by Vernor Vinge
Tommie laughed. “So what? I just subverted the DHS snoop layer! That’s a national-security rap.”
“I don’t care if we’re talking high treason!” said Robert. If I can get back my song…“I mean, you know what a lover of books I am.”
The others nodded.
“So what is the plan?”
Blount gestured to Tommie. The little guy said, “Do you remember our underground hikes?”
“In the 1970s? Yes, they were fun—in a brain-damaged way.”
Tommie’s grin broadened.
“You’re telling me the steam tunnels are still in use?”
“Yup. In the nineties that type of construction went out of style. There were lots of new buildings that weren’t connected. But then in the oughts, folks wanted Extremely High-Rate comms. And the bioscience people wanted automatic specimen transport. These guys had lots of money.”
“Even more so, nowadays,” said Carlos.
Tommie nodded. “NIR lasers are not for them. They want xlaser and graser gear, trillions of colors per path, and trillions of paths. Nowadays, the ‘steam tunnel’ network is not for power or heat. Now there are branches extending under Torrey Pines Road to Scripps and Salk. I hear you can walk out under the ocean a short ways, though heaven knows what they’re doing there. To the east, you can get into every one of the biotech labs.”
Suddenly, Robert saw why the Mysterious Stranger was interested in the Elder Cabal. Aloud, he said, “What does this have to do with the Librareome Project, Tommie?”
“Ah! Well, you know that Max Huertas made his fortune out of biotech. He owns some of the biggest labs in North America—including one just a few thousand feet northeast of us. It was easy for him to modify his genome software to support the Librareome. Okay, so he’s storing the shredda in vaults under the north side of campus.”
“And?”
“And he’s not done with them! The shredding got him plenty of images, but the coverage is not complete. He’s got to scan and rescan where there were problems in the first pass. Now if there weren’t this time limit, he’d be better just to wait till the next victim library goes up in shreds and use that for cross-checking, but he’s in a rush.”
“That storage is also part of the Huertas propaganda,” said Winnie. “When they’re done with the rescans, the shredda will be ‘safely preserved in the Huertas vaults, for the sake of the archaeologists of future generations.’ Some of our faculty actually bought into that!”
“Well,” said Rivera, “there’s a small amount of truth to the claim. The paper will last longer in cool nitrogen than it would on library shelves.”
Winnie waved his hand dismissively. “The point is, the books have been destroyed, and Huertas is going to destroy more libraries if he’s not stopped. Our plan is—” He looked around, and seemed to realize that he was on the edge of prison time. “Our plan is to break into the steam tunnels and go to where Huertas is storing the shredda. Tommie has come up with a way to make that shredda unreadable.”
“What? We’re protesting the destruction of the library by destroying what’s left?”
“Just temporarily!” said Tommie. “I’ve found an incredible aerosol glue. Spray it on and the shredda will be like a huge chunk of particle-board. But after a few months, the glue will just sublimate away.”
Rivera was nodding. “So we are not making things worse. I wouldn’t be here if I thought we were wrecking what’s left of the books. Huertas’s scheme is unnecessary brutality, trying to grab everything when a slower approach would be just as good. Maybe we can derail him long enough so that the old-time book-friendly digitizers can catch up—and no more libraries will be wrecked.” Now his T-shirt was touting the American Library Association.
Robert leaned back and pretended to consider what they were saying. “You say the Chinese are about to shred the British Library?”
Rivera gave a sigh. “Yes, and they’re going to whack the Museum, too. But the EU is looking for an excuse to stop them. If we make Huertas look bad…”
“I see,” Robert said judiciously. He avoided Winnie’s eyes. Blount was already suspicious enough. “Okay. The plan seems pretty feeble…but I guess it’s better than nothing. Count me in.”
A grin spread wide across Tommie’s face. “Hey, Robert!”
Robert finally looked at Winston Blount. “Now the question is, why do you want me in?”
Blount grimaced. “Another pair of hands. Various errands—”
Tommie rolled his eyes. “The fact is, we couldn’t dream of doing this before you showed up.”
“Me? Why?”
“Ha. Think what we’re talking about: breaking into the steam tunnels, walking a mile across one of the most secure bio labs on Earth. I bet I could get us in. But could I hike us undetected across the bio labs? No way. That only works in old Star Trek shows, where the ‘ventilation system’ was designed mainly to drive idiot plots. This is the real world—and real-world security guys know about tunnels too.”
“That still doesn’t answer the ‘Me? Why?’”
“What? Oh. I’m getting to that! Anyway, after our protest tactics fizzled, I began to do some research.” Tommie patted his laptop. “Newsgroups, chat, search engines—I used them all, along with crazy stuff that looks more like online betting than anything else. Maybe the hardest part was to do it all without alerting the feds. That slowed me up, but eventually I got a pretty good picture of the labs’ security. It’s what you’d expect of a critical national security site. Serious stuff, but clunky. The system is password- and user-intrinsic-oriented, and mostly automatic. The intrinsic is a standard biometric—from certain officers in the U.S. protective services. And guess who happens to be nearby and on the access list?”
“My son.”
“Not quite. Your daughter-in-law.”
Alice. “That’s ridiculous. She’s some kind of Asian-affairs expert.” When she’s not a mental basket case. And then he thought about the Mysterious Stranger. “This is all too pat.”
Winnie: “Since when are you the security expert, Robert?”
I should keep my mouth shut. They’re going in the direction I want! But he’d lost his old skills at verbal maneuver, and he blundered ahead: “Information like this doesn’t turn up in a Google search.”
Tommie shook his head. But there was a look of pity in his eyes. “The world has changed, Robert. Nowadays, I can get answers in ways that would have been impossible twenty years ago. A hundred thousand people all over the world collaborated in my search, in little bitty parts of it that no one ever recognized. The biggest risk is that my results are simply bogus. Disinformation is king nowadays. Even when the lies are not deliberate, there are the various fantasy groups out there trying to torque reality around to their latest adventure game. But if we’re getting fooled, it’s not an ordinary con job. There are details and corroboration that come from too many independent sources.”
“Oh.” Robert made that sound impressed. In fact, he was impressed. Maybe the Stranger could deliver.
THEY TALKED FOR another half hour, but nothing more specific was said about the betrayal expected of Robert. Tommie had other tasks for them: They needed some university passwords and some voice fakery. The entrances to the steam tunnels were embedded in concrete now. There was no ground-level entrance as there had been fifty years ago, when construction was under way. And there was a problem with Tommie’s “aerosol glue.”
“The glue?” Tommie looked faintly embarrassed. “It doesn’t exist yet. But it’s almost been invented.” Tommie had broached the concept on an ornamental gardening forum, crossed that with some VCs. The Ornamental Shrub Society of Japan was even now working with some Argentine biologists to create the final form of the aerosol. The product should exist in less than two weeks, its first showing to be in a Tokyo plant-training exhibit. A liter of advance product was to be UP/Exed to Tommie shortly before that. He looked back at Robert’s incredulity. “Hey, this is just what hacking is li
ke nowadays.”
It was past 3:00 P.M. The shadow of the library had stretched into the east, drowning nearby buildings. The four conspirators were done for the day.
Tommie stood. “We can do it! We may not even be caught. But if we are, so what? It’ll be just like the old days.”
Carlos Rivera got up more slowly. “And it’s not like we’re harming anything.”
Tommie put a finger to his lips. “I’m lifting the deadzone, gentlemen.” He typed on his laptop, and the LED on the top edge of the case was extinguished.
They were all silent for a moment, trying to think of safe things to say.
“Ah, okay.” Rivera glanced at Robert. “Would you like see what we—what the library has done with the empty stacks?”
“You mean, what Tommie said was propaganda?”
Rivera gave a wan smile. “Yes, but it’s beautiful in a way. If it had been done after a gentler digitization, I would love it without reservation.”
He led them around the floor, past the elevators. “The stairway entrance has the best ambience.”
Winnie Blount grimaced, but Robert noticed that he was tagging along.
The stairwell was dimly lit. The naked-eye view showed concrete walls, seamed here and there with the silvery lines he had seen from the outside. As he stepped through the doorway, Robert’s view shifted to some kind of standard enhancement: now the lighting came from gas mantle lamps set in the walls. The shadowed concrete was gone. These walls were built from large stones, squared with chisels, fitted together with scarcely room for mortar. Robert reached out to touch the wall, snatched his hand back as he felt slippery stone—not clean concrete!
Rivera laughed. “You’re expecting the usual disappointment, right, Dr. Gu?” When touch contradicted visual illusion.
“Yeah.” Robert let his hand trail over the stone blocks, trace out the softer patches of lichen.
“University administration has been very clever about this. They enlisted the belief-circle community—and encouraged them to install touchy-feely graffiti. Some of the props are impressive even without the visual overlays.”
They went down two flights of stairs. This must be the landing for the fifth-floor entrance, but now the door was carven wood, gleaming darkly in the gaslight. Rivera pulled at the pitted brass handle and the eight-foot-tall door swung open. The light from beyond was actinic violet, wavering from dim to painfully bright. There were sparking sounds. Rivera stuck his head through and chanted something unintelligible. The lighting became more civil and the only sounds were distant voices.
“It’s okay,” said the librarian. “Come on.”
Robert stepped through the half-opened door and looked around. This was not the fifth floor of the Geisel Library, Planet Earth. There were books, but they were oversized things, set on timbered racks that stretched up and up. Robert bent back. The violet lights followed the stacks upward, limned their twisted struts. It was like one of those fractal forests in old graphics. At the limits of his vision, there were still more books, tiny with distance.
Whoa. He slipped, felt Tommie steady him with a hand in the small of his back.
“Neat, huh?” said Parker. “I almost wish I was wearing.”
“Y-yeah,” Robert steadied himself on a nearby rack. The wood was real, thick, and solid. He brought his gaze down to floor level and looked outward along the aisle. The path through the stacks was twisted—and it didn’t end at the external wall that must be there, just thirty or forty feet away. Instead, about where the windows should be, there were sagging wooden steps. It was the sort of ad hoc carpentry he had loved in old used-book stores. Beyond the steps, the stacks themselves seemed to be tilted, as though gravity itself were pointing in a different direction.
“What is all this?”
The three were silent for a second. Robert noticed that they seemed to be wearing dark armor. Rivera’s outfit had some spiffy insignia. It also looked suspiciously like a T-shirt and Bermuda shorts done in blackened steel plate.
“Don’t you get it?” Rivera said finally. “You three are Knights Guardian. And I’m a Librarian Militant. It’s all from Jerzy Hacek’s Dangerous Knowledge stories.”
Blount nodded. “You never read any of those, did you, Robert?”
Robert vaguely remembered Hacek from about the time he retired. He sniffed. “I read the important things.”
They walked slowly down the narrow aisle. There were side paths. These led not only left and right, but up and down. Snakelike hissing sounds came from some. In others, he saw “Knights Guardian” hunched over tables that were piled with books and parchment; light shone into their faces from the pages of opened books. Illuminated manuscripts indeed. Robert stopped for a closer look. The words were English, printed in a cracked gothic script. The book was some kind of economics text. One of the readers, a young woman with overgrown eyebrows, glared briefly at the visitors, and then gestured into the air above. High in the stacks, there was a thump, and a four-foot-wide slab of leather and parchment came tumbling down. Robert hopped backward, almost stepping on Tommie. But the falling book came to a hover just within the student’s reach. The pages riffled themselves open.
Oh. Robert backed carefully out of the alcove. “I get it. These are the digitizations of what’s been destroyed so far.”
“The first-pass digitization,” said Blount. “Bastard modern administrators got more good press out of this than all the rest of their propaganda put together. Everybody thinks it’s so clever and cute. And next week they’ll shred the sixth floor.”
Rivera led them outward, toward the sagging wooden stairs. “Not everybody is happy. The Geisel estate—Dr. Seuss—didn’t go along with the University on this.”
“Good for them!” Blount kicked at the timbered stacks. “Our students might as well go to Pyramid Hill.”
Robert gestured in the way that was supposed to revert vision to unenhanced reality. But he was still seeing purple light and ancient, leather-bound manuscripts. He tapped the explicit reversion signal. Still no onset of reality. “I’m stuck in this view.”
“Yup. Unless you take off your contacts or declare a 911, you can’t see what’s really here. And that’s another reason for not using Epiphany.” Tommie waved his open laptop like some talisman. “I can see the illusions, but only when I want them.” The little guy walked down another side path, here poking at a book that lay groaning on the floor, there stepping into an alcove to look at what the patrons were doing. “This place is so cool!”
When they reached the wooden stairs, Rivera said, “Be careful. These things are tricky.” About halfway down, the steps tilted and the perspective was all askew. Winnie went first. He hesitated at the twist. “I’ve done this before,” he grunted, almost to himself. “I can do it.” He stepped forward, started to stumble and then stood straight—but tilted compared with Robert and company.
When Robert reached the threshold, he closed his eyes. The Epiphany default was to drop all overlays on “eyes-closed,” so he was briefly immune to the visual trickery. He stepped forward—and there was no real tilt, just a simple turn!
Tommie came right after him. There was a big grin on his face. “Welcome to the Escher Wing!” he said. “The kids just eat this up.” At the bottom of the stairs there was another ninety-degree turn. Parker said, “Okay, now we’re walking back toward the building’s utility core, only we have the feeling that we’re still wandering through unending books.”
Books ahead and behind, and off to the side, hidden in alleys. Books above, like chimneys disappearing in purple light. He could even see books below them, where rickety ladders seemed to drop off into the depths. If Robert looked at them with slightly averted vision, the lettering on the spines and covers gave back a blacklight glow, violet almost too deep to see, but very clear, with the Library of Congress codes cryptic and runelike. The books were the ghosts—or maybe the avatars—of what had been destroyed.
They made sounds, groaning, hissing,
whispering. Conspiring. Deep in the alleyways, some of the books were in chains.
“Gotta watch out for Das Kapital,” said Rivera.
Robert saw one of the tomes—the word fits for once!—pulling at its chains, the links ringing loudly on massive eyebolts.
“Yup, Dangerous Knowledge yearns to be free.”
Some of the books must be real, touchy-feely props. The students in one alley were piling books together. They stood back and the texts nuzzled into each other in an orgy of flapping pages. “So that’s bibliographical synthesis?”
Rivera followed his gaze. “Er, yes. This started out as the scam Dean Blount said, something to endear the shredding project to the public. We represent books as near-living things, creatures that serve and bewitch their readers. Terry Pratchett and then Jerzy Hacek have been playing on that theme for years. But we really didn’t appreciate the power of it all. We have some of the best Hacek belief circles helping with this. Every database action has a physical representation here, just as in Hacek’s Library Militant stories. Most of our users think this is better than standard reference software.”
Winnie looked back at them. He had gotten far enough ahead that he seemed foreshortened, as if they were seeing him through a telescope at some great distance. He waved in disgust. “That’s the betrayal, Carlos. You librarians don’t approve of the shredding, but look what you’ve done. These kids will lose all respect for the permanent record of the human heritage.”
Tommie Parker was standing behind Robert. He muttered gleefully, “Winnie, the kids had already lost all respect.”
Rivera looked down. “I’m sorry, Dean Blount. It’s the shredding that’s evil, not the digitizing. For the first time in their lives, our students have modern access to premillennium knowledge.” He waved at the students down in the alley. “And it’s not just here. You can reach the library from the net, just minus the touchy-feely gimmicks. Huertas is allowing limited access without charge, even during his monopoly period. This is just the first-pass digitization, and only HB through HX, but we’ve had more hits on our pre-millennium holdings in the last week than we had in the last four years. And much of the new business is from faculty!”