The words whispered aloud as they wrote themselves down. They spoke of stars forming, of debris smashing together, spinning in circles, becoming great solid spheres that revolved around even greater balls of burning gas.
The Librarians paid them no heed. Most of the words in the book were pretty similar, and it wasn’t the content they were currently interested in, but what would happen when there was nowhere left for it to go.
The answer came in the form of another book, which appeared beside the first. Or maybe, they thought, it had always been there, and they’d just never noticed it.
Yes, they agreed, as they polished off several coconut fingers and a few of the chocolate digestives they’d discovered waiting for them in the box that morning, that was probably it.
Time passed. The Universe developed. The Library grew.
The rate at which the books appeared increased exponentially as the planets cooled and life started to show up all over the galaxy in a trillion different flavors of primordial soup. It took several billion years for the first set of shelves to be filled.
The second set of shelves was filled in a quarter of that time. The third, in less than a quarter again.
The tenth shelf, when it arrived, was filled in a week. And that was when the problems started.
Space became an issue. Until then, the Library had seemed pointlessly big to the Librarians. Much of it was a vast hangar-like room that stretched for hundreds of miles in every direction. A few of them had set out to explore it once, returning months later only to announce that, aside from the bit they already knew about, it was almost entirely empty.
They had found some Earl Grey tea bags and an unopened pack of gingernut biscuits on the way back, though, so that was nice.
A scant thousand years after the tenth shelving unit had appeared, you could hardly move for the bloody things.
Books were stacked haphazardly, jammed into every available bit of shelf space and piled in teetering towers on top. The Librarians found themselves perpetually on the back foot, frantically trying to catalog and organize the thousands of volumes that appeared on a daily basis, falling further and further behind as, out in the Universe, fish-things grew legs and began to make decisions more complex than ‘eat it or mate with it’.
Not much more complex, granted, particularly the male ones, but sufficiently complicated that entire chapters were dedicated to their thought processes on even the most trivial of matters.
Should they go left or right?
Another chapter.
Was that thing with all the teeth dangerous?
Another chapter.
Was it possible to stitch a leg back on?
Two more chapters, plus an extensive series of footnotes.
Faster and faster the books appeared. Bigger and bigger the problem became.
Until, one day, one of the Librarians stumbled upon something that would change the Library forever. She saw it in the pages of a book that had fallen off a shelf and flopped open on the floor. It was on a page that described the instability of the Universe, and the relative thinness of its walls.
Curling up as best she could on one of the Library’s uncomfortably plastic seats, and with a nice pot of tea and a delicious selection of baked goods beside her, the Librarian read up on parallel dimensions and bubble universes.
And a plan began to form.
Cal looked around again at the Library. “Oh,” he said. “Huh!” he said. “So…” he said.
He didn’t really have the heart to tell the woman that, despite her explanation, he was still pretty much none the wiser.
“So, the books are all…”
“On the shelves,” said the Librarian.
“These shelves?” said Cal, pointing to the closest one. “The books are on these shelves?”
“Yes,” the Librarian confirmed.
“These shelves right here?”
“Yes. And, simultaneously, they are somewhere else.”
“Aha. Right. Gotcha,” Cal said, despite the fact that he very obviously hadn’t.
“We call it the Appendix,” said the Librarian. “It isn’t technically a bubble universe. Not exactly. It is more like a blister on the side of this universe, if you can imagine such a thing. A space, trillions of light-years across, which we use for storage purposes.”
Cal could just about get his head around that part, but was still having trouble with the rest.
“So they’re in another universe,” he said, replaying the conversation. “But also on these shelves?”
“Exactly,” said the Librarian. She produced a plastic box and held it open. “Coconut finger?”
“I’m good, thanks,” said Cal.
The Librarian nodded encouragingly. Cal relented and fumbled one of the long cookies from the packet. He bit, crunched, then swallowed. “Thanks.”
“The shelves are reference points,” the Librarian explained. Well, not explained, exactly, as Cal just stared back at her in confusion. “The Appendix contains the volumes, but the shelves allow us to access any book of our choosing. The shelves are a filing system, the Appendix holds the files.”
Cal ate the rest of the coconut finger. It was pretty good, and nowhere near as stale as he’d been expecting, given how long it must’ve been in the box.
“So, with all those books filling it up, aren’t you worried the Appendix might, you know, burst?” asked Cal. “I’ve heard that can be unpleasant.”
The Librarian smiled a thin smile. “We have a few million millennia before we need worry too much about that.” She glanced sadly around the old place. “It’ll probably be staffed by volunteers by then. We’ll let them worry about it.”
Her eyes widened a little in surprise, as if she hadn’t been expecting to say the words out loud. “Lovely people, of course, and they mean well, I’m sure, but…” Her nose wrinkled a little. “They’re not Librarians, are they? Not really.”
“No,” said Cal. “I guess not.”
He reached for another coconut finger and waved it around like a conductor’s baton. “So, all this. The books. They tell you everything?”
The Librarian swished her teapot gently, then topped up both cups. “Everything, yes. Everything that has happened all across the universe, from its very beginning until this moment.”
“Can it tell the future?” Cal wondered.
The Librarian snorted as she poured milk into her cup, spilling a little into her saucer. “Of course it can’t tell the future. It’s not magic,” she scoffed. “Besides, the future can be changed, Mr Carver. Few know that better than you.”
Cal winced. “So, you know about all that?”
“Oh yes,” said the Librarian, raising her cup to her lips. “We have a robust Alternate History section. You feature in it quite prominently.”
“Can I read some of it?” Cal asked.
The Librarian blew lightly on her tea. “I’d strenuously advise you not to.” Her eyes went to the Symmorium Sentience, then looked pointedly back at Cal.
“Right. Yes. That’s why I’m here,” Cal said, picking up the message loud and clear. “The Sentience told us it has to get home, but it doesn’t seem to know where home is. I guess it thought it might be able to find out here.” He smiled hopefully. “Would that be something you might be able to help with?”
“It is a popular subject of late,” the Librarian replied.
Cal’s chair creaked as he adjusted his position. “What do you mean?”
“I mean you are not the first to come to the Library seeking information on the Symmorium Sentience recently.”
Cal glanced down at the Sentience, then at Splurt. Neither gave him much in return.
“Who else?” he asked, his voice dropping to a whisper, as if whoever else had been inquiring might still be hanging around.
“Someone not all that unlike you, Mr Carver. An Earthling.” She sniffed haughtily. “At least, I believe so, although it was hard to tell with his silly outfit and mask. Manacle, he
called himself. I didn’t much take to him, to be honest.”
Cal’s stomach sank. “Manacle? When was this?”
“A day or two,” the Librarian said. “No more.”
“Damn it,” Cal sighed. “I thought we blew that guy up. Did you tell him anything?”
“This is a Library, Mr Carver. Its entire purpose is to share information.”
“Fonk!” Cal spat.
The Librarian placed a finger to her lips. “Shh,” she urged. “If you’d be so good as to keep your voice down. Thank you.”
“What did you tell him?” Cal asked. “What did you say?”
“I told him nothing. It was a book,” the Librarian said. She placed her cup back in its saucer and rose gracefully. “Come, Mr Carver. This way.”
Mech was struggling. Physically, partly, but mostly mentally.
It was the dial that was the problem. In order to power himself up enough to be able to lift the ship, he’d had to crank it several notches to his right, but while this had greatly enhanced his strength, he was having some difficulty in thinking clearly.
He knew, for example, that he had to lift the ship into position, he just couldn’t quite recall why. He knew that Cal had fallen down a hole, but couldn’t remember how big a hole, where it had been, or what Cal looked like. At least, not beyond a vague sort of sense of something small and irritating.
The blue one spoke in his ear. He’d known her name once, but that was a thing of the past. She spoke in slow, deliberate tones, using short words and phrases. He vaguely recalled instructing her to do that, but the memory felt made-up, and not quite real, so he wasn’t putting a lot of faith in it.
Whatever the reasons for them, her simple instructions were helping him to stay focused. And that, he thought, was the main thing.
Or possibly it wasn’t. He couldn’t remember.
“OK, so you should be standing under the ship, just in front of the wings,” said the blue one.
Mech’s brain groaned with the effort of processing this. He was under the ship. He was confident of that. And the wings were… not in front of him. The other one. Back-something.
“Yes,” he said.
“Good. You’re doing great,” the blue one told him. “Now, do you see a little door?”
Mech shuffled around, searching the ground beside him.
“Sorry, on the bottom of the ship. Above you. It’s a little square door that says ‘Emergency access,’ on it.”
Mech looked up at the underside of the ship until he found the little square door. It had something written on it, but the symbols were gibberish.
“Yes,” he said again.
“Great! Well done, you’re doing great,” said the blue one, and Mech’s chest swelled with pride.
“Bit slow, perhaps,” interjected another voice. Mech recognized it, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t picture a face to go with it. “Could possibly do with getting a move on.”
“Kevin, stop,” the blue one said.
“Stop,” Mech agreed. “Kevin. Stop.”
“You tell him, Mech,” said the blue one. “Now, there are two handles, one on either side of the hatch. They’re supposed to be for access, but we think they’re strong enough to support the weight of the ship for a little while.”
Mech stared blankly.
“Sorry. Not important,” said the blue one. “You see the two handles?”
Mech saw the two handles.
“You’re going to grab those, and when I tell you, you’re going to lift, OK? You’re just going to push both arms straight up and lift the ship as high as you can. You got that?”
Mech replayed the instructions slowly. Then he replayed them again, to be on the safe side.
He then went over them for a third time, but as he’d forgotten the first time by that point, it didn’t really help reinforce the instructions any more than it already had been.
“Yes,” he said.
“Great. We’re almost there, Mech,” the blue one told him. “We’re almost there.”
He heard her take a breath. “OK, so, if you’re ready, take hold of the handles.”
Mech took hold of the handles.
“Yes.”
“Now lift, Mech,” the blue one told him. “Lift!”
The Librarian brushed a fingertip back and forth along what looked to Cal to be a row of nothing at all, then stopped and gave a little cluck of approval.
“Aha. Here we are.”
She mimed, quite accurately, the act of removing a heavy leather-bound volume from a bookshelf, and then, to Cal’s surprise, the book was there in her hand, two words inlaid in gold leaf on the dark cover.
Symmorium Sentience.
And then, further down, another word enclosed by brackets.
(The)
“This is just one volume among many, of course,” the Librarian said. She blew some imaginary dust from the cover and wiped it with her sleeve. “But I think it contains all the pertinent information you seek.”
She clutched the book to her chest for a moment, eyed Cal warily, then handed it over with a reluctance that was readily apparent. “Be careful with it,” she instructed, as Cal fumbled with the book and the Sentience. “It is extremely old.”
“Great. Thanks. And I will,” said Cal, once he had the book safely in his hands and the Sentience tucked beneath an armpit. He flicked to a random page and saw hundreds of lines of small, densely-packed print that immediately made his brain switch off. He closed the book and smiled graciously at the Librarian. “So, do I get it stamped somewhere, or how does this work?”
The Librarian peered over her spectacles at him. “I’m sorry?”
“How do I borrow it?” Cal asked. “So that I can take it back to the ship.”
“Back to your ship?” the Librarian gasped. She looked utterly horrified by the suggestion. “You can’t take it anywhere. This is a reference library, not a lending library.”
Cal looked down at the book. “So, what are you saying? I can’t check it out?”
“No, Mr Carver, you cannot ‘check it out,’” the Librarian told him. “You may peruse. You may memorize. You may even take notes. But the book stays here. Is that understood?”
Cal groaned. “But there are so many words,” he protested. “This is really more Mech’s kind of thing. If I could just take it up to him…”
The temperature in the Library dropped a few degrees. The whispering voices became a hushed murmur of anticipation.
“The book stays here,” the Librarian insisted, her voice strained. Her uninteresting nose gave an almost-interesting little twitch that made her glasses fall off. They swung on the chain in front of her chest, and she made no move to replace them on her face. “Is that understood?”
“Uh, sure. Sure,” said Cal, shifting uneasily.
A sheen of sweat had formed on the Librarian’s brow. She tugged at the neck of her cardigan, as if suddenly growing hot.
Still holding the Sentience under one arm, and with Splurt sagging on his shoulder, Cal turned a few pages of the book.
Fonk, it looked dull. Even before he’d focused on any of the actual words, he could tell it was going to be tedious. It was the way all the text was so tightly bunched together, broken only by the occasional indecipherable graphic that might have been some sort of graph or diagram, but might equally have been the erratic doodlings of a madman.
It was big, too. There had to be hundreds of sections. Where did he even start to look?
The beginning, he decided. He wanted to know the Sentience’s origin, so it made sense to start at the beginning. Also, that meant that the heaviest side was on the right, so he could prop most of the book against the Sentience itself, saving his wrist from the effort of holding it up. It was a classic win-win scenario.
Except for one problem.
“Hey, there’s a page missing,” Cal remarked.
The Librarian trembled. “What?” she asked in a startled hiss.
“Som
eone’s torn a page out,” Cal said, angling the book so she could see. Sure enough, most of one page had been ripped out, leaving only a thin strip of ragged paper in its place. “Is that allowed?”
The Librarian dabbed at her forehead with her tissue, mopping up the sweat that was pouring off her now. “No. Of course, it’s not allowed,” she seethed. “It must have been the Earthling. I knew I didn’t like him, I knew it!”
One of her eyes bulged, swelling to a couple of times its natural size before returning to normal. Cal’s jaw flopped open.
“Uh, you might want to… You’re having some… I don’t want to say ‘face problems,’” Cal said. “But you’re having some face problems.”
“Give it to me,” the Librarian spat, her voice pitched somewhere between a squeak and a grunt. “Give me back the book! You can’t be trusted with it. No one can be trusted with them.”
She lunged for it, hands grasping, fingers twisting into claws.
Cal dodged, then instinctively swung with the thick, leather-bound volume. It thwacked her across the back of the head, sending her stumbling into a rack of shelves.
The whispers fell silent. Cal could only watch with a growing sense of terrible inevitability, as the shelving unit toppled and hit the one behind it.
And then that one toppled, too.
And the one behind it.
And the…
Well, you get the idea.
The crashing reverberated around the Library as shelves fell like dominoes, fanning out, spreading the destruction far and wide.
“N-noise!” hissed the Librarian, grabbing at her ears. “Too… much… noise!”
Cal clutched the book to his chest and quietly took a backward step away. “Uh, sorry, partly my fault,” he said. “But listen, I promise I will bring this right back. OK?”
Down on the floor, the Librarian reared back her head. Her neck twisted and she turned to Cal so suddenly that her face fell off and splatted onto the carpet.
Cal held his breath and stared at the heaving mass of reddish-brown flesh that wore the librarian’s scalp as a hat.
He looked down at her bland, forgettable features on the floor.
Space Team- The Collected Adventures 4 Page 46
