Short Story: "The Archivist" (Original Fiction)

[deemoyza]

The Archivist | 2,645 words | Sci-Fi

Sequel (of sorts) to “Das All”

————

Three weeks after her grandmother’s death, Pris watched her mother close the old suitcase for good.

“Do what you want with it,” Mother said with a sigh. "I’ve extracted all the memories from it that I can.“

The way she said it, Pris half-expected the suitcase to be light and brittle, like the dehydrated vegetables they’d been forced to eat during the Chloris Sector blight twelve years ago. Instead, the suitcase remained sturdy, heavy with the few, strange belongings Grandmother had seen fit to pack at the start of her destination-less journey all those years ago.

It was covered in dark green leather — an artifact in itself, though it was beginning to wear and peel — with clasps and hinges plated to look like gold, but chipped and nicked to reveal a much cheaper metal beneath. This was the first time Pris had been allowed to closely examine it, let alone touch it; Grandmother had kept it always close at hand, and, following Grandmother’s death, Mother had hoarded it like a treasure. Pris had always wondered what, exactly, was so valuable about its contents, and opening the suitcase yielded no answers.

Books, fabric, photographs … typical Terrestrial cargo. Pris shuffled through the photos; none of them were new to her, all of them already scanned and uploaded into the Iverly family database. The fabric was delicate and yellowed, and smelled like the inside of the suitcase, with the subtle undertone of a fragrance Pris couldn’t identify — too sweet, vaguely floral, slightly musky. A perfume, perhaps? She’d heard that the variable environmental conditions of Earth, and the biological reactions they elicited, had made the use of such substances desirable, even necessary in some circumstances. Whatever it was, it held little interest now. Pris set aside the fabric and reached for the books.

Only one of them was technical: the primer for space travel handed out to the first generation aboard the Alacrtias Caelestis. Pris had studied it in her classes, as a gauge against which to measure each generation’s progress in making the AlCael more habitable, more hospitable, more harmonious. They had come far, making the underlines and marginalia in Grandmother’s copy — questions about food supply, childrearing in an artificial environment, and the designation of essential tasks — seem incredibly quaint.

The other books were all fiction, ranging from classics that continued to populate curricula to a cheaply-bound item featuring a man in full armor pointing his sword at a large reptilian beast. That looked exciting, and Pris tucked it discreetly behind the monitor sitting on her desk for later investigation.

Beneath the books, more trinkets of an ephemeral life whose context had long passed: a vial of sand, with a tiny shell hanging from a ribbon tied around it; miniature replicas of ancient buildings with magnets glued to the back; a stuffed toy tiger, its features warped from the weight of the objects on top of it; a string of smooth, round stones that caught the light with subtle iridescence; and a flat box with a sheet of foam, into which were tucked hooks that had been wrapped with colorful feathers in a rough approximation of strange, winged insects.

Pris hesitated over the tiger, but eventually chose to replace it with the rest of the suitcase’s contents. She snapped the clasps shut and considered her options. She might be able to offload some of these items for a modest credit at the community market, but she doubted they would fetch much. She considered discarding it as refuse, but the memory of her grandmother, pleasant and patient and a little dreamy, softened Pris’ heart. There were always the archives. While not every item might be worth preserving, the archivist would surely know which ones were. In that way, the suitcase would be off Pris’ hands, but at no real disrespect to the woman to whom it had originally belonged.

It was settled. After classes tomorrow, she would visit the archives. Until then, there was that matter of the knight and the dragon to attend to.

————

The archives took up an entire sector of the AlCael, consisting of large rooms stocked floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall with shelves of books and objects and specimens, and smaller rooms where the initial appraisals took place. Each room was connected by a sterile labyrinth of white tile and harsh light, through which Pris wandered, carrying a scrap of paper on which the receptionist had scrawled "App145” — Appraisal Room 145.

It seemed to take the better part of an hour to finally find the room, and the suitcase was beginning to weigh Pris down. She peeked inside, saw a man hunched over a desk, peering at a paper through a loupe, moving his lips as he read what was written on it. Pris tapped on the doorframe, jumped as he did at the interruption, and introduced herself.

“I’m Pris — Priscilla Iverly, and I have some items I’d like to donate to the archive. They belonged to my grandmother.”

The man blinked at her for a moment, then smiled and cleared away what he’d been examining. “Oh, yes, please come in. It’s been a while since I’ve had any new items to appraise.”

Pris walked in and laid the suitcase on the desk. She studied the archivist, noting that he looked perhaps a few years younger than her father. Second generation, then; probably still attached enough to Terrestrial matters to find some value in Grandmother’s belongings. He pulled on a pair of gloves, then opened the suitcase, removing each item as if retrieving a treasure, turning it over in his hands, holding it up to the light, squinting and murmuring, before moving on to the next.

He continued this process until the suitcase was empty, ignoring Pris all the while. Finally, he looked up at her and smiled, tapping the stuffed tiger.

“Are you sure you don’t want old Tigeriffic here?” he asked, pulling out the tag beneath the tiger’s tail to reveal its name. "We have plenty of stuffed toys already; everyone seemed to bring at least one.“

"Well, perhaps.” Pris took the tiger and stroked its coat, then gave it a little squeeze. It did feel nice; strangely comforting. Perhaps that’s why so many people had brought them on board.

“That’s good. I’d hate to have to throw him down the refuse chute.” He moved through the other items, explaining whatever value they had and sorting them for further inspection. He separated the pieces of fabric by texture and design and placed each in a sealed bag with its own label; he accepted the vial of sand and string of stones as geologic specimens; he riffled through the books for notes or mementos, then ran the titles through the database to determine which were not already overrepresented in the archives; and he puzzled over the box of hooks and feathers for several minutes, before conferring with a coworker to ascertain their original purpose.

“Fishing flies,” he said, repeating his coworker’s response. "Apparently, these were created to resemble insects, especially underwater, to lure fish into biting. Did your grandmother fish, by any chance? Or anyone else in her family?“

"I don’t know,” Pris answered, studying the feathered creations. Oftentimes, Terrestrial pursuits puzzled her, and none did so much as this one. Why invest so much time and effort in creating a lure, when many equally efficient lures were already available? Why waste time luring fish at all, when there were other ways to secure food? Perhaps it had been a leisure activity; but then, why would leisure involve so much work?

She sat back as the archivist reclaimed the box, and watched him label it and set it aside. All that remained on the desk between them was Pris’ grandmother’s old primer.

“I assume you have far too many of those,” Pris said.

“Yes, we do,” the archivist answered, opening the primer and going through it slowly. "But each one’s different.“

"They were mass-produced and distributed. How is that possible?”

The archivist flipped a few more pages and stopped, then pointed to a flower that had been pressed and dried between the pages. A few pages over, another one; several more pages, and a small stack of paper clippings with faded ink appeared. Stories and names from long ago, no longer holding any connection to those living aboard AlCael, but obviously important to the Terrestrial who’d brought them along.

As the pages progressed, these objects became less common, replaced by long, handwritten passages in the margins, sometimes accompanied by drawings. Near the back, blank pages allocated for notes were filled, over and over, with the same words, each repetition dated to the same day, but a different year. It looked like a verse, a poem, and it got shorter as the pages went by, until the last entries, dated to the days before Grandmother passed away, repeated only two lines.

Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night.

Pris stared at the words, written over and over in her grandmother’s increasingly shaky hand, and felt a strange pull in the pit of her stomach, the sting of tears in her eyes. Why? The lines meant nothing to her; in fact, they didn’t make sense. What was to be feared about night? As she understood it, Terrestrial night was only a brief respite from the sun’s heat, something still mimicked for the passengers of AlCael by the daily dimming of the lights, to preserve the circadian rhythm for those later generations who would finally reach their destination.

And what was to love about the stars? Perhaps, growing up among them had inured Pris to the wonder Terrestrials felt about them. To her, they were constant, mundane; lacking, outside of Earth’s atmosphere, that “twinkle” that Terrestrials were so obsessed with.

Why, then, did those lines affect her so? She frowned and wiped at her eyes, frustrated with her inexplicable tears, angry at the archivist for his soft laugh.

“We see these lines a lot,” he said. "They’re part of a longer poem, one that predates the AlCael’s first generation by several hundred years. The poem details the thoughts of a dying astronomer, but those lines seem to resonate with many people, darkness and light representative of ideas of death and the afterlife.“ He sighed and read through the lines once more. "You see, Terrestrials had a different relationship with those elements, with night and day, than we do. I don’t know if it’s possible for us to completely understand it without having felt the sunlight filtered through an atmosphere, without having heard the different forms of life that are roused by the changing of the light.”

“I would think the Conservatory and gardens replicate that well enough,” Pris said, still fighting tears. "I’ve visited the Chloris Sector many times, and the workers there tell me it is a very close approximation of Earthly conditions.“

"Perhaps …” The archivist looked thoughtful. He turned to his computer once more and typed something in, then set the monitor to projection mode. A hologram hovered over the desk, displaying the AlCael’s logo, and it brightened as the archivist dimmed the lighting in the room.

“This is an amalgam of recordings from Earth,” he explained. "It’s available to everyone aboard AlCael, but specifically shown to archivists during their training to provide them with some context for the items they might encounter. Would you care to view it?“

Pris shrugged, squinting at Grandmother’s primer and reading those lines again in the glow of the hologram, any words she might say bunching in her throat, refusing to pass her lips without an accompanying sob.

"I should advise you,” the archivist went on, “that this recording tends to elicit very strong emotional responses from its viewers. Sensations that our minds have pushed aside, but that our blood remembers.”

“I’m Third Gen,” Pris said, her voice strangled, and shrugged again. “I’ll be fine.”

“Very well.” The archivist began the playback.

The recording showed things Pris had seen before, but only as still images: fields under golden light, snow-covered trees, rushing rivers and expansive deserts. But as she noticed the play of light and shadow, as she listened to the breeze and the water and the sounds of birds and insects and even other people, the feeling in the pit of her stomach returned, climbing toward her heart, fueling an ache, a longing, a love, that reached back years and years to the place her blood had formed, and reached forward generations and generations, to where that blood might feel warm and at home once more.

A place she’d never return to. A place she’d never reach.

Pris had never thought about the clinical cruelty of her situation. She’d been well cared for aboard the AlCael, had all her needs and wants addressed. She had a good family, and good friends, and studies and hobbies to fill her time. She had a career waiting at the end of those studies, a family of her own somewhere down the line. But she’d never have a home to be connected to, a whole sprawling lifeworld beneath her feet and above her head. The only pulse she’d feel around her was that of the cold workings of the ship; the only sky she’d ever see was dark, punctuated by harsh, unmoving points of light.

Driven by an instinct as ancient as the stardust in her bones, she reached toward the hologram, desperate to know the feeling of sunlight on her skin, of the weight and force of an unfettered stream, desperate to grasp that grasshopper skittering among the tall grass, to hold it and feel its lifeforce pulsing through her own palm. Desperate to be connected once more.

She was crying now, tears running hot down her cheeks, quiet sobs catching in her throat. When the hologram faded and the lights came up, she noticed the archivist was in a similar state, though he turned quickly and cleaned his face, before offering her a pack of tissues with which to do the same.

“Do you understand now, a little bit?” he asked her. "The love of light, the apprehension regarding darkness, the absolute joy of understanding that the darkness is nothing to fear. Triumphs of the human spirit, of the human mind … triumphs that led us far from what inspired them.“

Pris nodded, staring at her grandmother’s book. She pointed to it and asked, in a thin, trembling voice, "Will you need to keep that?”

The archivist flipped through several more pages, undecided. Then, he pulled out a few flowers and a small stack of paper clippings, and slid the book back to her with a smile.

“Like you said, we have far too many of these already.”

————

Her parents had been livid when she abandoned her study of engineering. Throwing away the best job on the ship, they’d told her. Jeopardizing her future, they’d said, to mess about with dust on her fingertips.

She’d weathered their anger with patience, letting it flow over her like the streams in the Conservatory flowed around the rocks in their path. She switched programs, dove into the stories of the past, and learned how to preserve them for the future.

After all, each family extracted memories at a different rate. There was never any shortage of items that had suddenly lost context. There would always be a young person tapping on the doorframe, a battered piece of luggage in their arms, ready to learn the meanings behind its contents, ready to remember a life they’d never know.

And Pris would look up with a smile, and set aside whatever she was working on, and say to them, “Please come in. It’s been a while since I’ve had any new items to appraise.”

————

The quoted lines in the story come from poem “The Old Astronomer to His Pupil” by Sarah Williams (1868)