27 Short Stories

by Orson Scott Card

  Everyone he saw was a patron-- people at lectors, people at catalogues, even people reading books and magazines printed on paper. Where were the librarians? The few staff members moving through the aisles turned out not to be librarians at all-- they were volunteer docents, helping newcomers learn how to use the lectors and catalogues. They knew as little about library staff as he did.

  He finally found a room full of real librarians, sitting at calculators preparing the daily access and circulation reports. When he tried to speak to one, she merely waved a hand at him. He thought she was telling him to go away until he realized that her hand remained in the air, a finger pointing to the front of the room. Leyel moved toward the elevated desk where a fat, sleepy-looking middle-aged woman was lazily paging through long columns of figures, which stood in the air before her in military formation.

  "Sorry to interrupt you," he said softly. She was resting her cheek on her hand. She didn't even look at him when he spoke. But she answered. "I pray for interruptions."

  Only then did he notice that her eyes were framed with laugh lines, that her mouth even in repose turned upward into a faint smile.

  "I'm looking for someone. My wife, in fact. Deet Forska."

  Her smile widened. She sat up. "You're the beloved Leyel."

  It was an absurd thing for a stranger to say, but it pleased him nonetheless to realize that Deett must have spoken of him. Of course everyone would have known that Deet's husband was the Leyel Forska. But this woman hadn't said it that way, had she? Not as the Leyel Forska, the celebrity. No, here he was known as "the beloved Leyel." Even if this woman meant to tease him, Deet must have let it be known that she had some affection for him. He couldn't help but smile. With relief. He hadn't known that he feared the loss of her love so much, but now he wanted to laugh aloud, to move, to dance with pleasure.

  "I imagine I am," said Leyel.

  "I'm Zay Wax. Deet must have mentioned me, we have lunch every day."

  No, she hadn't. She hardly mentioned anybody at the library, come to think of it. These two had lunch every day, and Leyel had never heard of her. "Yes, of course," said Leyel. "I'm glad to meet you."

  "And I'm relieved to see that your feet actually touch the ground."

  "Now and then."

  "She works up in Indexing these days." Zay cleared her display.

  "Is that on Trantor?"

  Zay laughed. She typed in a few instructions and her display now filled with a map of the library complex. It was a complex pile of rooms and corridors, almost impossible to grasp. "This shows only this wing of the main building. Indexing is these four floors."

  Four layers near the middle of the display turned to a brighter color.

  "And here's where you are right now." A small room on the first floor turned white. Looking at the labyrinth between the two lighted sections, Leyel had to laugh aloud. "Can't you just give me a ticket to guide me?"

  "Our tickets only lead you to places where patrons are allowed. But this isn't really hard, Lord Forska. After all, you're a genius, aren't you?"

  "Not at the interior geography of buildings, whatever lies Deet might have told you."

  "You just go out this door and straight down the corridor to the elevators-- can't miss them. Go up to fifteen. When you get out, turn as if you were continuing down the same corridor, and after a while you go through an archway that says 'Indexing." Then you lean back your head and bellow 'Deet' as loud as you can. Do that a few times and either she'll come or security will arrest you."

  "That's what I was going to do if I didn't find somebody to guide me."

  "I was hoping you'd ask me." Zay stood up and spoke loudly to the busy librarians. "The cat's going away. The mice can play."

  "About time," one of them said. They all laughed. But they kept working.

  "Follow me, Lord Forska."

  "Leyel, please."

  "Oh, you're such a flirt." When she stood, she was even shorter and fatter than she had looked sitting down. "Follow me."

  They conversed cheerfully about nothing much on the way down the corridor. Inside the elevator, they hooked their feet under the rail as the gravitic repulsion kicked in. Leyel was so used to weightlessness after all these years of using elevators on Trantor that he never noticed. But Zay let her arms float in the air and sighed noisily. "I love riding the elevator," she said. For the first time Leyel realized that weightlessness must be a great relief to someone carrying as many extra kilograms as Zay Wax. When the elevator stopped, Zay made a great show of staggering out as if under a great burden. "My idea of heaven is to live forever in gravitic repulsion."

  "You can get gravitic repulsion for your apartment, if you live on the top floor."

  "Maybe you can," said Zay. "But I have to live on a librarian's salary." Leyel was mortified. He had always been careful not to flaunt his wealth, but then, he had rarely talked at any length with people who couldn't afford gravitic repulsion. "Sorry, " he said. "I don't think I could either, thege days."

  "Yes, I heard you squandered your fortune on a real bang-up funeral."

  Startled that she would speak so openly of it, he tried to answer in the same joking tone. "I suppose you could look at it that way."

  "I say it was worth it," she said. She looked slyly up at him. "I knew Hari, you know. Losing him cost humanity more than if Trantor's sun went nova."

  "Maybe," said Leyel. The conversation was getting out of hand. Time to be cautious.

  "Oh, don't worry. I'm not a snitch for the Pubs. Here's the Golden Archway into Indexing. The Land of Subtle Conceptual Connections."

  Through the arch, it was as though they had passed into a completely different building. The style and trim were the same as before, with deeply lustrous fabrics on the walls and ceiling and floor made of the same smooth sound-absorbing plastic, glowing faintly with white light. But now-- all pretense at symmetry was gone. The ceiling was at different heights, almost at random; on the left and right there might be doors or archways, stairs or ramps, an alcove or a huge hall filled with columns, shelves of books and works of art surrounding tables where indexers worked with a half-dozen scriptors and lectors at once.

  "The form fits the function," said Zay.

  "I'm afraid I'm rubbernecking like a first-time visitor to Trantor."

  "It's a strange place. But the architect was the daughter of an indexer, so she knew that standard, orderly, symmetrical interior maps are the enemy of freely connective thought. The finest touch-- and the most expensive too, I'm afraid-- is the fact that from day to day the layout is rearranged."

  "Rearranged! The rooms move?"

  "A series of random routines in the master calculator. There are rules, but the program isn't afraid to waste space, either. Some days only one room is changed, moved off to some completely different place in the Indexing area. Other days, everything is changed. The only constant is the archway leading in. I really wasn't joking when I said you should come here and bellow."

  "But-- the indexers must spend the whole moming just finding their stations."

  "Not at all. Any indexer can work from any station."

  "Ah. So they just call up the job they were working on the day before."

  "No. They merely pick up on the job that is already in progress on the station they happen to choose that day."

  "Chaos!" said Leyel.

  "Exactly. How do you think a good hyperindex is made? If one person alone

  indexes a book, then the only connections that book will make are the ones that person knows about. Instead, each indexer is forced to skim through what his predecessor did the day before. Inevitably he'll add some new connections that the other indexer didn't think of. The environment, the work pattern, everything is designed to break down habits of thought, to make everything surprising, everything new."

  "To keep everybody off balance."

  "Exactly. Your mind works quickly when you're running along the edge of the precipice."

  "By that reckoning, a
crobats should all be geniuses."

  "Nonsense. The whole labor of acrobats is to learn their routines so perfectly they never lose balance. An acrobat who improvises is soon dead. But indexers, when they lose their balance, they fall into wonderful discoveries. That's why the indexes of the Imperial Library are the only ones worth having. They startle and challenge as you read. All the others are just-- clerical lists."

  "Deet never mentioned this."

  "Indexers rarely discuss what they're doing. You can't really explain it anyway."

  "How long has Deet been an indexer?"

  "Not long really. She's still a novice. But I hear she's very, very good."

  "Where is she?"

  Zay grinned. Then she tipped her head back and bellowed. "Deet!" The sound seemed to be swallowed up at once in the labyrinth. There was no answer.

  "Not nearby, I guess," said Zay. "We'll have to probe a little deeper."

  "Couldn't we just ask somebody where she is?"

  "Who would know?"

  It took two more floors and three more shouts before they heard a faint answering cry. "Over here!"

  They followed the sound. Deet kept calling out, so they could find her.

  "I got the flower room today, Zay! Violets!"

  The indexers they passed along the way all looked up-- some smiled, some frowned.

  "Doesn't it interfere with things? " asked Leyel. "All this shouting?"

  "Indexers need interruption. It breaks up the chain of thought. When they look back down, they have to rethink what they were doing." Deet, not so far away now, called again. "The smell is so intoxicating. Imagine-- the same room twice in a month!"

  "Are indexers often hospitalized?" Leyel asked quietly.

  "For what?"

  "Stress."

  "There's no stress on this job," said Zay. "Just play. We come up here as a reward for working in other parts of the library."

  "I see. This is the time when librarians actually get to read the books in the library."

  "We all chose this career because we love books for their own sake. Even the old inefficient corruptible paper ones. Indexing is like-- writing in the margins."

  The notion was startling. "Writing in someone else's book?"

  "It used to be done all the time, Leyel. How can you possibly engage in dialogue with the author without writing your answers and arguments in the margins? Here she is." Zay preceded him under a low arch and down a few steps.

  "I heard a man's voice with you, Zay," said Deet. "Mine," said Leyel. He turned a comer and saw her there. After such a long journey to reach her, he thought for a dizzying moment that he didn't recognize her. That the library had randomized the librarians as well as the rooms, and he had happened upon a woman who merely resembled his long-familiar wife; he would have to reacquaint himself with her from the beginning.

  "I thought so, " said Deet. She got up from her station and embraced him. Even this startled him, though she usually embraced him upon meeting. It's only the setting that's different, he told himself. I'm only surprised because usually she greets me like this at home, in familiar surroundings. And usually it's Deet arriving, not me.

  Or was there, after all, a greater warmth in her greeting here? As if she loved him more in this place than at home? Or, perhaps, as if the new Deet were simply a warmer, more comfortable person?

  I thought that she was comfortable with me.

  Leyel felt uneasy, shy with her. "If I'd known my coming would cause so much trouble," he began. Why did he need so badly to apologize?

  "What trouble?" asked Zay.

  "Shouting. Interrupting."

  "Listen to him, Deet. He thinks the world has stopped because of a couple of shouts."

  In the distance they could hear a man bellowing someone's name.

  "Happens all the time," said Zay. "I'd better get back. Some lordling from Mahagonny is probably fuming because I haven't granted his request for access to the Imperial account books."

  "Nice to meet you," said Leyel.

  "Good luck finding your way back," said Deet.

  "Easy this time," said Zay. She paused only once on her way through the door, not to speak, but to slide a metallic wafer along an almost unnoticeable slot in the doorframe, above eye level. She turned back and winked at Deet. Then she was gone.

  Leyel didn't ask what she had done-- if it were his business, something would have been said. But he suspected that Zay had either turned on or turned off a recording system. Unsure of whether they had privacy here from the library staff, Leyel merely stood for a moment, looking around. Deet's room really was filled with violets, real ones, growing out of cracks and apertures in the floor and walls. The smell was clear but not overpowering. "What is this room for?"

  "For me. Today, anyway. I'm so glad you came."

  "You never told me about this place."

  "I didn't know about it until I was assigned to this section. Nobody talks about Indexing. We never tell outsiders. The architect died three thousand years ago. Only our own machinists understand how it works. It's like--"

  "Fairyland."

  "Exactly."

  "A place where all the rules of the universe are suspended."

  "Not all. We still stick with good old gravity. Inertia. That sort of thing."

  "This place is right for you, Deet. This room."

  "Most people go years without getting the flower room. It isn't always violets, you know. Sometimes climbing roses. Sometimes periwinkle. They say there's really a dozen flower rooms, but never more than one at a time is accessible. It's been violets for me both times, though."

  Leyel couldn't help himself. He laughed. It was funny. It was delightful. What did this have to do with a library? And yet what a marvelous thing to have hidden away in the heart of this somber place. He sat down on a chair. Violets grew out of the top of the chairback, so that flowers brushed his shoulders.

  "You finally got tired of staying in the apartment all day?" asked Deet.

  Of course she would wonder why he finally came out, after all her invitations had been so long ignored. Yet he wasn't sure ff he could speak frankly. "I needed to talk with you." He glanced back at the slot Zay had used in the doorframe. "Alone," he said.

  Was that a look of dread that crossed her face?

  "We're alone," Deet said quietly. "Zay saw to that. Truly alone, as we can't be even in the apartment." It took Leyel a moment to realize what she was asserting. He dared not even speak the word. So he mouthed his question: Pubs? "They never bother with the library in their normal spying. Even if they set up something special for you, there's now an interference field blocking out our conversation. Chances are, though, that they won't bother to monitor you again until you leave here."

  She seemed edgy. Impatient. As if she didn't like having this conversation. As if she wanted him to get on with it, or maybe just get it over with.

  "If you don't mind," he said. "I haven't interrupted you here before, I thought that just this once--"

  "Of course," she said. But she was still tense. As if she feared what he might say.

  So he explained to her all his thoughts about language. All that he had gleaned from Kispitorian's and Magolissian's work. She seemed to relax almost as soon as it became clear he was talking about his research. What did she dread, he wondered. Was she afraid I came to talk about our relationship? She hardly needed to fear that. He had no intention of making things more difficult by whining about things that could not be helped.

  When he was through explaining the ideas that had come to him, she nodded carefully-- as she had done a thousand times before, after he explained an idea or argument. "I don't know," she finally said. As so many times before, she was reluctant to commit herself to an immediate response.

  And, as he had often done, he insisted. "But what do you think?"

  She pursed her lips. "Just offhand-- I've never tried a serious linguistic application of community theory, beyond jargon formation, so this is just my first though
t-- but try this. Maybe small isolated populations guard their language-- jealously, because it's part of who they are. Maybe language is the most powerful ritual of all, so that people who have the same language are one in a way that people who can't understand each other's speech never are. We'd never know, would we, since everybody for ten thousand years has spoken Standard."

  "So it isn't the size of the population, then, so much as--"

  "How much they care about their language. How much it defines them as a community. A large population starts to think that everybody talks like them. They want to distinguish themselves, form a separate identity. Then they start developing jargons and slangs to separate themselves from others. Isn't that what happens to common speech? Children try to find ways of talking that their parents don't use. Professionals talk in private vocabularies so laymen won't know the passwords. All rituals for community definition." Leyel nodded gravely, but he had one obvious doubt.

  Obvious enough that Deet knew it, too. "Yes, yes, I know, Leyel. I immediately interpreted your question in terms of my own discipline. Like physicists who think that everything can be explained by physics."

  Leyel laughed. "I thought of that, but what you said makes sense. And it would explain why the natural tendency of communities is to diversify language. We want a common tongue, a language of open discourse. But we also want private languages. Except a completely private language would be useless-- whom would we talk to? So wherever a community forms, it creates at least a few linguistic barriers to outsiders, a few shibboleths that only insiders will know."

  "And the more allegiance a person has to a community, the more fluent he'll become in that language, and the more he'll speak it."

  "Yes, it makes sense," said Leyel. "So easy. You see how much I need you?"

  He knew that his words were a mild rebuke-- why weren't you home when I needed you-- but he couldn't resist saying it. Sitting here with Deet, even in this strange and redolent place, felt right and comfortable. How could she have withdrawn from him? To him, her presence was what made a place home. To her, this place was home whether he was there or not.