by Vernor Vinge
“Hypocritical bastards,” said Winnie.
Robert looked at the students in their alcove. The sex-between-books had ended, but now the books floated in the air over the students’ heads and the pages sang out in tiny voices to volumes still unsearched. Metaphor incarnate.
They trooped back toward the utility core. It turned out to be several times farther than Robert remembered. The staggered aisles must take them around the center of the real fourth floor.
Finally they were in sight of the eight-foot-tall doors. After everything else, the carven wood was quotidian reality. Even the floor had flattened into something solid and normal-looking.
And then that floor shifted under his feet.
“Wha—” Robert flailed out, fell against the wall. Books shifted on their shelves, and he remembered that some of those were as real and heavy as they looked.
Lightning flashed in pulsing arcs.
Rivera was shouting in Mandarin, something about a fake earthquake.
Whatever it was, the swaying and shifting were real.
A groaning sound came from below, and bats rushed back and forth in the air above. The swaying diminished, cycled around like a dancer doing a little jig.
And then it was over. The floor and walls felt as steady as they had been in Robert’s grad-school years.
Tommie climbed back to his feet and helped Winston Blount up. “All okay?” he said.
Blount nodded dumbly, too shaken for sarcasm.
“It’s never done that before,” said Tommie.
Carlos nodded. “Āiya, duìbùqĭ, wŏ gāng xiăng qĭlái tāmen jīntiān shì xīn dōngxī,” he said, something about trying something new today.
Tommie patted the librarian on the shoulder. “Hey man, you’re talking Chinese.”
Rivera stared for a moment and then responded, still in Mandarin, but faster and louder.
“It’s okay, Carlos. Don’t worry.” Tommie guided the young man down the stairs. Rivera was still talking, but in bursts, repeating, “Wŏ zài shuō yīngyǔ ma? Shì yīngyǔ ma?” Am I speaking English? Is it English?
“Just keep going, Carlos. You’ll be okay.”
Robert and Winnie brought up the rear. Blount was squinting his eyes in that exaggerated way of his, searching. “Ha!” he said. “The bastards were using the stability servos to shake the building. See.”
And for a wonder, Robert did see; all the practice was paying off. “Yes!” The Geisel Library was one of the few buildings not replaced after the Rose Canyon Quake. Instead, they built active stabilization into the old frame. “So the admin thought this would give a little extra realism…”
“We could have been killed,” said Blount.
They were at the third floor. Coming up the other way was a group of students; at least, Robert assumed they were students, since they were laughing and most had chosen monstrous forms. The two groups slid past each other, the oldsters silent until the students had disappeared above them.
Tommie said, “What triggers the rock and roll, Carlos?”
Rivera weaved around an armoire that was built into the wall. Now he shouted, “Am I speaking English yet?…Yes! Oh, thank God. Sometimes I dream I get stuck forever.” He walked several paces, almost crying with relief. Then the words came streaming out of him. “Yes, yes. I understood your question: I’m not sure what triggers our fake earthquakes. I was at the meeting where we decided to use the stability system this way. The trigger was supposed to be any attempt to ‘open’ a book that contains knowledge ‘Mankind was not meant to know.’ Of course, that’s a joke—except when it’s so deadly serious that Homeland Security shows up. So I think we just trigger the shakes at random.”
They continued downward, Rivera all but babbling: “Our chief librarian is totally committed on this. She’s also a big cheese in the local Hacek belief circle. She wants to implement Hacek-appropriate penalties for users who break library rules.”
Tommie’s look of concern was replaced by technical interest. “Jeez,” he said, “Hacek torment pits?”
At the main floor, they stepped out onto the standard carpeting of the library’s main foyer. An hour earlier, Robert and Sharif had gone through this area to get to the elevators. Robert had scarcely noticed the clean, open space, the statue of Theodor Seuss Geisel. Now it was a welcoming sanity. They walked through glass doors into the afternoon sunlight.
Winnie turned to look up at the overhanging stories of the library. “They’ve turned the place into a menace. That earthquake was, was…” Abruptly his gaze came down from the sky. “Are you okay, Carlos?”
The librarian waved his hand. “Yes. Sometimes getting stuck is a little like an epileptic seizure.” He wiped his face; he was drenched in sweat. “Wow. Maybe this was a bad one…”
“You should get medical attention, Carlos.”
“I am. See?” Medical flags had popped up around his head. “I alarmed out on the stairs. There’s at least one real doctor watching me now. I—” he hesitated, listening. “Okay, they want me at the clinic. Some kind of brain scan. I’ll see you next time.” He saw the look on their faces. “Hey, don’t worry, guys.”
“I’ll come along,” said Tommie.
“Okay, but don’t talk. They’re prepping me for the scan.” The two walked off toward the west-side traffic circle.
Robert and Winnie stared after them. Blount spoke with uncharacteristic uncertainty. “Maybe I shouldn’t have hassled him about the Hacek stuff.”
“Is he going to be okay?”
“Probably. Every time another veteran gets permanently stuck, the VA looks real bad. They’ll do their best for him.”
Robert thought back to all of Rivera’s strangeness. Normally, his Mandarin was just short interjections, almost an affectation. If those had been in Spanish, he might not even have noticed. But now—“What’s the matter with him, Winnie?”
Blount’s gaze was abstracted. He shrugged. “Carlos is a JITT.”
“What’s that?”
“Huh? Christ, Gu! Look it up.” He glared around the plaza. “Okay. Okay.” He gave Robert a forced smile. “Sorry, Robert. JITT’s an easy search topic. You’ll find lots of good discussion. The important thing is, we have to keep our eyes on the ball. Um, Carlos would want that. A lot depends on you doing the right thing.”
“But what is that? What—”
Winnie held up a hand. “We’re working on it. We’ll get you the details soon enough.”
ON THE DRIVE home, Robert looked up ‘JITT.’ There were millions of hits, in medicine, in military affairs, in drug enforcement. He picked the Global-Security summary off the top of “respected contrarian” sources:
JITT, “just-in-time-training” (also, “just-in-time-trainee”, when referring to a victim of the procedure). A treatment that combines addressin therapy and intense data exposure, capable of installing large skill sets in less than 100 hours. Most famous for its tragic use in the Sino-American Conflict, when 100,000 U.S. military recruits were trained in Mandarin, Cantonese—
and a list of specialties that Robert had never heard of. In less than ninety days the Americans had made up their military language gap. But then there were problems—
This talent pool was decisive in ground operations; however, the human price of the procedure was apparent even before the end of the war.
Robert Gu—and perhaps every student—has dreamed of shortcuts. Learn Russian or Latin or Chinese or Spanish, overnight and painlessly! But be careful what you wish for…He read the sections on side effects: Learning a language, or a career specialty, changes a person. Cram in such skills willy-nilly and you distort the underlying personality. A very few JITTs suffered no side effects. In rare cases, such people could undertake a second hit—even a third—before the damage caught up with them. The rejection process was a kind of internal war between the new viewpoints and the old, manifesting as seizures and altered mental states. Often the JITT was stuck in some diminished form of his/her new
skill set…After the war, there was the legacy of the JITT-disabled veterans, and continuing abuse by foolish students everywhere.
Poor Carlos.
And just what is the Mysterious Stranger promising me?
This had definitely been one of those future-shock days. Robert rolled down the window and felt the breeze sweep by. He was driving north on I-15. All around was a dense suburbia much like the most built-up parts of twentieth-century California, except that here the houses were a little drabber and the shopping malls were more like warehouse districts. Strangely, there were real malls, even in this brave new world. He had shopped in a couple of them. Some places had plenty of solid architecture. Shopping “for the old at heart” was their motto; that would not have worked in 2000.
Robert pushed away the mysteries (and the fear) and practiced with his Epiphany. Let’s see the minimum adornment. Robert shrugged the familiar gesture. Okay so far. He could see simple labeling. Everything, even the ice-plant on the sides of the freeway, had little alphanumeric signs. Another shrug of the shoulder, and he was seeing what the objects he was passing—more accurately, the owners of the objects—wanted him to see. There was advertising. The malls had guessed he was an old fart, and tuned their ads accordingly. But there was none of the outright spam of some earlier sessions. Maybe he finally had his filters set right.
Robert leaned back from the window and reached out to wider universes. Colored maps appeared before his eyes. There were realities that were geographically far away, not overlaid upon San Diego at all. Those must be like the cyberspace crap of the eighties and nineties. Finally he got a window that promised “public local reality only.” Yeah. Only two hundred thousand of them for this part of San Diego County. He chose at random. Outside the car, the north county hillsides were swept clean of the subdivisions. The road had only three lanes and the cars were out of the 1960s. He noticed the tag on the windshield of his car (now a Ford Falcon): San Diego Historical Society. Bit by bit, they were reconstructing the past. Big hunks of the twentieth century were available for people who wanted those simpler times.
Robert almost stayed with this view. It was so near his own grad-school years. It was so…comforting. It also occurred to him that these history fans might be allies of the Librareome Project. With Huertas’s database in place they could proceed even faster with their reconstructed nostalgia.
He brought up the control window. There was something called “continuous paratime traversal.” Or maybe he should pick on a particular writer. There was Jerzy Hacek. No, he’d seen enough of “A Little Knowledge” for today.
How about Terry Pratchett? Okay. The subdivisions were adobe now. His car was an artfully contorted carpet, swooping down a grassy slope that a moment ago had been the grade north of Mountain Meadow Road. In the valley ahead, there were colorful tents with signs painted in a cursive script that made the roman alphabet look vaguely like Arabic calligraphy. There was a scrap of ocean visible in the long, westward-tending valley. And sailing ships?
Robert Gu had read one Pratchett novel. His recollection was that the action mainly took place in a city that resembled medieval London. This was different. He tried to see into the tent city…
Miri --> Lena, Xiu:
Xiu --> Miri, Lena:
Miri --> Lena, Xiu:
Xiu --> Miri, Lena:
Miri --> Lena, Xiu:
Lena --> Miri, Xiu:
Miri --> Lena, Xiu:
Someone gave a polite cough. Robert twisted around.
It was Sharif, sitting on the far end of the passenger seat. “Didn’t mean to surprise you, Professor.” The vision smiled ingratiatingly. “I tried to reappear earlier, but there were technical difficulties.”
“That’s fine,” said Robert, wondering vaguely if Tommie was still interfering.
Sharif waved at the landscape around them. “So what do you think?”
It was the land of San Diego with a little more water. And a different people, a different civilization. “I thought I was dialing into one of the Terry Pratchett stories.”
Sharif gave a shrug. “You got the main Pratchett belief circle all right. At least for San Diego.”
“Yes, but—” Robert waved at the grasslands. “Where’s Ankh-Morpork? Where are the slums and the dives and the city guard?”
Sharif smiled. “Mainly in London and Beijing, Professor. It’s best to fit one’s fantasy to follow something like the underlying geography. Pratchett writes of a whole world. This here, is what fits San Diego.” Sharif stared for a moment. “Yes, this is Abu Dajeeb. You know, the sultanate he put just south of Sumarbad in The Fiery Crow.”
“Oh.” The Fiery Crow?
“Written after you lost, ah—”
After I lost my marbles, yeah. “It’s, it’s immense. I can imagine someone writing about such a place, but no one man or even a movie company could put together all the—” Robert shrank back from the window as a woman on a winged iguana flew by. (He slipped into the real view, saw a Highway Patrol cruiser speeding past.)
Sharif chuckled. “It’s not the work of one man. There’s probably a million fans who’ve contributed to this. Like a lot of the best realities, it was also a commercial effort, the most successful external cinema of 2019. In the years since, it has just gotten better and better, an act of love on the part of the fans.”
“Hmm.” Robert had always resented the millions that went into the film industry, and the writers who got rich from it. “I’ll bet Pratchett made a pretty penny out of this stuff.”
Sharif gave a smirk. “More than Hacek. Not as much as Rowling. But the microroyalties add up. Pratchett owns a rather large part of Scotland.”
Robert shifted away from the Pratchett imagery. There were others: Tolkien views, and things he couldn’t recognize even from their labels. What was SCA? Oh. In the SCA vision, the suburbs were transformed into villages behind walls, and there were castles atop the higher hills. The county parklands looked fierce and forested.
Sharif seemed to be following his imagery. He jerked a thumb at the Los Pumas Valley Park just sliding by on the right. “You should see the Ren-Faires. They grab the whole park, sometimes run pretend wars between the barons of the hilltops. It’s excellent, my man, truly excellent.”
Ah. Robert turned and took a close look at Sharif. The match to his earlier appearance was perfect, except for the smartass grin on his face. “And you’re not Sharif.”
The grin broadened. “I was wondering if you’d ever catch on. You really must learn to be more paranoid about identity, Professor. I know, you’ve met Zulfi Sharif in person. That is the graduate student you think it is, and just the groveler he seems. But he doesn’t have good control. I can show up as Sharif whenever I please.”
“That’s not what you said a few minutes ago.”
Sharif frowned. “That was different. You’ve got other fans. One of them is not fully incompetent.”
Huh? Robert thought a second, then forced a smile. “Then perhaps you’d better have some password so I don’t blurt all your secrets to the wrong Sharif, eh?”
The Mysterious Stranger didn’t look amused. “Very well…When I first say ‘my man,’ that will trigger a certificate exchange. You don’t have to do a thing.” Now Sharif’s face had a faint greenish tinge, and his eyes had a slant that had nothing to do with epicanthic eyefolds. He smiled. “You’ll see your djinni and know it’s really me. So what did you think of Tommie Parker’s plan?”
“Ah…”
Sharif—Stranger-Sharif—leaned toward him, but there was no feel of motion in the faux leather seat. “I am everywhere, and I appear however I wish, to prod
uce the results that I wish. Despite all Tommie’s cleverness, I was there.” He stared into Robert’s eyes. “Heh. At a loss for words, aren’t you, Professor? And that’s your whole problem, isn’t it? I want to help you with that, but first you’ll have to help me.”
Robert forced a cool smile. A winning reply was nowhere to be found. The best he could do was “You’re promising me a miracle, without showing me a particle of evidence. And if it’s JITT you’re offering, I’m not buying. That’s not what creativity is about.”
Sharif sat back. His laugh was open and pleasant. “Very true. JITT is a dread miracle. But happy miracles are possible nowadays. And I can make them.”
His car had left the freeway. It drove the winding way along Reche Road. They were only a few minutes from West Fallbrook and Bob’s place. The Mysterious Stranger seemed to watch the scenery for a few moments. Then: “I really wanted to get a head start on things today, but if you insist on hard evidence…” He gestured and something flashed in the air between them. Normally that indicated that data had been passed. “Take a look at those references. And here’s proof that I was largely behind the breakthroughs described.”
“I’ll take a look and get back to you.”
“Please don’t take too long, Professor. What your merry crew is planning is dead on arrival without your prompt help. And I need that if I am to help you.”
His car turned onto Honor Court and slowed to a stop just beyond Bob’s house. It wasn’t even 4:30, but the ocean haze had moved in and things were getting dark. Little clusters of children were playing here and there along the street. God only knew what they were seeing. Robert stepped into the chill air and—there was Miri pedaling a bicycle up the street toward him. They stared at each other awkwardly. At least, Robert felt awkward. Normally they didn’t see each other except with Bob or Alice. In the old days, I never would have felt an instant’s discomfort for blasting this child. But somehow the concerted anger of Bob and Alice—and Miri’s own stiff-necked courtesy—made him very uncomfortable. I can’t stay here, owing children who should owe me.