Alexandrian Librarians

by Stephen L. Burns

  Now what? I asked myself, painfully aware of how fast time was running out. Once again my Academy training had let me down by not covering the threatening and/or shooting of passengers in a real depth. I stared at Xan, who radiated a calm confidence that I wouldn’t hurt the people I’d come to save. The problem was, he was right.

  But my captain had sent me down to rescue him and these other maniacs, and I intended to complete my mission.

  They always speak of inspiration striking. That’s what happened to me next. My brain gave a sort of hitch that made me blink, then I lowered the gun so its muzzle was pointed at the briefcase Xan carried.

  “No,” I said in as menacing a voice as I could muster, “But I’m perfectly willing to blow your data all to hell.” His round face went pasty white. “You wouldn’t! This material is priceless and irreplacable!”

  “So are all of you. So is my commission. So—” I jerked my thumb toward the airlock. “I suggest you get your over-educated asses in there this instant.”

  Nobody moved.

  I pulled the briefcase out of Xan’s hand and jammed the gun up against it. “I said move!” While that didn’t exactly start a stampede, they didn’t dawdle either.

  Once inside, I learned that not only had they filled the shuttle cargo hold, they’d stuffed the cabin section full of K’leven leftovers as well.

  There wasn’t time to clear off the passenger couches, or to see if I had enough control over them to get them to toss some of their precious artifacts overboard. So I had Shelby lie down on the one bare patch of decking and the others sit on him. Once they were settled in, I put the manual restraint field on at full power to keep them out of my hair.

  I had to climb over piles of stuff to reach the pilot’s chair. The briefcase went between my feet and the gun went back into my waistband, but I made sure it was within easy reach.

  My first look at the boards told me that my problems were still far from over. The payload indicators were showing me big numbers in an ominous red, the hazard avoidance systems were flashing ultra-urgent warnings that several giant chunks of K’leven’s moon were hurtling toward where we were sitting, and my captain wanted to have a word with me.

  “Here goes nothing,” I muttered, initiating lift. Then I opened a tacxline to the Gibbon. Captain Chandaveda’s face appeared on the screen. She looked somewhat aggravated.

  “It’s about time, Ornish. I was beginning to think you’d gone AWOL. Are you having a problem down there, or did you just plan to hang around for a while and get stoned?”

  “I’ve got a problem, ma’am.” The shuttle shuddered and began to lift with agonizing slowness. “The vulking Prezzies stuffed the shuttle full of junk from the vault.”

  “Artifacts!” came a chorus behind me.

  “I had to hold their data at gunpoint to get them to board. Now we’re so overloaded we can barely move.”

  “Sounds like you have your hands full,” she commented with a marked lack of sympathy. “I’ll stop being a distraction. See you when you get up here.” With that she broke the connection, leaving me staring at a dead screen.

  “Thanks for all your help,” I growled, searching my boards for some clue as to how to get out of this predicament. Then I looked again, hoping there was something I missed. No such luck.

  Less than four minutes remained until impact, we were less than a hundred meters up, and while our rate of ascent might have made an arthritic vulture carrying off a dead heifer proud, all it was giving me was a sour, sinking feeling that my next flight would be on angel’s wings.

  My fingers did a fast, sweaty flamenco, asking the shuttle’s computer a dozen questions.

  I started getting answers I didn’t really want to hear. The shockwaves impact was going to cause would be far nastier than the shuttle’s shields and hull could withstand. To survive them, we had to be almost halfway around the planet or pretty much clear of the atmosphere. The fastest way to clear air was to go straight up—right toward the oncoming Rocks of Doom—and our present rate of climb just wasn’t fast enough to get us to vacuum in time. I compromised, peeling us off at a slight angle so we weren’t on a head-on heading.

  The only thing in our favor was that escape velocity wasn’t a problem for the shuttle since it used gravitic propulsion. You just keep negating gravity until there isn’t any more. It was getting clear of that shockwave which was our deadline. One we were going to miss by a considerable margin.

  Back in the Academy simulators we called a situation like this a phillips head, so named because no matter what you did, you were completely screwed and in the crapper.

  What we needed was more acceleration. The gravgrid under the shuttle was running at redline. I had the small maneuvering thrusters running at full. While making the SOBs who had gotten us into the mess get out to push might have made me feel better, that wouldn’t help either. The only propulsion system not running flat out was the other gravgrid on top of the shuttle.

  Gravitic propulsion needs either a gravity field or at least a reasonable amount of mass to either react against or pull toward, the amount of lift and delta V constrained by several factors: the class and power rating of craft’s systems; the mass of the craft itself; the mass and gravitational pull of the bodies you are heading to and/or from, and the distance to those bodies. Much complex math here, but of a kind the shuttle knew how to do.

  In other words, to use the topgrid I needed something above us to hook onto. So I ran some numbers.

  Another dead end. K’leven’s moon was too far away to add all that much lift. The Gibbon was closer and suffci-iently massy, but the geometry sucked. Heading toward her would force me to take a longer flight path through more atmosphere, and we’d still be in air thick enough that the odds of the shockwave smutching us were seventy to thirty.

  On our present course the odds were seventy-two to sixty-eight. So I loaded the course correction to veer us off toward the Gibbon and gain us that pointless increment of lift.

  Just as my finger touched the surface of the pad which would initiate the change I froze. It was another case of inspiration striking, only this time it hit like a ten-ton gumball. I let out a strangled sound of dismay at the insane idea which had just stepped out onto the front of my brain, looked me in the inner eye, grinned and said, hey sailor, what do you think of ME?

  “Are you all right, son?” Dr. Xan called from behind me.

  I ignored him, moving my hands and preparing to run the numbers on the plan my possibly snapped mind had just given me.

  A crazed chuckle rose up out of some deep and strange place inside me. “To hell with it,” I said, still cackling dementedly as I laid in the new instructions and initiated them.

  The overloaded shuttle shied onto its new vector, moaning in protest. Noticeable acceleration settled over us as the topgrid sank its ethereal hooks into those oncoming rocks and began hauling us right toward them in a game of megalithic chicken.

  Now I was getting a readout that was less than encouragingly labeled TIME TO IMPACT. It started at just over three minutes, and the numbers were changing faster than realtime because the closer we came to those stony spitballs, the more acceleration I could wring from them. I watched them flicker madly, sweat trickling down my sides.

  When less than thirty seconds remained until we occupied the same space as those baby mountains I put my hand over the pad which would initiate our final, but hopefully not final course correction.

  “Better hang on—” I called to my passengers. Ten seconds left.

  “—This just might—” Five seconds. The slap of a pad unlocked the topgrid from the Stones of Death, stood the shuttle nearly on its side and latched onto the Gibbon.

  “—Get a little—” A fiery chunk of K’leven’s moon, the size of Gagarin Hall back at the Academy, roared by us with less than five hundred meters to spare. The shuttle bucked as the pressure wave its passing created hit us, but that too added another bit of acceleration.

  “—Ro
ugh!” One screen tracked the monster buckshot on its flaming descent. The shields were on full, and while we had reached the uppermost edges of the atmosphere, we still weren’t completely clear of it. The rocks’ kamikaze death-dive ended in a blinding blue-white light so sudden and so bright some of it made it through the shuttle’s luma-reactive ports.

  The wait for the Shockwave seemed to take an eternity, one I spent pounding on the arms of my chair and going, “Come on baby, just a little faster, you can do it, just a little farther—”

  When the wave front hit it was like a massive hand had come up under us and flung us like a shotput. My boards erupted with dire warnings and reports of systems failure.

  The wonder of it all was that I was still alive to deal with them.

  Just about an hour later I was still sitting in the shuttle’s cockpit. The boards were quiet, and there was no sense of motion. That was because it was snugged safely into its bay aboard the Gibbon.

  My passengers had already debarked. They had interrupted their heated discussion as to whether the vault might have survived (it was one to one with four abstentions), and whether there might be well-hidden military emplacements the Spyter had missed worth investigating on K’leven’s moon, to each thank me for saving their artifacts and data—and by the way, their lives too. Clotilde slapped a vigorous liplock on me, then whispered that if I came by her quarters later I might just be given a proper hero’s reward.

  I just sat there in the silence. My plan was to get up and leave the shuttle once I stopped shaking. I had high hopes that would happen before my thirtieth birthday, which was a mere four years away.

  Captain Chandaveda materialized beside me on her bare and soundless feet. For once she didn’t startle me. My nervous system was beyond such responses.

  “Shutdown checkout going a little slow, Ornish?” she asked, one eyebrow arched in inquiry.

  I shook my head. “No ma’am. It’s done.”

  “Good.” She parked a meaty hip on the edge of the control board. There was a bottle and two glasses in her hands. She filled both glasses, handed one to me. “Here, drink this.”

  “What is it?” I asked dully.

  “Nerve tonic. Go on, have some.”

  “Yes’m.” I accepted the glass. She tossed off hers like it was water. I tipped my head back and took a swig, nearly choking as what felt like liquid antimatter ate its way down my throat.

  “It’s 170 proof nerve tonic,” she added with a smile. “Maybe you’d better just sip it.”

  When I could breathe and see again I looked at her through watery eyes and gasped, “Thanks for the warning.” Her smile turned into a big grin. “You did a good job, Ornish. I’m damned proud to call you my first officer, and I’d like to make it a habit. I hope you’ll reconsider trying to get out of serving on the Prezzie fleet ”

  I gaped at her in open-mouthed surprise. “How did you know I—”

  She laughed. “Honey, when they first dragooned me into this fleet and my appeal was turned down I seriously considered mutiny as a way to get out”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  She refilled our glasses. “Nope. I was fit to be medicated. Then toward the end of my first voyage things got kind of interesting. Not as interesting as they did for you today, but enough to make me hold off taking my captain hostage I don’t know what I found harder to believe: her story, or her matter-of-fact attitude about what had just happened. “You call what I just went through interesting.?”

  “Sure wouldn’t call it dull.” She took a swallow from her drink. “You weren’t really in all that much danger. The Gibbon has gravities too, and a little atmospheric scorch wouldn’t have made her any uglier. I was locked onto you and ready to haul your ass out of there if I had to ” She saluted me with her glass. “Never had to lift a hand, though. You cut it pretty close, but you pulled it off all by yourself.”

  I shook my head in dazed amazement. “I never even thought of asking you to do that.” In fact, the two fields working together in gravitosynchronicity would have given the shuttle all sorts of lift, even if she hadn’t dropped orbit.

  “Don’t feel bad. I didn’t exactly encourage you to ask for help, and your first thought was to get yourself out of the jam you were in. Which you did. I was betting you were up to the job, otherwise our headhunter wouldn’t have picked you for Prezzie duty in the first place. We know how to pick the best and brightest, Ornish.”

  I appreciated the left-handed compliment, but I’d been chewing on my own liver about getting assigned this duty for so long I still had a bad taste in my mouth. “But why me?” I demanded. “Others had better marks than I did.”

  “Lots of reasons. Here’s one. Tell me, had you settled on what branch you wanted to enter after graduation?”

  “No ma’am,” I admitted miserably. “Of course you hadn’t. Because none of the other services offered what you were looking for.”

  “I guess. But I still don’t know what it is I wanted.”

  “Well, I do. It was something none of the others said they had. You wanted to be more than one small uniformed cog in a big well-greased machine. You wanted challenge and excitement. You wanted adventure— which isn’t what you thought you’d get dragging a bunch of fusty bookworms around to dead planets, is it?”

  “I guess not.”

  She patted my knee. “Now not every trip gets this wildly interesting. Sometimes the payoff is a few years down the line, when you find out that you were there when the Prezzies found some new music or literature, some scientific or medical advance, some new piece of the Big Puzzle that changes the way we look at the Universe. Every trip is a crapshoot. lake this stuff you just brought up from K’leven. Who knows what sorts of secrets and wonders Xav and his people might extract from it? Shiva, if nothing else you just helped keep a race that has been dead a thousand years from being completely forgotten.” She shook her head. “That’s no small thing, Ornish. It’s a very great tiling.”

  “I guess.” I drained my glass and sighed. My brain hurt from absorbing all of this on top of my earlier excitement.

  “OK,” I said after a moment, “Maybe this duty isn’t as bad as I’d thought it would be. But if the stuff the Prezzies save is so valuable, then why can’t they afford better ships? And why does their reputation, well, vac so bad?”

  My captain’s smile said she was pleased with me for having asked those questions. “The information learned and artifacts gathered on an expedition like this are freely published and displayed for those who have the wits to see their value. Historical Preservation Operations are done for the love of knowledge, and for the value of adding to that knowledge, not for money or fame. And as to the other—”

  She laughed and spread her arms. “We re greedy! If everybody thought this was a way to get rich, they’d try to horn in on our action. Better our branch remains dull, poor, and boring. That way we get to keep all this for ourselves.”

  I sat there mulling over what she’d just said, realizing that the Prezzie lile —and being part of their fleet—was like one of Clotilde’s blobby rocklike thingies. Not much to look at from the outside, but inside there was wild music and lobster orgies.

  I drained my glass again. I could really feel the effects of what I’d been drinking. “I still have one question, ma’am—uh, Serafina.

  “What’s that, Tephillip?” Hearing her use my first name made me shiver. It made me feel like I had just become her peer, and I kind of liked the feeling.

  “Teph. My friends call me Teph. Just before I went down, you gave me that gun and said something about Alexander’s Libraries. What was that all about?”

  She looked toward the shuttle’s airlock to make sure we were alone, then leaned close. Her voice dropped to a conspirational whisper. “That was the Alexandrian Librarians. It’s one very important part of the job, and one we don’t talk about around our passengers. A long time ago, back before the first millennium, there was a great library in a city named Alexand
ria. It was the greatest repository of learning and literature of its day, and it was sacked and burned by an invading army. Around the year 2000 a minor, obscure writer named Byrne or something like that asked the question, What happened to the Alexandrian Librarians? The answer he suggested to his question was that they probably died trying to save the library’s contents. We don’t remember the guy’s name, but we never let ourselves forget his conclusion that people who love learning so much that they’ve dedicated their lives to it are quite likely to put the survival of that learning ahead of their own.”

  “Like they did today.”

  “Just like. Running a ship is just half our job. The other half is protecting them and what they learn. They can be completely blind to risk, sometimes. We have to be their shield.”

  She stood up. “Speaking of our dusty band of scholars, I believe they are in the salon, waiting to throw a party in your honor. Shall we attend, First Officer Ornish?”

  I stood up as well, swaying from the effects of the nerve tonic. Then again my nerves felt a lot better than they had in quite a while. “Will there be something to drink? I think I could use one more ”

  “Count on it.” She eyed me critically. “But maybe you’d better hold off for a while. Much more alcohol and Clotilde is going to start looking good to you.”

  I pulled myself to attention and saluted my captain. “Then maybe I’d better have two, ma’am.”

  I served as first officer under Serafina for eight years—conducting a loose but highly educational affair with Clo for the first three—then became the captain of the Gibbon myself. Nine years after that I turned her over to my first officer and took on the job of converting a worn-out heavy cruiser named the Leonardo into a functioning Prezzie craft. A few years later I handed her off the same way as I had the Gibbon.

  Now I captain the Marie Curie. Serafina is still my boss, only now she’s in charge of the whole slap-patched Prezzie fleet. It’s one of the high points of my year to come back-Sol, renew our friendship, and sit at our table in Armstrong Hall and watch the greenies go by.