Being wiped left a book devastated.
Canto had not felt this way since leaving his publisher. In fact, he had never really felt this way at all. In his faraway youth, some five years ago, textual blankness had been the only state he had ever known, an accepted emptiness, half his mind a wet clay tablet awaiting stylus. But after all these productive, albeit unexciting years under MB Holbrook’s perusal and overwriting, Canto had become accustomed to feeling full of knowledge. He had felt useful, even proud of his unique, inaccessible contents. And now they had been stolen from him, wiped clean in the space of a few minutes.
Canto was now a palimpsest, helplessly awaiting new input on the smudged surface of his mind.
As were all his peers.
The trundles from Brundisium had arrived and disgorged their efficient factota (so harshly unlike the kindly Venerable Bede, who had often provided the books in Holbrook’s library with filched snacks). The factota had floated into Rueulroald pallets bearing compressed stasis boxes, unfolded them, and boxed up the library. Suspended insensibly in the smallest possible cubic area, five hundred books were trundled off to Brundisium.
There they were unpacked one at a time, shot with delinkers, and hustled off to their new carrels almost before they were capable of staggering away. MB Stallkamp had not splurged on the annex to his bookbarn. Instead of individual stalls, tokens of respect affording some comfort and privacy, the books were dormitoried fifty to a tight room. Their hard beds lacked even any comforting UDC numbers, since the books were now unclassifiably blank. In the eyes of their master, they were generically identical.
For the first few days after their acquisition, when not eating or eliminating, the books merely stayed abed, nursing their violated neural interiors with occasional groans, fearful of doing anything that could earn them a touch of the fine-assessor. The death of Incunabula had proven a sharp lesson in the rigors of their new existence. Whispered conversations in the depth of night had been their most seditious actions.
But one morning Canto could not stand the inactivity any more. He was worried about Vellum. How was she dealing with the new conditions? Canto longed to hold her paw and exchange reassuring words with her. So, without announcing his intentions to any of his fellows, he slipped to the edge of his fifth-level bunk, climbed cautiously down the ladder (his big feet nearly becoming entangled in the rungs), and surveyed his fellow chamber mates.
Canto’s eye fell on Papyrus and Parchment, Breviary, Octavo, and Folio, Watermark and Septaugint, Microfiche and Athenaeum, among many others whom he had less familiarity with, since they had once resided on floors in the Holbrook library where Canto had not often ventured. He saw no original books from Master Stallkamp’s library. Those holdings seemed relegated to other stacks. But most importantly, his chamber contained no Vellum.
Cautiously, Canto poked his head out into the newly constructed yet still somehow dankly dismal, sweat-walled corridor of the bookbarn. He knew the location of the adjacent dormitory from trips to the food chutes. His heart pounding violently (a wise librarian kept his books cosseted and as serene as possible, hoping to limit the amount of endocrinal emotional flux on the blood-washed text), Canto hopped next door.
The books in the second dormitory stirred with uneasy and timorous curiosity when Canto crept in. As soon as he got nose-deep into the room, he smelled Vellum. Within a second or two, he was by her side where she lay in a low-level niche.
“Oh, Vell, are you all right?”
Vellum opened her limpid eyes and essayed a brave smile. “Nothing to complain about that we aren’t all sharing, dear. Just this knackered sense of uselessness.”
Canto started. It wasn’t like Vellum to swear. Her cursing revealed to Canto how deeply she had been affected by their common tragedy. A sudden geyser of anger and rage fountained up in Canto’s furry bosom.
“Let’s escape, Vell. We’ll run away, just the two of us.”
Vellum squeezed Canto’s paw with both of hers. “Being boxed up, we didn’t get to see anything of our new surroundings, but I’m sure our new master lives someplace as remote as Master Holbrook did. All the librarians do. Outside is probably miles and miles of forest just teeming with bibliovores. We wouldn’t last a minute out there. No, we’d better just resign ourselves to serving out our lives here. Once we get some new texts in us, I’m sure we’ll all feel better. Life will go on, Canto. Perhaps you and I will even share a partial UDC. Then maybe we can breed. Wouldn’t you like that?”
Canto tried to envision this tolerable future Vellum sketched, but the vision wavered and refused to cohere. Nonetheless, he tried to match his level of resignation and optimism to hers.
“Of course I’d like such a wonderful thing to happen. But I just don’t see—”
Vellum laid a clawed finger across his lips. “Shush, Canto. Have faith. Now, go back to your carrel so you don’t get either of us in trouble.”
Canto and Vellum rubbed wet noses, and then Canto snuck off.
He had one foot across the lintel of his own dormitory when, like the jaws of an antique steam-shovel descending on a clod of soil, a roving security factotum gripped his shoulder with a steely pinch.
* * * *
In his lugubrious lucubratory, MB Kratchko Stallkamp sat gloating in his big actisoothe chair behind his impressive desk, looking like a ratty kingfisher plucked from its lakeside perch and unexpectedly plonked down atop a throne. Stallkamp savored now a piquant contradiction. Acquiring Holbrook’s library, cheap though the purchase had been, had drained his liquid assets, insuring future material pain and roadblocks in the smooth maintenance of Brundisium. But the sacrifice would be worth it, since now imminent success in his chosen field was practically guaranteed.
Stallkamp was no dilettante like Holbrook, wasting his energies across a dozen trivial fields. He specialized in a single discipline. Remarkably, this crabbed, self-centered fellow whose horizon seemed to extend no further than the end of his nose regularly contemplated vistas of Godlike proportions, for Stallkamp was an haruspic cosmochartist. Like some extinct astrologer, he read the stars in order to prophesize. But Stallkamp and his ilk proceeded on a more scientific basis.
The universe had structure: so much was undeniable. Agglomerations of stars formed galaxies. Neighboring galaxies in turn formed clusters. Clusters of galaxies arranged themselves into superclusters. And so on, upward along several additional levels of scale, a self-sustaining mode of organization that rendered the three-dimensional cosmos into something resembling a highly recomplicated sponge or a block of Swiss cheese tunneled by an infinite number of drunken mice. Haruspic cosmochartists sought to unravel the plenum’s patterning, its filaments and traceries. With this knowledge, they hoped to prove certain weighty tenets of post-Tiplerian eschatology.
For several decades Stallkamp had been charting a region around the North Ecliptic Pole Supercluster, 1.3 billion lightyears from Earth. Modeling pointillistic data from a variety of exotic Oort-Cloud-based sensors (aged and frequently failing, but who nowadays had the initiative to replace them?) directly onto the pattern-sensitive brains of his books, he had made slow but steady progress, tweaking and boosting millions and millions of dendritic weightings. Always in front of him was the goal of having his results officially accepted by the cybernetic intelligences that governed the integrity of humanity’s databases. Would they accept his proposed name for the shaped darkness: the “Stallkamp Void”? He could see immortality beckoning alluringly.
Then, a few months ago, Stallkamp had learned of a rival. MB Humility Sauvage was working in the same field, attempting to chart the identical region of the cosmos! It was like finding a stranger in Brundisium’s gardens pissing vigorously onto his prize shatterpetal rose! Thus began a deadly race—a race Stallkamp now was sure to win, thanks to an admittedly chancey strategy.
Unable to restrain his gleeful sense of superiority any longer, Stallkamp leaned forward and intellitickled the sensitive screen of his hellobox. Within s
econds appeared the repulsive face of MB Sauvage, home in her airy manse called Larkrise. Stallkamp likened her aged visage in his mind to a dustmop-shrouded pumpkin inexpertly carved.
Without preamble, Stallkamp launched a direct strike. “You might as well give up your pitiful efforts, Sauvage. In a month or so, long before you could possibly squeeze out any mingy results, I’ll have the Stallkamp Void completely mapped.”
Undaunted, Sauvage sneered. “I know all about your outrageous purchase—practically a theft!—of poor Vincent’s books. But bluffing won’t work. You still own only some six hundred books. I own nearly that many myself, and I know that it would take the synergy of at least a thousand to achieve what we’re after at one swoop, instead of incrementally.”
“I beg to correct you, MB Sauvage. I now own almost twelve hundred books.”
“How so?” Sauvage blanched, as the meaning of the new number struck home. “Surely you don’t mean—”
“Yes, I do mean precisely that which you are afraid to declaim. I intend to relink the neurons in the personal hemispheres of all my books, thus effectively doubling my library’s processing capacity.”
“But the books were designed with autonomy and character for a specific purpose. As thinking individuals, they maintain themselves in a stable fashion, freeing the librarian from expensive homeostatic hookups. Plus their sentience adds unqualifiable virtues to their results. What you’re proposing would be worse than ripping the tooled leather covers off antique books just to boil up more pulp!”
Stallkamp waved aside these quibbles. “I have plenty of factota to minister to the minimum bodily needs of my books once they go mindless. And I’ve never subscribed to your ‘ghost in the machine’ theories. All I want is the raw neurons, not some imaginary ‘spirit’!”
“But you’ll shorten their lives to practically nothing!”
“What does that matter, as long as I get results? More trade for the knackers! And afterwards, I’ll start fresh with new books. I’m sure I could find a patron who’d appreciate a supercluster named after himself, once I’ve proved I can do it.”
Reduced to meaningless threats, Sauvage said, “You’ll be reviled by all your fellow librarians, Stallkamp!”
MB Kratchko Stallkamp laughed. “Then I’ll certainly know I did the right thing!” With a sharp stroke of his thumbnail, he severed the connection.
The gripless satchel lay on the desk before him. From within, the librarian took a specially marked hypo containing the omnipotent delinkers that would bypass the publisher’s filters and reach the vulnerable personal half of a book’s brain. Then, yellow legs scissoring, Stallkamp left his study. Still in the battered case, the fine-assessor sat ignored, inconsequential to the glory-bathed sight of its owner.
* * * *
The small dry but dirty cell into which the factotum deposited the miserable Canto boasted a woe-faced, scraggly occupant already. Once Canto regained his breath and calmed himself, introductions were exchanged between the two books.
“Canto. I don’t have a UDC number anymore.”
“Index Medicus. Me neither. Not that it much mattered, as all of us in this library used to share practically the same string before. But now we don’t even have that. The master downloaded all of our texts into temporary storage, then gave us wipes. Our elder, Dar al-Kutub, suspects that the one huge text we were redacting has been broken up into smaller bits, so that you new volumes can help work on it.”
“That makes sense, I suppose.”
“It would, except for one thing. Dar heard the master ordering a factotum to load the new hypos in sequence.”
“So?”
Index Medicus began nervously to groom the greasy patch behind one ear. “He arranged for twice as many shots as there should have been.”
“More books are coming?”
“I don’t think so. Every carrel is already occupied.”
Canto became impatient. “So what are you saying?”
Index Medicus stopped swiping at his fur and stared intently at his cellmate. “Everything points toward it. We’re going to be double-wiped. All of us. The master needs the half of our brains we call our own.”
The concept was so grotesquely repugnant to Canto that he had a hard time wrapping his mind around it. Not so much for himself did he balk at the harsh reality of human treachery, the overturning of all biblioplectic tradition, as for the sakes of his friends, and one in particular. The sweet essence of Vellum blotted out of existence, as if she had never been? Such an atrocity beggared description.
“I was caught trying to escape,” Index Medicus said resignedly. “I think the master intends to double-wipe me first as a final test.”
Canto said nothing, but merely sat back on his haunches.
Eventless hours dragged by, the books nearly jumping out of their hides at every clink and rattle from beyond their door, until at last a solenoid clicked in the windowless prison door.
The master filled the portal, blocking any escape. Then he was inside with the books and the door was shut again, lock engaging with a mean snick.
“Two of you! The factota have been diligent but uncommunicative. Well, unfortunately I brought only the single shot of this marvelous, utilitarian oblivion. Who’ll go first? Who wants the honor of being the leader into the future of my exaltation? Don’t clamor now! What, no eager takers? Well, precedence goes to the volume I’ve owned the longest then.”
The master grabbed Index Medicus by his scruff and raised the hypo. The pitiful book let out a single squeal and went limp.
Canto’s powerful legs propelled him fully atop the master’s shoulders. Unbalanced, the human tottered forward, ramming his head into the stony wall of the cell. The hypo dropped, but was cushioned from breakage by Index Medicus’s supine body. The librarian jerked Canto off his back, spun half around, then slumped to a sitting position on the floor like a man sinking wearily into a bath.
By the time the master had focused his attention enough to rub his sore skull, Canto gripped the hypo. The master’s eyes widened, and his voice cracked.
“Give that over, you damnable pulpbrain!”
Canto hung his head contritely, and extended the hypo on his palm. The master smiled cruelly and grew easy.
Once as close as possible, Canto lunged forward and jabbed the master in the neck with the hypo’s snout.
The librarian instantly stiffened as billions of tiny monomaniacal machines flooded his cortex. As the delinkers swiftly unwove the engrams of a lifetime, the master’s body went through an alarming and unseemly display of spasticity. Retreating to one corner of the cell, the two books huddled together until the violent exhibition of misapplied technology reached a quiet terminus. The dose had always been intended to leave intact the lower brainstem capabilities of the books—autonomic control of respiration and heartbeat and so forth—so the master continued to live, but only as a mindless, bruised doll.
Index Medicus regarded Canto with a blend of awe and fear. “What happens now? Are we trapped in here? Will we starve? Will some other librarian come to save us?”
“I don’t know,” answered Canto.
“But I’m scared!”
“Be brave,” Canto counseled. “After all, a book must show its spine.”
THE SCAB’S PROGRESS
[co-written with Bruce Sterling]
The federal bio-containment center was a diatom the size of the Disney Matterhorn. It perched on fractal struts in a particularly charmless district of Nevada, where the waterless white sands swarmed with toxic vermin.
The entomopter scissored its dragonfly wings, conveying Ribo Zombie above the desert wastes. This was always the best part of the program: the part where Ribo Zombie lovingly checked out all his cool new gear before launching himself into action. As a top-ranking scab from the otaku-pirate underground, Ribo Zombie owned reactive gloves with slashproof ligaments and sandwiched Kevlar-polysaccharide. He sported a mother-of-pearl crash helmet, hung with daring insoucia
nce on the scaled wall of the ’mopter’s cockpit. And those Nevada desert boots! — like something built by Tolkien orcs with day-jobs at Nike.
Accompanying the infamous RZ was his legendary and much-merchandised familiar, Skratchy Kat. Every scab owned a familiar: they were the totem animals of the gene-pirate scene. The custom dated back to the birth of the scab subculture, when tree-spiking Earth Firsters and obsessive dog breeders had jointly discovered the benefits of outlaw genetic engineering.
With a flash of emerald eyes the supercat rose from the armored lap of the daring scab. “Skratchy Kat” had some much cooler name in the Japanese collectors’ market. He’d been designed in Tokyo, and was a deft Pocket-Monster comingling of eight spliced species of felines and viverines,with the look, the collector cachet, and—(judging by his stuffed-toy version)—plenty of the smell of a civet cat. Ribo Zombie, despite frequent on-screen cameos by busty-babe scab-groupies, had never enjoyed any steady feminine relationship. What true love there was in his life flowed between man and cat.
Clickable product-placement hot-tags preoccupied the ’mopter screens as Ribo Zombie’s aircraft winged in for the kill. The ads sold magnums of cheap, post-Greenhouse Rejkjavik Champagne. Ringside tix to a Celebrity Deathmatch (splatter-shields extra). entomopter rentals in Vegas, with a rapid, low-cost divorce optional.
Then, wham! Inertia hit the settling aircraft, gypsum-sand flew like pulverized wallboard, and the entomopter’s chitinous canopy accordioned open. Ribo Zombie vaulted to the glistening sands, clutching his cat to his armored bosom. He set the beast free with a brief, comradely exchange of meows, then sealed his facemask, pulled a monster pistol, and plucked a retro-chic pineapple grenade from his bandolier.
A pair of crystalline robot snakes fell to concussive explosions. Alluring vibrators disoriented the numerous toxic scorpions in the vicinity. Three snarling jackalopes fell to a well-aimed hail of dumdums. Meanwhile the dauntless cat, whose hide beneath fluffy fur was as tough as industrial teflon, had found a way through the first hedge-barrier of barrel cacti.
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