Science Fiction: Welcome to my Worlds

Calixte found the cool stones of the underground stairway soothing under her feet, in contrast to the heated whirl of her thoughts. The workmanship was good and the stones were smooth but not as smooth as they would be, she knew, after the passage of years and many feet polished them further. She was not surprised the Archive halls were nearly deserted at this early hour of the morning. This was not the usual domain of scribes and philosophers of status were not known to be early risers.

She couldn’t help taking a peek into the open doorways as she went along. There were rooms much like those in the main library above where scrolls were pigeonholed in bins and labeled in meticulous script. She noticed that most of the scrolls seemed much older, some almost crumbling with the effects of time, and none were written in Greek.

She passed another room that had no scrolls but there were tomes with pages of beaten gold and even fragile looking clay tablets with a curious form of writing she’d heard about only in legend. This, she knew, was where she belonged. Calixte’s excitement blotted out her reason. She reached for one of the clay tablets sprawled open on the table.

“Don’t touch that!” barked a grey-haired man whose toga bore an interlaced pattern of ink stains and, from the look of it, yesterday’s lunch. “What are you doing in the Archive boy?”

Calixte kept her eyes on the floor. She didn’t recognize the man and the great library drew people from all around. She