Valentina sniffed.
“There have been arguments. Even some fights. Some cryptonaturalists are allied with dangerous creatures who take mutual-defense pacts rather seriously. There have been a handful of ugly incidents. But, all in all, Clara’s work led to a better, more thoughtful, more unified community.”
“But why did you ask me to start with this book? I was expecting more, I don’t know, basic procedures and facts. Maybe something to help prepare me for our job tonight. This is more…personality.”
“Exactly, Mr. Green. Facts are just facts. They are inert. Unshaped clay. Facts do not contain inherent significance. Facts, in short, do not make meaning. People make meaning, sculpting it from the raw substance of facts. ‘Personality,’ as you put it. In any discipline, if the goal is to collect information, it is worth asking some basic philosophical questions first. Questions like, why bother? Why should I care about this set of data? What is this information for? Why spend our limited life minutes on this? Robert Herkimer had his answer. Clara Rodriguez had a much different answer.”
Green pondered. It was a big question.
“May I ask what your answer is?” Green asked.
Valentina looked around her library.
“I agree with Clara, though I have made some of Robert Herkimer’s mistakes in the past. I have had a very long time to make mistakes. Have you read any of my journals yet, Mr. Green?”
“Not a journal exactly. You…left a notebook in the cabin. I read some of it the night with the rag moth. There was a letter to someone named Ivan. I’m sorry. I don’t suppose I should have read that.”
“Ah. No, that’s not one of my indexed journals for a reason, but Idon’t particularly mind. I am not terribly shy these days. Not much of interest for you, though, in a sentimental letter to my past.”
“Yeah. About that. And the thing you said earlier about Clara. That letter to Ivan was dated from the 1930s and referred to a long time ago.”
“Yes.”
“So, yeah, exactly how old are you? If you don’t mind my asking.”
Valentina smiled.
“I don’t mind, but I’ll propose a trade. It’s a trade of trust. Truthfully, I had it in mind when I asked you to read Clara’s journal.”
“Okay. I’m listening.”
“I’ll answer your question honestly and in return you’ll answer a personal question about yourself honestly. Agreed?”
“Sure. Why not? Agreed.”
“I am 512 years old. As near as I can guess, that is.”
Green began to smile and then the smile melted away. She was not joking.
“How?”
“Well, technically that is more than one question, but once you begin reading my journals you’ll learn all of this anyway. Call it a botanical accident for now. I was one of the people of the East European forest steppe. I had a talent for finding unusual plant species. One singular species left me frozen in time for nearly two hundred years and…deeply changed. So, perhaps you could argue that I am more honestly three centuries old, but I think I’ve earned all five. I have certainly paid for them.”
“Holy shit.”
For a moment, the room around Valentina seemed to fade and she was standing like a giant on a gray, weather-blasted plateau of time. She was as much a cryptid as the horned wolf, singular and inscrutable, an alien presence walking in the world of mundane things. The idea made him feel suddenly homeless, once again beyond the edgeof the map. Green’s vision shifted, and he saw his teacher, the woman who built a treetop library, who made him cheese on toast to heal his unraveling nerves.
Green recalled Valentina’s letter to Ivan.
…if we knew then that there was such a thing as too far away…
“So, Ivan…”
“Was a dear, dear friend in eighteenth-century Russia.”
“Too far away.”
Valentina’s eyes went somewhere distant.
