greens, stared at Achimwene. “So much junk,” the boy said, at last, with a note of finality, and then, laughing, ran after the cart, jumping up on it with youthful ease.

  Achimwene stared at the cart until it disappeared around the bend. Then, with the tenderness of a father picking up a new-born infant, he picked up the box of books and carried them the short way to his alcove.

  * * *

  Achimwene’s life was about to change, but he did not yet know it. He spent the rest of the morning happily cataloguing, preserving and shelving the ancient books. Each lurid cover delighted him. He handled the books with only the tips of his fingers, turning the pages carefully, reverently. There were many faiths in Central Station, from Elronism to St. Cohen to followers of Ogko, mixed amidst the larger populations—Jews to the north, Muslims to the south, a hundred offshoots of Christianity dotted all about like potted plants—but only Achimwene’s faith called for this. The worship of old, obsolete books. The worship, he liked to think, of history itself.

  He spent the morning quite happily, therefore, with only one customer. For Achimwene was not alone in his—obsession? Fervour?