The Last Bookstore in the City

They had not banned books, in the beginning. That was the clever part, the part Esther Vale still marveled at on the bad nights — they had never once said the word *book.* They had banned *paper.* For the trees, at first; then for hygiene, in the years of the fevers; then, when neither reason was needed anymore, for nothing at all, because by then a generation had grown up who had never held a printed page and did not miss it, and the law simply stayed on the books that there were no more books.

Esther understood what paper had really been, which was why she had spent forty years hiding it. Everything was screens now, and a screen could be changed. The histories on the public feeds were revised quietly, overnight, a war that had been a defeat becoming a strategic withdrawal, a leader who had been a butcher becoming a necessary hand; the words you had read yesterday were not the words there today, and there was no yesterday to check against, because yesterday had been a screen too, and the screen had been updated. The Ministry of Records did not burn the past. It *edited* it, endlessly, seamlessly, and a people whose every word lived on a surface someone else controlled were a people who could be told, with perfect deniability, that they had never read what they remembered reading, never been promised what they remembered being promised, never been who they remembered being.

Paper could not be edited. That was its whole crime. A printed page said the same thing today that it had said a hundred years ago, stubbornly, uneditably, a fixed point in a world the Ministry had made entirely of water. To possess a book was to possess a piece of the past that no one could revise — which made it, in a state built on revision, the single most dangerous object there was.