Due Date

She waves her hand over my console and the transaction is complete.

“Thank you, your due date is in three weeks. If you need to renew feel free to ping me any time before the due date.”

Mysterious Island. Not good sign. It’s never a good sign when they check out books about the sea. It means they’re lonely. And if they’re lonely, they’re sad. I do my best to prevent this, by making suggestions, and of course the books we stock. But in the end, I can’t tell people what to check out, they have to have a least this freedom. But ocean stories, a bad sign. By now they know when I’m trying to talk them out of a selection, and if I do word will spread and within a month they’ll all be reading it anyway, and the sadness will spread crew wide.

It can be worse than that. If they start checking out books about space travel I know there’s real trouble. One might think that such books would be a comfort out here, reading about people in similar situations, but from experience I know this to be an act of desperation. It usually means they have forgotten what it’s like to be planet bound. When they forget the gravity there’s no coming back. If they reach for the sci-fi I have to call the doctor to intervene.

But I’ve painted a depressing picture. Since I curated the selection before we took off I know the stock really well and can typically make suggestions that help to improve overall morale. There are definitely things I would do differently if I could do it all again though. Like ocean and space books, I would have left those behind if I had known. Something about those great wide-open spaces always spells longing. And that’s an emotion that we can’t have lingering around on a ship this size. I wonder if when people traveled the world on the actual seas if their librarians faced the same troubles?

I also try to steer them away from the mysteries. One would think that these would be a great pastime while we hurtle through the nothingness with little to do. But I see it almost every time. They start to get suspicious. It’s not enough to have the mystery stay on the pages, they begin to doubt their bunkmates, sometimes the entire crew. Makes my job difficult, back home they were such an easy sell for those needing to while away the time.

Non-fiction. That was supposed to be the main thing. After all we are supposed to be preparing for our new life. I stocked every book on farming, construction, and basically everything we’ll need to survive. Not that the folks on this trip don’t have tons of skills like that, but we’re due to get rusty after all these years of inactivity. No matter how much I try to push these subjects, no one wants to hear it. The thought of soil in their hands is almost as bad as thinking about the sea, or space. The reminders of home drag my shipmates right out of the present and back to darker times. One would think that picturing a tree in your mind would be a peaceful affair, but it’s just another reminder of what we’re leaving behind, and the uncertainty to which we travel.

“Do you have another copy of Mysterious Island?”

The questions draws me out of my contemplative state. And so it’s begun to spread. The infection of the mind, missing those oceans, all that water, and shrinking at the thought of where we’re going, and all of the things it might lack.

“It’s checked out at the moment. How about something educational?”

They’re gone before I can hand them a book. The non-fiction route almost never works. Still, I have to try. It’s understandable that they don’t want the reminders, but we had better be ready when we arrive, even though that’s a decade away. That’s a long time not to practice one’s trade. Even longer not to be thinking about the work. For most of us our arrival seems so far away, and it is, but if we start to slip now there’s no telling how bad things could get in the remaining time of the journey. At least for the moment everyone is still doing their ship duties. But Mysterious Island… I may need to speak to the Captain.

What books would I have brought if I had known what I know now? It’s hard to say. I am comforted by the books themselves. Even just the smell of them calms me. That’s why we decided to bring physical books. Something about having the real object makes us feel more connected to those who wrote them. Or that’s what we thought. It still works for me, but I wonder if I’ll fall victim to the same malaise that’s infecting the crew. I’ve got to think of some new titles to recommend, something to help get them out of this funk.

Typically, when all else fails, I would divert to the classics. Now I know that won’t work either. In the early days of our trip I tried that, but the pacing was all wrong for everyone. Our trip is a slow one, so nobody wanted to read slow books about fanciful people that can move around at their leisure. No one was reading much in those days anyway, the boredom had yet to set in, everyone was still excited about our new lives and our upcoming adventures. Nothing like years of routine to get the restlessness going. Eventually everyone took to reading voraciously but it didn’t last. No one was interested in a book club. I guess the idea came off as stuffy, and no one was reading the same titles anyway. That was before the patterns started to emerge.

No requests have come in but I’m starting to wonder if we should have brought along some self-help books. Though they would probably be embarrassed about checking those out. Knowing what books the crew reads can be an intimate thing. Anyway, I didn’t bring many.

The looks the crew give me are a clear indicator that they too are disappointed with my selection. And they are not pleased when they sense my reluctance to check out their requests. If only they knew that I am trying to protect them for the dreaded malaise. How could I have known before being out here myself. I am afflicted with the same dangerous mindsets, but I can’t let anyone see that I am troubled, it would only make things worse and further interfere with the trust put in my position.

If I could do it all over again, I would have brought magazines. Something light that makes people feel connected with the goings on of the world, rather than the lonely places and dramas. Information that can be taken in in bite-sized pieces without the commitment of time that goes along with a novel. Our job, at this point, is mainly to wait, so the crew feels the passage of time in a painfully slow fashion. If I had brought more cheap entertainment perhaps they would have something to discuss with one another that avoids the more brutal aspects of our position. I think it might have worked. I wish I had known. Maybe the idea of something disposable would have been appealing to them, something we don’t have to recycle over and over again.

Or should I have brought audiobooks? These days everyone that comes in the library seems to have an aversion to conversing with me. If I had stocked audiobooks it would have brought along with it a whole cast of stranger’s voices. I think it’s the sound of my voice that makes them cringe, along with the fact that most of my job consists of fairly scripted dialog. The audiobooks could have spoken to them, introduced a slew of foreign voices that no one has had the time to grow sick of. But now I’m speculating, and it won’t do the crew any good to think about what could have been, what I could have brought, or what I could have done better. It’s too late for that.

But it occurs to me that perhaps it’s not the material that’s the problem. It could be that the act of reading is solitary. Everyone feels alone and I’m giving them one more reason to be alone. I think back to all those smiling faces of the children at the terrestrial library during story time and realize that that’s what we’ve been missing all the while. We need to read together, to go through the stories together. Perhaps it’s not the stories of the sea, mysteries, or sci-fi, but the fact that we need to face our loneliness together.

So, I’m not going to worry about what books people check out, reading should always be a good thing. Instead, I’m going to put out a notice that tomorrow evening the ship’s library will be hosting our first adult story time read along. Doing something fun together should raise the spirits of the crew, and we can face our loneliness together for a change.

Author’s Biography

Jean-Paul L. Garnier lives and writes in Joshua Tree, CA where he is the owner of Space Cowboy Books, a science-fiction bookstore, independent publisher, and producer of Simultaneous Times podcast. In 2020 his first novella Garbage In, Gospel Out was released, and in 2018 Traveling Shoes Press released Echo of Creation, a collection of his science fiction short stories. He has also released several collections of poetry: Future Anthropology, Odes to Scientists (2019), Betelgeuse Dimming (2020), and Utopian Problems (2021). He is a five-time Elgin Nominee and also appeared in the 2020 Dwarf Stars anthology. He is a regular contributor to DreamFoundry.org's blog and is the current editor of Star*Line Magazine.