Interlibrary Loan

by Gene Wolfe

  We got to Niagara the next day. I already knew that most of the Continental Library was underground in tunnels and big shadowy underground rooms that were almost three hundred years old; so I expected only a small building up on the surface. Wrong! It was huge, the pale stone nightmare of somebody who had seen the pyramids once, and it had too many levels for me to count before we rolled inside. We stopped; before long our driver unlocked our door and all three of us got out. What happened next was simple, quick, and quiet—and it caught me flat-footed.

  He locked it behind us. I had not been expecting to get back in, and I do not think Millie or Rose had either; so it struck me as kind of strange. He, or more likely his boss, thought we might try to get away from something.

  Pretty soon after that, one of the ’bots who had been unloading the truck and the first trailer came over and said, “Come with me.” Then it herded the three of us ahead of it the way they do, arms extended and spread wide. We hiked down rough corridors without windows for an hour or so, with me wondering where the hell we were going. When we finally got there, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.

  The ’bot put us into another truck parked in another part of the building, a truck that was smaller and quite a bit older than ours had been, and nearly empty. Later I counted the books and disks in there with us: seventeen. So fewer than two dozen books and disks, two or three cubes, a slop bucket, and the three of us reclone resources.

  Do I have to tell you we were locked in? We were, of course. That wasn’t too bad, but we’d left our coats back in the trailer. All three of us had, and I imagine the women felt as dumb about that as I did. When our new truck (which was really a pretty old one) began rolling, I stared at them and the two of them stared back at me. After a while Rose managed to say, “I imagine we’re going home to Spice Grove.” She tried to smile.

  Millie held up her tag. It was dark in the back of the truck, but not too dark for me to see that. She said, “They would have given us new tags.”

  So this was planned from the beginning. No truck ran from Spice Grove to wherever we were going, but there was one to Continental. So ship us off to Continental, and they would put us on the right truck for wherever it was that we were wanted. That was Polly’s Cove, as it turned out. I’ll have quite a bit more to say about Polly’s Cove later.

  All right, I was getting ahead of myself; but there is not much more to tell. Our truck went to various libraries and unloaded a few books and disks and so forth, and loaded a few new ones at each of them. When we finally stopped for the first night, I was able to talk the driver into letting me buy us blankets. Coats would have been better, but nice warm coats for all three of us would have cost twice what I had. Blankets were cheaper, and I could afford three of them. It left me a little over, but not much. A blanket—even a cheap one—is pretty warm if you wrap yourself up in it.

  By the third night I felt like we were never going to get wherever we were going; the libraries would just ship us here and there until we wore out or went crazy. We reclone resources do go crazy pretty often, but most of us had been writers the first time around; the rest had been artists, nearly all of them. With writers it can be hard to tell, and with artists it is next to impossible.

  When we got out of the truck, we did not even know we were about to walk into the Polly’s Cove Public Library. We were a mess, all three of us, with dirty faces and dirty, wrinkled clothes. Millie apologized to the head librarian for the way we looked, and Rose and I tried to explain. While we talked, the head librarian stared at us without saying a word; to tell the truth I was not sure she had understood anything any of us said.

  When she had gone, I looked at Millie and she looked at me. I said, “I guess she speaks French.” I was trying to be witty.

  “She didn’t look French.” That was Rose.

  It made me think of Georges; I smiled and shut up, and wished to God that Georges were there with us.

  Later we found out that the head librarian was stone deaf. She had been reading lips and had not talked because she knew she was hard for strangers to understand. We saw more of her after that than we wanted to, so I might as well tell you that she was taller than I am and as thin as a rake. She wore a lot of black and had dyed black hair. Her name was Prentice. Probably she had a first name, too; but I don’t think I ever heard it. I don’t know about you, so maybe you’re like me. Do you wonder sometimes about people like Prentice? Had she ever been in love, ever had a child, ever played on a jumpball team? All librarians read, but what kind of books did Prentice like?

  I was still thinking about that stuff when she left and another librarian, blond, pretty, and at least thirty years younger, came in and introduced herself; this one’s name was Charlotte Lang. I said something about being glad to find a librarian we could talk to, and she said, “Oh, I’m not a real librarian, Mr. Smithe. I only work here part-time. I’m just a volunteer, but Ms. Prentice said for me to look after you.”

  Of course she had made two mistakes right from the start. For one thing, a part-time librarian is a real librarian, just part-time. The other was that instead of calling me “Smithe,” she had called me “Mr. Smithe.” The librarians are not supposed to do that. So two mistakes, and I liked her for both of them. So I gave her my nicest smile and introduced Rose and Millie.

  “Oh, I’m so glad you’re here, Ms. Baumgartner! I asked for you, and Ms. Prentice finally got you. She said she couldn’t buy us a copy—we don’t have nearly enough money for that—but she promised she’d borrow one. She said she could get you from the big library in Niagara or someplace like that.”

  Millie started to say something then, but Charlotte wasn’t through. “And you, Ms. Romain! I read you all the time before I got married, only now I read Ms. Baumgartner more because I’m not a very good cook, not really half as good as my mother even, and I’ve learned ever so much from reading Ms. Baumgartner. The library has The Pleasures of Pork and Game Can Be Fun. Well, really I’m reading that one now. I’ve finished reading ‘Duck and Goose,’ and I’m halfway through ‘Pheasant Can Be Pleasant.’ That’s Chapter Four, isn’t it?”

  Millie agreed that it was.

  “People liked my duck, too. I had to use chili powder instead of allspice and I didn’t care for it much myself, but Bub and his friend said it was good—great is what they said—and your roast pheasant with chestnuts! Oh, my! It was perfectly scrumptious.”

  Millie smiled and said, “That wasn’t my roast pheasant you enjoyed so much, Ms. Lang. It was yours.”

  Charlotte actually blushed. “Well, you—you’ll want baths, I know. Everybody will. Baths and clean clothes. I’m afraid only one can bathe at a time here; it’s all we’ve got facilities for, so you’ll have to take turns. I’ll be fetching your clean things while you’re washing. Would you like to go first, Ms. Baumgartner? Will that be all right with everybody?”

  Naturally I nodded and said sure; I suppose Rose did, too. After that Rose and I sat and waited, me wishing that I could have a quiet look around and get the layout of the library, but knowing it was way too early for me to make any kind of trouble—and snooping around would probably turn out to be big trouble if Prentice caught me. After ten minutes or so, Charlotte came back with a short stack of clean clothes for me, but I didn’t want to strip and put them on with Rose sitting there. Besides the embarrassment, I was grimy and sweaty from the truck. That library was worse if anything, dusty and overheated and then some.

  When Millie came out and Rose went in, Millie wanted to know if I had met some of the other reclones. I said no, I hadn’t even seen them.

  “Have you had a look at the shelves? They must have shelves for us or they wouldn’t have borrowed us.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve been right here the whole time. How do you like your new clothes?”

  “I want an apron. If I can get a good one, the rest will do.” Millie clammed up for a bit, maybe because my watch was striking; then she said, “You can hold the fort until
Rose comes out, but I’m going to sneak around.”

  The idea of Millie sneaking around just about made me laugh. Millie would have made some country a terrific spy, because nobody would ever suspect her of anything. I said, “I’ll sneak along with you. Rose is good for a solid hour. Maybe more.”

  Our bathroom opened on the dusty little hall I had already walked down behind Charlotte. I pointed to the way we had come and told Millie to go that way. I would go the other way and have a look. After that we’d meet back in the bathroom and compare notes. Ten or twelve strides brought me to the end of the hall, and a door there opened on a good-sized room with high shelves and a lot of empty space. There were more shelves on the other side of them. No labels on anything anywhere, but opening a couple of the books told me I was in History. Maybe Ancient History, because that was what all the books I looked at seemed to be about: Ancient Greece or Egypt or Babylon. Those books were pretty ancient themselves. The paper was yellowing, and somebody had made notes in the margins of one, in neat cursive. Cursive made it a hundred and fifty years old, minimum. Probably quite a bit more.

  So another tall case, this one almost entirely empty. Which was good, because looking between its empty shelves I saw something I had not seen since I died the first time. It was an iron staircase of piece-of-pie-shaped steps coiled tight around an iron pole.

  The History Room—I could see everything in it as soon as I had climbed up the first half dozen steps—was even smaller than I had thought. It had a nice high ceiling, though, and a couple of tall windows that would have been a whole lot more interesting if they had not been blocked by tall bookcases.

  Upstairs was what they probably called the Stacks. That’s where you keep the stuff that patrons cannot just walk up to and pull off the shelf. Here, though, there were no shelves but actual stacks of books and disks and cubes and whatever, some stacked on a couple of tables and the rest on the floor. At the moment none of those things interested me. What did were the windows, two again; tall, narrow, dirty notint windows. Looking out I saw the roofs, roofs of red or brown tile, of what might have been houses or shops.

  And way out on the other side of those red and brown roofs, boats.

  2

  WHAT THE SHIRT SHOWED

  Three of them looked like fishing boats, and there were four or five sloops (rich men’s toys) bored but resigned to it. All these were moored. Beyond them stretched an ocean of seawater that looked like it went clear around the planet. Just empty salt water, and more salt water, and nothing else; seawater in smooth dark swells as far as my eyes could see. Featureless seawater that looked as smooth as olive oil, and wheeling, moaning seagulls, all under the great curved dome of a clear blue sky without a single cloud. I ought to have looked out at all that for a minute or two, seen what was to be seen, and gone back to my own part of the library. I ought to have, but I didn’t. The boats, the gulls, and most of all the water seemed to be telling me that there was a thousand times more to life than I had ever supposed, ten thousand times more to life than being treated like a thing, just a library resource, another battered book standing idle on one of a million slightly dusty library shelves. So I looked and looked and drank it all in, feeling that I could never be just another bipedal book again. The sea and the sky spoke slowly; but in quiet chorus they told me about life, warmth, friendship, and love. Told me in tones that kept me standing there until my legs ached, tired and stiff, spellbound while I drank in all that they had to say.

  When I got back to the third-rate restroom where Millie and I were supposed to be waiting for Rose to get out of the tub, Millie was already there. She looked troubled, but she managed a nice friendly smile for me. So I smiled back and made my smile as friendly as I could.

  “I found out where we are, Ern.” Millie hesitated. “Do we care?”

  It was a slippery question the way I felt just then, but I kept my smile while I told her I did.

  “This is Polly’s Cove.” She paused, waiting for some reaction she didn’t get. “I’ve been talking to a patron, a nice kid named Chandra.” Millie drew a deep breath. “All right, I know we’re not supposed to talk to patrons unless they’re consulting us. But under the circumstances it seemed to me that it was time to … well, you know. Do something.”

  I tried to say sure, but what came out was “Certainly.” Like I told you, I have to talk like that. Pretty often it sucks, but I can’t help it.

  “Chandra has been looking through all the cookbooks.” Millie hesitated again, then decided to back up a little bit. “I had turned up the ones she needed, but there’s no copy of Game Can Be Fun. What I mean is that there’s none shelved—a screen told me it’s out. Do you think that was mean of me? Checking up on a nice young part-time librarian like that?”

  “Hell no. You wanted to see if Charlotte Lang had told you the truth.”

  Millie nodded. “And to help this Chandra along, Ern. Besides, I couldn’t remember what came after pheasant. That’s the last of the game birds, actually. She’d skipped duck, goose, woodcock, and quail. Venison comes next.”

  I nodded. It seemed clear that the person Chandra was cooking for hunted, and I thought of the deer rifle I’d found in Conrad Coldbrook’s mine. It had been a swell gun, but it was gone forever now, and all of a sudden I missed it a lot.

  Still remembering, I choked down five or ten minutes worth of stuff I was itching to tell Millie about that gun and substituted, “Rose isn’t through yet?”

  Rose’s voice came from behind the curtain. “I’ll be out soon. Just a minute.”

  Millie told her there was no need to hurry, one of the few times I was tempted to yell at Millie.

  It was another half hour at least. Neither of us went out again; but Millie told me various things she had found out about Chandra, and that Chandra had told her the name of the town. I was still not feeling too friendly toward Millie; even so I told her a little bit about the stacks of Ancient History and the tall windows, and what I had seen out of those windows.

  When I had finished, Millie said, “There was one other thing I should have told you. You’re going to think I’m a liar, but it would be another kind of lie—a really wrong, really terrible lie—not to tell you.”

  She quit talking then, and I could see she was hoping I’d talk and change the subject. I didn’t, and finally she whispered, “I saw a little girl in a white dress, Ern. This wasn’t Chandra.”

  I nodded, trying to make her think I was interested when I really wasn’t.

  “She was white, too. Her face was paler than her dress, actually. She watched me for a minute, and then she turned away and melted into the wall.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I think I may have said something silly like “wow.”

  “I can’t prove it and you don’t have to believe it, but that’s what I saw.”

  Neither of us said anything after that, sitting side by side on a bench and each wrapped in our own thoughts. I was pretty sure somebody had slipped Millie some kind of dope, but who would do that? Who could have done it, and why? Either dope or she was cracking up, and why would she crack up when she wasn’t under all that much pressure? I kicked both of those around for quite a while.

  Then Rose came out, all fresh and smiling, and looking a lot more like a romance writer in a sleeveless red dress that was almost as low-necked as she liked them and might have been next to new. Have I said that they get our clothes from those places that take clothes donations and give the money to charity when they sell them? Those are dead people’s clothes, mostly, and for a minute or two I wondered about the woman who had worn the red dress first.

  After that I went in, carrying the clean underwear, the socks, the blue canvas jeans, and a sturdy work shirt that would soon be mine. There had been a clean jacket, too, a quilted black jacket that looked pretty warm; that had been on a hanger. When we came into the room with the curtained tub, Charlotte Lang had taken it off the hanger and hung it on a nail. I had left it there, knowing I could get
it when I came out.

  Meanwhile, here was a nice clean bathtub with no ring around it (Rose must have scrubbed that off), a thin old washcloth with a hole in it, a little cake of dark yellow soap, and what seemed to be plenty of hot water. I filled the tub as high as I dared and got in, feeling as though I could have stayed right there in the tub for the rest of my life.

  There are places to plan and places to dream. Probably you’ve noticed that yourself. Behind a desk is a place to plan, and so is a seat in just about any kind of a vehicle. The places to dream all begin with B—bed, bar, boudoir, and bathtub. “B” for bemused.

  When I finally got out, I found that the ladies had left me one dry towel, just one and no more, a thin towel and pretty small. I could have used three of those, but I poached a little on the ones that they had used and dropped into the laundry bin. I found three or four that were barely damp.

  Then it was time for striped cotton (?) undershorts and black socks, with all of them going on smoothly. When I unfolded the work shirt—yellow torso and blue sleeves—I found two shiny metal rectangles on the coarse cloth. There was one well down on the right sleeve, and another on the left side of the torso. Touch one to the other and they stuck together like glue; you had to pull them apart, which was not easy. I tore a fingernail, swore, and tried to pull off the one on the yellow fabric, but they stuck so hard I had to give up on that. Pretty soon I figured out what they were there for.

  It was not until I was dressed and looked myself over in the foggy old mirror that I noticed some faint stains. My shirt had been washed and probably bleached, too, and that had weakened them; but they were still there. Small bloodstains up near the right shoulder.

  3

  THE HOUSE ON SIGNAL HILL

  The reclone section was in nonfiction, which was fine for Millie but wrong for Rose and me. The ponticwood shelves here were four high, just as they were in Spice Grove; but that was where all resemblance ended. Here there were no washbasins and no curtained toilets—no plumbing of any kind on the shelves. There were beds, but they were no wider than graves and not much thicker than our old mats. These beds had reading lights on the headboards; that was about it. No sitting down in a red leather chair with a nice floor lamp for reading; if we wanted to sit down, we sat on the bed or on the shelf, cross-legged or with our legs hanging over. If we had to go, Millie from her two and I from my three climbed down the ladder and went back to the restroom we’d been in before. Bathing, the same. Patrons used that restroom, too; it wasn’t just for us. Librarians had their own (I found out later) across the hall from Prentice’s office. They had to get the key from her and give it back as soon as they were finished. If one of us asked for that key, she threw her stapler or the kafe cup from her desk. I know because I had to duck them both.