Un Lun Dun

38. Class-Marks All the Way Down

…over the top of the wall of books, and looked out over UnLondon.

Deeba clung exhausted. Below and all around her was the abcity. The loon shone down.

She was so tired and confused that for several moments she could not make much sense of what she saw. She hooked her umbrella carefully over bricks, and swung her leg over. Then she looked around.

Deeba swayed giddily. The wind pushed her hard.

She was straddling the rim of an enormous tower. It was a cylinder, at least a hundred feet in diameter, hollow and book-lined. Outside, bricks went down the height of countless floors past small clouds and flocking bats, to UnLondon’s streets. Inside, it was ringed with the bookshelves she had climbed.

The vertical tunnel of books was dim, but lights floated at irregular intervals in the dark void below. It didn’t seem to end. It wasn’t a tower: it was the tip of a shaft of books that went deep into the earth.

At some point during her ascent, what had been a flat shelf-cliff must have curled around and joined up behind her back, so gradually she hadn’t detected it. It had become a chimney poking from a vertical universe of bookshelves.

There was motion below her. There were people on the shelves.

They clung to the edges of the cases and moved across them in expert scuttles. They wore ropes and hooks and carried picks on which they sometimes hung. Dangling from straps they carried notebooks, pens, magnifying glasses, ink pads, and stamps.

The men and women took books from the shelves as they went, checked their details, leaning against their ropes, replaced them, pulled out little pads and made notes, sometimes carried the book with them to another place and reshelved it there.

“Hey!” Deeba heard. A woman was climbing towards her. Several men and women turned in their tethers and looked curiously.

“Can I help you?” the woman said. “I think there’s been some mistake. How did you get past reception? These shelves aren’t open-access.”

“Sorry,” said Deeba. “I don’t know what you mean.”

The woman moved like a spider just below her. She looked at Deeba over the top of her glasses.

“You’re supposed to put in a request at the front desk, and one of us’ll fetch whatever you’re after,” she said. “I’m going to have to ask you to go back.” She pointed over at UnLondon.

“That’s where I want to go,” Deeba said, pulling off the glove and putting it in her bag. “But I came from inside.”

“Wait…really?” the woman said excitedly. “You’re a traveler? You came by storyladder? My goodness. It’s been years since we’ve had an explorer. It’s not an easy journey, after all. Still, you know what they say: ‘All bookshelves lead to the Wordhoard Pit.’ And here you are.

“I’m Margarita Staples.” She bowed in her harness. “Extreme librarian. Bookaneer.”

“Where did you come from?” Margarita said. “Lost Angeles? Baghdidn’t?”

“I’m not from an abcity,” Deeba said. “I climbed in from London.”

“London?” The woman narrowed her eyes. “A young thing like you? You expect me to believe you climbed all that way? Straight up? Didn’t have any trouble from wordcrows? None of the warrior booktribes of the Middle Shelves?”

“I dunno. Something had a go at me, but I got away. I climbed out of my library. And I came here.”

“Oh my…” Margarita Staples stared at her. “You’re telling the truth. Well. Well well.

“It’s a good thing you didn’t go left or right on your way here; you might have ended up almost anywhere. There are some terrible libraries, believe me, that you really don’t want to emerge in. Not, I have to admit, that we’re doing so well ourselves at the moment.” She sighed.

“Why?” said Deeba. “What’s happening?”

“We’re in the middle of a war,” Staples said. “Not just the library: the whole of UnLondon.”