Short Story: Aged Plant Fibers and Ink

 

 New story published.

My first professional-market credit in many, many years. Very proud of how it turned out.

When humanity is gone, what will we leave behind? More importantly, how will extraterrestrial life interpret what we leave behind? Will they understand anything we created?

Aged Plant Fibers and Ink, on Zooscape.

 

 

 

The feline slipped a raised disc in front of Ker’r. The canine leaned over and scented it. It had encoded olfactory information on it, and with a single sniff he knew the menu and the prices.

Paperback: 1C d6 PY+210, | ~8 / ~27
Paperback: 2C d1 PY+199, | ~12 / ~35
Hardback: 4C d14 PY+212 | ~9 / ~32
Hardback: 6C d3 PY+202 | ~19 / ~44
OB: The John Varley Reader John Varley Ace, 2C PY-201 d2 ~12 | ~133

Learning to understand the menu was itself a skill and often required a guide just to comprehend what one was ordering. C denoted the continent, d was the district, PY denoted the year it had been bound, calculated to the number of solar cycles on the Planet of Paper. Paperyears. Negative numbers indicated estimated solar cycles before the year the planet had first been discovered.

They always had one Original Binding on the offer for page-by-page consumption. These were the only listings that included an olfactory bitmap representation of the glyphs on the spine of the Binding. Comprehending images with datascent was difficult for anyone, but he had enough experience with Bindings that he could visualize them.

Many Originals were never for sale as a whole, as retailers often only received one copy of each, so they had to be sold per page. One had to be extremely wealthy to buy those Originals as entire Bindings.

Anyone could buy a Binding and take it back to their den, but it was never the same as experiencing it in a place like this, as close to how the hairless bipeds might have enjoyed them on the Planet of Paper.

He looked up at Erok. “Paperyear minus two oh one. Surprised you can still buy whole Bindings.”

The cat nodded. “We have enough copies to sell in whole. The older volumes are getting rare though.”

Ker’r laughed. “What will we do when we run out of originals?”

“We’ll have to stop saying plus and minus. Paperyear will be all positive numbers, and new Bindings will be considered originals. By then they’ll have printed enough to create Bindings good enough to be called Originals.”

 

Read the rest at Zooscape.