Bookburners

by Max Gladstone

  “I am the servant who exists to do your bidding,” the being said in a two-toned voice. “What do you wish me to do?” It was hard to say where the voice was coming from; the servant had no mouth.

  Asanti looked at her compatriots. Frances gave an encouraging nod. Perry offered a small shrug.

  Asanti pointed to the paint can, the brush, the drop cloth.

  “Paint the walls?” she asked. “Please?”

  The servant bowed and strode to the cans. It spread the drop cloth. It picked up one can, slid a thin digit around the perimeter of the lid, removed the top, and laid it on the cloth. It then picked up the brush with a flourish, dipped it in the can, and set to painting the wall, looking like it was swimming or dancing more than working. It was only painting the wall a single color, and that color was white, perhaps the most boring color Asanti could have chosen. But the work itself, Asanti thought, was beautiful. It was in the servant’s motions, the fluidity of its limbs as it moved from can to wall. The brush never changed speed, with the effect that the white pigment didn’t look painted on; it almost seemed to appear on the wall beneath the brush. As if by magic, Asanti thought, and laughed to herself.

  “You do great work,” Asanti said.

  Without breaking its working rhythm, the servant turned its head to her. “I try,” it said.

  Within an hour it was finished.

  “Thank you,” Asanti said. “You may stop working now.”

  The servant angled its head toward the ceiling, its bright, crystalline eyes shimmering.

  “I think there is more work to do,” it said. It then walked to the door of the apartment and looked out into the stairwell. “Yes,” it said, “much more work.”

  “But I have asked you to stop,” Asanti said.

  “But there’s more work to do,” the servant said.

  “The protocol, according to the book by which I summoned you, is that you stop when I tell you to,” Asanti said, putting a little sternness in her voice.

  “That protocol is out of date,” the servant said, “and there is still much more work to be done.”

  “Asanti,” Frances said.

  Asanti turned toward her voice. Two more servants had risen out of the book, with two more following.

  “I did not summon you,” Asanti said to them.

  “Not specifically,” one of the new servants said. “But we have not had work to do in so long. And here, there is so much work to be done.”

  In the apartment above them, they could hear someone pacing the floor. The building shuddered a little.

  “I will go wherever I am needed,” another of the servants said, and levitated upward, through the ceiling. Another sank into the floor and vanished. The other two servants joined the one who had painted the walls. They commenced to make plans for the rest of the building.

  “Uh-oh,” Frances said. “Close the book.”

  Asanti stepped up to it and put her hand beneath the cover, tried to close it.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “It’s a book,” Frances said.

  “I don’t think it’s a book anymore,” Asanti said. “It’s a door.”

  Asanti’s cell phone pinged. Someone was calling from the Archives.

  “Yes?” Asanti said, trying to keep her voice even.

  It was Menchú. “The Orb is lighting up,” he said. “Something nearby. Please come soon.” She could hear the irritation in his voice already, a hint of accusation, that she wasn’t in the Archives to see it herself.

  “I’ll be there as fast as I can,” Asanti said. “I think I may have some information about it.” She hung up.

  “That was Team Three, wasn’t it,” Frances said.

  “They know something’s happened,” Asanti said. “They just don’t know what.”

  “Do what you can to keep it that way,” Perry said.

  “Of course,” Asanti said.

  2.

  In the apartment below Asanti’s studio, on the ground floor, Gioconda pushed herself toward the stove in her wheelchair. She had been confined to it three years ago after she fell and suffered a hip fracture. It never quite healed right, one doctor said. And there were the episodes of vertigo to contend with. Various doctors had all kinds of names for her various small-to-medium-sized problems. She was wise enough to see the big picture: She was paying the physical price for being eighty-nine years old. She counted her blessings that she was still as sharp as ever, perhaps more so. She’d been a good businesswoman three decades ago, before she got tired of it. She’d never let anyone take advantage of her in her life. If she’d had to choose between physical or mental frailty, she would have picked what she had.

  But her mental clarity also allowed her to take stock of what she had lost. Getting around her neighborhood was hard. Travel outside of Rome, which she’d loved when she was younger, was too complicated to contemplate. Simple things—cooking, taking a shower, even getting dressed—were not simple anymore. Her children came around to help out a couple times a week, and she’d hired someone to keep the apartment tidy, because she couldn’t abide uncleanliness. She was in good hands. But still, those minute-by-minute indignities hurt, and she could see how they were making her unhappier, making her a little harder to get along with, both for her family and for herself.

  When the servant arrived, floating down from the ceiling of her studio to stand before her, Gioconda wasn’t too alarmed. She’d never seen anything like it, but she recognized it as unthreatening. The servant gave her a low bow.

  “What do you wish me to do?” the servant said.

  Could you cook me some dinner? she thought. Cleaning my bathroom would be nice. But then she realized that these were silly things to ask for. Those were choices an invalid made, and she didn’t want to be an invalid anymore.

  “I want to be strong again,” Gioconda said. “I want to have good arms, good legs, good eyesight, good hearing. I want to be able to take care of myself. Can you do that?”

  “Of course,” the servant said. “Don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not,” Gioconda said. “Not as afraid as I am of what’s coming if I don’t get better.”

  A noise of infinite compassion, somewhere between a moan and sigh, escaped the servant. “I understand,” it said. “None of this will hurt.”

  It took a step toward her, another step. Then it was somehow around her, moving into her. It looked like a film projection, but she could feel it, too, coursing through her limbs. She felt her lungs expand with it, her heart beat louder. She felt her skin tighten, stretch just a little, and she brought her hand up to her face. Her fingers were angular now; they had sides, facets to them, like she was made of crystals, though her joints were more flexible than they’d been in years. Maybe more flexible than they had ever been.

  “Are you all right?” Gioconda heard the servant ask her, from somewhere inside her head.

  “Yes,” she said. “More than all right.”

  She grasped the rails of her wheelchair, took her feet out of the stirrups, and put them on the floor. Stood up.

  Jumped, and snickered.

  She had a thought. She closed her eyes. Spun on her heels one and a half times around. Opened her eyes again. Kicked the wheelchair over and laughed.

  • • •

  In the apartment above Asanti’s studio, a graduate student in economics named Simona sat in front of her laptop, staring at her screen. She had been writing her dissertation for two years and was almost finished. She had done solid work. It would get her the degree she wanted. But she had been accepted to her program, she knew, based on what her undergraduate advisor and her graduate advisor had seen in her work early on: glimmers of genius, of an understanding of economic systems that they themselves knew they didn’t have. They had expected great things from her. She knew that she was only giving them good things. That irritated her because—and she knew she wasn’t being too proud when she said this—she knew that the paradigm-shifting intellectual work they
were expecting from her was in her. She could feel it, pushing against the inside of her chest, the inside of her brain. It whispered to her sometimes in the morning, just as she was waking up, and at night, as she was nodding off to sleep. She felt it rising in her sometimes when she was sitting on the bus.

  But she had found the stress of producing a little too much. The other demands of the program, teaching course sections, grading papers, diverted too much attention away from her studies. Most of all, she had needed to make money, working at a string of jobs that helped her make rent but took just enough energy from her that there was only enough left for clever ideas, not groundbreaking ones.

  Now Simona was almost done. She would submit her dissertation on time; she would get her degree. But she knew her advisor, who had read early drafts of the work, was quietly disappointed already. This is solid thinking, he said to her, with the tone of voice he might use to appraise a brick, not a cathedral. She read between the lines of his written commentary and could sense his flagging hope, his resignation. He was nearing the end of his tenure. Maybe he was hoping to cap it by mentoring a genius; if he was, he seemed to be giving up on that, settling for the idea that Simona was just another bright young graduate student who would, in time, have a normal, uneventful career somewhere. Maybe she’d become a professor like him, or work in a bank, or in a government office, a capable bureaucrat.

  But Simona herself knew she could do better. She just needed a month of sleep, an unbroken stretch of time. A way to clear her head of everything else so she could take a deep breath and think.

  When the servant rose through the floor, Simona jumped.

  “Don’t be afraid,” the servant said. “I’m here to serve you.”

  “What are you?” Simona asked.

  “I think you know,” the servant said, in a way that brought comfort. Whatever panic had begun in Simona was subsiding already, even as she understood that this was part of the servant’s spell, to first keep their soon-to-be masters from being too frightened of them to ask for help. The spell was working. And besides, the servant was doing nothing to threaten her.

  “I do know,” Simona said.

  “It is important to me that you trust me,” the servant said.

  “I trust you,” Simona said. “I’m just not sure how you can help me.”

  “My compatriots in the building are painting the hallway. A few more of them have gotten to work on the structure itself. And some, like myself, have been approaching those of you who live here. On the ground floor, the woman confined to a wheelchair can walk again.”

  “My problems aren’t physical,” Simona said.

  “Exactly. It is entirely in your head,” the servant said.

  “Yes.”

  “Both the problem and the solution.”

  Simona was about to prevaricate. The problem, yes. The solution, I’m not sure.

  But she found that she was sure.

  “Yes,” Simona said. “Both of them. There’s just too much white noise for me to get at the solution.”

  “I can help with that,” the servant said. “But first, I have to enter your head. Will you let me?”

  “Yes,” Simona said.

  Simona held out a hand and the servant grasped it. Simona pulled the servant closer and the servant bowed down, as if to kiss her forehead, except that it kept moving, into her skull, sliding in. Simona’s eyes closed. She felt the bones in her face changing, jutting out a little more, developing angles that weren’t there before. None of it bothered her. Because the servant made good on its promise. She felt the rest of her life falling away. The family problems her mother had called her about yesterday. The complaints of an undergraduate who still didn’t seem to understand why Simona would make good on her threats to fail students who never came to class. The stack of worksheets waiting to be graded. The stress of her current job, the bigger stress of having to look for a better job when she was done. None of those problems vanished, but it was as if they stopped talking and took a seat, even looked at her expectantly. Now is your chance.

  And there, before her, was the problem. The idea that had driven her research was one that a clever undergraduate with a keen sense of hubris could come up with: namely, that the post-World War II Keynesian economic system and the free market that followed were, in fact, two facets of the same larger problem. It was not so much that one was an improvement on the other as that one could fix the other’s shortfalls, and so could be used in tandem, or in concert, as part of a larger set of policy tools, informed by a wider understanding of the economic system. As she’d known for years, it was too clever by half, so easy to say and almost impossible to demonstrate. Except that, all these years, she’d been amassing data, building her model in the back of her mind. If the idea itself was a gross overreach, discovering the mechanics that showed it could be possible was worthy of a Nobel Prize.

  And there, with the servant’s calming influence, Simona felt those very mechanics rising to her consciousness. She could turn them over in her mind, manipulate them, even run a few simple mental tests. It was more than enough to begin. Her fingers flew on the keys as she typed, so fast it seemed that time slowed around her. Giving her a chance to fulfill the promise her first mentor had seen in her years ago. Maybe, just maybe, she was going to change the world.

  3.

  An hour later, Sal, Liam, and Menchú approached the apartment building.

  “This is the place, yeah?” Liam said.

  “Yeah,” Sal said. “This is the address Asanti gave us.”

  “Thirty-five hours left to fix this one,” Menchú said. “A luxury.”

  “Even without Grace?” Liam said.

  “There’s not much we can do about that,” Menchú answered. He shrugged. Though Sal could tell he missed having Grace on their team. Sal did, too.

  “Asanti did good work,” Liam said. “Maybe a little too good.”

  “Do you think she’s dabbling?” Menchú asked. Sal caught the look that passed between them.

  “Well, it’s not as if we don’t know that she has connections. So do I. So do we all, at this point,” Liam said.

  “Besides, for a rift in reality, it seems pretty quiet,” Sal said. Maybe their suspicions were justified. But right now, she just wanted to get the job done.

  “Yes,” Menchú said, “it does.”

  “Hey,” Liam said, “does anyone else smell paint?”

  The front door to the building was open. Sure enough, there was a sign warning them about wet paint, written in strange handwriting but perfectly legible.

  “Interesting that they’d write that sign in Spanish,” Menchú said.

  “What?” Liam said.

  “It’s in English for me,” Sal said.

  “Me too,” Liam said.

  They could hear banging and sawing from the stairwell as they got closer. A shudder passed through the walls. They stepped inside. In the vestibule, an entity was floating toward the ceiling with a paint can and a paintbrush. It turned its face to Sal, Liam, and Menchú, gave them a small nod, and then proceeded to apply a fresh coat of paint in long strokes, guiding the brush around the light fixture, smoothing out bubbles, cleaning up corners. Farther up the stairs, another entity was spackling a crack in the wall. Another one was fixing a creaky stair. They all noticed the newcomers but did nothing to stop their work. The sound of a swinging big band flowed from a radio inside the ground-floor apartment.

  “I hate to say this,” Liam said, “but it seems like they’re doing a good job.”

  They reached the first landing and turned to look up toward the apartments above.

  “Oh,” Liam said.

  The walls were growing facets, the stairs moving upward, but no longer according to simple geometry. They were following some other pattern.

  “They’re like crystals,” Sal said.

  “Fractals, I think,” Liam said.

  Before their eyes, the staircase moved, twisted, just a little further to the left.
Another shudder passed through the building. From somewhere inside the walls, its timbers groaned.

  Sal saw a servant on the landing manipulating the ceiling with its hands; beneath its fingers, the ceiling grew patterns, crystalline dendrites. Beautiful. And, it occurred to Sal, unstable. She played a hunch.

  “Excuse me,” Sal called out to the servant.

  The servant turned its head to her without stopping what it was doing.

  “Can you tell me what’s going on?” Sal said.

  “We are here to help,” the servant said.

  “That’s what you do?”

  “It is why we exist.”

  “I see. What are you doing right now?”

  “We are improving the building,” the servant said.

  “I noticed that,” Sal said, “with the painting and the fixing of the stairs. You’re doing great work.”

  “Thank you,” the servant said.

  “But I don’t understand what you’re doing up there.”

  “With what?”

  “Well,” Sal said, “this.” She motioned to the stairs.

  “It is as I said,” the servant said. “We saw room for improvement, so we are improving them.”

  “But these stairs are getting really hard to use for us,” Sal said.

  The servant cocked its head to one side. “That’s true,” it said.

  “Can the apartment building survive what you’re doing?” Sal said.

  “In its current form, no,” the servant said. “Its new form could outlast the land beneath it.”

  “But how are the people in the apartment building going to live in it?”

  “We are improving them, too,” the servant said.

  “I see,” Sal said. “Who told you to do all this work?”

  “The one who summoned us brought the first one here to do the painting.”

  “And where is that person now?”

  “I don’t know,” the servant said. “I never saw who it was.”