#Part 4: Engineers and Scientists and Bookshops

[ishipgenfics]

You and Your Human: Part 3

Part 1

Part 2

You do not know where you are.

To be fair, you have not known where you are for a very long time, but this is a different kind of uncertainty. This room looks different from your old one. Last you remember, there were alarms ringing through the air and you were curled up into a ball trying to ignore the rumbling in your stomach because no one had come in so long--

You shove the memories down. You have always been good at that, even before your abduction, although never to this degree.

You get up, shakily. You have been left water, and down it eagerly. You are glad to have it, but its presence is a bad sign. If they want you to get your strength back, it means more tests are coming up. It may mean they want you to fight, which you really aren't in the mood for.

You push yourself up to your feet, ignoring your shaking limbs. You can let yourself be weak if you ever get out. For now, you need to put on a show of force. If they ever think they don't need to fear you anymore...

You pace the perimeter of your new room, tapping on the walls as you go. No cracks, no weaknesses. You didn't really think there would be, but you had to check.

... you can't hear anything. Or well, that isn't true, you can hear the shaky sound of your own breathing, your footsteps on the stainless steel floor, but you can't actually hear anything outside of your cell. And that's weird.

There's always noise. The sound of screams, the clash of metal against metal, crying, sobbing. There has never been anything like this, this cold unearthly silence. You shiver.

As you sit in your cell, with nothing else to do, you begin to wonder what happened. The ship crashed. You are fairly certain of that, unless it was some sort of trick-- but no. You have agreed to take the world at face value, lest you go mad.

So. The ship crashed. No one came for a long time. You assumed they were all dead. You assumed you too would die.

... is that why its so quiet? Are they all dead? Did the alarms finally run out of power?

Except no, that doesn't make sense either, because if they're all dead, how on... wherever you are would you be in another room?!

You bury your head in your hands.

You are bored. It has been days and each time you fall asleep, food and water appear in your cell. None of it has been drugged, and most of it has been edible, which is good, but you have seen no one.

You know you sound like an entitled prick-- complaining about being bored while on an alien shapeship-- but at least the experiments made sense. You knew what to expect. Those days where you were sure you were going to die forgotten in your cell were worse that any test the aliens could come up with, and you really don't want to go back to them. Even if you do have food now.

You start talking. Just to the air. Back when you were capable of acting like a normal human being, you would have been worried that this made you seem crazy, but you really could not give a damn anymore.

You recite snippets of books and movies, and then, when you run out of those, you just talk. About anything and everything.

Sometimes you could almost swear someones listening.

Some time later, out of the corner of your eye, you see a small fuzzy head poke into the doorway. You heart stops.

"Hello?" you say.

"Hello?" the alien calls back. You warn your frantic heart not to get its hopes up. It's probably just mimicking you, like a parrot. There's no reason to be excited.

But then it keeps talking.

"Okay?" it says. "I speak some. Not past, so couldn't speak you-me. Can now. So, okay?"

You just stared, stunned. The alien pronounces words strange-- buzzing its ses and clicking its ces, and it hesitates over each word, but it is speaking to you. Speaking English.

It has been so, so long.

The alien's ears twitch. They are tall and bristly. Like a rabbit. You had a friend who had a pet rabbit, a long time ago. "Go?"

"No!" You are shocked by the levels of desperation in your voice. Only a week ago, you would have given anything for the aliens to leave you alone. But now...

"Alone... bad for humans? Or you? Or three?"

You think through how to phrase this in a way the rabbit alien will understand. "Yes. Much alone bad. Much alone makes little alone worse."

The rabbit alien swishes its tail once, firmly. "I will stay."

You talk to the rabbit alien often. It is different from the gem aliens. It talks to you like you are a sentient being, rather than an experiment. It never runs tests. Sometimes it lets you out of your cell.

You are certain you are on a different ship. No one on the other ship would ever be this kind.

You like this alien. It is your alien now. You decided this, and so it is true. You have not told your alien this because you don't want to scare it away, but you think it feels the same. You have caught it referring to you as its human when it mumbles under its breath.

Your alien shows you how to unlock the door to your cell. You are no longer a prisoner here, it seems. Strange, to be trusted after only a few short weeks. You can't say it's something you're used to.

Your alien also might be a criminal, because the ship you are on was clearly not made for it. It is small, and it has trouble reaching things. The ship the gem aliens on was definitely built for them so... your alien might have stolen a ship?

Eh. You don't care. From how the gem aliens acted, your existence is probably illegal.

You get out of the ship for the first time into a grassy area surrounded by mountains. It is beautiful, but your alien seems to be... upset. You don't like that. Your alien should not be upset. But it is making whimpering noises and its breaths are halted and shuddering as it tries to explain things to you.

You kneel down to the ground, heedless of the way the dew on the grass seeps into your pant legs and wrap your arms around your alien. It leans its head into your shoulder.

As you feel your aliens pitter-patter heartbeat against your neck, you think to yourself that it is a damn good thing your alien's crew will never meet you.

Hell hath no fury like a human scorned.

[mercerislandbooks]

SEABookstoreDay Road Trip

I know, I know--Independent Bookstore Day was weeks ago. So why are we still talking about it? Well, it was a pretty big deal. Our schedule for the day at Island Books was as overstuffed as it’s ever been, and the same was true at bookstores all over the region. Over 300 people rose to the #SEABookstoreDay challenge and made it to every one of the participating businesses, going from the islands in the Sound to the Eastside, from South Seattle to Mill Creek in the north, and everywhere in between. The members of this proud group were declared Indie Bookstore Champions and earned themselves a 25% discount at all those stores for the next year.

This was the third year in a row I’ve undertaken the challenge, but this time with a new passenger on board. I’d told James Taylor, a customer at Island Books, about the itinerary my friends and I were attempting, and intrigued, he wondered if we had room in our car. It so happened we did, and we arranged to meet at the downtown ferry terminal to launch our epic journey. Plans quickly went awry, though, and his championship dreams were dashed from the start. I’ll let him pick up the story from here.

--James

----------------------------

Despite the initial setback of missing the 7:55 a.m. ferry to Bainbridge, we decided (via text and a phone call) that the best course of action would be for me to hop on a bus north and meet the group--the ones who had made the ferry--at the Edmonds Bookshop. I could then hop in their car and we'd be back on track.

I had some time to melt in Edmonds, so I was flipping through a giant book called The Way Things Work, which I'd had as a kid. James and my mystery group walked into the bookstore and we had a good laugh about the ferry fiasco. I already knew James because he gives me science fiction recommendations at Island Books, and with him were Katie, a sales rep from Penguin Random House, and Emily, a well-read employee of Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park. When we piled into Katie's blue Prius it dawned on me that 1) we were going to be parking like negligent maniacs at every bookstore, and 2) I was way out of my literary depth. This was a group that, as Steinbeck once wrote, could "eat stories like grapes." If we were choosing roles, I figured I'd be the customer--the everyman. Some weekend warrior of literature.

There's a fun bit of strategy that goes into visiting so many spread-out bookstores in a day. I recently moved to the Seattle area and thought visiting all these shops would be a fun tour of the neighborhoods. It was. It was also excessively easy to strike up conversations with people on the tour. You could tell they were doing it because they had a map (or "passport") in their hands and they were usually in a hurry. But never too much in a hurry to talk about the books they'd purchased and their plan of attack for the day.

The next few stores flew by in a hurry--the Neverending Bookshop in Bothell, BookTree in Kirkland, Third Place Books in Seward Park. The one that stands from that cluster is Fantagraphics, a comic book store in Georgetown. I was chatting with the owner after he stamped my passport. There was his face talking to me, and above and just to the left was was a cartoon rendering that looked exactly like him in the store front window.

I can't remember the order of everything, but here are some of the books I bought: Paintwork and Snow Crash from Island Books (my local spot). In Queen Anne I bought a nonfiction book called White Trash: The 400-Year Untold Story of Class in America. At probably three different stores I flipped through Neil Gaiman's Norse Mythology and vowed to pick it up later. Katie showed me some children's books about female architects and female engineers she’d purchased at Island Books (Rosie Revere, Engineer and Ada Twist, Scientist). I ended up buying those later in the day for my two little nieces in California. At some point in the car, when people discovered I was new to Seattle, they took to pointing out things along the drive and explaining the history of some of the neighborhoods. It was Seattle through a literary lens. Or at least through a reader's lens.

I'm such a sucker in bookstores. I go in to browse and end up coming out with a wheelbarrow full of books--perhaps imagining some future version of my self who has read these titles and memorized their contents. Or perhaps imagining the book hanging off the edge of my coffee table for some visitor to notice and flip through. And there were so many bookstores rolling by to tempt me--Seattle Mystery Bookshop, Queen Anne Book Company . . .

Back in the car we started talking about how bookstores are selling more and more toys and games, the onslaught of e-books, and other challenges for the smaller shops. James helps buy some of the books for Island Books. "The trick," he was saying, "is to find and promote the books that are worth reading even if you're not particularly interested in the topic. If I'm not interested in the Civil War, is the book still worth reading? Those are the books I look for."

At about 4 p.m., I got into conversation with a passport-carrying woman in line at Magnolia's Bookstore. She was explaining the route she’d taken over the course of the day, and I was explaining that I was doomed from the outset because I'd missed the ferry. She said that was where she was headed next, and we went our separate ways. As I made my way out to the Prius, it struck me that the lady I'd been talking to was on a route that would end near my car. My eyes grew wide for a moment and I chased her down and asked her for a ride. I ran back to the Prius, offered my perfect solution to the "how-do-I-get-home-problem," and they seemed to understand, despite the rush of it all.

I hopped into my new friend’s silver Subaru and we peeled out--no, we didn't peel out--but that's the sentiment anyway. She struck me as kind of a Melissa McCarthy type. Chatty--and kind to a fault. Smart in a way that people probably look past. She was pretty excited about the whole day. She had been drinking a lot of coffee, and I'd just taken a shot of espresso so we chatted it up, practically talking over each other.

Things slowed down as we waited to board the ferry. I realized the strategic sacrifice I'd made. My previous group would soon be arriving at a cookbook store called Book Larder. Supposedly they have deliciously glossy cookbooks and interesting visiting chef/author events. I traded that for a ride that would end closer to my car and a chance to see Eagle Harbor Books and the Traveler on Bainbridge and everything I'd missed in the morning. I was weighing it, but it was too late to do anything.

My new driving companion showed me a book she'd just bought, and said, "It's about decisions, it's about figuring out--when you get older--how you want to die. There's a whole medical industry that's focused on keeping people alive but they don't ask these important questions. It was written by a doctor." [Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, no doubt.] The topic seemed close to her, near enough that I didn't inquire further, but just nodded. It turned into quite a grave, but beautiful, conversation about the rights of the soon-to-be-dead.

One boat ride and two stamps later, we parted ways in Bainbridge. She headed north, and I ended my adventure after 11 bookstores, content to bow out. There were a few, like Book Larder, that I promised myself I would see next time I had a visitor in town.

I had a little time to reflect on the ferry ride back to my car. What a full day! What a nice way to see these neighborhoods. What a nice sense of camaraderie among these bookworms. What an amazing race!

Maybe next year I'll make it to all of them. 

photo credit: K. Huntsberger/Shelf Awareness