by Vernor Vinge
“I’m so sorry, Miri. I—”
Miri’s wail got even louder, but she stopped beating on him. After half a minute, her weeping trailed off into choking sobs, and then silence. But she still held onto him. Her words were halting and muffled. “I just found out that…Alice is…Alice is back in Training.”
Oh.
“She’s not even recovered!” Miri was sobbing again.
“What does your father say?”
“Bob is out of touch tonight.”
“Out of touch?” In this day and age?
Miri pushed him back. She started to wipe her face on her sleeve, then grabbed from the box of tissues he set beside her. “Really out of touch. Tactical blackout. D-Don’t you follow the news, Robert?”
“Um.”
“Read between the lines. Bob is off somewhere making places and things glow in the dark.” She wiped energetically at her face, and her voice returned to something like its usual tones. “Okay, maybe not literally. Bob talks that way when he has to do things he really doesn’t want to do. But I watch the rumor mills and I watch Bob and Alice. Between the three I’m a pretty good guesser. Sometimes Bob is out of touch, and I read about something wonderful or something terrible happening in another country. Sometimes Alice goes into Training, and I know that somebody needs help or else very bad things may happen. Right now Bob is away and Alice is back in Training.” She hid behind her hands for a moment, then resumed wiping her face. “My g-guess is that the top rumors are right. Something awful happened at the Library Riot, worse than the GenGen takeover. Now all the superpowers are running scared. They think someone has figured how to crack their security. A-Alice almost admitted that tonight. That was her excuse!”
Robert sat down again, but on the edge of his chair. His great confession had vanished into the abyss. “You should talk to Bob when he gets back.”
“I will. And he’ll argue with her. You’ve heard that yourself. But in the end he can’t stop her.”
“This time, maybe he can go over her head, or get the doctors to back him up.”
Miri hesitated, seemed to relax a fraction. “Yes. This time is different…I-I’m glad we can talk, Robert.”
“Any time, kiddo.”
But then she was quiet.
Finally, Robert said, “Are you conspiring, or just Googling?”
Miri shook her head. “N-Neither. I tried to call someone…but they’re not answering.”
Ah! “You know, Miri, Juan is in Puebla visiting his great-grandfather. He may not be wearing all the time.”
“Juan? I wouldn’t call him. He’s not very bright, and when the crunch came in Pilchner Hall, he was useless.”
“You can’t know that!”
“I know I was down in the tunnels by myself.”
“Miri, I’ve talked to Juan almost every day since I started at Fairmont. He wouldn’t let you down. Think back to the times you do remember. You two must have conspired a lot to keep track of me. I’ll bet he played fair. He could be your good friend, another person you could talk to.”
For once, Miri’s chin came down. “You know I can’t talk to him about these things. I couldn’t talk to you, except you already know.”
“That’s true. There are things you can’t tell him. But…I think he deserves better from you.”
Miri’s eyes flicked up to meet his, but she didn’t speak.
“Remember how I told you, you remind me of your great-aunt Cara?”
Miri nodded.
“You were happy to learn that. But I think you know how I treated Cara. It was like the Ezra Pound Incident, over and over again, for years. I never had a chance to make up for that; she died when she was not much older than Alice is now.”
Tears were back in Miri’s eyes, but she held the tissues tight on her lap.
“I went through my whole life like that, Miri. I married a wonderful lady who loved me very much. Lena put up with more than I ever dumped on Cara, and for years longer. Even after I drove her away, you know how she helped me at Rainbows End. And now she is dead, too.” Robert looked down, and for a moment all he could think of was lost opportunities. Where was I? Oh: “So…I think you owe Juan. Dumping on him isn’t in the same league as my screwups. But you still have a chance to set things right.”
He looked at Miri. Her shoulders were hunched. She was shredding the tissues she held in her hands. “Just think about it, okay, Miri? I didn’t mean to get carried away.”
Finally, she spoke: “Have you ever broken a solemn promise, Robert?”
Where did that come from? But before he could get his mouth in gear, Miri continued:
“Well, I just did!” And with that, she grabbed the box of tissues and ran from the room.
“Miri!” By the time he got into the hall, Miri had disappeared into her room.
Robert dithered for a moment. He could go down and pound on her door. Or maybe he should message her.
He stepped back into his room, turned—and saw the golden light on the table, right beside where Miri had been sitting. It was an enum, granting some kind of limited message capability. But he already had that and more for Miri. He opened the golden enum and looked inside.
This one was for Lena Llewelyn Gu.
ROBERT SAT BESIDE the enum for almost half an hour. He studied it. He studied the documentation. It was exactly what he thought. Lena lives.
There was no physical address, but he could write her a simple message. It took him only two hours to do so. Less than two hundred words. They were the most important words that Robert Gu had ever written.
Robert couldn’t sleep that night. Morning came, then afternoon.
There was no reply.
EPILOGUE
Six weeks passed.
Robert was watching the news more now; he had learned that the world can bite you. He and Miri compared notes on what they saw. The raids at the edge of the world were allegedly over. Rumors held that little had been discovered. Rumors—and some real news—spoke of scandals in the EU, Indian, and Japanese intelligence services. All the Great Powers remained very nervous about insert-your-favorite-crazyass-theory-here.
On the home front, Bob was back! Robert and Miri took that to mean that some disaster theories were much less likely. Others remained scarily viable. Indeed, Bob blew his stack when he learned about Alice. Things got very tense around the house. Both Robert and Miri sensed heartbreaking battles hiding behind the looks and silences. Miri had years of putting together the clues. Her best guess was that Bob had appealed to the doctors, that he had complained far up the chain of command. None of it mattered. Alice remained in Training.
Somewhere in all of this, Juan returned from Puebla. Miri didn’t have much to say about him, but they were talking. The boy was smiling more.
From Lena there was…silence. She lived. His messages didn’t bounce and her enum remained accessible. It was like talking into an infinite void. And Robert did keep talking, a message every day—and wondering what more he should do.
Xiu Xiang had left Rainbows End.
“Lena asked me to leave,” Xiu told him. “Maybe I pushed her too hard.” But I know where she lives now! I could go there. I could make her see how much I’ve changed. And maybe that would just prove that he had changed in all the ways that didn’t matter. So Robert didn’t drive out to Rainbows End; he didn’t snoop the public cams there. But he continued to write her. And when he was outside, he often imagined that besides the 7-by-24 attention of the security authorities, perhaps there was another watcher, one who would someday forgive him.
Meantime, he threw himself into schoolwork. There was so much to learn. And the rest of his time was spent with Comms-R-Us. They liked his work.
Two months after the Great Library Riot, Robert returned to UCSD. He had lost track of Winston and Carlos. It was strange when he thought about it. For a few days the cabal had been such a tight conspiracy, but now they never spoke. The easiest explanation was mutual shame. They had been used, an
d their various agendas had come close to killing a lot of people. There was truth in all that, but for Robert there was another explanation, something weirder and almost as unsettling: the cabal was like a childhood clique, the animosities and closeness now vanished as his childlike attention morphed in new directions. Sometimes the desperation of the fall semester seemed almost as remote as his life in the twentieth century. There were so many things he wanted to learn and do and be, and they had so little do with what had previously consumed him.
In the end, it was his project with Comms-R-Us that brought him back to campus. Jitter and latency were bad problems in video protocols, worse in voice, and absolute death for touchy-feely interfaces. Haptic robots were getting better and better—but they were almost useless when run over the net. Now, Comms-R-Us wanted Robert to try his crazy synch schemes on haptics.
In the aftermath of the Librareome and the riot, the UCSD administration had dumped further bushel-baskets of cash on the library. In some ways its touchy-feely experience was better than commercial parks like Pyramid Hill. The question was, how could you export that across the net? He had done plenty of reading, studied the design of touchy-feely bots, but until the problem was solved there would be no substitute for firsthand experience. He took a car down to UCSD.
TWO MONTHS. NOT really a long time. The server shacks on the north side of Warschawski Hall had merged. There was a soccer field where the Software Engineering Department had been. Robert could see that this wasn’t destruction related to the Library Riot or the marine landings; it was the normal churn of any modern institution.
He took the footpath through the eucalyptus. As always, coming out of the trees gave the naked eye a sudden vision across miles of table land, into the mountains. And there, standing before it all, was still the Geisel Library.
It was by far the oldest building at UCSD, one of the twenty percent that had been rebuilt after the Rose Canyon Quake. But that damage had been nothing compared with what befell it during the riot, when the cabal’s sponsors literally ripped the east side from its foundations. Any other building on campus would have been razed after such trauma, perhaps restored if it was of sufficient historical value. But neither had happened in the case of the Geisel Library.
Robert walked around the north side of the library, down past the loading dock. He had seen views of the structure immediately after the riot, the floors sloping and sagging, the ad hoc buttresses that the fire department had added as the internal servos burned out, the chunks of twentieth-century concrete that littered the terrace.
Those signs of destruction were gone. The overhanging floors were level once more.
The university had not undertaken a simple restoration. On the west it looked almost unchanged, but there was perceptible distortion above the loading dock, and on the east there was a graceful twisting of the building’s great pillars. Where those pillars had moved, where the library had “walked,” now the pillars were set. At the base was grass and smooth concrete, the tiled path that was the snake of knowledge. Looking upward, lush ivy followed the curving twist of the concrete. Where the ivy ended, there were lines of colored pebbles set in the pillars, making bands like stress fringes in illuminated crystal. And then above that, the rectangle of each floor was slightly turned from the one beneath it.
From the building specifications, Robert could see that some of the pillars were carbon fibers embedded in lightweight composite. Yet the building was as real and solid as it looked to the naked eye; more than any building on campus, this was real. This building lived.
HE TOOK THE stairs, stopping at each floor to look around. He recognized the Hacek domain. There were still Librarians Militant here. But I thought their circle got booted out? In other places, there was craziness he recognized as Scooch-a-mouti. The Scoochi mythos was eclectic nonsense that he had never figured out. How it fit with library metaphors was beyond him. But the Scoochis had “won” the riot and the library.
In other places, both belief circles were running in parallel. You could choose which you wanted, or neither.
Robert concentrated on management and naked-eye views. After all, he was here to study the touchy-feely support. There were haptic robots everywhere—not as many as at Pyramid Hill, but the University had crammed almost as much parallel variety into a few floors of a single building. UCSD had spent an enormous amount of money on the gadgets. There were some free-running models, but most were surface-mounted. These were fast. As quick as a Librarian Militant could reach for the vision of a book, a robot would slide into position, altering its surface just where it would meet the reacher’s hand.
Robert stood for a few moments, watching the action. The naked-eye view was like nothing in his experience. When the student—that’s what she was without her “Librarian Militant” cover—turned the book in her hands, the haptics flipped in coordination, never losing contact or slipping in a way different from the vision it was supporting. When she set it on a table, the haptics moved instantly to another task—this supporting some Scoochi client in even more unintelligible maneuvering.
He noticed that the girl was staring at him. “Sorry, sorry! I just haven’t seen all this before.”
“Tragic, not?” and she gave him a wide grin.
“Yes, uh, tragic.” Somewhere on a high protocol layer, all this involved books and the contents of books. At the physical layer it was even…more…fascinating. He wandered along, his mind far away, trying to imagine how the intricate dance of the haptics could be replicated on robots that were at some distance on the network. If both sides had human players it would be infernally hard. But if it was an asymmetric service, maybe—
“Hey, Professor Gu! Look up here.”
Robert looked in the direction of the voice. The ceiling above him had become transparent, as had the one above that. His view had tunneled through to the sixth floor. Carlos Rivera was looking back down at him, a happy smile on his face. “Long time no see, Professor. Come on up, why don’t you?”
“Sure.” Robert found his way back to the stairwell. The stairs were free of haptic diversions…
…as was the sixth floor. But there were no more books either. Someone had set up some offices.
Rivera gave him a tour. He seemed to be just about the only one on the floor. “Right now, the team is spread all over. Some of them are working on the new extensions underground.”
“So what’s your job now? Still library staff, I assume?”
Carlos hesitated. “Well, I have several titles now. It’s a long story. Hey, come into my office.”
His office was on the southeast corner, with windows overlooking the Snake Path and the esplanades. In fact, this was just where the cabal had held its meetings. Carlos waved him to a seat, and sat behind a wide desk. Carlos himself…he was still overweight, still wore the bottle-glass spectacles and the old-fashioned T-shirt. But there was a difference. This Carlos seemed relaxed, energetic…happy with whatever he was doing. “I was hoping we could talk, but things have just been so busy since—you know, since we almost fucked things up beyond all recognition.”
“Yes, I know what you mean. We were…very lucky, Carlos.” He glanced around the office. Nowadays, rank could be hard to see in visible things, but much of the furniture and plants were really what they seemed. “You were going to tell me about your job.”
“Yes! It’s a little embarrassing. I’m the new Director of Library Support. That’s the title the University recognizes. In some circles that’s not the important title. Downstairs and across the world, you’ll find that I’m other things—like Dangerous Knowledge and the Greatest Lesser Scooch-a-mout.”
“But those are two different belief circles. I thought—”
“You read that the Scoochis won it all, right? Not quite. When the dust settled, there was a very bizarre—well, ‘compromise’ isn’t quite the right word. ‘Alliance’ or ‘distanced merger’ might be better.” He leaned back in his chair. “It’s scary how close we came to
blowing up this end of San Diego. But we stopped just short. And that crazy riot made more money than a new cinema release. More important, it sucked money and creativity from all over, and the school administration was smart enough to take advantage.” He hesitated, a little sadness creeping into his voice. “So we failed in everything we told each other we were trying to do. The books are gone. Physically gone. But the Geisel Library lives, and these two crazy belief circles are driving its content all over the world. But you’ve seen that, right? That’s why you came down here?”
“I came down to study your haptics, actually.” Robert explained his interest in distanced interactive touch.
“Hey, that’s great! Both groups have been beating on me to extend our reach. But at a higher level, what did you think of what they’re doing to the library experience?”
“Um, the Librarian Militants look the same as before, I guess. It’s an amusing interface, if you like that sort of thing. The Scoochis…I tried to see what they’re doing, but it doesn’t make sense. It’s so scattered, almost as if each individual book is its own consensual reality.”
“Almost. The Scoochis have always been eclectic. Now that they have a librareome, they’re building game consensus down to fine-grained topic levels, often down to individual paragraphs. It’s much more subtle than the Hacek stuff, though children pick up on it very quickly. Their real power is that Scoochis can blend realities. That’s what’s happened with them and the Hacekeans. The Scoochis come from all over, even from the failed states. Now they’re feeding the digitizations back outwards. Wherever it fits, the Hacek people are running things. Other places, other visions—but all with access to the entire body of the library. If you can crack the problem of remote interactive touch, it should make their attraction even greater.” Carlos looked around his office, where the cabal had plotted for such very different ends. “An awful lot has changed in just two months.”
“What do you think really happened that night, Carlos? Was the riot intended to distract from what we four were doing—or was it the other way around?”
