The Ships of Aleph Read Free Page A

can be provided,’ it said. Then it added, ‘You have no wish to return, then?’
    ‘Return where?’
    ‘To your village.’
    It had not occurred to me that this was even possible. I thought about it, though not for long, balancing my old life as a misfit who dreamed against my new one, living in my dream. ‘No. I have no desire to go back.’
    ‘Good. Then I will leave you for now.’ It made to go.
    ‘Wait ... you said when I first came here that I could ask questions. Is that still true?’ I should have thought about this before, maybe considered what I wanted to ask.
    ‘It is.’ 
    ‘Then ... ’ I searched my whirling thoughts and hit upon the book I had been studying most recently, a treatise on the disposition of the heavens, ‘ ... I want to know about stars.’ Some scholars thought them eternal fires; others, holes showing a glimpse of the light of Heaven beyond. ‘What are they made of?’
    ‘That is not a question I can answer.’
    I wondered if I had misheard it. ‘But you are an angel! You know the mind of God.’ My words were thoughtless, insolent. Who did I think I was to talking to?
    But the angel merely said again, ‘That is not a question I can answer.’ Then it left.
    The next morning, along with my food, I found a white hemisphere the size of my palm. It was featureless save for a slider on the bottom. When I moved this along its track, the object lit up with a cold white light, like starlight. Presumably I had not angered the angel with my presumption, for it had granted my request. I wondered if I was being tested; perhaps it had refused to answer my question because I needed to find out the truth for myself. Maybe the answer was in the books.
    I began to keep a note of questions to ask the angel when it returned, which it did, every ten days. I noted its answers with equal care and as the sun grew smaller and winter – or a re-creation of it – arrived, I found a pattern emerging.
    The angel would answer any question I posed, save those that dealt with God, or with the sky, such as queries on the nature of the sun or stars. It would even provide answers I could have found in my books: for example, the writer of a treatise on the fauna of the Inner Spine mountains suggested that perhaps the snow-hares did not hibernate, and instead changed form. The angel confirmed the truth of this. Sixty-seven days later, in a different book, written some years after the first one, I found this written down as a solid observation. Had the angel known I would discover the answer for myself, yet chosen to tell me anyway? I asked that, but this was another question it would not answer, presumably because it strayed into matters of the spirit.
    It also told me some things no man had recorded, such as why the Duke’s ship had finally foundered. There was, it said, a ring of rock just inside the lip of the world that helped control the flow of water over the edge. When I asked what was beyond that, and where I was in relation to it, the angel was predictably uninformative.
    I asked about myself. It told me that I could chose to live out my allotted span of days – however long that might be – either here or back in the village. I was becoming emboldened so I asked, ‘What if I were to ask to be returned, not to my village, but to Omphalos, to the halls of the University?’
    ‘If you wished. But what would you do then?’
    ‘Why, tell people what has happened to me!’
    ‘Are you sure? You would go back to the world exactly as you left it, save for the time that has passed and your remembered experiences of being here. Why should the words of a rootless stranger be heard in the halls of great scholars?’
    It was right, of course. ‘But why am I here at all?’ I asked.
    Again I thought I detected faint amusement. ‘That is a question every thinking being must answer for themselves.’
    ‘No, I mean why am I here , in this constructed place, with all these books.’
    ‘To learn and think and