Banned Books, Banned Girl

Part One

The morning light penetrated even the cave that was Surrat's Bookshop, as Maria Kehoe dusted the grim thick blue tomes that were the main officially-allowed reading matter these days in the republic of Lycia. Once, as Maria's father told her, Lycia was the freest nation in the world. Now Maria spent her days at a ghost-job checking daily updates to the banned-book lists and pulling newly forbidden books from the used-book shelves in the back room.

There were official employees assigned to Surrat to assist him in tending his shop. They were D-4s--- the lowest level of the proletariat--- those from the chronically jobless and crime-filled bad neighborhoods who hadn't managed to rise up into any level of usefulness or party activism. There were four of them, and every three months the government would take them back and send four new ones. They were supposed to be dusting, sweeping and mopping, since few of them could be trained to run the cash register, and most were not literate enough to shelve books. 

Ronin was the worst of them. Short, muscular and tattooed, he didn't take the concept of work very seriously. He'd come in the morning with the rest, and then disappear for the rest of the day. Today, though, he was sticking around the shop. Not doing anything that resembled work. Just following Maria around.

Suddenly, Ronin grabbed Maria by the shoulders, making her drop her feather-duster.

"I know about you, girl," he said. "You ain't one of us--- you are just a ghost worker, a defective, you ain't allowed to have a job, you ought to have been sent to a mercy center and got rid of."

Maria twisted out of his grip. "I have work to do--- you might try that yourself some time." She fled, rushing up the back stairs to the second floor where Surrat kept the overflow of used books that he obtained until they could be sorted and shelved. She sat on the floor with a current list of banned books, and began sorting through the new acquisitions. Some books were innocent, some were of a questionable category but not officially banned, and of the banned books--- well, Surrat never said anything to Maria, but some banned books were in high demand among people who could pay for such things, and some were of no use except to add to a pile at a book lighting. And shopkeepers were expected to donate those, since book lightings were considered wholesome activities for the Young Folk groups.

Sorting through the books, her fingers lit upon a small blue booklet she remembered from her childhood--- it was the same rosary booklet her mother had, that she'd got from her parish church before the Ds got around to padlocking it. Maria hesitated over the booklet. She'd memorized the rosary prayers in childhood, but she didn't know the rosary mysteries. Should she take the booklet out? She could put it back into stock once she'd finished the memorization.

"Knock yourself out, kid," Mister Surrat's voice came from the doorway. "Keep the booklet--- but don't let anyone catch you with it on the street."

"I'm not planning to take it out of the shop," Maria said. "Just like the books you allow me to read, it's better when I keep them in the building. And I don't need to keep this booklet--- I just want to memorize something in it. The Ds can't ban what you keep in your head." Though the Ds could ban you, if they were so minded.

Surrat came into the room and began looking though the books Maria had sorted into the 'banned' pile, smiling and nodding at the sight of certain books.

"Hey, Mister Surrat, who's minding the shop?"

"You will be, in a minute," Surrat said. "I'm going off on my lunch break. Do you want me to bring you back a sandwich? They have spicy soy-lentil butter."

Maria grimaced. "No, thank you. The double-coffee with cream and butter I had this morning should tide me over."

In the shop, Maria manned the cash register, mainly to discourage the D-4 'workers' from trying to steal from it. There were always a few nicely dressed people in the shop over the lunch hour, but they mostly paid electronically. Many of them didn't even read, but they decorated their living spaces with expensive thick volumes, the work of dead-but-not-disgraced D leaders who had cribbed most of their tired ideas from Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung and that Austrian guy with the mustache. The books were not there to be read, but to signal D party loyalty.