by K. M. Szpara
She answered then a question I hadn’t wanted to ask. She grinned at me. “Here on Stahvi,” she said, “I flicker for myself.”
There are limits to Versa medical tech. They guard the secrets of their magic-like sciences, but they are not quite as god-like as they’d have us believe. Lake got me minor bodyscaping for free—she’d positioned herself as a Versa scaper’s muse/walking advertisement. Every few months she’d shift a little—taller, or rounder, black-skinned, etc.—but she kept the green eyes and the black hair in every iteration. She never spoke of it, but I know from my own experience it was her choice. My first scape was to change my eye color to match her precise shade of green. Then I had the Versa scaper do my hair black. The Versa suggested a change to the shape of my nose and a correction to my slightly pigeon-toed stance, but something in me wouldn’t let ver do it. As Lake would say it, I’m no Versa: I need some fixedness, some small tether to link who I’ve been with who I’ll be. And so I’ve been a red-haired, white-skinned woman. And I’ve been a lean, black-haired something-in-between. And I’ve been a sharp-faced grey-eyed man, but in all those iterations I’ve had the nose and the pigeon toes with which I was born.
Having two of us on Stahvi drummed up more business for the Versa scaper, but ve was a hungry and ambitious sort, and there is an art to scaping that eludes my human mind. Ve came to Lake and me one day and proposed a set of scapes that would—in ver words—equalize us. The Versa took our ragged, mangy DNA and sculpted out of it twins. Ve gave me Lake’s emerald-jade eyes and ink-black hair. Ve gave Lake my hawkish nose and wrong-angled feet. There was enough detritus in our genetic codes to match us on skin tone, on height, on build. We emerged from ver cocoons as mirror images, left and right.
The thing about finding another Terran on Stahvi back then was that as the two sole members of our species on the planet we were forced to choose: love each other deeply or hate each other on sight. Nothing in between was workable for either of our human minds; we each of us craved that extreme. Mercifully, we both turned to love. It would have been awkward but nothing more than that had we both turned to hate. I still shudder to think what it would have been like for one of us to love the other and the other to hate them in return. Lake and I were inseparable, were devoted, this is true. We’d shared a thousand kisses before we were equalized, and yet, something about the equalization, that strange magical-scientific twinning the Versa scaper pulled off, sparked something new. New and old—something forgotten but familiar. When we kissed the first time as a mirrored pair, as so identical and yet still different in our fundamental and imperceptible ways, it felt exactly like it had when he kissed me at midnight as that long-past year turned over. Something about it, some strange and charming taboo overturned, danced upon, celebrated and destroyed, at once lived in both that equalized kiss and the kiss on Arthur’s doorstep. There is something in that tension between the sameness of us and the difference that pulls at me. Something that highlights the glorious randomness of life. Something in those kisses that makes me feel at once infinitesimally small and yet the center of the universe, and the unresolvable paradox of it is intoxicating.
We lay entwined that first night as made twins, in bodies that were still unfamiliar but which already felt like home. I told Lydia Brightlake I loved her. She stroked my new breasts and told me she loved me, too. And then she smiled. “Well. Well, really, I love us. I love creating us from nothing, from scratch. I love being us.”
Jas’s job was to bring libraries into the twenty-first century. St Simon’s library hadn’t left the seventeenth, yet.
Jas stood in a university quad, surrounded by stone buildings. In the centre was a huge yew whose branches brushed the walls. The wooden library door, ahead, was studded with nails.
The house Jas shared with his mother in Bradford would have fitted comfortably into this quad. Jas felt his principles—the anti-elitist, democratic ones that drew him to work in libraries—should have soured the sight. But they didn’t. He felt out of place (too brown, too poor, too queer) but was still attracted.
The oak door opened. An older woman appeared in its shadow, straight-backed in dark clothes that swung about her like robes.
“Jaswinder? I’m the librarian for the Harrad Collection. You’ve brought a lot of luggage.”
Jas was smuggling the future, in big suitcases. Digitisation equipment: expensive, and unique, and terribly heavy. They’d been hell to drag around on the long train journey (although had probably done wonders for his developing arm muscles). The librarian hasn’t asked for them, his boss had said. But you can change her mind. Just don’t tell her you brought them with you. “I wasn’t sure what the weather would be like,” Jas said.
“I’ll send Fred to help.”
She slipped back inside, and from the same door rocketed a figure in a suit, thin as a stick with thick-framed glasses and a mane of hair tossing around.
“Hand ’em over. I’m stronger than I look.” A Scots accent. “I do all the shelving. Up and down the stairs, too—no lifts, the place is too old.” He grabbed a case, swung it over his shoulder, staggered a little. “Follow me.”
Up a stone staircase, into a room overlooking the quad. The yew tree pressed its fingers on the leaded glass window.
“Do I sleep here?”
“Yep. Student rooms. I’m down the corridor.”
“Aren’t you a librarian?”
“God, no. Who’d want to do that?”
“I do.” His holiday job was a decent start, but Jas planned (when he’d finished his degree) to get properly chartered.
“You’re young. You’ll grow out of it.”
Fred led Jas back to the library. A dim room, as long as one side of the huge quad. When the door opened, a knife of light stabbed across the floorboards. Tweedy readers cluster around the windows. Academics were strange. Any sane person would take a book outside, sit under the tree.
The librarian looked up from her desk near the door, shook back her bobbed grey hair.
“Jas. Call me Moira. Now, we have you for eight weeks?”
“Yes.” Or longer, if they need you, Michelle-the-boss had said.
“You’re going to tag our rare books, and connect each book to our catalogue record. You’ve had experience?”
“I tagged the incunabula in the founders’ library in Lampeter.” A miserable wet fortnight in Wales, but useful for the CV.
Moira laid a book on her desk. “Show me.”
Jas eyed the book, conscious of being auditioned. Nice leather binding, useful crescent-moon gap between the sewn pages and the spine. He took from his bag a small plastic box and a slim long tool, like a sparkler. Talk them through it, Michelle reminded him.
“So these are the seeds.” The box was full of flat beads, like white lentils. “And I pick one up…”
Dipping the sparkler in the box, giving it a theatrical stir, then tapping to dislodge all but one seed.
“Then we…” He slid the sparkler into the spine-gap of the book. Good: no knots of glue, no tearing threads. You wanted the invisible worm, from Blake’s poem, to wriggle into the book and hide the seed there, in the spine or the cover. The benevolent reader would never notice, the malevolent reader would never be able to find the seed and remove it.
“And now you can never lose it.” It was part of the sales patter, but heartfelt. In a traditional library books got lost, not just in a prosaic sense (like lost keys) but in a profound way (like lost souls)—misplaced, they became inert, never again to be useful.
This was a great time for a quick demonstration. Find an excuse, Michelle had said. It’ll hook them.
“Can I show you…” Jas moved around the room, sprinkling seeds at different heights on the shelves. (They were fiddly, but you couldn’t, ipso facto, lose them.)
This was the fun part. “Now, if you want to find something…”
Jas held his device up to the room. The screen showed dots of light sprinkled all around. Constellations. Jas knew w
hy it worked: because librarians thought of themselves as being gods of a miniature cosmos.
“Each light is a book. And when you know which book you want…” Jas turned off all the seed-lights except for the one he’d just installed. A single light remained, the star over Bethlehem.
“Hmm. I suppose it could be useful,” said the librarian.
Jas felt his smile congeal on his face.
“Okay, let’s do philosophers,” said Fred.
“Plato.”
“Ooh, a toughie. Ockham! William of Ockham. Your turn.”
“Morris. William Morris.”
“Sartre!”
At Moira’s instruction, Fred was helping Jas to seed the books. He was beaky, frenzied, seemed likely to jab a seed tool straight through a book cover. “I’m only working in this library until I get a post-doc job,” he’d announced. Jas resented this slur on the profession, but Fred did help to pass the time with whispered word games. Without Fred, it would have been dull work; Jas never read the books he seeded, to avoid getting sucked in.
By lunch on the first day, they’d seeded a huge stack of texts.
“We need the catalogue,” Jas whispered. “To match the seeds to records. How do I access it?”
Fred pointed to a beige terminal.
Jas read a peeling sticker announcing it had been inspected for safety. “Ten years ago?”
“Well, it passed!” Fred said. “What more do you want?”
When consulted, Moira searched under her desk and dragged out a laptop, maybe only five years old. “Don’t take it out of the library.”
It was ridiculously slow. The ancient kit was inexplicable, given that St Simon’s was so well endowed. The library catalogue wasn’t complex, you could run it on anything. Jas could load it on his phone, for goodness’ sake.
After an hour of wrestling with the ancient laptop, he did just that, and the work went so much quicker he nearly cried with relief. He kept the laptop open in case anyone was watching.
On the dot of five o’clock Fred stood and clapped his hands. Every tweedy reader looked up, and half of them closed their books and donned their jackets. Fred the pied piper led them towards a pub on the seafront.
“Why do you want to be a librarian, then?” Fred asked Jas as they walked. “Isn’t it a wee bit boring?”
Jas wondered if he was being tested. “There are radical librarians.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, fighting restrictions. Freeing information.” Jas admired them for all those things. What stole his heart was also the multicoloured hair, the facial piercings, and the fact that half of them seemed to be trans or queer. “Mostly in America,” he admitted.
“If you say so. I’ll get the drinks in. Connell, tell Jas about your research!”
Connell was a squat black professor from Los Angeles. He nodded his bald head sharply at Jas. “Trauma! War, civil conflict, interpersonal violence.”
“Oh. Goodness.”
One by one, the other researchers named their expertise.
“Italian Fascism.”
“Madness. Sorry, I wouldn’t say ‘madness’ normally, of course. But I’m eighteenth century, it’s all madness, lunacy, all that outdated terminology.”
“Medical ethics. Well, mostly when it goes wrong.” That was a woman from Sweden.
“I suppose you could say…the occult?” A younger man wearing a pentagram necklace.
“Mass graves.”
There was nobody else to speak. Say something! thought Jas. Anything! “Nazis?”
“Not really.”
With a clunk, Fred set down his tray of pints.
Ritual grumbling commenced. Jas knew it had all been said before, because people took up one another’s refrains.
“If I could take books back to my room…”
“And you’re only working on early twentieth century, aren’t you? They’re not fragile…”
“…not fragile at all.”
“And the chairs!”
“No back support! I have to do stretches…”
Prof. Connell murmured to Jas. “Hey, you’re doing something technological with the library, Jas?”
“Yeah.”
“Fantastic. Now, this place needs to open up a little, you know? An amazing collection. Should be available to the best people, twenty-four/seven. No offence to these guys! Are you going to shake things up?”
Jas nodded weakly.
When he next saw Professor Connell, the prof. was reading a book while sitting in the yew tree.
“Stop this at once.” Moira’s voice ricocheted off the walls of the quad.
“Okay, okay. Tell me which part I can’t do. Is the tree the problem? Can I sit on the grass?”
Jas grinned, then un-grinned. Better not to appear partisan. Better not to be seen at all. He’d just arrived in the quad, and hung back.
“You’ve removed a book from the library. You signed a contract.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure that contract’s legal. Forgive me. Two months in a dark room could make anyone a little wild. Cabin fever. Jas?” He’d been spotted. “Take this book while I climb down?”
The professor leaned down from the branches to pass Jas the book: a slim gum-bound paperback from the 1970s. Then the professor dropped neatly onto the grass, and walked back into the library.
“Good morning, Jas.” Moira fell into step beside him. “You’ve done counter work, haven’t you?”
“Sorry?”
“You’ve worked on library counters.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“You’ve probably had moments like this.”
“Mm.” Students hiding books down their trousers. Tossing them in the air as they walked through the security sensor. “I reckoned it was their job to push it as far as they could, and my job to bat it back.”
“It’s not symmetrical, though, is it? If half the time the thieves win, and half the time we win, soon there’s no library.” Moira held the door. “Jas, I want all the books seeded. Not just the old ones.”
“Yes.” That doubled the project. Michelle would be delighted. “I mean—I’m studying, I start my course again in October.”
“What are your grades like? You could study here at St Simon’s, perhaps, and work in the Collection.”
The casual offer, in the chill of the dark room, sent a shiver up Jas’s neck. To go to university—to indulge in that old, expensive rite of passage. To use a real library, rather than downloading e-books.
Then there was the added appeal of starting in a new place. His friends, his mother, had been a life support. But to begin again, where people had always known him as Jas, was tempting.
Fred had been eavesdropping. “So, she said you could study here? Will you go for it?”
To distract him, Jas asked: “What are you researching?”
“The Gothic.” Fred widened his eyes, tossed his hair.
“Isn’t that old-fashioned?”
“It won’t die! It’s big in America right now. I’m working on getting myself a Stateside post-doc. Going to become a genius.”
“Can you—I mean, you can’t plan to be a genius.”
“You need more than brains. You need funding.”
Moira was clearly embracing technology, so Jas decided to give her another demonstration.
“University of Salisbury—special collections. My boss designed this for them.”
Moira prodded Jas’s device, bringing up related lecture notes, an audio clip of two students debating.
“You could have something like this,” Jas said. “Use work from the visiting researchers. Showcase what the library does.”
Moira shook her head without taking her eyes off the device.
“This modernity,” she said. Jas thought she was referring to something on the screen, until she continued: “This modernisation.”
“Yes?”
“It happens, of course, but it’s not inevitable. This project you’re leading. It’s incredibly us
eful. But it’s not the leading wave of an unavoidable rising tide.”
“Of course!” Jas tried to sound sympathetic. “Not every innovation suits every library.”
“I hope you don’t feel you’re here under false pretences.”
“No, no. I’m happy just tagging,” Jas lied. “I just—I liked this.” He pointed at the device, at the University of Salisbury’s shining showcase.
“I like it too.” Moira was faking regret. Dishonesty was contagious. “Perhaps if things were different.” Then, sincere again, she held out a Post-it note. “Here’s the number for St Simon’s admissions. I told them you’d be in touch.”
“…your fatuous little dictatorship…”
Professor Connell had been shouting for a couple of minutes. Jas’s hands had started to shake—he hated arguments—so he put down the seeding wand.
“What harm does it do anyone?” The professor was playing to the gallery, but getting no response. The madness expert shook her head regretfully, the occultist pursed his lips. “So that’s it? No second chance?”
“You used your second chance weeks ago, Professor,” replied Moira.
The professor scooped up his notebooks. Everyone found somewhere else to look as he stomped down the aisle, slammed the oak door behind him.
Jas scribbled on a piece of paper: What was that about? Pushed it towards Fred.
Fred mimed holding a box, squeezing: a camera. Except the Professor wouldn’t have made that gesture—he’d have taken his snap with a discreet tap on his phone.
Back to America, Fred wrote. Utterly expelled.
“So photographs aren’t allowed at all?” Later, in the pub, Jas was still keeping his voice down.
“Nothing’s allowed.” Fred pulled out a sheet of crumpled paper. “Here’s the contract researchers sign. Check which ones you’ve already broken.”
No stealing, no smoking. Fair enough. No photocopying, no scanning. Well, it might damage the books. But for every three reasonable requests, there was a big ask.