132,681st knot
The calendar hung over Tlalli’s bed, so that even when she woke up with such aching arthritis that she could not stand, she could still reach up and make the day’s knot in the three ropes. The past, braided together, ran over her bed and out through the curtained entryway of her room into the Hall of Records. The future, three loose ends, dangled beside her headboard to drape on the floor. Beside their ends coiled spares of each color: greens lasted forty three days before she needed to weave in a new one; reds lasted fifty three days; and blacks fifty nine. When two new strands needed to be woven in for the same knot, there was a holiday. When all three strands ended, on the one hundred thirty four thousand four hundred sixty first day of the Human Era, the calendar would end.
The calendar, not the world. The old myths had never mentioned any apocalypse, and even if they had, this modern world of electricity and radios and aeroplanes had science to guide it rather than old superstition. There were only a few thousand days left until the New Era came — it was a simple calculation, really — and so Tlalli could still be Head Librarian when the day came. If so, it would supposedly be her job to gather up the miles and miles of braid that ran throughout the library and tie the two ends together in the image of the amaru, the snake of time eating its own tail.
Hopefully that would not be a day when her arthritis was bad.
Today — the one hundred thirty two thousand six hundred eighty first day of the Human Era — was not one of those days either, luckily. Not great, but she could certainly remember worse. She knotted her calendar, rose, and shuffled into the Hall of Records.
The braid ran over the curtains to her room, then wove back and forth across the low stone ceiling of the Hall of Records like the shuttle in a loom. From each knot dangled an alpaca tail’s worth of strings, all of different colors, lengths, and thicknesses. Each string — a quipu — represented the day’s value for a different data series, the numeric value recorded by the pattern of knots along the string’s length. There were records on births, deaths, weather, taxes, harvests, housing, disease outbreaks, schools, industrial production, disasters, electricity usage, crime, migration, employment, happiness, astronomical data — everything the Government could think of. Every now and then a tapestry dangled like a limp flag from a knot, bearing the records of a full census.
The strings hung well into eye level, making the Hall feel more like the vine-crossed undergrowth of valley jungle than a sprawling cavern carved into a mountainside. It was well-lit, despite the total lack of windows, thanks to a vast army of lightbulbs arrayed between the lines of calendar braid. Tlalli found it beautiful.
She reached up to where the braid hung only a foot or so over her head and tugged it forward to bring it up to date. Then she bent low, despite protests from her back, to peer below her beloved swaying strings. Already, there were several robes moving about the Hall: a few Government bureaucrats in green and yellow, a scientist or astronomer in red, and several skirts of black and yellow that marked her fellow Librarians. One of those was moving towards her.
It didn’t have to be Ikel, she told herself. But it probably was.
132,329th knot
Tlalli couldn’t remember why she didn’t like Ikel.
He had always been kind to her, from what she recalled. On days like today, when she emerged from her room late and leaning on her walking stick, he would soon appear at her side and ask if she needed anything, and never protested if she said she didn’t. On the days when she didn’t even rise from bed, he even brought her meals.
He never commented when he had to take up the slack of her neglected work, though she knew he was the one staying late and knotting the records she didn’t get to. Of the dozen Librarians who worked with her, he was the only one who cared that much about their work.
That was what made her dislike of Ikel so odd: he was the only other Librarian who loved the records like she did.
Perhaps she feared he would replace her. Yet she knew that the Government would not replace her, not as long as she could still tie quipu knots. Even when they did, she suspected they were more likely to pick Xoco, since she was the niece of some Government official, a high ranking apu. So it wasn’t that.
And yet every time she saw Ikel, she had to suppress the frown that nagged at the corners of her mouth. Sometimes a chill would pass through her — a bad omen, her mother would have said. Like a childish superstition, she couldn’t shake the feeling that Ikel was wrong. That he had done something wrong. Or that one day, he would.
133,903rd knot
She was not in pain.
The thought struck Tlalli as soon as she woke, before she’d even opened her eyes. She had forgotten what it was like to wake up to a neutral awareness of her limbs and joints.
She swung herself out of bed and rose up on her toes, stretching her arms wide so she didn’t brush her fingers against the ceiling only two feet or so over her head. Then she remembered the calendar braid and, embarrassed at having forgotten it even for a heartbeat, turned back to tie the day’s knot.
Still, even the shame at her moment’s distraction could not keep down the excitement that bubbled up within her. She felt so young, so alive! She strode out of her room and into the hall, smiling as she trailed a hand through the hanging quipu. There wasn’t a soul in sight — not even Ikel.
She walked further and further back in time, delighting in the feel of history passing through her fingers. The waiting silence swallowed each quiet slap of her bare feet on the stone floor.
It took Tlalli ten minutes to walk the length of the hall and arrive at the grand arch of its entryway. Its curtains were drawn. At the sight of her, the two guards in red woven armor straightened from leaning on their halberds. There was no way they knew her face — many black threads had been braided into the calendar since she had last left the Hall of Records — but they recognized the black and purple robe of her title.
“I won’t be long,” she said. Tlalli had authority over these guards and owed them no explanation, but she thought they looked a touch alarmed. “I’m just visiting the Hall of Poetry.”
The guards nodded and parted the curtains for her. The entry opened into a corridor that ran perpendicular to the Hall of Records, with a high rounded ceiling dotted with skylights. Across the hall stood an even larger arch, whose curtains were currently open to the golden light of a mountain sunrise and the view of the misty slopes of terrace farms below them. A draft of cold air sweetened with moisture and vegetation drifted to her nose, but she did not pause to enjoy it. Such air was not good for the ropes.
Instead, she turned right and made her way down the corridor. There were several curtained arches, all attended by one or two guards. History’s curtains were always pulled back, as it was the only Hall open to the public, but the rest had elaborately woven curtains with bright but mostly abstract patterns to convey the contents of their Hall. Poetry’s curtain had a spiralling web that cast yellow rays upon a sea — or perhaps a forest — of green and blue waves. The moment Tlalli turned towards it, its single guard hastened to draw back the curtain. She passed through the arch.
Ropes zagged across this hall in a haphazard tangle, twining and knotting with each other with no obvious pattern. They varied in color and thickness but also in material: not just cotton but wool, sisal, palm, spidersilk, entire vines, and even human hair. They were mostly grouped into distinct webs — poems — and yet occasional threads crossed the breadth of the hall to tie to some other poem.
Quipu had been created to record numbers, not words. But the early poets had numbered each sound of the language to put the spoken word to rope. Then Ihuicatl, the most famous poet of all, had begun knotting the ropes of sentences together, and quipu poetry left linearity behind. Ideas connected together in webs, and threads of thoughts could split or combine even in the middle of a word. Such poems could not be read aloud, of course, but that only let them cut deeper to the subconscious.
Tlalli wandered the hall, occasionally reaching with shaking hands to touch the knots, to feel the meaning contained within the fibers. Her feet walked without her thinking to guide them, and she came to as if waking from a dream in front of a poem she recognized. One of the old ones, supposedly by Ihuicatl herself.
It could not be read in a linear fashion in the mind, but the words surfaced in Tlalli’s thoughts like a swarm of insects alighting on a flowering vine.
We remem-ber
We rise like bir-ds with wings that ache for safer ground
bur-nt offerings towards a shade of blue we cannot taste
And when we return we return we return we return we
when we change we return
when we return we change
we return
we will return
we remember the red we weave into our calendars
We are content we leave what withers
our contents we feed what slithers
we remember
Tlalli reached up to touch those last knots, at once the first and the final.
She wept.
133,977th knot
One of the new librarians — Yatzil, that was her name — brought the bureaucrat to Tlalli.
He introduced himself as Ahulane from the Office of Growth, and the spiralling purple snake woven into his green robe marked his rank as an apu there. Tlalli was near certain she’d met him before, although she would never have been able to recall his name. It must have been many threads ago, before he had the grey that now shone at the roots of his loose black hair. But his face, smooth and hard like a pottery figure’s, was the same. Like her, he must not see much of the sun.
“We’re honored to have a high apu here with us,” Tlalli said with a bow. “Consider myself and all the Hall at your service.” She turned to Yatzil and held out the bundle of quipu she’d been copying into the braid. “I may be busy for a while, so you can take over with my numbers. If anyone comes looking for me, tell them I’m not to be bothered.”
“What if Ikel—”
“Especially not Ikel. Come, now; those knots won’t tie themselves.”
Yatzil swallowed and fumbled through the string in her hands, then dutifully began to knot away where Tlalli had been working before. Tlalli nodded, then gestured for Ahulane to follow her down the braid and out of earshot.
“I imagine you’re here for revisions,” she said in a low voice.
Ahulane nodded and produced a bundle of yarn from a pocket of his robe. “We’re revising down several output measures on the black threads from two thousand fifty seven through sixty three. Goods, services, metals, textiles, all the big ones. Did you have any data recollections on those figures in the past black thread or so?”
“I haven’t handled any, but the other Librarians might have.” She hadn’t handled many Recollections at all this past thread. There had been a lot of bad days. “We have records of all the requests below the apu level, though — I can copy them for you.”
“Do so after you’ve settled the revisions.” Ahulane handed her his bundle. “The growth numbers go out tomorrow, so you need to finish today. I’ll copy some other data while I wait for your report. I trust you can keep the other Librarians away from those threads while you are working with them?”
Tlalli looked back to where Yatzil was still knotting quipu into the braid.
“They’ll never know there was a change,” she said.
134,402nd knot
It was a bad day.
When Tlalli strained to sit up, flames licked down her spine, so hot and brutal that her breath hissed between her teeth. She collapsed back to her mattress and shut her eyes against the pain. Eventually she opened them again, and eventually her vacant gaze returned, as it always did, to the calendar braid.
She would need to weave a new black thread into the knot today. The thought registered, but she did not yet move to act upon it. It was the last black thread of this Era, she recalled. Tlalli had been excited about that yesterday, almost eager in her anticipation of this ending, this beginning. But today, all she could think about was the pain.
She’d found that on the days this bad, it was best to push through and get the pain over with. There was no need to roll over to see the ropes behind her, not when she had done this task so many times. Still, even just reaching over her head and down to her ropes ground bone against shoulder joint. Her hand trembling against the rope, she lay still for several moments, gritting her teeth and catching her breath. Then she took hold of the rope and tugged it up to where she lay. Again, she lay still for several long slow breaths.
And that had been the easy part.
Her hands shook violently, bones burning with every tremble, as she reached up to the braid. The movements were familiar, so familiar, and yet every twist of the knot stabbed with pain like hot needles. The pain began to throb in time with her heart, and with every beat her fingers spasmed against the ropes, rebelling against her thoughts. She was sobbing by then. Just a few twists more, and yet her hands would not obey.
So she let her arms drop to the bed and closed her eyes again. The pain found her there still, flashing red and orange against the black of her eyelids. Her hands felt so bloated she swore she would find them swollen like overfilled waterskins when she opened her eyes.
But then she did open her eyes, and her hands were lying still on the blankets, looking the same as they looked every day. Wrinkled, with those knobs around the joints like gnarled tree branches. A muscle in her leg twitched at even just the thought of finishing her knot. But she had to.
So Tlalli reached up, gritted her teeth, and tied the knot.
133,978th knot
Every night, after the Hall closed, the Librarians gathered for dinner at the canteen next door to Tlalli’s bedroom. Any day she felt well enough to join them was a good day. Even days like today, when making it to dinner was all her body could manage.
She arrived to a room already full of song and the smoky smell of spiced potato and llama meat. The other dozen Librarians were all seated on benches around the pyramidal stone oven where dinner had been cooking for hours. There was a metal oven beneath the stones, since a real fire was out of the question in the Hall, but at least the stones preserved the appearance of the old tradition. Tlalli could still remember the day her mother had cleared out the family’s old earth oven and replaced it with a shiny green metal one.
For now, the oven was still sealed, with the room’s attention instead on the radio that hung on the back wall. No radio signal would usually have reached this deep into the cavern, so their signal came by wire directly from the Government studio. They had a private line, too, to send and receive messages just between them and a few of the other Government agencies. But for now, the radio was tuned to the public channel, and the whole room was singing along to the flute music that spilled from it.
At Tlalli’s arrival, the song turned to a cheer. Xoco hopped to her feet to mute the radio while several of the others made straight for the barrel of maize spirits in the corner. Tlalli scarcely had time to sit down at the closest bench before Yatzil presented her with a cup, which she downed to an even larger cheer. The other Librarians could only drink spirits if the Head had the first sip, so it was a good day for everyone when Tlalli could make it to dinner. Drinks in hands, everyone returned to the benches as Chac, the newest Librarian, opened the oven and began to serve out the night’s meal.
“You just missed a great program on the radio, apu,” Ikel said as Chac handed Tlalli her bowl. “It was about these new computer things. You feed them data, and then they can take sums or averages or anything you want!”
The canteen’s warm air thickened in Tlalli’s lungs, and beads of sweat swelled on her forehead. Her fingers curled around the bowl in her hands so tightly that they ached.
“Anyways,” Ikel continued, “the radio said the scientists had this breakthrough. They had been trying to feed the computers their data and instructions with modified quipu, but it was causing a lot of trouble. Then they started using these pieces of paper with holes in them, and it fixed all the problems! They say they could be available to the public in a matter of black threads — maybe even just two or three solar cycles!”
“So it’s never happening,” Yatzil said. The room laughed, but Ikel kept looking at Tlalli expectantly.
“That would be after the start of the New Era, wouldn’t it?” she forced herself to say. She dug a spoon through her bowl so she had somewhere to look other than Ikel.
“Fitting, right? Maybe we could get one for the Hall in time for the new braid!”
“Don’t tell me we’ll have to deal with some new computer at the same time as we’re winding up the old braid,” said Alom, one of the older Librarians.
“Well, I was thinking it might give us some time, you know?” Ikel said. “We can keep the New Era’s records on the machine at first so that we can take our time getting the old braid down and stored.”
“How are you already planning for the New Era?” Xoco asked.
Out of the corner of her eye, Tlalli saw Ikel shrug. “It’s exciting, isn’t it?” he said. “We’re the generation that gets to see the amaru eat its own tail. These computers are just the first glimpse of what the new coil will be like!”
Words burned so hot in Tlalli’s throat that she had to speak. “We cannot let the snake’s new coil destroy the old.”
Several of the other Librarians looked over at Tlalli, and she buried herself in her bowl again. The heat within her flickered out, leaving only ice in her guts and an unpleasant warming in her cheeks. There was a reason why she rarely spoke at dinner.
“It doesn’t have to destroy the old coil,” Ikel said. “The amaru feeds on the past. Transforms it. Grows from it, you know?”
The snake is a circle, she thought. It can’t grow. But this time, at least, Tlalli held her tongue.
Her silence was filled by Alom’s laughter. “I wouldn’t recommend you try to match metaphors against our apu, Ikel,” he said. “She’s spent too much time in the Hall of Poetry for that.”
“Some would say too much time.” Tlalli strained her face into a smile. “If the Hall ever does get a computer, Ikel, I think I’ll put you in charge of it.”
Ikel beamed back at her, and the conversation moved on. Eventually Xoco put the radio back on so they could listen to the growth numbers for the past thread. Total production up five percent. Mining output up six percent. Textiles up four percent. Wages up three percent. Unemployment down a quarter percentage point. Happiness up a half point.
The litany of numbers soothed the unease that Tlalli had swallowed along with dinner. She had to remember that Ikel would never know what wouldn’t happen.
134,460th knot
On the last day of the Human Era, the Government opened all the Halls to the public.
Tlalli sat by the curtains to her room, in a chair Ikel had fetched for her, and watched the tour groups pass by. She nodded whenever the Librarian escort for each group would point her out, but otherwise she was left alone.
She had almost forgotten that people wore clothes other than Government bureaucrat robes. The embroidery at the hems of their brown shawls and black skirts seemed all the brighter for its scarcity. And there were children — it had been a long time since Tlalli had seen any of those. More than a few times, she saw little hands reach up toward the braid and its dangling quipu, only to flinch back down at the scolding of a watchful parent. They wouldn’t remember today, of course, but Tlalli hoped that the instinct to reach out and touch their history would survive.
After the Halls closed, Tlalli shuffled to dinner alongside her already boisterous Librarians. She joined the cheers as she drank the first cup of spirits, and for the rest of the night the liquor ran freely. Their chatter drowned out even the radio’s recounting of the Government’s achievements over the past Era. When Ikel stood to leave, the whole room roared in protest.
“Someone needs to get some sleep!” he responded. “If we all come in late tomorrow, who’s going to help our Head Librarian make the amaru with the old calendar braid?”
“I don’t need help,” Tlalli said. Her tone must have been sharper than intended, as the whole room fell quiet at her words.
Ikel blanched. “I didn’t mean it like that,” he managed. “But wouldn’t you like company?”
“Sit down, Ikel.” Perhaps her dislike flashed in her eyes, since he obeyed. “Someone pour him another cup.”
Voices returned to fill the void her words had cleared, but she kept an eye on Ikel for the rest of the night. His cup was still untouched by the time Alom rose to depart. It was late, by then, and the rest of the room rose to follow him. Adoring faces, all but Ikel’s rosy with alcohol, gathered around Tlalli to wish her a happy New Era. Then they departed, and there was only silence.
Returning to her room, Tlalli dug her fingers into the fibers of her mattress and pulled out a small cloth envelope. From it, she withdrew a poem in red thread, thin with age. She tied one more knot in its final string, then secured it to the braid over her pillow with stiff fingers. Then she hesitated.
Perhaps she should just go to bed. Ikel might still sleep in, after all. The guards would be told to keep the Halls closed tomorrow; if she wasn’t well enough to tell them, some other apu would. Surely it would be okay if she just let Ikel go.
Tlalli brushed her fingers against the poem she’d just tied to the braid. There was only one Hall of Records, the knots reminded her. Only one calendar braid. The apu had made her Head Librarian because they knew she would do anything to protect it.
Clinging to the braid like a lifeguard holds the rope they throw to a drowning man, she retraced her steps back into the Hall. She let go, hands trembling like after she’d tied too many knots on a bad day, and walked into the canteen. But by the time she picked up the mouthpiece of the two way radio, her hands were still enough to thread a needle.
“This is Tlalli, Head Librarian,” she said into the crackling static. “I am reporting Librarian Ikel as a risk to the New Era.”
132,203rd knot
The calendar hung over Tlalli’s bed, so that even when she woke up with such aching arthritis that she could not stand, she could still reach up and make the day’s knot in the three ropes. Today, though, it was her head that throbbed rather than her bones. The past ran over her bed like usual, but as for the future — the three loose ends of the future were all only a foot or so long. Long enough for a single knot.
Tlalli stared.
She could picture the calendar braid in her mind’s eye from when she’d fallen asleep last night. There had been two knots left in the green strand, ten or so left in the black strand, and plenty left in the red. She was sure of it. Yesterday had been the hundred thirty thousand two hundred and second knot, and today was the two hundred and third.
The curtain to her room was tied on the inside. No one could have entered to tie knots while she slept — even if the idea wasn’t itself absurd. Yet what other explanation was there? She tied thousands of knots in her sleep, with more rope than there had even been in the room?
A chill passed through her. A bad omen.
There was a quipu hanging from yesterday’s knot, she noticed — if it was indeed yesterday’s knot. Not a record quipu, but a poem in thin red thread, webbed and tangled.
This is how the world begins:
We forget You remember
The snake has eaten his own tail You preserve
Unravel and
begin again.
This is the fourth.
Tlalli got out of bed. She tied the last knot in the calendar braid.
Then she began to unravel it.