Rainbows End

by Vernor Vinge

  Robert shrugged. It was surprising how much he did not want to go into his problems with Bob and Miri. “The timing is just coincidence. I came down to UCSD because…because I wanted to see the books.”

  A not-so-friendly smile came to Blount’s face. “How very like you, that you come the day we start burning them.”

  Rivera protested, “It’s shredding, Dean. I mean, technically speaking. Except for the chad, all the shredda is preserved.”

  Robert looked at the torn paper he had brought from downstairs: shredda that had escaped its final resting place? He held up the forlorn slip of paper. “Honestly, I don’t know what’s going on. What was this? What madness explains destroying the book this was part of?”

  Winnie didn’t answer immediately; he waved at Rivera to pass him the fragment. He set it on the table and stared for a second. His bitter smile grew a little wider. “What pleasant irony. They’re starting in the PZ’s, aren’t they, Carlos?”

  “Duì,” the young man replied, hesitantly.

  “This,” Winnie waved the paper in the air, “is from a science-fiction book!” A grim chuckle. “Those sci-fi bastards are just getting what they deserve. For thirty years they had literature education hijacked—and this is what all their reductionism has gotten them. Good riddance.” He crumpled the paper and tossed it back at Robert.

  Tommie grabbed the little ball of paper and tried to resuscitate it. “It’s just an accident that science fiction came first, Dean.”

  “Actually,” said Rivera, “there are rumors the shredders started with science fiction because there would be fewer complainers among the geeks.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Tommie. “They were scheduled to be well into other stuff by the end of today.”

  Winnie leaned forward. “What do you mean ‘were scheduled’?”

  “You didn’t know?” Parker patted his laptop again; was he in love with the ancient device or what? “The shredding ran into a minor technical problem. They’ve shut down for the day.” He grinned. “The popular press says the ‘minor technical problem’ is the sudden appearance of Robert in the middle of their operation.”

  Rivera hesitated, and light glinted in the depths of his thick eyeglasses. “Yes,” he said. So the crowd outside had something to celebrate after all. Winnie got up, looked out the window again, and sat down. “Very good, we’ve earned our first victory! Relay our congratulations to the troops, Tommie.”

  Robert raised his hands, “Will somebody please explain this madness to me? There may be nothing burning, but this does seem like Fahrenheit 451. That’s another science-fiction story, Winston.”

  Rivera waved vaguely. “Search on keyword Librareome, Professor Gu.”

  Robert gestured and tapped. How does Juan manage to do this without looking like an idiot?

  “Here, use my laptop. You’ll never figure out how to drag news out of Epiphany.”

  Winston Blount slapped the table. “He can do that on his own time, Tommie. We have serious work to do.”

  “Okay, Dean. But Robert has changed things. We can use his reputation.”

  Rivera nodded. “Yes. He’s won practically every literary prize there is.”

  “Stuff it,” said Blount. “We already have five Nobelists on board. Compared to them, Gu is nothing special.” Blount’s glance flickered across Robert’s face. The putdown he directed at Robert was accompanied by a minute hesitation, probably too short for the others to notice.

  The most important things about Winston Blount were not in his Google bio. Once upon a time, Winnie had thought himself a poet. But he wasn’t; he was merely articulate and the owner of a large ego. By the time they both arrived as junior faculty at Stanford, Robert had lost patience with the poseur. Besides, committee meetings would have been deadly dull if not for his hobby of needling Winnie Blount. The guy had been an unending source of amusement because he seemed to think he could outwit Robert. Semester after semester, their verbal duels became more pointed, Winnie’s failure more obvious. It hadn’t helped the other’s cause that Blount had no talent for what he wanted most, to create significant literature. Robert’s lighthearted campaign had been devastating. By the late 1970s, Poor Winnie was the laughingstock—quietly the laughingstock—of the department. All that was left of his claims to significance was his pomposity. He had departed Stanford, and Robert remembered feeling the satisfaction of having done the world a good deed when Blount found his proper place in the scheme of things, becoming an administrator…

  But he was probably just as good a poet as the new Robert Gu. I wonder if Winnie really knows that?

  Of course, Tommie Parker was oblivious of such undercurrents. He responded to Blount’s comment as though it were a neutral statement of fact. “Someone thinks he’s important, Dean. Someone who had the power to slip him past some fairly good commercial security.” He turned to Gu. “Think back, Robert. I know you’re new to the information scene—and Epiphany obscures an awful lot—but did you notice anything strange today? I mean, before you got to the library?”

  “Well—” He looked into the air above them. His web search was just beginning to show results, text and pics about the “Librareome Project: rescuing prehistory for the students of today.” That was certainly strange stuff. Otherwise…there were the floating lights that meant various things. He tried to remember Juan’s explanations. Ah. Sharif was back, a ruby icon that hovered just around the corner of the stacks. “I’ve had some help, a grad student named Zulfikar Sharif.”

  “Were you in contact with him as you came down toward the library?”

  “Yes. Sharif thought I could get in easier if I didn’t try to walk through the crowd at the main entrance.”

  Rivera and Parker exchanged glances. “You didn’t see the security ribbons? They should have guided you to the south side of building.”

  “Professor, I think you were hijacked.”

  Parker nodded. “Don’t feel bad about it, Robert. That sort of thing happens a lot with wearables. We should track down this ‘Zulfikar Sharif’ character.”

  Robert pointed to the ruby light. “I think he’s still here.”

  The gesture must have been taken as a cue by his Epiphany—somehow making the light a public thing: Rivera looked in the direction he was pointing. “Yes! See that, Professor Parker?”

  Tommie looked down at his laptop and massaged the touchpad. “Of course I see him. I’ll bet he’s been listening via Robert. What say we invite him out for a chat?”

  Blount was squinting around, hopelessly. Evidently, he couldn’t see the ruby glow. Nevertheless he took the question as directed at him. “Yes. Do it.”

  Robert tapped a release. A second passed. The ruby tinkerbell floated down to the edge of the table—and abruptly became a full-sized human being, dark-skinned, with earnest eyes. Sharif smiled apologetically, and shuffled through the edge of the table to “sit” on a chair on the other side. “Thank you so much for invoking me, Professor Gu. And yes,” nodding to the others, “I have been listening. Apologies for my various communication problems.”

  “I call that taking advantage of a beginner’s ignorance,” said Parker.

  Blount nodded emphatically. “I would say so! I—” He hesitated, seemed to think it over. “Ah, hell. What does it matter, Tommie? Everything we’re doing today is perfectly open.”

  Tommie grinned. “True! But one thing I’ve learned is you always look a gift horse in the mouth. Sometimes they turn out to be the Trojan variety.” He looked at the image in his laptop. “So, Mr. Sharif, I don’t care if you’ve been eavesdropping or not. Just tell us what you’ve been doing with Robert Gu. Someone led him down to the service entrance and through all sorts of security.”

  Sharif smiled hesitantly. “In all honesty, I was as surprised as you about that. Professor Gu and I were talking freely when he arrived on campus. He got rather quiet as we came down the slope from your Warschawski Hall. And then for no apparent reason, he turned left and we went a
round the north side of the library. The next thing I knew he was walking into the freight entrance—and I lost contact. I don’t know what more I can say. My own wearable security is of the highest order, of course. Um.” He hesitated a moment and then changed topic. “Aren’t you taking this whole thing in the wrong way? I mean, the Librareome Project will open up all past literature to everyone—and faster than any other project could do it. What is wrong with that?”

  This last was met with total silence. Winston Blount smiled thinly. “I don’t suppose you’ve seen our website?”

  “Ah, not as yet.” He paused and his eyes seemed to be looking far away. “Okay, I see what you’re saying.” He smiled. “I suppose I should be on your side—what you want will keep my 411 job safe! See here, I love the old poets, but old-time literature is so hard to get at. If your interest is in post-2000 topics, critical sources are everywhere and research gets results. But for the rest, you have to search through that.” Sharif waved at the orderly ranks of books, the stacks that filled the library’s sixth floor. “It can take days to gain even trivial insights.”

  Lazy bum, thought Robert, and wondered at Sharif’s earlier enthusiasm for “real books.” But he had noticed the trend even in his own teaching days. It wasn’t just the students who refused to get their hands dirty. Even so-called researchers ignored the universe of things that weren’t online.

  Winnie glowered at the young man. “Mr. Sharif, you don’t understand the purpose of the stacks. You don’t go into the stacks expecting the precise answer to your burning-question-of-the-moment. It doesn’t work that way. In all the thousands of times that I’ve gone hunting in the stacks, I’ve seldom found exactly what I was looking for. You know what I did find? I found the books on close-by topics. I found answers to questions that I had never thought to ask. Those answers took me in new directions and were almost always more valuable than whatever I originally had in mind.” He glanced at Rivera. “Isn’t that so, Carlos?”

  Rivera nodded, a little weakly, Robert thought.

  But Winnie was absolutely right, so right that Robert had to say something on the same side. “This is insanity, Sharif. Apparently, the Librareome Project is someone’s idea for photographing and then digitizing the Library. But—” suddenly he was remembering things from his last years at Stanford “—didn’t Google already do that?”

  “That’s true,” said Rivera. “In fact, that was our first argument, and perhaps still the best one. But Huertas is a great salesman, and he does have arguments in his favor. What he has in mind is fast and very, very cheap. Past digitizations have not been as global or as unified as this will be. And Huertas has lawyers and software that will allow him to render microroyalty payments across all the old copyright regimes—without any new permissions.”

  Winnie vented a sour laugh. “The real reason the administration people bought into this is that they like Huertas’s money, and maybe even the publicity. But let me tell you, Mr. Sharif, shredding destroys the books. That is the bottom line. We will be left with a useless jumble.”

  “Oh, no, Professor Blount. Read the overview. The pictures coming from the camera tunnel are analyzed and reformatted. It’s a simple matter of software to reorient the images, match the tear marks and reconstruct the original texts in proper order. In fact—besides the mechanical simplicity of it all—that’s the reason for the apparent violence. The tear marks come close to being unique. Really, it’s not a new thing. Shotgun reconstructions are classic in genomics.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Robert picked up the much-abused page that he had rescued from the PZ stacks. He held it out like some limp murder victim. “So what perfection of software is going to recover something that was torn from its binding and never photographed?”

  Sharif started to shrug and then saw the expression on Robert’s face. “Sir, it’s really not a problem. There will be some loss, true. Even where everything is properly photoed, the programs will make some mismatches. Potentially, the error rate can be less than a few words per million volumes, far better than even hardcopy republishing with manual copyediting. That’s why other major libraries are participating in the project, to get accurate cross-checking.”

  Other major libraries? Robert realized that his mouth was hanging open. He shut up; he couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Tommie stared into his laptop. “You seem suddenly well informed, Mr. Sharif.”

  “But…well, I am wearing,” the young man said.

  “Hmpf. And all you really want is to pursue your love of literature.”

  “…Yes! My thesis advisor has based her entire career on Gu’s Secrets of the Ages. And now I find out that the great poet is back from Alzheimer’s! It’s the opportunity of a lifetime…Look. If you don’t believe the Google bio, check in the 411 directories. I have lots of satisfied customers, many of them literature students at UCSD—not that I give them an unethical degree of help! Not at all.” Aha. Maybe ghostwritten homework was still a no-no, even in this brave new world. “I don’t know what happened with Professor Gu today, but didn’t it slow down the Librareome Project? Isn’t that what you want?”

  Blount and Rivera were both nodding agreement.

  “Yup,” said Tommie. “You’re a horse of some kind.”

  “I am simply a Lit-in-English student!”

  Tommie shook his head. “You could be almost anything. You could be a committee. When you want to sound like a lit-lover, we get chat from a member who knows about poetry.” Tommie tilted back his chair. “There’s an old saying: The beginning of trust has to be an in-person contact. I don’t see any usable chain of trust in your biography.”

  Sharif stood and walked partway through the table. He looked upward, waving his arms at the sky. “You want in-person? That I can supply. Look down here, at the bench by the footpath.”

  Tommie tilted his chair still farther back and glanced over his shoulder. Robert walked to the window and looked down. Much of the crowd had dispersed, leaving just a few knots of die-hard demonstrators. The footpath was a tiled serpent that wound its way up the hillside, its head reaching just to the edge of the library terrace. It was a very real mosaic, new artwork since Robert’s years at UCSD.

  “I came all the way from Corvallis just to see Professor Gu. Please don’t turn me away now.”

  And there by the path was a second Zulfi Sharif, this one not virtual at all. He was looking up at them and waving.

  13

  THE MIRI GANG IS BORN

  For as long as Miri could remember, she’d had this problem with grandparents. Alice’s parents—and Alice’s grandparents, too—had all been living in Chicago; not one of them had survived. On Bob’s side of the family, Robert had been almost dead, but then he came back! Now Miri was afraid she was losing him all over again.

  And then there was Lena…

  Lena Gu was only dead on the record. Lena had persuaded Bob to set up that lie with the Friends of Privacy. Lena even ordered him to keep the details from Miri. But Bob had told Miri what he was doing. That was smart, because Miri would have figured it all out anyway. This way, Miri was imprisoned by her promises to Bob. She hadn’t breathed a whisper of the truth to Robert, even when they were still talking and he had been so desperate.

  But now Miri was getting desperate. She hadn’t seen Lena in five months. Almost, she had called Lena after the Ezra Pound Incident. But that would have only confirmed Lena’s opinions of Robert. Bob just wanted to ignore Robert’s problems; coward. Alice was no coward, but she was deep in training these days and it wasn’t going well. Okay, I can handle this on my own, Miri had told herself. She conceived a clever rehabilitation plan, working with Zulfi Sharif. At first, that had been great. Sharif’s wearable had been easy to subvert; she had direct access to Robert. But after Robert’s trip to UCSD, she realized that someone else was using Sharif, too.

  It was definitely time to visit Lena.

  Miri waited till the weekend and took a car down to Pyramid Hill. The plac
e was really busy on Saturdays. Bob said it reminded him of the arcades of his childhood. You had to travel physically to the park, but once you got there you could do touchy-feely with all the best games. It was run by Baja Casinos, but for kids not old enough to legally gamble. The important thing for Miri was that the park had pretty good security. Even if Robert got curious about where she was going, it was unlikely he could follow her through to Lena.

  She unhooked her bicycle from the rack on the back of the car, and imaged it as a small jackass. Her own persona was classic anime: big eyes, spiky hair, and tiny mouth. That should turn off anyone who might otherwise try to play with her.

  Miri walked her jackass along a path that circled the hill. She overruled the anime imagery to view what was most popular today. Ugh. It was mostly Scooch-a-mouti nonsense. Salsipueds and baba llagas were everywhere. A year ago, no one had heard of the Scoochis, and now they were bigger than some of the corporate names. They had even dented the mega release of the latest Cretaceous Returns. There were hundreds of different types of Scoochi characters. Some were slyly stolen intellectual property. The rest were from folklores at the edge of the world. The imagery was very, very cheap, without any creative center. Maybe that’s why little kids were the biggest fans.

  Near the top of the hill, a Lesser Scooch-a-mout roared into the sky. That sound was not watts from some synthesizer. The departing Scooch-a-mout was how her view imaged the Park’s high ride. The ride capsule blasted from deep in the hill, hit four gees before it coasted into the sky, giving its passengers almost a minute of zero-gee before touching down in the park annex. It was the most spectacular ride in Southern California. Nowadays Miri’s friends sniffed at it: “Might as well be a UP/Ex package.” But when Miri was little, she had spent more than one afternoon bouncing back and forth across the sky.