COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2015 by Martin Berman-Gorvine
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Published by Wildside Press LLC.
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
For Christian, Kamryn and the hundreds of other children who have to live in the D.C. General homeless shelter in Washington, D.C., and other Persons Sitting in Darkness.
ALSO BY MARTIN BERMAN-GORVINE
Seven Against Mars
Save the Dragons
OPENING QUOTATIONS
I’m the hero of this story—don’t need to be saved.
—Regina Spektor, “Hero”
Shall we go on conferring our Civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness, or shall we give those poor things a rest? Shall we bang right ahead in our old-time, loud, pious way, and commit the new century to the game; or shall we sober up and sit down and think it over first?
—Mark Twain, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” 1901
Half-truths are more dangerous—and enduring—than are lies.
—John Lukacs
CHAPTER 1
The door to the school library burst open, and a boy ran in, his eyes wide with terror. Voices called after him, the voices of other boys pitched high in falsetto.
“Hey Gross-fart, where you running to?”
“Hey Gross-fart, try not to stink up the library too much! Other people need to use the n-readers, you know!”
A woman stepped out from behind the counter in a swish of long skirts. She walked over to the door and stopped, her arms folded over a deep purple blouse, a patchwork quilt of a skirt, and high but ill-matched boots.
“Is there a problem, boys?” Skittering footsteps and mocking laughter answered her. She shut the door, shook her head, and turned to the boy who had run in.
He stared at her. “Th-thanks for scaring Matt and Jared off, but who are you, and where is Mrs. Wilkes?”
“She retired over Thanksgiving. I’m the new school librarian, Gloria,” the woman said, extending her hand.
“Umm, hello, I guess, Miss Gloria,” the boy said. “I’m Arnold—Grossbard.” He said his last name hesitantly, and Gloria thought he must be waiting to see if she would laugh at it. When she didn’t he slowly reached out his hand to take hers, but suddenly jerked it away. “Hey—you’re hot! I mean, your hand, your hand is hot!” He stared at her as she smoothed her long red hair down around her ears. “Hey, what’s the matter with your ears?” he asked. “How come they’re pointy on top?”
Gloria smiled. “I’m glad to meet you, Arnold. You’re the first person I’ve seen here who didn’t come into the library just to use the neural readers.” She motioned with her head toward two bulky gray machines mounted in carrels. To use one you sat in a bright orange Naugahyde® easy chair and attached electrodes to your temples. Then you more or less became a part of the furniture yourself. Gloria thought the people using the n-readers looked dead, curled up in a fetal position or sprawled all over the chairs with their eyes shut and their mouths wide open. Nevertheless the carrels were always occupied, and there was always a waiting list. There were two users now, a girl and a boy of about fifteen, probably the same age, Gloria thought, as Arnold himself. She noticed the way Arnold’s gaze lingered on the girl’s legs, which poked out from a red cheerleader’s skirt. One of her shoes had fallen off.
“I’m not allowed on the n-readers,” Arnold said, turning his attention back to Gloria and wrinkling his nose as if he smelled something bad. “Not since Mom got so sick from the Net. Though that happened back home—I mean, when we lived in Pikesville.”
“You’re not a ‘from-here,’ then.” Gloria was still smiling.
“Me? Born on Chincoteague Island? Never in a million years. Not like Bill Cherricks and Hailee Pruitt, here.” He gestured at the n-reader users. “Pikesville is near Baltimore, Miss Gloria,” he added.
“Just Gloria, dear,” the new librarian said, but Arnold wasn’t looking at her. He was looking around the room, wide-eyed.
“Do you like how I’ve changed things?” Gloria asked.
“Where did you get those wooden shelves? Did you pay for them yourself?” Arnold replied. Gloria smiled and dipped her head, without answering. “And what’s that hanging plant?” he added.
“It’s called a spider plant,” Gloria said. “You can re-pot those little clusters of leaves hanging over the sides and they grow into whole new plants.”
“That’s neat, I guess,” Arnold mumbled, looking at the floor. The black-and-white tile pattern down there was pretty, as Gloria had found out herself once she’d ripped out the musty pea-green carpet that covered it, but Arnold obviously wasn’t admiring the pattern. The tips of his ears were red. How to get through to him, she wondered, past that awful shyness?
Gloria had an idea how. “Well, now that you’re here, Arnold, would you like to browse the new books I’ve brought?”
“Why did you move everything around?” Arnold asked, walking among the new wooden shelves. The old shelves had been horrible gray aluminum. How could a kid ever daydream among them? Gloria followed him.
“I like it better this way,” she said.
“It seems you don’t like the Dewey Decimal System, though,” Arnold said.
“I never could figure it out.”
She had science books mixed in with fiction and history. Sometimes she liked to group them by author. For instance, there was Rachel Zilber, who had written both a science fiction novel about a swashbuckling hero called Zap-Gun Jack Flash and beside it a nonfiction book about the geology of Mars. But she also felt, for reasons of her own, that an atlas of the currently nonexistent country of Khazaria belonged next to Charles Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which in some versions of history he had died before completing.
Arnold jumped. “Don’t creep up on me like that!”
“Sorry,” Gloria said, pursing her lips.
Arnold pulled the book he had been looking at off the shelf and held it out to Gloria. “I though Mark Twain was banned? Like, not just from school libraries, but from all libraries?”
“Really?” said Gloria, wide-eyed.
“My Dad has lots of his books anyway, up in the attic,” Arnold said.
Gloria smiled more broadly. She had just known there was something she liked about this kid, the moment he ran in the door.
“But I never heard of this one,” he added. Then he seemed to forget all about her, as he sat cross-legged on the floor, propped his chin in his right hand and started flipping through Letters to a Woman Sitting in Darkness. After a few minutes he looked up, his eyes narrowed. “Hey! This isn’t a funny story like I expected!”
“Really?”
“Well, parts of it are funny in a sick way. But all this stuff that Private Sam Shipman is writing to his girlfriend Daisy back home about what the American Army is doing in the Philippines, back in 1902? Killing all those women and children? That not what the history textbook we use in Miss Kelley’s class says.”
“What does it say, Arnold?”
Arnold shut his eyes and recited from memory. “The Spanish-American War broke out when a feeble, declining Spain met the surging power of the New World. The new harmony that America imposed from Puerto Rico to the Philippines was like a faint foretaste of the greater, Cosmic Harmony to come later in the century, when the High Ones came from the stars, bringing peace to the whole world.”
Gloria was impressed. “What do you think about that, Arnold?”