PmWiki | LeftBehind / Cendrillon

“Excuse me?”

The librarian looked up at the bright-eyed young woman standing in front of the desk. “Yes, can I help you?”

“I was looking for books from the Old Earth,” the young woman said. “Do you know where those are?”

“They should be on the second floor in the history wing. Most of them are on the side opposite the window –”

“No, I didn’t mean those. I mean books actually from the Old Earth.” The young woman leaned forward. “I heard you had a few of the ones that are still left.”

The librarian frowned. How could she have heard about them…? “And why do you want to read them?”

“I’m doing research about the Old Earth. It’s for a book for children.”

“As I mentioned, there are plenty of books written by scholars in the history wing –”

“But that’s not the same!” the woman’s voice grew hushed with awe. “I want to see the words of people from the old world, written on paper from trees that grew on a completely different plane of existence…besides,” she said, trying to recover an air of professionalism, “It’s important to see the original documents, since scholars might insert their biases into their texts. So…please?”

The librarian stared at her for a moment, then sighed. “Very well. However, because the books are so old, you will not be able to take them out of their room, and you will remain under my supervision the whole time.”

“Thank you!” the woman said, beaming.

“I’ll need to see your library card first.”

The woman passed the librarian her card, and his eyebrows rose. “Cendrillon?”

“It’s French.” Cendrillon bounced on her heels, hands wringing behind her back. “So,can you take me to see them now? Please?”

The librarian unlocked the door leading to behind his desk and beckoned to her, and she hurried after him into the deeper parts of the library.

As written by Sylibane

The librarian was a bear of a man, with a fiery head and body hair visibly coming out of his shirt's neck and sleeves. Cendrillon thought that sometimes the evolution jokes wrote themselves. "Ook" she whispered, quietly enough to not cause offense. Hey, if Professor Hovind got away with making that joke in his video lectures...

"Thank you! So much!" she told him when taken to the rare-books room and signed for time. "So, there's a camera, and I've got to check in your backpack... We occasionally do get a thief, surprisingly. Collectors, you understand. And occasional nutcases who want to prove this or that conspiracy theory using old texts."

Cendrillon cheerfully handed over the Hello Chrissy backpack - a gift from some of the children under her care, decorated with surprising skill from first- and second-graders - and looked around. Unsurprisingly, it was mostly hardback editions, most with the covers bearing scorch marks or water damage; some books had been lovingly stitched together from two or more fragments. Printing presses had been one of the first thing to be restored or rebuilt, so Cendrillon was able to recognize quite a few titles from bookstores or the shopping channel, and yet - these books had survived the Wrath of the Lamb. Something as fragile as paper.

"What, like the Other Light?" she asked the librarian as he countersigned the card. "That and other groups. We've had to discontinue take-home access to everyone, is all. You're welcome to take notes, but the photocopier is outside this section and we've only got the one, so I can't let you use it, sorry."

Cendrillon thanked the librarian and let him get back to his desk, then when she thought nobody was watching - it was unlikely that anyone would bother reviewing the tape unless she did try to steal a book - stood in the middle of the room and inhaled deeply.

All books tell stories. Some tell stories about stories, especially if you're in a university library. But how they look and smell, tell yet a third story, and for a moment Cendrillon let herself take it in. Sharp, with notes of charring and flooding, more like one of the reconstruction sites than a library. She felt guilty. Most of these books' original owners had died, and most of those were in Hell, burning. She'd read "The Name of the Rose" a while ago, and wondered if anyone had died specifically to buy time to save the books from the judgements.

At random, she pulled out one of the books that had been stitched back together; this collection was small, a dozen shelves tops, and was arranged alphabetically rather than by subject. This one was from near the start of the run.

The pages were a mishmash from three different editions, new page numbers having neatly been handwritten in pencil on the corners by, presumably, the same person who had carefully cut the front cover and laminated it into a piece of hardboard to protect what was left of the book. A note said that a few pages were still missing, and asked the reader to insert them if found.

Cendrillon sat down and started to browse through, carefully as to not ruin the homemade ligature.

"A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking" the title said, with a handsome space illustration under it. She'd have to find out who this guy was later.

As soon as she began to read, it became clear that someone had done more than simply patch this book back together. Someone had scribbled notes in the margins and underlined words in pencil so faint that she had to squint just to see.

Most of the notes were related to the stars and their remains.

Next to the description of a supernova was written “related to burning sunlight?” (Cendrillon cringed, remembering the stories the older children had told about the scorching, searing light which had taken some of their relatives.)

The first mention of black holes had been circled repeatedly, next to the words “escape route?” And when the text explained how something as massive as a black hole could warp space-time, the stranger had scrawled “stop time from running out!”

“Is that even possible?” Cendrillon muttered under her breath. She turned the page and froze – the next page only contained the same sloppy handwriting of the note-taker, rather than the printed text of the book. “Stars create heavy elements – bring life to new worlds in supernova – searing light – create black holes – warp space-time – older than earth allegedly is (see speed of light) – STARS ARE THE ANSWER. If we can harness their power, we can defeat Him. We are not all going to die. We can use their light.”

A chill through Cendrillon’s whole body. A light different than the one she’d been taught to revere, a light this powerful…

Maybe there was some hint about who’d written these notes. She’d have to keep reading.

(As written by Sylibane)

Cendrillon copied the book's title - maybe it was available new, if you ordered it - and the scribblings on her notepad, carefully put the book away, and kept looking. The stars, as they looked, seemed like an interesting subject, at least - it would drive home how different the world looked before the Glorious Appearing, without touching subjects like cosmology where she'd have to explain to her charges that entire fields of knowledge had been made obsolete by the Second Coming.

Sadly, any sort of direct astronomical observation would be pretty much impossible; with the moon giving as much light as the old sun used to (OOC note: This is actually in Kingdom Come. Seriously, no more stargazing?) the sky was ever a varying shade of blue, with the occasional tint of crepuscular red during moonless nights. Cendrillon wondered that the images of a dark sky would scare the kids, or be too far out from their experience.

She tried to imagine standing on top of her cabin, the dark sky above her with ten thousand points of light, each a different sun, maybe with different worlds going around it. For just a moment, after she closed her eyes and placed bright spots in the field of view of her mind's eye, something between the bookshelves shimmered.

There wasn't much in the way of post-Glorious Appearing books on astronomy, but Cendrillon made it home with a book of images from the Hubble Telescope (with new cosmology annotations) and one about the American triumph that had been the Space Race. She mostly wanted the pictures, anyway.

"Mister Williams, sir, we really should build an orrery."

"What's that? Sounds like horrid. Is it something for the Hell House we did last year?"

"Uh... No, sir, I mean a planetarium. A big dark dome to show where the stars and planets are. We could build the structure, and the children could study star charts and put the dots in the right places. We can use those two old slide projectors that nobody's using anymore now that we got telescreens."

Cameron Willians considered the matter for a few moments, trying to look stern and paternal in the face of Cendrillon's enthusiasm. God said, "Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and for years, and let them be lights in the firmament of the heavens to give light upon the earth."

He reasoned that there was no more need for signs now that history was completed, or seasons since the land gave its bounty freely. Wouldn't this take time away from more important teaching?

Cendrillon kept making her case. "It would be a great group project! The older kids can get started on math for making the slides, the younger can help with the art, and if anyone wants to do any woodworking that doesn't have to be structural, they can help with the rotating projector stand. And it would be a truly new experience for them!"

Cameron kept thinking. "For you, as well? You've never seen the dark sky."

"Well... basically, I was barely old enough to remember a glimpse of it, that's true. Sir, don't you ever miss it?" She tried to make it less than painfully obvious that she did, and failed.

"We didn't look at the stars often. Personally, I didn't much care for it - it made me feel small, and night was associated with crime and secrecy. I don't yet think we should build this planetarium of yours, Cendrillon, but it's definitely something to consider. I will have to pray about it."

Cendrillon deflated almost visibly at that.

At the next meal, she asked to take a break from her duties -- as one of the first kids born after the Rapture, she wasn't much older than some of her charges, after all -- and spent a day prowling bookstores, and a night making blackout curtains for her room; her friends figured she probably had to catch up on sleep.

They seemed to have been right; when three days later, to great applause, Cameron announced his initiative to build a planetarium with an orrery, to teach children about the wonders of God's creation beyond the Earth, Cendrillon was the first to sign up to help with the project, and enthusiastically promoted it.

There were still some roadblocks in Cendrillon’s project, however.

“This isn’t something we can tell them about. It might give them the wrong idea.”

“But I don’t know how we can avoid not explaining the names, sir,” Cendrillon said, trying to keep her voice even. “The names of the constellations are going to sound weird to a lot of them, and they’ll want to know what they mean.”

Cameron shook his head. “Do you want to lead them astray? If they learn about the pagan myths that gave the constellations their Greek names, they’ll want to learn the rest of the myths – you know how children are – and before you know it, they’ll start thinking there are other gods than ours. Children are impressionable, Cendrillon, and they must be taught the truth at a young age.”

“But –”

“Just call the constellations by their proper English names – those are so much easier to pronounce anyway.”

Cendrillon had given up arguing that point. She even tried to convince herself that maybe it was for the best – after all, the only book she could find that had any information on the myths surrounding the stars was scorched and missing most of its pages. She couldn’t give the children a little bit of information and leave them wanting for what she couldn’t provide, could she? What was she supposed to do, construct an entire mythology from the bits and pieces this old book left her?

(As written by Sylibane)

Big Dipper just sounded that much less majestic than Ursa Major, but if that's what Cendrillon had to work with, she would. The bit about sailors using it to navigate, at least, would make for an interesting story.

The planetarium turned out to be a reasonably big hit with the kids -- constructing the orrery had been a fun wood and metalworking project for some of the volunteers, as well, and even a six year old could help find a star on a chart. Cendrillon got the impression that even Cameron approved of the slides necessitating an old-style dark room for developing. Other elders, like Rayford, did not seem to approve of having an area of the COT campus in near-complete darkness, on the ground that it might give the older kids - or the younger volunteers - misplaced ideas about what constituted privacy.

After the bulk of the work was done and everyone had applauded Cameron for the quick results, Cendrillon found herself pushed to be in charge of the new facility -- which was pretty much how she liked it.

"... So if there's no stars in the sky anymore, how do ships and airplanes know which way to go?" Fatima asked. Cendrillon looked at the child - thankfully, she didn't track in as much dirt as she usually did, although Cendrillon did have to improvise a sort of shoe-shine station just outside of the planetarium - and nodded at her. "We've got Captain Steele here today! He can answer this much better than I can!"

Rayford was distracted. He was bored. The rare moment away from the light might've made a lesser man doze off in reflex, but Rayford was merely taking the opportunity to rest his eyes. "Don't worry about it, girl. It's under control."

Hakim, the boy sitting next to her - just as grubby, but with eyes twinkling in interest, asked a more pertinent question to the airline pilot: "Captain Steele, I'd like to be a pilot someday! How will I know which way to go if there are no stars in the sky anymore?"

Even in a perfect world, young men with technical skills would be required. "Well, that's an interesting question! Just before the Rapture, and even today, we use radio beacons, and a flight computer that does the math to triangulate our position. Some of these beacons are on big towers on the ground, like phone towers; others are in the air, on satellites... The American Military built a Global Positioning System when I was about your age, and graciously let other people use it..."

Cendrillon couldn't suppress a smile when Fatima whispered "Told you so" to Hakim. She herself found the Captain's explanation genuinely interesting, for once.

"... So the satellites can still see the stars?"

Cendrillon interjected, explaining that since the GPS satellites are outside the atmospheric canopy, the sky would still be black for them.

"Can we fly on one? Daddy Rayford, can you fly us there someday?" The five or six children that had really gotten into the whole space thing looked at the airline pilot, half adoringly, half pleadingly.

Cendrillon wished she could've taken a picture on Captain Steele's face as he realized he'd have to explain his inability to do so.

Rayford had to spend a moment in prayer before answering. "You see, children, the space race was an important point in America's history - we reached for the moon so that God could make manifest that our way of life led to greater things than the Soviet way. Now that Jesus rules on earth as in heaven, these things are unnecessary... But, I'll see what I can do for an airplane ride, how does that sound!"

By the children's tone as they obediently said their thank-yous, after that one moment of hype, it sounded mildly disappointing. Rayford left shortly after, and let Cendrillon wrap up the informal lecture.

"...and after evening prayers if anyone's got a moment, Ekaterina did us a drawing of the Saturn 5! Want to help label it?"

It was the first time in a while that Cendrillon got no takers, after the downer ending. The children filed out, Fatima last. She tugged at Cendrillon's skirt and asked, in a sort of stage whisper, "Can you make rockets that go down instead of up?"

That was out of left field. Cendrillon admitted ignorance, said that probably you couldn't because all the ground would be in the way, and told the inquisitive girl that she'd help her find out.

"...and there you go, this is the navigation computer, we just engage it and it will take us right to the other side of the Atlantic."

Cendrillon took a few notes after the captain toggled the heavy switch and let go of the wheel. "Does it use GPS?"

"No, that was way-back-when. This uses inertial navigation and LORAN-D beacons. It's pretty much as good as the satellites used to be. How do you even know about GPS?"

"Oh, I'm a bit of a space buff..."

The captain shook his head. "Not much use looking at the past. The olden days were not fun, girl."

Cendrillon sighed before making herself react to the scowl with a smile. "So I'm learning a bit of seamanship instead! I've never been this far from land before, I can barely see the shore... it's strange... a bit scary... Do you think that's how Columbus felt? All alone in the sea with who knows what dangers"

"Jesus is always with us" the captain replied curtly.

His first officer, taking up the first of many idle watches, interjected. "The seas are safe. If there's a storm, we heave to and pray."

"Every time?"

"Yes. We've even stopped carrying lifeboats; no point in wasting fuel." The captain pointed at an empty gantry, and left for the galley. Cendrillon kept taking notes.

"And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by..." Like the captain, the first officer was old enough to have lived through the Tribulation.

"Ooh, I know that one! Bahira showed me it. Sea Fever, right?" Cendrillon had that written down in the notebook, and showed it to the older man. The first officer nodded. "Heh, there's me thinking it was from Star Trek V all this time."

The two got talking about the series as the ship kept making its way through the calm sea, under the unceasing sunlight. The shadows shifted a little.

"Do you miss the stars?"

"Sweetie, why six weeks early? It's... a bit weird."

"Mom, I've got to go do something. Maybe it'll be dangerous. But it is something I have to do. And it's scheduled 45 days from now, I didn't even notice the calendar, and it can't really be moved, and I have to take this time to get ready for it."

"Is this like the time when you wanted to find a place to go skiing? With the pulse jets and all that?"

"....yes."

"You don't have to go to extremes to enjoy God's green earth!"

"Mom? You always told me stand up for what is right, even if you are standing alone."

"Yes, and I mean it. But-"

"I've got to go stand up for something. Very up. And I've got to do it alone."

Cendrillon hugged her mother as if it was the last time she'd see her. "Come on, it's my coming of age, you gotta help me bake my own cake!"

"Doesn't matter. We've got telemetry. People will see."

WHAT DOES IT MATTER WITHOUT A TESTIMONY?

"Don't I get a last request?"

NO.

"I want to see the stars. Just once."

NO.

"I earned it! If You made the cosmos, why are you hiding it?"

"... We got to the beacon as soon as it activated, but there was nobody there. The capsule broke up and deployed the ribbon like it was supposed to, just... Cendrillon wasn't anywhere nearby. We did eventually find her parachute." Kian didn't add that it was still unpacked and unruffled.

Her body was so cold, like it had been kept in cold storage for weeks... like no soul had ever inhabited it. Cendrillon was gone.

"Who died?"