The Cactus and the Corpse (short story)

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The Cactus and the Corpse was the fourth short story in the 2023 anthology Horrors of Arcbeatle. It acted both as a crossover between the Auteur and Coloth series, and as the first official release of both of these spin-offs. Due to a framing device of a story being told by a narrator significantly prone to digressions, the plot was told significantly out of order.

Summary

A human has becme lost in an infinite Library. They stumble upon a a strange, inhuman being resting by a campfire, who gives them some food and offers to tell them a story.

The story begins with a summary of the history of Coloth of the Ulk-Ra, and specifically the events surrounding his "senseless, brutal murder". This early death contradicts the highly optimistic predictions previously made by the soothsayer Ugrith-female about Coloth's life, causing her to be disgraced and commit suicide; this event reached historical significance, setting Coloth's tribe on a path of rationalistic enlightenment which would go on to produce "many of the Ulk-Ra's keenest scientific minds" centuries down the line. However, says the storyteller, Ugrith's prophecy had been correct; Coloth's premature death was an alteration to history, caused by a blunder on the part of "the people who ran the universe at the time". When the error is noticed in Heaven, the event gains further cosmic significance by boosting the political career of one "minor Tribune" from House Duskeriall who had coincidentally argued against the decision which led to Coloth's death, but been overruled by his superiors. This proves unfortunate when, some time later, the former Tribune, now Altissimus Cancellarius to the Supreme Being himself, takes advantage of this elevated position to murder the Supreme Being in an effort to steal his power.

Skipping ahead, the true beginning of the narrator's primary narrative finds Coloth alive and on the run, having been recently resurrected as a "hard-light techno-ghost manifesting out of a holo-cube" as part of a program of ladling up eyewitnesses to major historical events in order to verify the accuracy of various records. This operation is the work of the Bookkeepers of the pocket-dimensional Library itself; formerly the Plume Coterie, this clique of posthumans discovered the Library after domesticating the "world-birds" known as the Birdhemoths, and decided to attempt to sort through its infinite collections to "compile the complete and sufficient list of all true history books". Because they started this research program during the Cosmic War, when the Archons were still alive, and have yet to realise that this is no longer the case, the Coteries endeavour to do this with as little disruption to history as possible, hence merely taking a biodata-print of the subjects rather than physically rescuing them from their historical deaths, and also, as a rule, destroying the holo-cubes shortly after they're done interviewing the subjects. Coloth, however, was rescued from this second death by two teenage Novices, Maritsa and Callum, with whom he has been on the run in the Library ever since.

Camping on a deserted floor for the night, the three youths ponder their situation and where to go next. Coloth is disturbed by a large Birdhemoth feather in his possession, unable to remember how he acquired it, but is jolted out of that melancholy train of thought by the practical discussion at hand. Having agreed to get moving again early the next morning, the children check the infinite map of the Library which Callum possesses. They zero in on Floor 899,167,435,042, a few hundred flights of stairs down from their current location; the map's description of its contents is mostly blank, despite checkpoints indicating that it was scouted out by a Stocktaking Party led by Master Librarian Roland "a couple of centuries back". Though they are unsure of whether it means they didn't find anything of interest or found something "really dangerous", they are won over by the presence of bathrooms near the stairs where they'll be able to restock on water. Having all agreed on the plan, they agree to have Maritsa keep watch while the boys rest; to keep herself awake, she finds a pile of horror literature, selecting a dusty 21st century paperback entitled Horrors of Arcbeatle. Noticing that the first story she lands on, The Cactus and the Corpse, seems to be about her, she dutifully skips over it to the next entry, The Thing in the Woods.

Playfully deciding that it should leave her to her reading, the Bookwyrm interrupts this story to go back in time 278 years within the Library's time-stream, and relate an event whose significance is not yet apparent, as witnessed by Master Librarian Baligant Caulphin: the arrival of a mysterious bearded man with the power to command the Library itself into the Void Gate Room of the Library, through which patrons from the outer multiverse enter and leave the Library (whereas patrons from the Third Universe itself use the Cosmic Gate on the "other side" of the Library). After scanning him with the device used by the Library's Receptionists to identify visitors, Caulphin is baffled by what he finds. The storyteller interrupts that story-strand there, though it heavily implies that the newcomer was the mysterious Creator of the Library, returned to it at long last as foretold in various prophecies.

Returning to the "present-day" thread of Callum, Coloth and Maritsa, the narrator finds them running for their lives from Master Librarian Naimon, an unpleasant and arrogant man descended from Roland, who ruined his own eyesight on purpose because near-sightedness is a mark of honour among librarians, but is nevertheless a dangerous shot with his crossbow, handed down from his famous grandfather. In fact, he has manage to wound Callum, though he and Maritsa are still evading him, hiding in a dead-end corridor of shelves, in an area of the Floor which is thick with such small, identical alcoves. Coloth, calling on his fragmentary training among the Ulk-Ra as an arborea warrior and hunter, has taken the high ground, walking silently on top of the shelves, but he is unable to find an edge before Naimon find the right aisle where the children are cowering, and he gives up the element of surprise to throw off his attempt to take a lethal shot at them. Maritsa misjudges her ability to tackle a man twice her size, however, and loses what little advantage Coloth had won them. Now holding all three of them at crossbow-point, Naimon captures them and begins gloating.

Because it dislikes people like Naimon, the narrator dodges out of having to relate Naimon's speech by going back in time again, to an event twenty years after the stranger's arrival. Dismissing the earlier suggestion that the stranger was the architect of the Library, "if there had ever been such a person". Instead, it transpires that he had identified himself, and been identified, as a surviving Mapper, one of the guild of Archons who "explored the outer reaches of reality — and beyond — in the earliest ages of the universe". This is surprising, first because the Mappers were previously believed to have all been lost within "the early millennia" of the Archons' history, "some to madness, some to the horrors and wonders that roamed in those days"; but also because it is abnormal for a native of the universe to enter via the Void Gate. The Mapper claims that he has simply been spending all those eons travelling through the Void and the Multiverse, and that the Library is now the only part of reality left for him to chart before he returns to the Cathedral of Time and presents the fruit of his labour to "the Lord Founder". As such, further endearing himself to them by making no obvious attempt to be allowed back into the universe through the Cosmic Gate, the returned Mapper lived among the Librarians for twenty years, leading Stocktaking Parties, creating supernatural maps of the Library such as the one which would later find its way into Callum's possession, and even taking on an apprentice among the Bookkeepers, none other than Roland.

By the time of the event the narrator has chosen to focus on, however, Roland's trust in his mentor is beginning to erode, having noticed a pattern to the Mapper's erratic behaviour, which suggests that he is not simply exploring the Library for its own sake or moving at random, but searching for something in particular. Finally threatening him with his crossbow, Roland gets the man to admit that he isn't the mythical Mapper at all; in that moment, a veil lifts from Roland's perception and he sees the old man as he really is, not the idealised white-bearded explorer but a skeletal corpse in disguise. Noting that his claim to be "him" had been getting old even before he came to the Library, and this will be the last time he uses the alias, the skeleton confirms that he is nevertheless a genuine Archon. When asked if he's "another" Archon, he briefly claims that he is not "un autre" but "l'Autre", before dropping the notion, admitting that he is simply "a bit of him" and slightly rearranging the letters of the French word to reveal his true name.

Returning to the present-day strand of narrative, the narrator quickly catches the listener up to speed: after capturing the children, Naimon searched them, and found Callum's map. Having noticed Roland's sigil, he became "overjoyed at the chance to get twice the glory in a single mission" and thus "commanded his prisoners to help him to the uncharted floor, to complete his ancestor's work at long last". Consequently, the present moment finds them having finally made their way through the maze of shelves, and to the staircases and lifts meant to lead down to the coveted floor. However, a mysterious tunnel-like hole has been eaten through the structure of the Library, rendering both the stairs and the lift unusable. Due to his ruined eyesight, Naimon is unable to see it, and ends up walking backwards into the cabin-less elevator shaft, falling to his death — despite Coloth, in a bout of selflessness, attempting to warn him at the last minute of the "Cho" in his midst.

After he lands in a bloody mess on Floor 899,167,435,042, however, his blood has a very definite effect. It turns out that the Floor was marked as empty because centuries ago, Roland burnt it down — a very extreme, almost unthinkable measure for a Library to take in defence of the Library — to destroy the threat to the Library within after the skeleton attempted to sacrifice Roland's firstborn child to summon "a primordial god-serpent". Auteur's scattered ashes, however, have retained a kind of consciousness, and respond eagerly to the appearance of blood, using it as ink. Writing his own name in intricate, fractal patterns, Auteur manages to reconstitute himself into a "healthy" skeleton once more — his sixteenth regeneration.

After the children make their way down (by means of Coloth adjusting his hard-light form to a gigantic squash-like, quill-less cactus which serves to cushion the impact of the fall as Maritsa and Callum ride down on his back), Auteur happily greets the trio, appearing particularly excited to meet Coloth: he has met older versions of Coloth before, but knows this to be the first time Coloth is meeting him from his perspective. He also reveals that, viewing himself as a "script-doctor" to their "story", he has taken advantage of his presence in the Library to make a few alterations to their timeline; among other things, he destroyed one particular Birdhemoth who was supposed to become their friend and their means of escaping the Library, because he believed their adventures ought to begin with an extended adventure set entirely within the Library instead of them escaping immediately into the wider universe. This is the origin of the single feather whose origin Coloth couldn't remember, an echo of the destroyed timeline. Auteur also changed the spelling of Maritsa's name (previously Marissa) to protect her from the Interdimensional Copyright Office.

Losing interest in them because he "is on a schedule", Auteur then decides to resume the ritual Roland interrupted centuries ago, using the spilled blood of Roland's descendant Naimon to stand in for that of the actual firstborn. The object of the ritual turns out to be to summon "the Bookwyrm", whom his invocation describes as a "devourer of stories, eater of words and worlds" and the "ancient worm at the heart the great apple of knowledge". He intends to subdue the entity and ride it triumphantly back into the universe. However, when the Bookwyrm arises, revealing itself as the creator of the holes Callum, Maritsa and Coloth observed in the stairwell, it makes it clear that it has no interest in serving Auteur, and promptly eats him, as the narrator reveals itself to be none other than the Bookwyrm itself — a development which throws into a different relief prior asides made by the narrator about a "gentleman of [its] acquaintance" who had an obsession with books, and whom the Bookwyrm had described thusly: "a man, even now, very close to my heart; but some of his positions I find harder to digest than others".

Characters

Mentioned only

Worldbuilding

Notes

“Just pee over a shelf,” Maritsa groaned. “Lots of people do.”
That was a really funny thing to say from the perspective of a very narrow group of people in all of time and space; but none of them were in the room, and, judging by your lack of reaction, you weren‘t one of them either. Unless the penny‘s only just dropped from my belabouring the joke? A-ha. Yes, I went there.The Bookwyrm

  • Callum and Maritsa were named after Calum and Marissa, similar characters who appear in a similar (but distinct) "infinite Library" setting in Lawrence Miles's spec script for a Tenth Doctor TV story, The Book of the World. In her prior, fairly brief appearance in White Canvas, Maritsa was in fact referred to as "Marissa" like the Miles character; the copyright-dodging nature of this slip-up is referenced by Auteur, who is credited with changing her name to "Maritsa" from now on.

As for you, you're lucky I got here and switched out that S for a T. You flew close to the sun there, for a second, jeune fille. The Interdimensional Copyright Office has eyes everywhere, surely your Masters have told you that…Auteur

Continuity

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