Page 174 - Musings 2020

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Beyond the first Years

Shivam Soni 2017D2TS1238P

FIVE SHORT HOURS to plane-fall, Pete sat watching Magda die. Her hands were thin and
wrinkle-fine, the leathern colour of paper five hundred years old. She had been Archivist
sixty years before him there in the great, silent bulk of the ship.
“But what am I to do when we land?” he asked. “I have only been a Transcriber, Magda. I
never-”
“You must look behind the shelf of the first years.”
“The shelf of the first years is empty.”
“Did I say no, foolish man?” Magda asked. “How can you record history if you do not
listen?” Her eyes were as sharp as her voice, clear and precise, honed from the long years of
watching that her duties entailed.

Pete flushed and bowed his head. “Behind the shelf, Megda. I understand.”
How can she possibly die? he thought. Yet the grey-white walls of her quarters were hung
with freshly picked jasmine to hide the stink of it.
“You understand nothing, foolish man. Look at me.” And again, kinder, when he did not.
“Look at me.”
“Yes, Magda.”
“What lies behind the shelf of the first years is important, but does not change your duty. You
must record all things, as I have. Record and preserve, Peter. In all these lifetimes under
space, that has been our calling.”
“Record and preserve. Yes, Magda.”

He had first spoken the words fifteen years prior when he became Transcriber. His parents
cried during the ceremony, then left him to go back to Bottom. Magda had been old even
then, and Pete used to go to bed terrified of finding her dead when he woke, and he was still
an untrained youth. Now she was going to last.
She coughed once, twice making no move to clean the deep red flecks from her lips.
Her eyes had gone dim.

“Peter,” she said, “Peter.”
She reached out with one frail hand and he took it: “Yes, Magda.”
“You will be building the history of the world. Remember…. the first years.”
Pete did not respond; she was gone. He placed her hand back on her stomach and wiped her
lips one last time with the damp cloth the ship’s doctor had left him. The man waited outside
the door, polite and sympathetic.

“I know it’s hard, but it may be for the best. The dispersal would have been hard on her.”
Pete nodded, not trusting himself to speak, and left the doctor to his work. It was eighteen
floors down to the archives, but instead of the express lift, he took the stairs. Something
Magda had said didn’t sit tight, but he could not put his finger in it. Walking helped him
think.

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