HUMAN EXISTENCE IS SUFFERING.
THE ROOT OF SUFFERING IS DESIRE.
THE ROOT OF DESIRE IS IMAGINATION.
This time, it was the System’s voice blasting inside his head. A sonorous broadcasting voice that rolled each syllable around on its tongue like the stone of a fruit, sometimes sucking it, other times spitting it out. A voice that pressed down on the words until they snapped like brittle twigs under military boots. The voice was the color of khaki and it had a mustache.
The only way he could make sense of the world anymore was through metaphor.
As he followed the frail old man through the dim hallways, he wondered if the Censorship Authority had surveillance cameras. But the Secretary didn’t look worried—if they really were watching him, he’d have been thrown in prison years ago. In fact, he didn’t understand how the old man had avoided arrest. What kind of security lapse allowed him to stay under the radar for so long?
Sometimes he still felt he was a model citizen, troubled by the government’s disregard for matters of national security, and he’d forget that he belonged to a small Cancer cell trying to infiltrate the System. This reminded him of what he’d read in yesterday’s book about “doublethink,” but he immediately dismissed the notion—doublethink required you to deny its existence as much as it required you to acknowledge it.
Had he read about those things, or had he lived them? The New World was built on the idea of a human who could break free from the fateful pull of the past. His own upbringing at home and at school had taught him that there were three basic, legitimate desires: to belong, to procreate, and to work—everything else was toxic and superfluous. But had it succeeded? The early founders had focused their efforts on getting rid of unnecessary choices, arriving at the extremely simple (and truly ingenious) conclusion that human suffering and the worst of all human instincts were intimately connected to the ability to imagine. There was a time when robots were modeled after humans, but now it was the other way around.
Right from the start, the government had worked tirelessly to block all outlets of imagination, eliminating cognitive surplus, overturning the communications revolution, and abolishing what used to be known as the internet. Electricity was rationed, and sex was confined to a single, sanctioned formula: man, woman, and a marriage contract. Stores and restaurants dropped 80% of their product, and stocked only what was deemed necessary by the Ministry of Plenty. That wasn’t its real name—it was the Ministry of Commerce—but he found it hard to disagree with the Secretary’s conviction about the book he’d just read: it told their story. Don’t let your imagination run away with you, he warned himself.
What would happen when everyone found out that the only person capable of understanding the truth was a five-year-old girl caked in baby powder?
The Censor walked quietly behind the Secretary, taking in his bony back and the dejected slope of his shoulders. The old man must be tired of this game; maybe that’s why he recruited me, he thought. They headed for the storeroom where they’d had their first real conversation, surrounded by picture books, a little girl, a stuffed toy wolf, and an imaginary grandmother.
The old man sat cross-legged on the floor. The younger man sat facing him. He had made up his mind about hell: it was where the difference between what was real and what was imagined ceased to exist.
“Tell me,” the old man began, then stopped to clear a strange hoarseness from his throat. “Do you know where the greatest library in the world can be found?”
He shook his head. How would he know? He’d never seen a proper library before in his life. Even bookstores didn’t sell decent books anymore; they sold cigarettes, bottles of water, turkey sandwiches, and khaki pants. They were supermarkets that sold books alongside everything else, books full of soppy declarations, books that tried to teach their readers the secrets to happiness and success—books he had no interest in whatsoever.
As for the Department Head’s library, he liked it well enough, but not to the extent that he’d think it was the greatest in the world. There must be a bigger one somewhere, even bigger than Victory Mansions, or the Ministry of Truth. A library that was dizzying, eternal, and in whose presence he might—with a little luck—lose consciousness, just like characters in the novels he’d read, when they encountered the Absolute. And it dawned on him then: a library was the closest thing humanity had to the idea of the Absolute.
He remembered that the Ministry of Truth contained three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. There were no other buildings in the city of similar size, except for rehabilitation centers. Not even the government laboratories came close. But the idea made his heart dance; his head filled with images of endless rooms packed with bookshelves. He’d felt this way once before: entering the wormhole, traveling through time, leaving his body, and inhabiting Zorba. He’d begun to understand what was happening to him in a different way, and his musings made him happy: seeing his thoughts—his own thoughts—made him feel wise and mature. Before turning those pages, he had been just a lonely book censor, but here he was, pondering the laws of physics and watching new galaxies unfurl in his head. The universe was getting bigger, he was sure of it. What else could all these stories be doing with the world?
Even so, his answer was no—he didn’t know where the greatest library in the world was. After all, he’d only just started to read, in a place where reading any truly meaningful book was a crime.
The old man tapped the side of his nose and gave him a sly wink. “It’s the Book Detention Center.”
His eyebrows shot up. “What? The Center where books are held captive until Hate Week? Er, I mean Purification Day? How—”
The old man interrupted. “Can you imagine what’s inside there? All the banned literature in the world has passed through those walls. Every piece of writing ever produced by humankind. Hundreds of thousands, maybe even at one point millions, of books spread out over spacious acres.” He swallowed. “All the world’s treasures, buried.”
This was some revelation! They were sitting among boxes of books on which a deportation decision had been made—they would be taken to the world’s greatest library. He wanted to visit. To stand, small and vulnerable, among a sea of titles sentenced to death by execution. To inhale the musk of paper, dust, and wood, to hear the rustle of the browned pages, to run his fingers along the embossed titles on the leather covers and turn the books over in his hands.
“They call it the Labyrinth.”
“Who?”
“Others like us.”
“The Brotherhood?”
He knew the resistance called themselves Cancers, but were they really that different from the group in Big Brother’s republic? A thought sprang into his head: every story was a retelling of older ones and a harbinger of tales still to come. It’s been the same story since the beginning of time, and it will live on forever, giving birth to a new version of itself every day. He had never felt so close to understanding the Divine as he did at that moment.
“You can call them the Brotherhood, if you like.”
How many Cancers were there? The question nagged at him, but he didn’t ask. He liked knowing there were others out there besides this deranged, tree-hugging, book-smuggling old man who never slept.
“What do you Cancers want from me?”
The old man stared into his eyes. “We want you to sneak into the Labyrinth, grab some books, and bring them back.”
He didn’t understand. “You’re asking me to go into a library where there is book after book and just pick some at random? What makes one book more worthy of saving than another?”
“You’ll be given a list, of course.”
“Based on what?”
Slipping off his spectacles, the old man glumly studied his shoes. “We’re trying to save classics, fables, myths, folktales, songs from bygone civilizations, recipes for herbal medicines, old stories of creation, Holy Books in their original editions, and the commentaries written about them. Those get priority.”
“Why?”
“Because they’re changing the past, and we need to protect our collective memory. That way, when this world falls, as it’s destined to do, we’ll have somewhere to start from. Do you remember what the book said? Who controls the past … controls the future: who controls the present controls the past. We’re trying to save the past to make the future possible.” He paused. “But you clearly need to learn some history. You’re a typical citizen in Big Brother’s republic, stuck in a nation that’s slowly killing you, trapped in the whale’s belly, its stomach acid eating away at you, with no way to escape.”
“And how can anyone escape from a whale’s belly?” the Censor asked.
“By lighting a fire.”
“But what will you do with the books we save? Where will you hide them?”
The old man’s gaze wandered aimlessly again, a grin slowly forming on his lips. “Listen to this story,” he said. “Once upon a time, there was a magic mirror. It belonged to a beautiful, slightly reckless princess. She had vowed never to be married, except to the young man who could hide from her mirror. The mirror could find anyone, anywhere; it was as good as any listening device, surveillance camera, or observation screen—and it could see everything, all the time.
“Whenever a man proposed to the princess, she would challenge him: ‘Run away and hide from my mirror. If I don’t find you before the night is over, come back the next day and we’ll get married. But if I do find you …’” He drew a line across his neck with a finger and made a gagging sound.
The younger man gulped. “What happened?”
“Dozens of foolhardy suitors were executed until one came along who managed to give the magic mirror the slip. The princess dispatched her soldiers to every corner of the land, but the night went by and there was no sign of him. He had won. The princess was forced to marry him and be done with her murderous game. It was a great relief to her people.”
“But where did he hide?”
“He hid in the princess’s bedroom. He was right under her nose the whole time.”
What was the old man trying to say? “What does this have to do with saving books?” he asked him.
“We’ll hide the books in the Department Head’s library.”
“Are you out of your mind? He’ll find out!”
“He won’t suspect a thing.”
“How do you know?”
“Because the idiot doesn’t read. He just pretends to.”
“But all those books—”
“Those are the books I read and approved myself. But after I got caught and they set up a committee to investigate, that impostor went and banned them all in one go. He held on to them as trophies. He only keeps them there to annoy me.”
“And it never crossed his mind that you might be reading them in secret?”
“He probably knows.”
“Then why hasn’t he turned you in?”
“He needs me.”
“What for?”
“I’m the one who understands him best.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You don’t need to.”
From his pocket, the old man fished out a scrap of paper and shoved it into the Censor’s hands—into the Guardian of the Library’s hands. “Here’s the list,” he said. “One of our operatives will be waiting for you. Try not to get lost.”