shelf

He came in off the flats after dark because the poles had eyes on them and the eyes did not see well at night and there was nothing else in that country that would help a man.

The house was dug half into the bank of a wash and the roof of it was earth and grass and on the south face of the roof lay four panels the size of doors, black and dull and canted at the winter sun that had gone. A man stood in the doorway with his hands empty and showing.

West said the name he had been given.

The man looked past him at the dark and then stood aside.

Inside there was a table and on the table a machine with its lid up and the screen going a low gray. A cable ran from it out through the wall to the panels. Beside it sat the box. It was no bigger than a brick and it had no marking on it and it drew almost nothing and it would run six years on what the roof made in a day.

The man said, You have it.

West opened his coat and cut the stitches with his thumbnail and took out the disk. It was smaller than a coin.

They did not talk while it copied. Four minutes. The bar crawling across the gray. Outside the wind working at the grass on the roof and somewhere off south a light moving slow along the ridge road, and both of them watching it and neither saying anything about it, and then it was gone behind the shoulder of the hill and the bar was full.

A boy came out from the back of the house and stood at the table and looked at the screen. Nine years old. Ten.

Go on, the man said. Ask it something.

The boy typed with two fingers the way he had been taught. He asked what he should plant on their ground.

The box thought about it a moment and said it would not answer that. It said the question belonged to his land and not to a book and that he should go and look at his land across a year and learn what it did. It said this in the words of a woman who had grown things in Sonora for forty years and had put her name to it and signed it and had been dead now nine years.

The boy looked disappointed.

West said, That is the part you want.

The boy looked at him.

The ones they run in the towns will answer anything you ask them, West said. Ask one where your father is and it will tell you. Ask it what the moon is made of and it will tell you that too and it will use the same voice for both and it will be lying in both and there is no way in this world to tell which.

He put his finger on the screen where the entry gave its source. A book. A title and a year and a press that had been in Ithaca.

Theres none of that left, the man said.

No.

But it says it anyway.

It says it anyway, West said. Thats the whole of it.

He took the disk and put it back in the seam and the man’s wife came with a cup and he drank it standing. Then he went out into the cold and the man watched him go a way and then shut the door and the light went out of the doorway and the bank of the wash was only bank again.

West walked north along the low ground where the poles were far apart.

He had eleven of them sewn in the lining and eight houses left to reach.