"How are you doing?" A male voice came from behind Viriya.
Not again, thinking, she decided not to look back. She thought, What even is the point of this? Why do they worry so much about others?
It hadn't been too long since Viriya was at the University. And it was the sixth or eighth time someone had asked that.
The first time, an elderly person asked when she got out of the carriage. She was a bit relieved hearing that. After talking to her and entering the University, a girl, maybe a child, asked the same thing. She talked to her as well. From then until arriving at the library, it was maybe countless times she was asked that. Coming to the library was one of the reasons, thinking it would be silent.
Viriya looked towards the person and replied with a subtle, maybe forced smile, "You can see me, not that bad."
The man was shorter than Viriya and had a cane with him. He was looking at Viriya with what seemed like a genuine smile.
The forced smile went off and not any smile, but a relief washed over her. Looking at him she asked, "How about you?" Before knowing who it was, she didn't have any intention to carry on with the conversation anymore. But knowing Nrit most likely had it worse than her, she softened her tone quite a bit.
"Same as you." Coming closer and sitting on a chair next to Viriya, he said, "You could have taken some rest."
"Ehh, rest. Rest is overrated. And are you staying here for a long time?" Viriya knew Nrit was visiting his letter friend, who died in front of him, so Nrit still staying here after that wasn't making much sense, maybe just grief.
"The next crossing day isn't fixed yet. I came at the last calm one, waiting for the next one," Nrit replied.
Viriya was confused, almost completely. At first she acted like she understood whatever Nrit said, but remembering she had just met him just one day beforehand, she acted confused and asked, "Huh? What calm one?"
"That, uh that — the current between the lands?" Nrit replied. It was like he was looking for a short and simple answer, which might have tripped him up.
Viriya had heard about the severed southern continent during the carriage ride a few days before. If it's severed then there most likely is water, she guessed Nrit might be talking about that. She just nodded and said, "Oh yes, that one. Right. That's unpredictable."
She asked then, to move on from that topic, "Where are you staying?"
"Here. At the school." He replied with an exhausted sigh.
"Living at the University must've been exhausting." Viriya replied to the man sitting in front of her, who was so talkative at their first meeting.
He then continued, "Shokre, well I was supposed to live at his house but." While talking about Shokre, his friend, Nrit was looking down with his hand supporting his head.
After staying like that for a little while, he stood up and said, "My too-much-talking self went back to talking about myself. Do whatever you were doing." And started going towards the lady at the front desk near the entrance of the library.
That lady, Shereka, had hazel eyes with thick glasses on them. She wore dark leather trousers with a white shirt and vest. She was the last person before Nrit who had asked about Viriya's situation like the others.
She most likely knew the original Viriya well; she talked with some very pointed topics to Viriya. Viriya felt familiar with her conversation but couldn't exactly pinpoint what that was. Shereka of course asked how she was doing, about Viriya's pets, her family. Some other names she mentioned which Viriya couldn't really place in terms of who they were; the faces of the names felt fuzzy to her. Picking out faces from the memory flood was maybe hard after all.
A professor also came to the desk; he was asking Shereka for some suggestions about books, so they didn't talk much then. He didn't talk much with Viriya either; he just nodded towards her slightly once when he entered the room. In front of the professor, Shereka just asked if Viriya wanted to talk to Ruoark there. Ruoark might be able to help Viriya in that situation.
Viriya didn't talk much there; she just talked around those topics, but the "there" was somewhere Viriya didn't understand at all. Maybe a common place they used to go, or something else.
Maybe she was being a bit too cautious; maybe she should open up more, maybe not. But being this cautious was working for her. And she didn't want to fall into any hole while she was being a kind of normal Viriya.
When Viriya had gone from the desk, she heard a raised voice from the professor, the voice rough but a little high-pitched, "Why do you all keep moving the books around." Shereka replied something but Viriya didn't catch that.
Later she just went in, asked for a book about trees, and started reading, hoping she could find anything about the Imaginary tree. She wasn't done reading it when Nrit came along and they talked a little.
Viriya started to read the book once more. Till then she hadn't found any clue of that Imaginary tree. She hadn't read any of it in detail but the contents table wasn't obvious about whether the tree was in the book. She had roughly looked over about a quarter of the book and still found nothing other than what might have been normal trees at that time period.
The more she looked over the book, the more she found some trees which were quite weird; some were carnivorous, and pictures of them were actually really beautiful. One of them had really fragile-looking long vines, which the plant used to crawl onto surfaces, like a pumpkin plant. The plant had crawled into a different tree nearby. On those fragile-looking vines, along with leaves, some bones were hanging.
Along with other plants similar to them, almost completely opposite were the plants that grow fruit used for nutrition for the same tree, listed there. But not the tree she was looking for.
It also had some trees which read as though they were dead, but apparently not actually. They gave no response to the outside world, almost like a rock, but were actually alive. The only reason it was identified as alive was because of the internal structure of it, which was quite different from trees or any living beings. But different enough that it couldn't actually be dead.
She knew the tree called the "Imaginary tree" wouldn't be in a book of trees, but it was worth a try.
Later she thought she should get a book about geography, to understand the world she was in right then, or something which might contain something about the Imaginary tree.
She could vividly remember the leaves coming up from underwater and going towards the tree grown on the spiral mountain. And on each leaf, some things she-or he, Anish-wished to happen. He-she imagined the leaves and the wishes on them, all of them. But after saying sorry to Makriva yesterday, she couldn't remember the leaf where she was apologizing to Makriva. She remembered it was there, but bot how it looked or even if actually existed at all. Maybe because she had already done that, the leaf didn't even exist anymore.
The dream vision where she saw the tree was an experience of someone, after all. But the leaves showed his own inner desires, not the person whose experience she experienced.
Before she apologized to Makriva, she did lie quite a lot, but she used many truths she now knew from the original Viriya's experience. Maybe she misused the memories of the original Viriya, maybe not. Viriya did whatever she had to do to stay as Viriya.
Maybe from the guilt of using those memories, or maybe not, in the dream Viriya-Anish went towards Original Viriya, who had fallen on the top of the opposite side of the table. He made Viriya sit normally on the ancient futuristic throne correctly, after a lot of time because of the fog. He later walked along the long table to sit on his throne, looking at the sleeping, or half-sleeping, sitting Viriya on the ancient futuristic side, who had fallen on the table before.
He then sat there contemplating what should have actually been done.
After waking up she decided to go to the University to meet the door guard of "Her Breast," or what the Rene-la Shrit magazine calls The Nurturing Veins. The guard seemed like he knew many things and most likely didn't know Viriya very much. He was a good person to ask any question about.
But after coming to the University, that guard wasn't there guarding the door; it was someone else. After asking around, she got to know that the guard would be coming later. That was another reason for waiting and reading at the library.
She went back to Shereka, passing by other readers, to return the book of trees. And looking at the book Shereka was reading, Viriya asked, "What book are you reading? Do you have another copy I can read?"