FERDINAND DYING
1529 4D
The tall shafts of the Archive pillars taste sweet as I lick them, scents and tastes bursting in choral harmonies across my palate, reciting ancient verses scribed on silvered grains of tasty sand. My doses of KPX and met were lethal, but slow-acting, so I’ll be in here for quite a while before the end. I call out, “Talu. Taaaalu.”
She appears out of a pale whipped-candy mist, gloriously beautiful, and I shine back at her. “I’m here to stay,” I announce.
Her pastel opal eyes scan me up and down, at first in a kind of hunger, and then sadly, and finally in a hard stare. “You came here to die.”
“Yes, that’s true. I wanted to be with you. Come and hold me.” I begin the usual morph into nakedness and heat, coming ready for her, but she backs away in a swirl of zircon dust.
“No. Not any more.”
“Talu! All I’ve ever wanted was to be here with you. You’re–“
“No. All you wanted was information. All you want now is information and death. I refuse you both of these things now.” She fades like smoke, and is gone.
I can move very quickly here, and now I chase her like an arrow through the pillared hallways filled with tasty edible language. I inhale deeply, manuals of instruction soak into my bloodstream instilling me with yet more language, and I ignore all of it, because I want nothing but Talu. As I delve deeper and deeper among darkening shapes of architecture, thousands of voices singing madly in me, I sense my end approaching. Rooms open to me on either side, very ancient rooms of forgotten Earth; I glance into them tasting their fullness with my eyes. A man sits in one room in a huge smooth-surfaced bulky chair. I stop, stand before him, and ask, “Have you seen Talu Tribin?”
He is human, his skin dark gold. His clothes are of the nineteenth century of Earth‘s European style. His mustache moves slightly as he speaks, his accents skewed. “Hello, Ferdinand.”
“You know my name? Who are you?”
“We have much to discuss. Sit down.” He motions to another big chair nearby.
“I’m going to die soon,” I tell him.
“Maybe you are. Before you die, I want you to read this.” He hands me a thick hard-bound book with withered paper pages.
“What is it? I need to leave.”
“It will tell you some things you need to know before you die.”
“I know all I need to.”
“Then you know nothing, Ferdinand. Just read the first few words, and you’ll see why you need to read more.”
I fumble with the covers of this thing – it weighs so much, not like a datasheet – and finally a big page flaps up in my face. In the center of the page appear unfamiliar characters lined up in rows. “I can’t read this,” I say.
He looks at me with surprising blue eyes. “Yes, you can.” He points at the book; I look again, and these symbol streams make sense now:
or
“Turn the page,” he says.
The words and letters rearrange themselves to suit my vision. It’s utterly peculiar; they’re alive and looking for me, trying to find a way into my eyes and my understanding. It frightens me.
“No! Read!” He’s next to me now, one knee on the floor by my chair. His breath smells of darkness and smoke.
I sink into the chair, deeper and deeper. As my mind travels here, the drugs perfuse my body, in its sleep cubby, with death. I begin to read.
