There is a place called Hangover nestled within the Sourlog Mountains. It’s a small city that has been noted for its festivals and steptune culture, and for its rock beaches where the residents lie in long lines on sunny days. They do this to avoid vitamin deficiency, as most of the city recieves no natural light at all.
Building a city into a mining scar did not happen overnight. The original operation was run by a Balatine manufacturing consortium over six hundred years ago, and following the collapse of the Balat regime the site became an operations center under the command of the Factor Amiable, evolving into a layered fortification that held for a hundred and twenty years only to be abandoned again. A group of nomads established a trading post in the ruins of the fort, and a township grew out of that, and so on.
It is now home to over 7,500 people. Its name comes from the vast outcropping of rock that hangs over it, and absolutely nothing else.
It was quite a sight, thought Roy. Lanterns hung from every clothesline and cable. It was like living in a bag full of stars: expensive, and hard to get to sleep.
In his early morning fug he was heading for a junk shop he had noticed on the way in last night. At the far end of the street there was a blinding patch of daylight, and when he glanced behind him another blinding patch of daylight greeted him. Distant silhouettes drifted in and out of the light, their heels clicking against the cut stone of the sidewalks, the sounds echoing against the row houses and shops to form a reverberating polyrhythm. Many were heading for the beaches. Roy hadn’t been yet; he wondered how long he had before his bones bent or his teeth fell out or whatever.
He was on a job, though the job was really an excuse to be here. Here, or anywhere else he could be alone in a strange city. He had decided that this was an essential experience of being young, along with feeling faceless, directionless, and unnecessary. In this one sense Hangover had not yet disappointed him.
The junk shop seemed to be open. A thin man with a beak of a nose was hunched over a line of boxes on a shelf. Roy thought he might be very old but he straightened when he heard Roy coming in.
“New shipment today!” he called, waving Roy over as if he was a regular. “The Effortlessly. Lantern Brothers. Dig and Divide. Do I know you?”
It took Roy a moment to realize the last thing was a question. “I’m new here.”
“To my shop,” said the man, flipping through a box of records, “my neighborhood, or my city?”
“Ah. All three.”
The thin man was dark-complexioned and wore wire-rimmed glasses. He pulled an album from the box and held it out for Roy to admire. The cover depicted four well-dressed people, two women and two men, laughing around a table. “The Effortlessly. Not local, but well-liked in these parts.”
Roy wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. Just as he was about to reach out to take the album, the man nudged him aside and went to a record player on the counter. Slipping the record from its cover, he guided it onto the spindle, then set the tone arm down with exaggerated care.
A bass began a slow ascent through a long and twisting scale. The man nodded and propped the cover up in front of the record player. “I’d like to sell records. Exclusively, I mean. Instead of all this.” He waved a hand in the air, indicating the shop, then returned to the line of open boxes.
Roy could see the appeal. There was no easy way to organize a junk shop, as one look about this one quickly revealed. Clothes needed hangers. Books needed bookshelves. Appliances required heavy-duty shelves, and odds and ends would be easier to manage with little ones. A proprietor who didn’t stay ahead of the merchandise would eventually wind up with a shop full of bins overflowing with random items. A record shop, on the other hand, could be organized into neat rows of albums in tasteful displays.
“I do trades with other stores,” the man was saying as he rummaged through his latest finds. “Other cities. I’m trying to build up a good inventory of records. Offload the rest. I’m Mateo.”
“Roy. I’m Roy.” On the record, the bass player seemed to be wandering over some jagged musical hillside, loosing their footing in places. The rest of the band were making a determined trek around the base of the hill. “What’s the competition like?”
“Three of them. But I’m telling you, Roy, it’s all the same. Steptune. Now, we all love steptune.” Mateo put a hand in the air as if holding off objections. “But you eat the same thing every day and you get bored with it. I’m opening things up. World music. All the worlds. Where you from?”
“Berceau, originally.”
“Don’t know it. What’s the music scene like?”
“A few popular styles. Baril blanc was big when I was in school.” Roy tried to imitate the characteristic barrel beat. “Bump-a-dump-dump-a-do-dump, a-de-dump. Like that.”
“Don’t know that either. But that’s a good thing. New worlds to explore.” The shopkeeper pulled another album from a box and spent a few moments staring at the cover. “Treadwater Trio? Another one I don’t know. Why so many? But hey, have a look around.”
Roy nodded thanks and went to the bookshelves as the bass player at last rejoined the rest of the band. Together, they took a new path over the hill, meandering across a field of clumps and dips before fading into the distant meadows.
You never started with a guess, at least not a personal one. Roy glanced over the rows of books a few times, then pulled his hand augur from his pocket. He set it for an open-ended selection, then pushed the read button and watched the dials spin. The outcome was driven by random pulses filtered through distribution functions. It was engineering. It was mathematics. It was impersonal.
The dials clicked and locked into place. Roy glanced at the reading and winced: BOULE 24:2/17. Some augury references came up more often than others, and Boule was a rarity. He hadn’t seen it in some months and had in fact dropped it from his reading rotation. He flicked through the pages in his head. Twenty-fourth chapter, second section, seventeenth statement. The words swam before his eyes, then jumped into focus.
There is a space between us that cannot be filled by words alone, and a space within us that must be filled with each other.
As forecasts go, it was fairly vague, but Boule also had a sizable commentary associated with it. Roy thought through this as he scanned the titles on the shelves. Occasionally he slid a book from the shelf, browsed the blurb and the cover art, weighing their qualities against the interpretations.
Ultimately it came down to a choice between two: Finley’s Shipwrecked on the Empty Sea, and Tidelle’s Want and Worry. The naive approach would be to ship both, but Roy had been doing this long enough to know that it didn’t work that way. He held the books at arm’s length, then closed his eyes.
There were several schools of thought about what to do at this point. Get another read from the augur, discard the discrepancies, and see if you were left with anything more definite. Sample the works themselves and contrast them against the commentary, scribbling matrices in a workbook like a fifth-year student. If you weren’t a strict adherent of the Formalists you could take the alchemical path. Follow intuition. Check the vibes. Which one feels warmer? Does it whisper to you?
You could follow all their advice and come out ahead. You could trust your judgement and lose. You could stand there for-fucking-ever like a bonehead.
Or, you could just take a guess. Was it all a sham? Sometimes, in his darker moments, he allowed himself to wonder. But the packages went out and the money came back. If it was a sham, then everyone involved was being fooled.
“Never read it,” said Mateo, musing over the book as he checked the price tag. “You into the normative fiction stuff?”
“It’s not for me.” He paused, then realized the ambiguity. “The book, I mean.”
“Special occasion?”
“For a client.” Roy decided that there was little point in being mysterious. “I’m a picker.”
“Oh, is that right?” The shopkeeper pursed his lips in mild interest. “Do they like normative fiction?”
Roy chuckled. “I don’t know. They want books. That’s all I get. That’s all I know.”
The record player switched tracks. A horn played a single note, holding it completely steady for a surprising length of time, then warbled and collapsed. Someone started plunking on a stringed instrument. Mateo listened intently, then shook his head.
“Not a fan,” he said. “But someone is. That’s the important thing.” Roy handed over the money and received the book and his change. “Would you say you had good taste, Roy?”
“I’m a good curator, is what I would say.” Roy struggled to explain what he did, as he always did. “It’s like any system of augury. You have a source of truth.” He pulled out his hand augur, waggled it in the air. “You have a set of references for interpretation, both the original works of the Augurs, and the later commentaries. Wisdom of the ages, both theoretical and practical. Usually that’s all you need.” He put the augur back into his pocket. “Sometimes you guess. I’ve gotten good at that. I think I have, anyway.”
There was a long expectant silence.
“It sounds,” said Mateo, “as if the artistic merit of the book is not the deciding factor here.”
Roy opened his mouth to say something. He wasn’t sure what. He was thinking about a duck with red feet, a little ceramic duck that he had found in a shop, a little junk shop like this one. It had been a silly trinket without any pretensions. They want ducks. Performing the forecast had taken less time than ringing up the purchase. Should he have gone to an art gallery instead?
“I don’t know,” he said at last, sensing that the atmosphere between them had changed, but unsure exactly why or how. “I don’t talk to them. I don’t know what they think, or what’s important to them. I just make the call.”
The plunk-plunk-plunk of the record was the only sound in the shop.
“I wonder,” said Mateo, “if anyone will ever read that book again.”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“I would buy it back from you. If I could afford to.” Mateo turned from the counter and went to a door behind it, disappearing into the back. When it became apparent that he was not coming back out, Roy left the shop.
There were only three people in line at the shipping office, but each of them required the full powers and attention of the clerk. Roy waited with his hands jammed into the pockets of his blazer and the book tucked under his arm.
His thoughts were chasing each other in the aftermath of his encounter with the shopkeeper. He had never considered the artistic value of his guesses. He had never expected to have this shoved it in his face.
He tried on a little anger. Fuck that guy. But there was nothing in Mateo’s questioning that had seemed unreasonable or unfair. Clearly he was passionate about these things, and Roy could envy him for that.
Outside, the morning was picking up. He could still see strings of lanterns hanging outside the office window, but the darkness around them was softer, less absolute. A gaggle of city officers in mandarin collars marched down the sidewalk, heading for the committee chambers, while a pair of cyclists rolled past calling out anti-government slogans. Roy turned from the window, marveling at the normality of strange places.
He plucked the book from the crook of his arm. For his purposes, it was an object. It was of interest not for its contents but for his attention to it. He had selected it and in the process, elevated it. Would anyone ever read it again? Did it matter?
Uncertain was he was looking for, he opened the book to a random page and read:
All of the girls were bent over except for Trune, who laid on her back with her legs in the air. I decided I'd have her first, but just as I was about to deliver the goods the door burst open. It was, believe it or not, the fellow I'd kicked aside earlier. He was panting and sweating, and as I stared at him I began to feel quite another passion taking hold of me.
He turned the page. There was more. The narrator fucked the sweaty fellow and five of the girls before succumbing to exhaustion. Then another man called The Bull barged in and fucked the narrator. It was quite an experience, apparently. By the time the clerk called Roy forward they were all going out for ice cream, which he thought was a nice touch.
“Sorry about the wait,” said the clerk, a short young woman. Her dark hair hung down to her shoulders and she seemed to spend a lot of time brushing it out of her eyes.
“Not a problem.” Roy waggled the book in the air. “Catching up on my reading. Do you like normative fiction?”
“Mm,” she said, shrugging in apathy. “I’m more of a Ventist fanatic. Harliss, Wren, Tota, all those gals. Can I help you with something?”
“Want to send this to my niece.”
The clerk smiled. “Address?”
He gave her the broker’s address and selected a suitable shipping box. “Just a moment,” he said when she held her hand out for the book. He grabbed a routing slip from the counter and wrote GOOD BOOK? in the blank area, then scribbled his tellme code. After tucking the slip out of sight at the end of the book, he handed it over. “A surprise for the birthday girl.”
He spent a few more days in Hangover, sunning himself and avoiding his own thoughts. On the way back he found a tellme machine in the station and checked his messages. Most were junk. Two were not. Client asks that you not include personal information in shipments, said the message from the broker. So, that was one mystery solved.
The other message was unsigned. It said EVERYTHING GOOD, which explained so much, and so little.