The Live-Forever Machine Read online

  “It’s here somewhere,” the other man whispered viciously. “Any hiding place, I’ll find. And, Alexander, there are machines—real machines that have to be seen to be believed. You can’t imagine the power of them. They’re beautiful. When I walked out of the Louvre that day, everything else … before … all a dark dream. These machines are the power and the glory, the way of the future, Alexander. You can’t stop them. This is my time. Yours is over.”

  “Go, go,” said Alexander, his voice a tired croak.

  The man in black threw the sword to the ground and turned.

  “The way of the future,” he said again. Without looking back, he stepped over the railing and walked out of the gallery.

  Eric watched as Alexander stooped over the toppled soldier and tried to stand it upright. But it was apparently too heavy and he lowered it gently to the ground. He picked up the sword and shield and examined them carefully. Then he stood up, looking around the armoury. He seemed alert, as if he were listening.

  Eric pressed his hands hard against the ground and tried to remain absolutely motionless. A trickle of sweat ran down over his ribs. Whatever that was, he told himself, you were not supposed to see it.

  Alexander stood a moment longer, his head tilted attentively. Then, holding the sword and the shield, he turned and moved deeper in the display, further and further back. Eric squinted after him. Where was he going? The shadows closed around him and he was soon just a dark outline, and then, nothing at all. He’d disappeared. Must be a door back there somewhere.

  Eric let out a deep breath. All he wanted to do was get out, fast, but he made himself wait a few more seconds before painfully pushing himself out of his crouch. He walked quickly to the railing and hopped over onto the tiled floor. Then he hesitated. There. It was still there, just at the edge of the display.

  He took one quick look around the gallery and then bent down and reached out his hand. His fingers closed around it.

  2

  Dad

  He held it delicately in his trembling hands, as though it might disintegrate. It was an oblong of dark-grained wood, about the size and weight of a micro-cassette tape, though much thinner. Even though he was alone in the house, he had closed the bedroom door, and he sat on the edge of his bed, his heart still racing, his mouth dry.

  What was it? He ran his thumb softly around the bevelled corners. It was old. He could tell. I felt old. There was a hinge along one of the longer sides, and he put his fingernail between the two paper-thin halves and carefully prised them apart.

  It opened like a book. His breath caught in his throat. On the right side was a tiny oil portrait of a woman. She sat in profile in front of a large open window, and in the painstakingly detailed background were a series of rolling meadows, the church spires of a town, and beyond that, the ocean, extending to the horizon.

  But it was the woman’s face that held his attention. Her dark eyes seemed to crackle in the painted light. She looked almost fierce, with her heavy eyebrows, strong, straight nose, and mane of reddish-brown hair brushed back in thick waves from her high forehead. But her full mouth was vulnerable and gentle. She held her head high, gazing imperiously at something beyond the picture frame. He looked at the left panel. A name had been carved into the wood in a swirling script, and below that, a date:

  Gabriella della Signatura

  A.D. 1445

  He swallowed hard. This strange, beautiful object was more than five hundred years old, and he had taken it out of the museum. It was probably part of one of the displays. But why had it been in the worker’s pocket? The question throbbed in his mind for a few seconds. It didn’t matter, he told himself. He’d have to return it. But then his eyes returned to the woman in the painting, and he looked at her for a long time. He gently closed the panels and slipped the wooden locket into his desk drawer.

  “Fall of the Roman Empire.”

  “400 A.D.,” Eric replied automatically.

  “Battle of Waterloo.” His father hurled out the next question without a pause, shutting the front door behind him.

  “1815.”

  “Discovery of the electric battery.”

  “Umm, 1800.”

  “By?”

  ‘‘Alessandro Volta.”

  “Magna Carta signed when?”

  “1200. No, wait. 1215.”

  “Good. Discovery of King Tut’s tomb.”

  “1922.”

  “Name of the archaeologist.”

  “Howard Carter.”

  “Sinking of the Titanic.”

  “1912.”

  “Be more exact.”

  “April 12, 1912.”

  “Yes. First printing press.”

  Eric shook his head in defeat. “Don’t know.”

  “Gutenberg press, 1440s. How could you forget the Gutenberg press? Without it, we wouldn’t have any of these, not a single one.” Mr. Sheppard waved his hand at the crammed bookcases as he crossed the living room. “In all, though, not bad.”

  It was a game they had always played, historical dates and facts, and his father would start it up without warning, while making dinner, walking down the street, reading a book.

  “How was your day?”

  “Well—”

  But before Eric could go on, his father had sat down at the table and was hunched over the ancient typewriter, glaring at the piece of paper that curled out of it. He struck clumsily at the keys, cursed, and reached for the bottle of correction fluid. The fan was going full blast. Cans of tomato soup kept his tidy piles of handwritten notes from blowing away.

  “There,” he said after a few moments. “Had that sentence banging around in my head all the way home.”

  He shrugged off his conductor’s jacket and let it fall to the floor beside the chair. His shirt was rumpled and damp. He yanked his tie loose.

  Eric watched him staring intently at the typewriter, oblivious. Gone for the duration, Eric thought wryly, shaking his head. Eric had been waiting eagerly for his father to come home so he could tell him what had happened in the museum—waiting half the afternoon, damn it! But now it looked as if his latest story had him in the usual headlock.

  Eric looked down at the book he’d been flipping through listlessly for the past hour. Museums of the World. He was only looking at the pictures. It was too hot to do anything else. His T-shirt was plastered against his back, and he was sure his dark hair was collecting the heat, storing it like solar coils. He pushed his hands through the thick curls and grimaced. He needed to get it cut.

  He restlessly brushed away some bits of plaster that had flaked off the wall onto the cushions. The heat had been making it worse. It was an old house, long and narrow, with hardwood floors and crooked doorways and radiators that clanked noisily. It had been slowly falling apart for more than a hundred years. It was one of the last farm houses in the city, and certainly the only one downtown. It had been left to Eric’s father years ago by his father—Eric’s grandfather. Now it was sandwiched between two luxury highrise apartment buildings, and the side windows had been boarded up because they looked out onto concrete foundations.

  “Damn!” his father said, reaching for the correction fluid again.

  Eric thumbed through a few more pages of his book, unable to concentrate. Since he’d come back from the museum, he’d been trying to piece together the conversation he’d heard in the medieval gallery. But all that came back to him were unconnected phrases and sentences, puzzle pieces that didn’t make any sense. He’d been thinking about the locket, too, or at least the woman in the painting. Why couldn’t he get her face out of his mind? He glanced over at his father. Eric always felt guilty interrupting him when he was writing.

  “I saw something really weird in the museum today,” he finally blurted out.

  “Tell me,” his father said without looking up.

  Eric waited for him to stop typing before he started. He told his father everything but stopped before the part about the locket. His father would want t
o see it, hold it, and Eric didn’t want to share it with anyone.

  “They were fighting right in the medieval armoury display?” his father asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s a ridiculous place to fight,” his father remarked. “They could have caused a lot more damage than they did. It’s lucky they knocked over only the one soldier.”

  “No, Dad,” Eric said, impatience creeping into his voice—he knew his father hadn’t been listening very carefully. “The guy in black pushed it over on purpose. It happened before the fight.”

  “Was the armour all right?”

  “Uh, yeah, I think so; I didn’t—”

  “What about the shield and sword?”

  “They were fine, too, I think. It was only the soldier, the statue, that got busted up.”

  “They should really put up a glass shield. Those things are extremely old and valuable.” He shook his head. “It’s beyond me … one of them actually picked up the shield?”

  “The sword. I thought he was going to kill the other guy.”

  “Appalling. You don’t just grab an antique sword that’s centuries old and wave it around.”

  Eric traced the rip in his jeans. He couldn’t tell his father that, in a strange way, he thought it was fitting the two men had fought in the middle of the display, surrounded by all those frozen soldiers holding weapons that hadn’t been used for hundreds of years. His father would have been horrified.

  His father was already looking back to the typewriter.

  “Hey,” Eric said. “Hello?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I mean, who do you think they were? Doesn’t the whole thing sound weird to you?”

  “I really—” His eyes were straying to the piles of paper on the table. “I really don’t know, Eric. Look, I’m sorry; it’s just that I’m at a really good part.”

  You’re always just at a really good part, Eric thought. Lately, the stories seemed to be eating up more and more of his father’s time. As soon as he got home from his shift on the subway, he’d start hacking away at the typewriter, sometimes not even stopping for dinner.

  “You’re going to love this one, Eric,” his father said.

  Probably, Eric thought grudgingly. He usually did. His father’s stories were the strangest he’d ever read, but they were wonderful. The settings were cut off from the rest of the world, neither past nor present nor future. There were deserts and jungles and snow-capped mountains and angels with broken wings and magic cameras, and small towns overrun with cats, and sometimes, a woman with laughter like Nepalese wind chimes who disappeared down narrow streets into the twilight.

  The woman, Eric felt certain, was his mother. She had died so soon after he was born that he had no memory of her. She had gotten caught in the subway doors, and the train hadn’t stopped. His father had told him this when he was seven and he hadn’t known how to react. Part of him wanted to laugh—it was impossibly horrible and absurd; the other part wanted to cry for the woman whose face he couldn’t remember. But all he had done was watch his father’s fingers as they traced a pattern on the tabletop, again and again.

  His father never really talked about her, except in the stories, and Eric read them all hungrily, hoping to catch glimpses of his mother. He sometimes thought his father missed her as much now as when it had happened. There were periods when he seemed caught in a deep reverie—days when he’d slip through the hours lifelessly, not writing, not talking much. There had been a few other women over the years, some of whom had even made breakfast in the mornings, but they never stayed longer than a month or two. And then his father would start a new story.

  “Why haven’t you ever tried to get them published?” Eric asked.

  “I’ve never thought about it.” He shrugged. “I do them for myself.”

  It made Eric angry to think of the pile of stories in his father’s bedroom, yellowing with age.

  “If you sold enough,” he said, “maybe you wouldn’t need to work on the subway anymore.”

  “It’s as good a way to earn a living as any,” his father said quietly. “It’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “That’s not what I—”

  “I’ve still made time for all this.” He waved his hand to indicate the bookshelves. Self-taught. That was the word his father always used.

  “That’s not what I meant, anyway,” Eric grumbled irritably, fanning out his shirt to cool his back. In fact, he wasn’t sure quite what he’d meant. Maybe it had been intended as a small stab. But it couldn’t be healthy, spending whole days in the subway tunnels, in the dark.

  “I was thinking about you today,” his father said distractedly.

  Eric waited for him to go on.

  “A book,” he said, after hammering out a few more words on the typewriter. “A book that you should read.”

  “Oh,” Eric said, disappointed.

  “Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole. I think you’d enjoy it.”

  Eric sighed. “Dad, you already gave that one to me. Remember? A couple of weeks ago.”

  “Oh. It’s good, isn’t it?”

  “It was all right. It was kind of dumb.”

  “Kind of dumb?” His father looked up from his typewriter, scandalized. “It’s a great classic.”

  Eric just nodded. Every old book was a great classic, according to his father. A shopping list would have been a great classic if it had been written a hundred years ago.

  “You should try to read everything,” his father said. “That’s the only real education.”

  “You make it sound as if I picked up one book every five years,” Eric said resentfully. “Chris thinks all I do is read.”

  “Well,” his father said with a chuckle, “Chris isn’t exactly an intellectual.”

  “You hardly know him!” Eric objected. “Last time he was over you didn’t even say hello.”

  The lights flickered suddenly and the electric fan jolted in mid-revolution. The tiny television set in the corner switched on full blast.

  Eric jumped. “Not again,” he groaned.

  “What a din,” Mr. Sheppard said, gathering up his papers.

  “It’s been doing this all afternoon,” said Eric. “Must be the heatwave.”

  “For most people,” a dignified off-screen voice said, “shopping is not simply a pleasure, but a way of life. Here, in the heart of downtown, next door to the museum, a new shopping experience is about to be forged. More than four hundred new shops under one magnificent roof for the discriminating consumer. It’s the mall of the future, for the way of the future, designed as a series of figure-eight patterns to encourage maximum shopper participation. Three kilometres of enclosed floor space, much of it totally underground, will take you effortlessly through an incomparable collection of the finest boutiques and eateries in the world. You’ll be dazzled by neon, soothed by the sounds of our in-house music. It’s all there for you, waiting. Elegance, simplicity, complicity. The new mall. Opening this fall.”

  “Complicity, for sure,” growled Eric’s father, shaking his head in disgust.

  “Just another mall,” Eric said with a shrug. “Chris told me this was one of his Mom’s deals.”

  A news reporter appeared, standing across the street from a building that was spewing out smoke and flames. Eric recognized it as the rare-book library. He walked past it practically every day.

  “The fire,” the reporter shouted, “started early this morning at the corner of Main and Kierkegaard, and spread quickly out of control through the entire library. Firefighters have been working to stop the blaze, but many of the water hydrants in the immediate area have run dry. Filled with so much paper, this building is like a giant tinderbox. Just look at those books burn! This is the second fire in the downtown area within a week. Only three days ago, a well-known antiques dealership was the scene of a similar blaze, which destroyed most of the shop’s merchandise and did millions of dollars of damage.”

  The reporter paused to wa
tch as part of the library’s wall collapsed outwards onto the street.

  “At the scene,” he said, turning to face the camera, “I’m Stuart Daw for Split Second News.”

  “Thanks, Stuart,” said the studio anchor. “Just an incredible fire. And who needs it in this heat? Next, the latest in wrestling. Bob?”

  “Well, Dirk, it was a good, good day for the Beast—”

  It took Eric three tries to switch off the TV. When he turned around, he was startled by the pallor of his father’s face.

  “It’s a terrible thing,” his father was saying. “One of the finest libraries in the world.”

  Eric watched his father.

  “Floors and floors of books rising up all around you. They don’t let you just browse, of course. You have to ask one of the librarians to get a particular book for you—and then you look at them under glass most of the time. But sometimes, you get to hold one. You can touch it, feel the old leather binding and the brittle pages, smell the old paper.” A small smile fluttered across his mouth. “Once your mother—” He stopped suddenly and looked back down at the typewriter.

  “What?” Eric said. He sat forward slightly.

  But his father just shook his head. “Nothing.”

  Eric slumped back into the tattered upholstery of the sofa. It wasn’t fair, he fumed inwardly. Why wouldn’t he talk about her? Eric knew hardly anything about her; he’d never even seen a photograph. He suddenly thought of the locket, the tiny portrait inside.

  “I wonder if they’ll be able to save any of the books,” his father muttered. “The worst thing is hardly anyone cares. Most people would rather watch the library burn on TV than read a book.”

  “Chris is probably watching it right now, eating popcorn,” Eric said to annoy his father.

  His father just nodded sadly.

  “The whole city’s been changing so fast, it’s frightening,” he said. “It’s all so different from what it used to be.”

  “Lots of construction,” Eric said.

  “It’s not just the construction,” his father replied, waving his hand dismissively. “It’s the whole city. It’s getting too big. It’s getting too high. But it’s also getting too forgetful. It can’t even remember what it used to look like fifty years ago, twenty years ago, maybe even ten years ago. No wonder libraries burn. The city’s eating itself up!”