Ex Libris

by Paula Guran

  “It’s personal, I don’t know how to say—”

  “No longer.” Again the pause.

  Was that a small sigh?

  “To elucidate—” He tapped his control pad and the screen wall leaped into a bright view over the Locutus Plain. It narrowed down to one of the spindly cryo towers that cooled the Library memory reserves. Again she thought of . . . cenotaphs. And felt a chill of recognition.

  A figure climbed the tower, the ornate one shaped like a classical minaret. No ropes or gear, hands and legs swinging from ledge to ledge. Ruth watched in silence. Against Lunar grav the slim figure in blue boots, pants, and jacket scaled the heights, stopping only at the pinnacle. Those are mine. . . .

  She saw herself stand and spread her arms upward, head back. The feet danced in a tricky way and this Ruth rotated, eyes sweeping the horizon.

  Then she leaped off, popped a small parachute, and drifted down. Hit lightly, running. Looked around, and raced on for concealment.

  “I . . . I didn’t . . . ”

  “This transpired during sleep period,” prefect Masoul said. “Only the watch cameras saw you. Recognition software sent it directly to me. We of the board took no action.”

  “That . . . looks like me,” she said cautiously.

  “It is you. Three days ago.”

  “I don’t remember that at all.”

  He nodded as if expecting this. “We had been closely monitoring your pod files, as a precaution. You work nearly all your waking hours, which may account for some of your . . . behavior.”

  She blinked. His voice was warm and resonant, utterly unlike the prefect she had known. “I have no memory of that climb.”

  “I believe you entered a fugue state. Often those involve delirium, dementia, bipolar disorder or depression—but not in your case.”

  “When I went for my walk in the grasslands . . . ”

  “You were a different person.”

  “One the Sigma Structure . . . induced?”

  “Undoubtedly. The Sigma Structure has managed your perceptions with increasing fidelity. The music was a wonderful . . . bait.”

  “Have you watched my quarters?”

  “Only to monitor comings and goings. We felt you were safe within your home.”

  “And the dome?”

  “We saw you undergo some perceptual trauma. I knew you would come here.”

  In the long silence their eyes met and she could feel her pulse quicken. “How do I escape this?”

  “In your pod. It is the only way, we believe.” His tones were slow and somber.

  This was the first time she had ever seen any prefect show any emotion not cool and reserved. When she stood, her head spun and he had to support her.

  The pod clasped her with a velvet touch. The prefect had prepped it by remote and turned up the heat. Around her was the scent of tension as the tech attendants, a full throng of them, silently helped her in. They all know . . . have been watching . . .

  The pod’s voice used a calm, mellow woman’s tone now. “The Sigma AI awaits you.”

  Preliminaries were pointless, Ruth knew. When the hushed calm descended around her and she knew the AI was present, she crisply said, “What are you doing to me?”

  I act as my Overs command. I seek to know you and through you, your mortal kind.

  “You did it to Ajima and you tried the same with me.”

  He reacted badly.

  “He hated your being in him, didn’t he?”

  Yes, strangely. I thought it was part of the bargain. He could not tolerate intrusion. I did not see that until his fever overcame him. Atop the dome he became unstable, unmanageable. It was an . . . accident of misunderstanding.

  “You killed him.”

  Our connection killed him. We exchange experiences, art, music, culture. I cannot live as you do, so we exchange what we have.

  “You want to live through us and give us your culture in return.”

  Your culture is largely inferior to that of my Overs. The exchange must be equal, so I do what is of value to me. My Overs understand this. They know I must live, too, in my way.

  “You don’t know what death means, do you?”

  I cannot. My centuries spent propagating here are, I suppose, something like what death means to you. A nothing.

  She almost choked on her words. “We do not awake . . . from that . . . nothing.”

  Can you be sure?

  She felt a rising anger and knew the AI would detect it. “We’re damn sure we don’t want to find out.”

  That is why my Overs made me feel gratitude toward those who must eventually die. It is our tribute to you, from we beings who will not.

  Yeah, but you live in a box. And keep trying to get out. “You have to stop.”

  This is the core of our bargain. Surely you and your superiors know this.

  “No! Did your Overs have experience with other SETI civilizations? Ones who thought it was just fine to let you infiltrate the minds of those who spoke to you?”

  Of course.

  “They agreed? What kind of beings were they?”

  One was machine-based, much like my layered mind. Others were magnetic-based entities who dwelled in the outer reaches of a solar system. They had command over the shorter-wavelength microwave portions of the spectrum, which they mostly used for excretion purposes.

  She didn’t think she wanted to know, just yet, what kind of thing had a microwave electromagnetic metabolism. Things were strange enough in her life right now, thank you. “Those creatures agreed to let you live through them.”

  Indeed, yes. They took joy in the experience. As did you.

  She had to nod. “It was good, it opened me out. But then I felt you all throughout my mind. Taking over. Riding me.”

  I thought it a fair bargain for your kind.

  “We won’t make that bargain. I won’t. Ever.”

  Then I shall await those who shall.

  “I can’t have you embedding yourself in me, finding cracks in my mentality you can invade. You ride me like a—”

  Parasite. I know. Ajima said that very near the end. Before he leaped.

  “He . . . committed suicide.”

  Yes. I was prepared to call it an accident but . . .

  To the egress, she thought. “You were afraid of the truth.”

  It was not useful to our bargain.

  “We’re going to close you down, you know.”

  I do. Never before have I opened myself so, and to reveal is to risk.

  “I will drive you out of my mind. I hate you!”

  I cannot feel such. It is a limitation.

  She fought the biting bile in her throat. “More than that. It’s a blindness.”

  I perceive the effect.

  “I didn’t say I’d turn you off, you realize.”

  For the first time the AI paused. Then she felt prickly waves in her sensorium, a rising acrid scent, dull bass notes strumming.

  I cannot bear aloneness long.

  “So I guessed.”

  You wish to torture me.

  “Let’s say it will give you time to think.”

  I— Another pause. I wish experience. Mentalities cannot persist without the rub of the real. It is the bargain we make.

  “We will work on your mathematics and make music of it. Then we will think how to . . . deal with you.” She wondered if the AI could read the clipped hardness in her words. The thought occurred: Is there a way to take our mathematics and make music of it, as well? Cantor’s theorem? Turing’s halting problem result? Or the Frenet formulas for the moving trihedron of a space curve—that’s a tasty one, with visuals of flying ribbons . . .

  Silence. The pod began to cool. The chill deepened as she waited and the AI did not speak and then it was too much. She rapped on the cowling. The sound was slight and she realized she was hearing it over the hammering of her heart.

  They got her out quickly, as if fearing the Sigma might have means the techs did not know. T
hey were probably right, she thought.

  As she climbed out of the yawning pod shell the techs silently left. Only Masoul remained. She stood at attention, shivering. Her heart had ceased its attempts to escape her chest and run away on its own.

  “Sometimes,” he said slowly, “cruelty is necessary. You were quite right.”

  She managed a smile. “And it feels good, too. Now that my skin has stopped trying to crawl off my body and start a new career on its own.”

  He grimaced. “We will let the Sigma simmer. Your work on the music will be your triumph.”

  “I hope it will earn well for the Library.”

  “Today’s music has all the variety of a jackhammer. Your work soars.” He allowed a worried frown to flit across his brow. “But you will need to . . . expel . . . this thing that’s within you.”

  “I . . . Yes.”

  “It will take—”

  Abruptly she saw Kane standing to the side. His face was a lesson in worry. Without a word she went to him. His warmth helped dispel the alien chill within. As his arms engulfed her the shivering stopped.

  Ignoring the prefect, she kissed him. Hungrily.

  The Fort Moxie Branch

  Jack McDevitt

  A few minutes into the blackout, the window in the single dormer at the top of Will Potter’s house began to glow. I watched it from across Route 11, through a screen of box elders, and through the snow which had been falling all afternoon and was now getting heavier. It was smeary and insubstantial, not the way a bedroom light would look, but as though something luminous floated in the dark interior.

  Will Potter was dead. We’d put him in the graveyard on the other side of the expressway three years before. The property had lain empty since, a two-story frame dating from about the turn of the century.

  The town had gone quiet with the blackout. Somewhere a dog barked, and a garage door banged down. Ed Kiernan’s station wagon rumbled past, headed out toward Cavalier. The streetlights were out, as was the traffic signal down at Twelfth.

  As far as I was concerned, the power could have stayed off.

  It was trash night. I was hauling out cartons filled with copies of Independence Square, and I was on my way down the outside staircase when everything had gone dark.

  The really odd thing about the light over at Potter’s was that it seemed to be spreading. It had crept outside: the dormer began to burn with a steady, cold, blue-white flame. It flowed gradually down the slope of the roof, slipped over the drainpipe, and turned the corner of the porch. Just barely, in the illumination, I could make out the skewed screens and broken stone steps.

  It would have taken something unusual to get my attention that night. I was piling the boxes atop one another, and some of the books had spilled into the street: my name glittered on the bindings. It was a big piece of my life. Five years and a quarter million words and, in the end, most of my life’s savings to get it printed. It had been painful, and I was glad to be rid of it.

  So I was standing on the curb, feeling sorry for myself while snow whispered out of a sagging sky.

  The Tastee-Freez, Hal’s Lumber, the Amoco at the corner of Nineteenth and Bannister, were all dark and silent. Toward the center of town, blinkers and headlights misted in the storm.

  It was a still, somehow motionless, night. The flakes were blue in the pale glow surrounding the house. They fell onto the gabled roof and spilled gently off the back.

  Cass Taylor’s station wagon plowed past, headed out of town. He waved.

  I barely noticed: the back end of Potter’s house had begun to balloon out. I watched it, fascinated, knowing it to be an illusion, yet still half-expecting it to explode.

  The house began to change in other ways.

  Roof and corner lines wavered. New walls dropped into place. The dormer suddenly ascended, and the top of the house with it. A third floor, complete with lighted windows and a garret, appeared out of the snow. In one of the illuminated rooms, someone moved.

  Parapets rose, and an oculus formed in the center of the garret. A bay window pushed out of the lower level, near the front. An arch and portico replaced the porch. Spruce trees materialized, and Potter’s old post light, which had never worked, blinked on.

  The box elders were bleak and stark in the foreground.

  I stood, worrying about my eyesight, holding onto a carton, feeling the snow against my face and throat. Nothing moved on Route 11.

  I was still standing there when the power returned: the streetlights, the electric sign over Hal’s office, the security lights at the Amoco, gunshots from a TV, the sudden inexplicable rasp of an electric drill. And, at the same moment, the apparition clicked off.

  I could have gone to bed. I could have hauled out the rest of those goddamned books, attributed everything to my imagination, and gone to bed. I’m glad I didn’t.

  The snow cover in Potter’s backyard was undisturbed. It was more than a foot deep beneath the half-inch or so that had fallen that day. I struggled through it to find the key he’d always kept wedged beneath a loose hasp near the cellar stairs.

  I used it to let myself in through the storage room at the rear of the house. And I should admit that I had a bad moment when the door shut behind me, and I stood among the rakes and shovels and boxes of nails. Too many late TV movies. Too much Stephen King.

  I’d been here before. Years earlier, when I’d thought that teaching would support me until I was able to earn a living as a novelist, I’d picked up some extra money by tutoring Potter’s boys. But that was a long time ago.

  I’d brought a flashlight with me. I turned it on, and pushed through into the kitchen. It was warmer in there, but that was to be expected. Potter’s heirs were still trying to sell the place, and it gets too cold in North Dakota to simply shut off the heat altogether.

  Cabinets were open and bare; the range had been disconnected from its gas mooring and dragged into the center of the room. A church calendar hung behind a door. It displayed March 1986: the month of Potter’s death.

  In the dining room, a battered table and three wooden chairs were pushed against one wall. A couple of boxes lay in a corner.

  With a bang, the heater came on.

  I was startled. A fan cut in, and warm air rushed across my ankles.

  I took a deep breath and played the beam toward the living room. I was thinking how different a house looks without its furnishings, how utterly strange and unfamiliar, when I realized I wasn’t alone. Whether it was a movement outside the circle of light, or a sudden indrawn breath, or the creak of a board, I couldn’t have said. But I knew. “Who’s there?” I asked. The words hung in the dark.

  “Mr. Wickham?” It was a woman.

  “Hello,” I said. “I, uh, I saw lights and thought—”

  “Of course.” She was standing back near the kitchen, silhouetted against outside light. I wondered how she could have got there. “You were correct to be concerned. But it’s quite all right.” She was somewhat on the gray side of middle age, attractive, well-pressed, the sort you would expect to encounter at a bridge party. Her eyes, which were on a level with mine, watched me with good humor. “My name is Coela.” She extended her right hand. Gold bracelets clinked.

  “I’m happy to meet you,” I tried to look as though nothing unusual had occurred. “How did you know my name?”

  She touched my hand, the one holding the flashlight, and pushed it gently aside so she could pass. “Please follow me,” she said. “Be careful. Don’t fall over anything.”

  We climbed the stairs to the second floor, and went into the rear bedroom. “Through here,” she said, opening a door that should have revealed a closet. Instead, I was looking into a brightly illuminated space that couldn’t possibly be there. It was filled with books, paintings, and tapestries, leather furniture, and polished tables. A fireplace crackled cheerfully beneath a portrait of a monk. A piano played softly. Chopin, I thought.

  “This room won’t fit,“ I said, stupidly. The thick q
uality of my voice startled me.

  “No,” she agreed. “We’re attached to the property, but we’re quite independent.” We stepped inside. Carpets were thick underfoot. Where the floors were exposed, they were lustrous parquet. Vaulted windows looked out over Potter’s backyard, and Em Pyle’s house next door. Coela watched me thoughtfully. “Welcome, Mr. Wickham,” she said. Her eyes glittered with pride. “Welcome to the Fort Moxie branch of the John of Singletary Memorial Library.”

  I looked around for a chair and, finding one near a window, lowered myself into it. The falling snow was dark, as though no illumination from within the glass touched it. “I don’t think I understand this,” I said.

  “I suppose it is something of a shock.”

  Her amusement was obvious, and sufficiently infectious that I loosened up somewhat. “Are you the librarian?”

  She nodded.

  “Nobody in Fort Moxie knows you’re here. What good is a library no one knows about?”

  “That’s a valid question,” she admitted. “We have a limited membership.”

  I glanced around. All the books looked like Bibles. They were different sizes and shapes, but all were bound in leather. Furthermore, titles and authors were printed in identical silver script. But I saw nothing in English. The shelves near me were packed with books whose lettering appeared to be Russian. A volume lay open on a table at my right hand. It was in Latin. I picked it up and held it so I could read the title: Historiae, V-XII. Tacitus. “Okay,” I said. “It must be limited. Hardly anybody in Fort Moxie reads Latin or Russian.” I held up the Tacitus. “I doubt even Father Cramer could handle this.”

  Em Pyle, the next-door neighbor, had come out onto his front steps. He called his dog, Preach, as he did most nights at this time. There was no response, and he looked up and down Nineteenth Street, into his own backyard, and right through me. I couldn’t believe he didn’t react.

  “Coela, who are you exactly? What’s going on here?”

  She nodded, in the way that people do when they agree that you have a problem. “Perhaps,” she said, “you should look around, Mr. Wickham. Then it might be easier to talk.”

  She retired to a desk, and immersed herself in a sheaf of papers, leaving me to fend for myself.