The Planet of Books
As the traveler descended to the pale planet she heard a whisper, welcome to her ears, a whisper that she could not place. It was not the sound of falling water nor the sound of breathing nor the sound of wind in leaves, though it was close to all of these. But this sound evokes interiors, a fireplace, a mug of cocoa, rain on dark windowpanes. As her starlings gusted downward she saw below her flocks of other birds winging over the treetops, and even from far above she sensed they were unlike the birds she knew, and the trees seemed strange, as if they had too many leaves. But it was not until she was almost among the branches that several of the strange birds flew past with a riffling whir and she realized they were not birds at all, but books, books freed from fingers and shelves, flapping unfettered through the air. She saw that the trees bore, instead of green leaves, the dry, pale leaves of books, like many-petaled flowers fondled by the wind. This was the whisper of course, that was not quite water or breath or leaves, it was the shuffle of ten thousand turning pages. All across the planet pages turned in the wind.
Tugging on the strings that harnessed her starlings to the flower pot, she guided her terra-cotta craft to a landing in a little clearing and disembarked. Flowers spattered the grassy circle, small squarish blooms, which, when she knelt, she realized were tiny volumes of poetry, exquisitely bound, with gilt-edged pages and marbled endpapers. The grass was printed too with lines of verse, and she browsed among them, lying with her chin propped on her palm, running her fingers through shredded iambic pentameter. Booklets wafted like butterflies flower to flower and when one lit on her wrist and fanned its pages she read a dainty haiku. After a while she set off through the forest, though she made little headway as she was constantly stopping to muse on odes etched into tree trunks or leaf through a half-decayed book dropped from a tree. Some of these fallen volumes were so sweet they made her light-headed, others so sour she felt queasy after she read them.
She came upon a dappling of mushrooms, or books that grew like mushrooms, in a dark corner beneath great trunks, with their spines upward, their leaves hanging toward the soil. She was careful to avert her eyes, not knowing which were poisonous.
Eventually, browsing through this world of words, she came in the afternoon to a meadow where several dozen massive books lay splayed open on the grass, and in the center of their pages, along the creases, lay beings like herself, asleep. As she watched they sat up and stretched and rubbed their eyes and reached for their spectacles. She saw that they wore garments sewn up of printed pages, pleated and ruffled, with sprays of torn paper blossoming from sleeves and cuffs, and folded paper caps, and they rustled when they moved. All wore thick spectacles, which made their eyes enormous. They did not seem surprised to see her, but invited her to join them and tell her story. This she was pleased to do, sitting on the cover of a fat book and relating her journey thus far, and as she spoke they watched her with huge dreamy eyes.
When she was done with her tale and had listened to several sonnets and snippets of ballads, they began to wander off in various directions, muttering about lunchtime. She as well was hungry, and decided to follow one group as they descended to the river, for they bore nets in their hands. But when she crouched on the banks beside them and peered into the water she saw that the creatures which moved there, wavering their pages like fins or gills, were not fish but books, their covers pebbled like the river bottom. Some were tiny and swam in groups, flicking this way and that, but others moved alone, ponderously, and it was these the book folk aimed for with their nets. When a heap of heavy, dripping tomes lay on the bank, some pages still flipping idly over, they put their nets aside and, stretched out on the printed grass, began to read, inviting the traveler to join them. This she did, though her stomach rumbled and she was disappointed they had not scooped up a trout or salmon to grill. But when she lay among the other readers and began turning the sodden pages, she soon sank deep within the story, so deep in fact that several times she had to lift her eyes for fear of drowning. This river books was the strongest, most satisfying book she'd ever read, full of blue light and rapids and deep, dark pools, and when she'd finished, replete, she lay back and slept, submerged in currents and shadows. She realized when she woke that she was no longer famished, that the book had somehow taken the edge off her hunger. And now she knew that on this planet of books hunger was not sated through the mouth but through the eyes, and she thought this a much more satisfactory means of acquiring nourishment.
Over the next days she partook of the winged books she had seen in her descent, which made her dizzy with their soaring prose, and she read the delicately flavored volumes plucked from certain trees, spiced with collections of pungent aphorisms gathered from certain bushes, and she savored prized books of poetry, printed in silver on black vellum, dug from among certain roots. She even learned to tell which of the mushroom books were safe, and she was glad she had been wary, for the dreamy readers told dreadful tales of companions who had choked before their eyes, going into spasms as they perused the wrong toadstool.
On this diet of incessant reading and conversations with her companions, who were forever sidestepping into fantasy or flights of poetry, she began to lose her own sense of the real. She became unsure whether she woke or dreamed, whether the hand she held up was her hand or a hand from a book she read, and this sensation, though initially disconcerting, was not unpleasant.
Sometimes late at night the book folk told terrifying tales of strange rare books that roamed the deep forest, and at the heart of these was always the carnivorous book, a huge tome, its leather dappled gold and black. It was seldom seen, and those who did see it seldom lived to tell the tale. When this book opened its great covers a reader would be drawn inexorably within, into the pages printed in red ink that never seemed to dry. The unwitting victim would move closer, mesmerized, desperate, despite dry tongue and quaking knees, to read on. And then, with a snap and a crackle, the carnivorous book close its pages and the reader would vanish.
Yet there were young people among the book folk not sated by the tame forest diet that sustained their parents, who from time to time left the safety of the clearing and sought out this savage book. For it was said that those few words one managed to read in the moment before one was consumed, that single red page or paragraph or sentence, was worth all the books in the world.
The traveler could have stayed on this planet forever, she thought, reading, gathering books, and for a wonderful afternoon she even contemplated seeking the carnivorous book in the depths of the forest. It seemed a glamorous way to die. But her starlings were growing restless and there were other planets to explore. She could see those worlds between the printed leaves at night, as she lay on the soft pages of an open book, glimmering like illegible words in the sky. Also, she was afraid that if she stayed on this world any longer her own story might be lost, submerged into others until she no longer remembered who she was or where she came from. So, though they beseeched her to stay, she bade farewell to her bespectacled companions and made her way back to the little clearing where her starlings stirred and chirruped, and stepped into her waiting flowerpot. But before she left she plucked a flower, a pretty little volume of poetry to put in her pocket like a fancy chocolate to nibble at, a keepsake from this strange, wonderful planet of living words.
