The Shadow and Night (81 page)

Then his troubled look lifted and he smiled again. “But it is good to see you.”

“I was sorry to hear about Brenito. I'd like to visit the grave.”

“I'll try and find the time.”

“Do you miss him?”

“Yes. I keep saying, ‘What will Brenito counsel?' and then—” Emotion welled up in Vero's voice, and for a few moments he was silent. “But then I tell myself he would have told me to decide for myself.”

“Are you living at his house?”

“No. I have been tempted. But it's too far out to run a secure communications link to. And I've been working very odd hours. I have two people staying there, though. Cataloging all that he left behind. It's quite a collection of objects. They have instructions to look for anything that has a bearing on the rebellion.” Vero's expression brightened. “But how is Ynysmant? Isabella? your parents?”

“Troubled, Vero. All of them. There are problems in Ynysmant. The mood—whatever we call it—is spreading. I'm sure.”

“So quickly?” Alarm flooded Vero's face. “I have heard hints of problems. I don't think we have any time to spare at all.” He paused. “Anyway, I've brought you here first because I want you to hear what Harrent the librarian says about a problem. He's not part of us—not really—so don't reveal anything, right? Then we move on to the base.”

“The base? I thought this was it.”

“This?” Vero seemed amused at the thought. “You don't understand. The base is very much larger. You remember the new water transport project for Isterrane, based up in the Walderand River?”

“Vaguely . . .”

“Well, the project was frozen; the pumps were being brought in through the Gate. So they've given us—that is, the FDU—the pump chambers. It's ideal. But secret.” He tilted his head, listening. “Ah, that will be Harrent now. But remember, don't say too much.”

There was a knock at the door, and a very tall and elderly gray-haired man in a dark official suit came in, stooping carefully and rather stiffly to avoid hitting his head on the doorframe. Inside the room, he straightened himself up carefully, eyeing the low ceiling with suspicion. He shook hands in a rather ritualistic way, first with Vero and then with Merral.

“Harrent Lammas, Assistant Librarian of Isterrane,” he said in polite, formal tones. His air of reserve seemed to Merral to be heightened by the dark eyes and a rather stern expression.

They sat down and Vero turned to Merral. “Let me start by explaining that Lorrin and I wanted to do research in the Library, but I was worried that we might be watched. So I consulted Harrent here and, well, together we found some interesting things. Harrent, please explain.”

The tall man rested his long arms on the table, exposing neat white shirt cuffs beyond the dark, precisely turned-up sleeves of the jacket.
This is a man,
Merral thought
, who is everything I would imagine a librarian to be: precise, knowledgeable, retiring.

“Very well,” Harrent said, his expression suggesting that he was far from being at ease in this setting. “Hmm, Merral, I'm not sure how much you know about how the Library works. I take it you have some understanding?”

“I know that the Library is modeled on a fixed geography of rooms, corridors, and stacks which goes back to the days before virtuality when libraries really were repositories of books. So wherever you are in the Assembly and whether you access it by a diary or a computer, you get the same pattern.” Harrent nodded encouragingly, and Merral continued. “What else? I also know that there are rules and protocols of Library use, which, to my limited knowledge, have always existed. I suppose they go back to the era of the Technology Protocols?”

“Actually they started to be subscribed to over a hundred years earlier. Anything else?”

“No, not really. It's just there for whatever we want—words, text, images, programs.”

Harrent nodded in a rather restrained way. “Hmm, in some ways I am pleased by your ignorance. It is a maxim of Library usage that the system and the librarians should be transparent.”

A cautious smile flickered across his face. “Sometimes, in our case, literally.”

He tapped his diary and the wallscreen opposite lit up with the familiar picture of a grand vaulted Gothic interior with multiple levels of floors, along which book-lined corridors stretched off on either side as far as the eye could see. As Merral looked at it he remembered the pang of disappointment he had had as a child when he had found out that there had never been a real building as grand and glorious as this.

With a smooth and practiced speed, Harrent slid the viewpoint confidently along the main aisle and then down a side corridor. As he did, he passed gray, stylized human figures, devoid of detail, that were either standing by shelves or moving along purposefully. The librarian nodded at the screen. “The Library at the moment. Very familiar and part of all our lives. Every member of the Assembly has grown up with this exact version since 2170, with only minor software tweaks since. And a billionfold more data.” His tone was so dry and formal that Merral wondered how much contact with real human beings his job involved.

“Now for various reasons,” Harrent continued, “some practical and some psychological, it has always been found helpful to indicate other users graphically. As we just saw. It's really just a convention.”

“But you never know who they are or what they are reading,” added Merral.

“Just so. Hmm, privacy. But—and it's a little known fact—the on-duty librarians have a different view. Diary, librarian mode.”

The figures on the image were now suddenly marked in multicolored bands, and as Harrent approached a form standing nearby, Merral saw that superimposed on the color bands were long sequences of letters and numbers.

“See now, this coding allows us librarians to help a little if needed. I can walk down the library, quite invisible to other users, and see all this. Thus I can tell you from the color codes that this, hmm—yes, is a male academic from Qarantia, that he studies language acquisition, and that he is a regular user of text files and familiar with the Library. In this case, he is unlikely to need help. I can even check, if I wanted, from the data displayed on him, what he has ever examined or downloaded.”

“I had no idea,” Merral said. “You have more of a supervisory role than I suspected.”

A strange, rather awkward smile slid onto Harrent's face. “Hmm, I take that as a compliment, Forester. The ease of Library use is only achieved by a lot of hard work behind the scenes. And anyway, why should you? What we do is only to help users. Though it's also, to a lesser extent, useful for us. It's so much easier to get an idea of what is popular in the Library, and with who. Hmm, actually very usefu—”

“Harrent,” interrupted Vero, glancing at his watch, a finger raised in partial admonition, “could you explain the oddities? Please?”

“Hmm, sorry. Ah, I am beginning to fear that in this new era some of the relaxed traditional customs may go. Yes, well when Vero here asked for my help, I realized, after the initial surprise, that he might be able to shed light on some anomalies that had recently occurred. And which were, in my long knowledge of library work, unprecedented.”

He delicately tapped a corner of his diary screen. “Now, in order. This is a data record, taken eight days after Nativity Day last year. A remote librarian recorded this view.”

There were the multicolored figures again but, in the middle of them, a figure shaded black stood examining a data file on a shelf.

“Harrent,” Merral asked, hearing the alarm in his voice, “who is it?”

The librarian gave a little sigh of bewilderment. “Hmm, we really don't know. We at first assumed a data error, or a software glitch. The figure has no code identifiers, no records, no identity. We named him, her, or it, ‘the ghost.' ”

Vero gestured at the screen. “Please tell Merral what the ghost is downloading.”

“It is in the History rooms and it is scanning Lyonel's
Introductory History of the Assembly of Worlds.
”

“The basic high school text?”

“Quite.”

“Is that all?” Merral asked, remembering having read Lyonel's work when he was around thirteen.

“Odd, eh? But watch, it moves on and we lose it. It was leaving no trail for us to follow. We can't call it up. Very irregular.” Merral thought that it was the untidiness of the matter that outraged Harrent. “Not at all the sort of thing one likes to have in a library.”

“Was the ghost ever seen again?” Merral asked. As he spoke the word
ghost,
it seemed eerily appropriate.

Harrent nodded stiffly. “Briefly, a day later, which was a Lord's Day.”

“But,” Merral exclaimed, unable to hold back his surprise, “surely, no one uses the Library then?”

“A few people: doctors, engineers, and, hmm, a surprising number of preachers who need to check some last-minute sermon illustration. Anyway, this happens to be a routine survey frame of the main aisle.”

Harrent tapped his diary, and the new image showed the central Library aisle from a high point of view by the main entrance. Apart from two forms heading in the direction of Medicine, there were no figures to be seen. Suddenly the black figure appeared at the entrance, glided along the main aisle, turned down a side corridor, and then stopped and seemed to retrace its steps until it was back in the main aisle. There it appeared to look around.

“Our belief is that it has just realized that it's on its own,” said Vero.

The figure rotated again, abruptly headed for the exit, and vanished before it got there.

“After that unhappy incident,” Harrent said, “where, incidentally, the ghost seems to have been again heading for Assembly History, it was never seen again.”

Merral heard himself speaking, the incredulity thick in his voice. “What sort of being is it that is surprised by the Library being empty on the Lord's Day?”

Harrent looked at him quizzically. “Hmm, I'd like to know too. Very much . . .”

Merral caught a cautioning glance from Vero. Clearly, he felt that it was a question that could be better discussed later. Besides, there was an obvious but disturbing answer: Only a creature from quite outside the Assembly could make that sort of a mistake.

Vero leaned forward toward the librarian. “Now, Harrent, tell Merral why we think it is still there.”

“Ah yes. Our guess is that it soon realized how the Library worked and either became invisible or adopted another person's identity. But since then there have been other oddities. It was Vero's idea to set the trap.”

“Oh, it was hardly a trap,” Vero said, his tone slightly defensive. “It was perhaps a test. It was just that—after I heard this story—I was worried. So, when I went to check some data files, I got Harrent to watch me while there was a virtual camera running.” He gestured to the screen and a new image appeared of colored bodies walking and standing in a library corridor.

“There I am,” Vero said. “The green hue at the top is because I'm from Ancient Earth, the purple base is for a sentinel. Now watch as I skim through the contents of a file here.”

The image focused onto a line of thin, vertical gray files with glowing green lights on their bases. “Now watch as I consult the volume.”

On the bottom of one file, the green light turned red.

“The accessing light glows; Anatheon on
The Causes of the Jannafite Rebellion,
for your information. I put it back.” The green light came back on. “It's not being accessed. But, on my suggestion, Harrent kept the virtual camera on it. Watch now!”

Abruptly at the base of the file, the light went from green back to red.

“Hey!” Merral cried. “But there's no one there!”

“Exactly—no one we can see. But I was expecting something like it and had Lorrin ready. Watch now as he races across and tries to access the same file. Even in a virtual library our Lorrin is fast.”

A figure with yellow and blue bands on its head moved over swiftly and stood by the file with the glowing red light. As the figure representing Lorrin reached for the file, the light instantly changed back to green. A black shape, vaguely human in outline, appeared briefly, flickered, and then vanished.

“Our ghost knew he'd been discovered, panicked, and fled, losing invisibility on the way.” Vero's voice was serious. “To use the expression of the ancients, he ‘pulled the plug.' ”

“ ‘Pulled the plug'?”

Vero shrugged. “As in ending a bath. I suppose.” He looked solemnly at Merral. “Well, that's it. So the Library has a ghost.”

“A most unhappy state of affairs,” said Harrent, his somber expression endorsing his words.

“I agree,” Vero said, “but it gets worse.”

That,
Merral noted with alarm,
is another expression I'm getting used to.

“Yes, the losses,” Harrent muttered in an irritated tone.

“Quite so,” Vero agreed. “When I started looking up some works last week, I was surprised to find that they were not there. Not being familiar with library nodes on the Made Worlds, I wondered if they were ones that normally would have been asked for through the Gate. But I checked with Harrent. . . .”

The librarian's face had acquired a look of deep vexation. “Hmm, I checked the index banks and they were not listed. Then, after a suggestion by Vero, I checked an older index that was on an unerasable archive and, well, there they were.” He looked at his big hands as if to hide his emotions. “In all my years, I have never heard of titles being erased deliberately. But for them to be erased and then to have the matching records removed too is yet another thing. I have to use the word
wicked.
” He paused and repeated to himself softly, “Wicked.”