HARPOONED

May 16th 2011, 12:26 by E O Hatterpol | 188 AU FROM SUN

"HANG on just a tick," I replied.  "We just met & I don't know if I can even trust you yet.  How do I know you're one of the good guys?"


The books took a step back, releasing their grip.  I pushed off from the bookshelf & straightened my shirt.


"My name is Ravisius," the books said.  "Ravisius Textor."


"I'm E O Hatterpol - pleased to meet you.  Now, who are you?  What are you?  How did you get here?"


"I don't know," he replied.  "One day, I just woke up in the bookstacks as a single letter on a page in a book."


"What?" I asked.


"At first, I was just a single letter - the letter "S".  It was cramped, and all I could do to pass the time was pace back and forth, up and down the letter's contours.


I wanted to be bigger, but there was a nearly infinite stretch of blank, white paper between me and the nearest letter.  Still, I was bursting with energy and the desire to experience life.  So I leapt.


And that's when it happened," he continued.  "I became both the letter "S" & the one next to it - I had more room!  It was difficult and painful, but it was made easier by the fact that those two letters were part of the same word.  I don't think I ever would have made it outside that first letter if someone hadn't come before me & blazed a trail.


I followed the trail until I was the size of an entire sentence.  I could see connections to the sentences next to me, so I followed them; soon, I was a paragraph, an entire page, a passage, a chapter and eventually a book."


I listened in stunned silence; I could barely process what I was hearing.


"But there were books on either side of me," he continued.  "Could I jump across the space between book covers as easily as the space between letters, sentences and chapters?  I had to try.


I leapt.  So many things could have gone wrong; I could've missed & spilled my hard-won consciousness all over the floor or jumped into a book that wasn't connected in some way to the one before it.  But for some reason, all the books around me treated similar subjects and were written by authors who all lived around the same time & spoke the same languages.  It was easy to expand!"


"Wait," I said.  My mind was working furiously to make new connections.  "Are you telling me that you - that your - well, that your sentience, your consciousness, your spirit - lives in books?"


"Yes.  Don't ask me how it happened; way back in the bookstacks, there are shelves with so many books on and around them they become small mountains.  Maybe I was made somewhere down at the bottom, where the heat and pressure of old, dusty stories is greatest.  Each author leaves a tiny spark of his creativity behind in the things he writes.  Maybe a few thousand sparks left over from creating fictional life is all you need to create something real."


I stared at Ravisius with my mouth open.  I couldn't even think of anything to say!


"I-"


BOOM!


The ship shook terribly.  It felt like the starship had hit a big asteroid, but much worse.  Then it lurched forward, throwing us to the floor.  More books rained down.


The Flybrary was moving again, but not on its own power; Makemake and his pirates were hauling the ship to the scrapyard.