Rainbows End

by Vernor Vinge

  Parker was studying the numbers on his laptop. “Well, we’ve got the world’s attention. We spiked at two million viewers a few moments back. And lots more will be watching this asynchronously.”

  “What does UCSD Public Relations say?”

  Parker typed briefly on his laptop. “They’re lying low. The PR people would just as soon that this be a non-event. Ha. But they’re getting pounded by the popular press…” Parker leaned back and shifted into reminiscence. “There was a time, I would have hidden my own cameras down on the lower floors. And if they deadzoned me, I’d’ve broken into the PR site and pasted pictures of burning books all across their press releases!”

  “Duì,” said Rivera, nodding his head. “But that would be difficult nowadays.”

  “Yup. Worse, it would take courage.” Tommie patted his laptop. “And that’s the trouble with people nowadays. They’ve traded freedom for security. When I was a young man, the cops didn’t live in every widget, and there wasn’t some clown collecting royalties on every keystroke. Back then there was no ‘Secure Hardware Environment’ and it didn’t take ten thousand transistors to make a flipflop. I remember in ’91, when I took down the”—and he was off on one his stories. Poor Tommie. Modern medicine had not cured him of his need to tell about old adventures again and again.

  But Carlos Rivera seemed to love these stories. He nodded every few seconds, his expression rapt. Blount sometimes wondered whether Rivera’s enthusiasm should be held for or against the young fellow.

  “—so anyway, by the time they thought to check for crimps in the fiber, we had dumped all the files and—”

  Now, for a wonder, Rivera was no longer listening. He had turned toward the stacks, and his expression was full of surprise. He rattled off something in Chinese, then thankfully slipped back into English: “I mean, please wait a moment.”

  “What?” Parker glanced at his laptop. “Have they started the shredders?”

  Damn, thought Blount. He had been hoping that terrible moment could be marked by the protesters.

  “Yes,” said Rivera, “but that was several minutes ago, while you were talking. This is something different. Someone has gotten into the loading area.”

  Winston bounced to his feet—bounced as much as semirejuvenated joints could be made to bounce. “I thought you said there was security down there?”

  “I thought there was!” Rivera came to his feet, too. “I can show you.” Images popped into Blount’s eyes, views from cameras on the north and east sides of the building, more views than he could make sense of.

  Blount waved the images away. “I want to see this for myself.” He plunged into the library stacks, Rivera close behind.

  “If we had known about this, we could have put some of our people down there.” That was the problem nowadays. Security was so good that when it broke down, no one was around to take advantage! In the back of Blount’s mind, something marveled at his new priorities. There had been a time when Dean Winston C. Blount had been the fellow on the establishment side, doing his best to make sure that the know-nothings didn’t bust things up. Now…well, now, a certain amount of hell-raising might be the only way to set the establishment right.

  “Has the choir seen this?”

  “Dunno. The best views were quarantined.” Rivera sounded out of breath.

  They detoured around the elevators and staff rooms that occupied the middle of the floor. Now they were moving at right angles to the stacks. Far down the book-lined shelves he glimpsed the sky beyond the windows. “You said there was chance that Max Huertas might show up today.”

  “Duì. Yes. There’s some chance he might come. Several libraries begin the project this week, but UCSD is the star.” Huertas was more than just the money behind the Librareome. He was also a major investor in the biotech labs near campus. He had turned the university scene upside down with his Librareome insanity, ultimately greasing it past an administration that should have fought him to the death.

  Blount’s jog slowed as they approached the windows. The UCSD campus had suffered a revolution in the last decades. The vibrant building campaign of his time as dean had been swept away by the Rose Canyon quake and the facile logic of the modern University administrations. The campus had reverted to a woodsy, low-density style, with buildings that might just as well have been prefab Quonsets. In a sad, sad way it reminded him of the campus’s earliest years, of his grad-school years. We built such a beautiful place here, and then we let opportunism and remote learning and the damn labs dissipate it all. What shall it profit a university, if it shall enroll five hundred thousand, and lose its own soul?

  He reached the northeast windows and looked down. The sixth floor was at the building’s maximum overhang. You could see almost straight down—to a stretch of cracked concrete, the library loading dock. And there was a guy down there, furtively looking around. Carlos Rivera caught up with Blount and for a moment they were both staring downward. Then Blount noticed that the younger man was actually staring through the floor; he’d found some camera on the lower levels. “That’s not Max Huertas,” said Carlos. “He’d come with a gang of lackeys.”

  “Yeah.” But it was someone who could persuade the Library rent-a-cops to let him go down there. Blount tapped the glass. “Look up here, you jerk!” It was amazing what little he could see from straight up. The stranger carried himself with a twitchy awkwardness, like an old-timer coping with a regrown nervous system…Blount was beginning to get a very bad feeling. And then the stranger turned his gaze upward. It was like finding a large rat at your feet.

  “Oh, Christ.” A strange combination of disgust and curiosity forced him to say: “Just get him up here.”

  AFTER THE SUNNY loading dock, the hallway seemed very dark. Robert hesitated, adjusting to the light. The walls were streaked with scuff and scrape marks. The floor was naked concrete. This was not a public area. It reminded him of years ago when he and certain undergrads would sneak around in the utility cores of these buildings.

  Epiphany hung tiny labels on the doors and ceiling, and even the cracks in the walls. They weren’t terribly informative, ID numbers and maintenance instructions, the sort of thing that might have been paint-stenciled in the old days. But—if he wanted to take the time—he could search through the signs and get background information. And there were mysteries. A large, silver-puttied crack in the wall was marked “cantilever-LimitCycle < 1.2mm:25s.” Robert was about to search on that when he noticed a door decorated with a larger banner, one that ticked out the seconds:

  00:07:03 Librareome Equipment in Operation: KEEP OUT!

  What the hell, this door was open too.

  On the other side, the power-saw racket was louder. He walked fifty feet, past plastic crates—“Rescued Data,” the labels said. At the end, behind some kind of legged forklift, there was another unlocked door. And now he was on familiar ground: he was at the bottom of the library’s central stairwell. He looked up and up, into the foreshortened spiral of steps. Tiny flecks of white floated and swirled in the column of light. Snowflakes? But one landed on his hand: a fleck of paper.

  And now the ripping buzz of the saw was still louder, and there was also the sound of a giant vacuum cleaner. But it was the irregular ripping buzz that echoed down the stairwell and beat him about the head. There was something familiar about that, but it wasn’t an indoors kind of sound. He started up the stairs, pausing at each landing. The dust and the noise were worst at the fourth floor, labeled “Catalog Section PZ.” The door opened smoothly. Beyond would be the library stacks. All the books you could ever want, miles of them. The beauty of ideas waiting in ambush.

  But this was like no stacks he had ever seen. The floor was draped in white tarpaulin. The air was hazy with drifting debris. He took a breath, smelled pine pitch and burnt wood—and for a moment he couldn’t stop coughing.

  Brap, painfully loud now, coming from four aisles to his right. There were empty shelves here, a littering of paper scraps and d
eep dust.

  Brrap. Against logic, sometimes recognition comes hard. But finally, Robert remembered the exact sound which that abrupt roar must be. He had heard it occasionally throughout his life, but always the machine had been outdoors.

  Brrrap! A tree shredder!

  Ahead of him, everything was empty bookcases, skeletons. Robert went to the end of the aisle and walked toward the noise. The air was a fog of floating paper dust. In the fourth aisle, the space between the bookcases was filled with a pulsing fabric tube. The monster worm was brightly lit from within. At the other end, almost twenty feet away, was the worm’s maw—the source of the noise. Indistinct in the swirling haze, Robert could see two white-suited figures, their jackets labeled “Huertas Data Rescue.” The two wore filter masks and head protectors. They might have been construction workers. In fact, this business was the ultimate in deconstruction: first one and then the other would pull books off the racks and toss them into the shredder’s maw. The maintenance labels made calm phrases of the horror: The raging maw was a “NaviCloud custom debinder.” The fabric tunnel that stretched out behind it was a “camera tunnel.” Robert flinched from the sight—and Epiphany randomly rewarded his gesture with imagery from within the monster: The shredded fragments of books and magazines flew down the tunnel like leaves in tornado, twisting and tumbling. The inside of the fabric was stitched with thousands of tiny cameras. The shreds were being photographed again and again, from every angle and orientation, till finally the torn leaves dropped into a bin just in front of Robert. Rescued data.

  BRRRRRAP! The monster advanced another foot into the stacks, leaving another foot of empty shelves behind it. Almost empty. Robert stepped into the aisle and his hand caught on something lying on a shelf. It wasn’t dust. It was half a page, a remnant of all the thousands of books that had already been sucked into the “data rescue” equipment. He waved it at the white-suited workers and screamed words that were lost in the noise of their shredder and the worm tunnel fans.

  But the two looked up and shouted something back.

  If the body of the glowing worm hadn’t been between him and them, Robert might have rushed the pair. As it was, they just waved impotently at each other.

  Then a third guy appeared, behind Robert. This one was an overweight thirty-something wearing Bermuda shorts and a huge black T-shirt. The young man was shouting at him in—what, Mandarin? He waved pleadingly for Robert to follow him back toward the stairwell, away from the nightmare.

  THE SIXTH FLOOR of the library was not part of the nightmare. In fact, it looked pretty much as Robert remembered from the early 1970s. The guy with the big t-shirt led him through the stacks to a study area on the south side of the building. There was a short fellow with an ancient laptop computer, sitting right by the windows. The little guy stood and stared. Then suddenly he laughed, and stuck out his hand. “I’ll be damned. You really are Robert Gu!”

  Robert took the proffered hand, and stood uncertainly for a moment. Book shredders below, mystery man up here. And the crazy choir. He could finally see the singers in the plaza.

  “Ha. You don’t recognize me, do you, Robert?” No. The guy had lots of blond hair, but his face was as old as the hills. Only his laughter was familiar. After a second, he shrugged and waved for Robert to sit down. “I don’t blame you,” he chattered on. “But recognition the other way is easy. You lucked out, Robert, didn’t you? I’d guess the Venn-Kurasawa treatment worked a hundred percent for you; your skin looks better than when you were twenty-five years old.” The old man slid an age-spotted hand across his own features and smiled ruefully. “But how’s the rest of you? You look a little twitchy.”

  “I—I lost my marbles. Alzheimer’s. But—”

  “Hey, right. I can tell.”

  It was the heedless frankness that Robert suddenly recognized. Behind the stranger’s face, Robert recognized the freshman who had made his UCSD years significantly more exciting. “Tommie Parker!” The young squirt who could never be put down, who had been a computer-science jock at UCSD before he had even graduated from high school, before there had even been such a major. The little guy who couldn’t wait for the future.

  Tommie nodded, chuckling. “Yup. Yup. But it’s been ‘Professor Thomas Parker’ for a long time. You know I got my doctorate from MIT? Then I came back here and I taught for almost forty years. You’re looking at a Member of the Establishment.”

  And seeing what time had done…for a moment Robert was silent. I should be immune by now. He looked out the window at the crowds, away from Parker. “So what’s going on, Tommie? You’re camped up here like some grand commander.”

  Parker laughed and typed at his keyboard. From what Robert could see of the display, it was some ancient system, worse than his view-page—and nothing like what he could get from Epiphany. But there was enthusiasm in Tom Parker’s voice. “It’s this protest demonstration we set up. Against the Librareome Menace. We didn’t stop the shredding, but—jeez, look at that. I got your break-in on video.” Tommie’s display showed what looked like a telephoto image shot from north of campus. A tiny figure that might have been Robert Gu was entering the library’s freight area. “I don’t know how you got past security, Robert.”

  “Management wonders that too,” said the young man who rescued Robert. He had sat down behind the front desk and brushed flakes of paper dandruff off of his hair and T-shirt. Suddenly the “Chad is Bad” slogan on his shirt made a lot of sense. He noticed Robert’s regard and gave him a little wave. “Hi, Professor Gu. I’m Carlos Rivera, library staff.” His T-shirt morphed to white, which at least made the little bits of paper less obvious.

  “You’re part of this destruction?” He suddenly noticed the half page he had saved from the shredder. He laid it gently on the table. There were words there; maybe he could figure out what they had been part of.

  “No, no,” said Parker. “Carlos is helping us. In fact, all the librarians oppose the shredding—excepting the administrators. And seeing that you got past library security, I think we have allies even there. You’re a famous guy, Robert. And we can use the video you got.”

  “But I—” Robert started to say he didn’t have a camera. Then he thought of the clothes he was wearing. “Okay, but you’ll have to show me how to give it to you.”

  “No problem—” began Rivera.

  “You’re using that Epiphany junk, aren’t you, Robert? Yeah, you’ll have to get some wearer to help you. Wearables are supposed to be such a convenience, but mainly they’re an excuse for other people to run your life. Me, I’ll stick with the proven solutions.” He patted his laptop. Through some fluke of memory, Robert recognized the model. Twenty-some years ago, this gadget had been at the cutting edge of power and miniaturization, barely eight inches by ten, with a brilliant, millimeters-thin screen and a fancy camera. Now…even to Robert it was a ponderous behemoth. How can it even talk to the modern magic?

  Parker’s glance slid across to the librarian. “How did he make it into the building, Carlos?”

  Rivera said, “Wŏ bù zhīdào.”

  Tommie groaned. “You’re talking Chinese, Carlos.”

  “Oops, sorry.” He glanced at Robert. “I was an army translator during the war,” he said, as if that explained everything. “I don’t know how he got in, Professor Parker. I saw him walking down from Warschawski Hall. I was using the same viewpoints as our security does. But you notice that even after he got to the shredders, there was still no one to stop him.” He turned, looked expectantly into the stacks. “Maybe the dean has other people working on this.”

  After a moment, an old man stepped out from behind the books. “You know I don’t, Carlos.” He walked to the window without looking at Robert. Aha, thought Robert, so this is where Winnie’s disappeared to the last couple of weeks. Blount stared down at the plaza for several seconds. Finally he said, “The singing has stopped. They know about Gu’s arrival, don’t they?”

  “Yes, sir. Even though we haven’t pu
blished our own video, there’s plenty of journalists floating around. At least three popular sources have IDed him.” Outside, the crowd was cheering.

  Robert tried the little shrug that Juan said would bring up local news. All he got was advertising.

  And Sharif was still silent.

  After a moment, Blount walked back to the head of the table and sat down with a wheeze. He hadn’t looked directly at Robert; Winnie didn’t seem nearly as confident as in Chumlig’s class. How long has it been since we last played our little political games? Robert gave Blount a steady look. That should cause Epiphany to search on him. Also, in the old days, that look had always unnerved the guy.

  “Okay,” Blount nodded at Tom Parker, “tell our protestors to start the windup. You know, the interviews and opinion pieces.”

  “What about Mr. New Development here?” Tommie jerked a thumb in Robert’s direction.

  Blount finally looked at Robert. And Epiphany began streaming information across his view: Google BioSource: Winston C. Blount, MA English from UCSD 1971, PhD English Literature from UCLA 1973, Associate Professor of English at Stanford 1973-1980, Professor of Literature and later Dean of Arts and Letters at UCSD 1980-2012. [Biblio, Speeches, Favorite things]…

  “So, Winnie,” he said, “you still wheeling and dealing?”

  The other’s face paled, but his reply was evenly worded. “Call me Winston, or Dean Blount. If you please.” There was a time when he had gone by “Win.” It was Robert who had cured him of that.

  They stared at each other silently for another second. Finally, Blount said, “Do you have an explanation for how you got in the service entrance?”

  Robert gave a little laugh. “I just walked in. I’m the most ignorant of all, Winston.” What had become of Zulfi Sharif?

  Tommie Parker looked up from his laptop. “There is recent public information on Robert Gu. Robert’s been in deep Alzheimer’s for almost four years. He’s one of the late cures.” He glanced up at Robert. “Jeez, man, you almost died of old age before you got well. On the other hand, it looks like you’ve had great medical luck otherwise. So what brought you to UCSD on this of all days?”