Rainbows End

Guardians of the Past, Handmaidens of the Future

From its beginning, the Elder Cabal had met on the sixth floor of the Geisel Library. Winston Blount, calling in favors from his years at Arts and Letters, had made that possible. For a while, he had even had a nice clubroom in the staff lounge up here. That had been after the Rose Canyon quake, when the bright young future freaks had been briefly leery of their own technological fixes and floor space was available to those willing to risk the heights.

In the first years, there were almost thirty regulars. The membership had changed from year to year, but they were mostly faculty and staff from the turn of the century, almost all retired or laid off.

Time passed and the cabal dwindled. Blount himself had drifted away from the group, discovering that there weren't many more favors left for him to call in. His plans for a resumed career had centered on the Fairmont Adult Ed program. Then the Orozco boy had unintentionally pointed him at a magnificent shortcut: the Librareome protest movement. And the inner circle of the cabal was perfect for that. Perhaps it was just as well that the inner circle was exactly the cabal's entire remaining membership.

Tom Parker was sitting right beside the window wall. He and Blount peered down upon the protesters. Parker chuckled. "So, Dean, are you going to preach to the choir?"

Blount grunted. "No. But they can see us up here. Give the folks a wave, Tommie." Blount followed his own advice, raising his arms in a kind of blessing upon the singers at the main entrance and the slightly smaller mob on the terrace by the Snake Path. In fact, he had offered to speak at the demonstration. In the old days he would have been a featured speaker. Now he was still a critical player, but of zero publicity value. He flickered through some of the images that glowed above the crowd. "My, this event is big. Layered in fact." But some of the layers were counterdemonstrations, obscene ghosts that capered through the crowd to mock them. Damn them .

He turned off all enhancements, and noticed that Parker was grinning at him.

"Still trying to use those contact lenses, aren't you Dean?" He patted his laptop computer lovingly. "It just goes to show, you can't beat the genius of a mouse-and-windows environment." Parker's hands slid across the keyboard. He was working through the layers of enhancement that Blount had been seeing directly with his contacts. Tom Parker might be the sharpest fellow left in the cabal, but he was hopelessly fixated on old ways. "I've customized my laptop to pick out what's really important." Images flickered on his tiny screen. There were things Winston Blount had not noticed in his contacts: someone had set a kind of nimbus over the demonstrators. Impressive.

Tommie was still chuckling. "I can't tell about that purple halo. Is it supposed to be pro– or anti-Librareome?"

On the other side of Parker, Carlos Rivera leaned back from the window and stretched. "Anti, according to the journalists. They say the halo is to bless the guardians of the past." The three watched silently for a moment. The sound of the choir came through the high glass windows, but also from protesters around the world. The combined effect was more symbolic than beautiful, since the voices were so far out of synch.

After a moment, Carlos Rivera spoke again. "Almost a third of the physical visitors are from out of town!"

Blount grinned back at him. Carlos Rivera was a strange young fellow, a disabled veteran. He hardly met the cabal's informal age requirements, but in some ways he was almost as old-fashioned as Tommie Parker. He wore small thick glasses, the kind that had been popular in the early teens. He had typer rings on all his fingers and both thumbs. His shirt was one of the old displayables. Right now it showed white letters on black: "Librarians: Guardians of the Past, Handmaidens of the Future." But the most important thing about Carlos Rivera was that he was on the Library staff.

Parker was studying the numbers on his laptop. "Well, we've got the world's attention. We spiked at two million viewers a few moments back. And lots more will be watching this asynchronously."

"What does UCSD Public Relations say?"

Parker typed briefly on his laptop. "They're lying low. The PR people would just as soon that this be a non-event. Ha. But they're getting pounded by the popular press…" Parker leaned back and shifted into reminiscence. "There was a time, I would have hidden my own cameras down on the lower floors. And if they deadzoned me, I'd've broken into the PR site and pasted pictures of burning books all across their press releases!"

"Duì ," said Rivera, nodding his head. "But that would be difficult nowadays."

"Yup. Worse, it would take courage." Tommie patted his laptop. "And that's the trouble with people nowadays. They've traded freedom for security. When I was a young man, the cops didn't live in every widget, and there wasn't some clown collecting royalties on every keystroke. Back then there was no 'Secure Hardware Environment' and it didn't take ten thousand transistors to make a flipflop. I remember in '91, when I took down the" — and he was off on one his stories. Poor Tommie. Modern medicine had not cured him of his need to tell about old adventures again and again.

But Carlos Rivera seemed to love these stories. He nodded every few seconds, his expression rapt. Blount sometimes wondered whether Rivera's enthusiasm should be held for or against the young fellow.

" — so anyway, by the time they thought to check for crimps in the fiber, we had dumped all the files and — "

Now, for a wonder, Rivera was no longer listening. He had turned toward the stacks, and his expression was full of surprise. He rattled off something in Chinese, then thankfully slipped back into English: "I mean, please wait a moment."

"What?" Parker glanced at his laptop. "Have they started the shredders?"

Damn , thought Blount. He had been hoping that terrible moment could be marked by the protesters.

"Yes," said Rivera, "but that was several minutes ago, while you were talking. This is something different. Someone has gotten into the loading area."

Winston bounced to his feet — bounced as much as semirejuvenated joints could be made to bounce. "I thought you said there was security down there?"

"I thought there was!" Rivera came to his feet, too. "I can show you." Images popped into Blount's eyes, views from cameras on the north and east sides of the building, more views than he could make sense of.

Blount waved the images away. "I want to see this for myself." He plunged into the library stacks, Rivera close behind.

"If we had known about this, we could have put some of our people down there." That was the problem nowadays. Security was so good that when it broke down, no one was around to take advantage! In the back of Blount's mind, something marveled at his new priorities. There had been a time when Dean Winston C. Blount had been the fellow on the establishment side, doing his best to make sure that the know-nothings didn't bust things up. Now… well, now, a certain amount of hell-raising might be the only way to set the establishment right.

"Has the choir seen this?"

"Dunno. The best views were quarantined." Rivera sounded out of breath.

They detoured around the elevators and staff rooms that occupied the middle of the floor. Now they were moving at right angles to the stacks. Far down the book-lined shelves he glimpsed the sky beyond the windows. "You said there was chance that Max Huertas might show up today."

"Duì . Yes. There's some chance he might come. Several libraries begin the project this week, but UCSD is the star." Huertas was more than just the money behind the Librareome. He was also a major investor in the biotech labs near campus. He had turned the university scene upside down with his Librareome insanity, ultimately greasing it past an administration that should have fought him to the death.

Blount's jog slowed as they approached the windows. The UCSD campus had suffered a revolution in the last decades. The vibrant building campaign of his time as dean had been swept away by the Rose Canyon quake and the facile logic of the modern university administrations. The campus had reverted to a woodsy, low-density style, with buildings that might just as well have been prefab Quonsets. In a sad, sad way it reminded him of the campus's earliest years, of his grad-school years. We built such a beautiful place here, and then we let opportunism and remote learning and the damn labs dissipate it all . What shall it profit a university, if it shall enroll five hundred thousand, and lose its own soul?

He reached the northeast windows and looked down. The sixth floor was at the building's maximum overhang. You could see almost straight down — to a stretch of cracked concrete, the library loading dock. And there was a guy down there, furtively looking around. Carlos Rivera caught up with Blount and for a moment they were both staring downward. Then Blount noticed that the younger man was actually staring through the floor; he'd found some camera on the lower levels. "That's not Max Huertas," said Carlos. "He'd come with a gang of lackeys."

"Yeah." But it was someone who could persuade the Library rent-a-cops to let him go down there. Blount tapped the glass. "Look up here, you jerk!" It was amazing what little he could see from straight up. The stranger carried himself with a twitchy awkwardness, like an old-timer coping with a regrown nervous system… Blount was beginning to get a very bad feeling. And then the stranger turned his gaze upward. It was like finding a large rat at your feet.

"Oh, Christ." A strange combination of disgust and curiosity forced him to say: "Just get him up here."

After the sunny loading dock, the hallway seemed very dark. Robert hesitated, adjusting to the light. The walls were streaked with scuff and scrape marks. The floor was naked concrete. This was not a public area. It reminded him of years ago when he and certain undergrads would sneak around in the utility cores of these buildings.

Epiphany hung tiny labels on the doors and ceiling, and even the cracks in the walls. They weren't terribly informative, ID numbers and maintenance instructions, the sort of thing that might have been paint-stenciled in the old days. But — if he wanted to take the time — he could search through the signs and get background information. And there were mysteries. A large, silver-puttied crack in the wall was marked "cantilever-LimitCycle < 1.2mm:25s." Robert was about to search on that when he noticed a door decorated with a larger banner, one that ticked out the seconds:

00:07:03 Librareome Equipment in Operation: KEEP OUT!

What the hell, this door was open too.

On the other side, the power-saw racket was louder. He walked fifty feet, past plastic crates — "Rescued Data," the labels said. At the end, behind some kind of legged forklift, there was another unlocked door. And now he was on familiar ground: he was at the bottom of the library's central stairwell. He looked up and up, into the foreshortened spiral of steps. Tiny flecks of white floated and swirled in the column of light. Snowflakes? But one landed on his hand: a fleck of paper.

And now the ripping buzz of the saw was still louder, and there was also the sound of a giant vacuum cleaner. But it was the irregular ripping buzz that echoed down the stairwell and beat him about the head. There was something familiar about that, but it wasn't an indoors kind of sound.

He started up the stairs, pausing at each landing. The dust and the noise were worst at the fourth floor, labeled "Catalog Section PZ." The door opened smoothly. Beyond would be the library stacks. All the books you could ever want, miles of them. The beauty of ideas waiting in ambush.

But this was like no stacks he had ever seen. The floor was draped in white tarpaulin. The air was hazy with drifting debris. He took a breath, smelled pine pitch and burnt wood — and for a moment he couldn't stop coughing.

Brap , painfully loud now, coming from four aisles to his right. There were empty shelves here, a littering of paper scraps and deep dust.

Brrap . Against logic, sometimes recognition comes hard. But finally, Robert remembered the exact sound which that abrupt roar must be. He had heard it occasionally throughout his life, but always the machine had been outdoors.

Brrrapl A tree shredder!

Ahead of him, everything was empty bookcases, skeletons. Robert went to the end of the aisle and walked toward the noise. The air was a fog of floating paper dust. In the fourth aisle, the space between the bookcases was filled with a pulsing fabric tube. The monster worm was brightly lit from within. At the other end, almost twenty feet away, was the worm's maw — the source of the noise. Indistinct in the swirling haze, Robert could see two white-suited figures, their jackets labeled "Huertas Data Rescue." The two wore filter masks and head protectors. They might have been construction workers. In fact, this business was the ultimate in deconstruction: first one and then the other would pull books off the racks and toss them into the shredder's maw. The maintenance labels made calm phrases of the horror: The raging maw was a "NaviCloud custom debinder." The fabric tunnel that stretched out behind it was a "camera tunnel." Robert flinched from the sight — and Epiphany randomly rewarded his gesture with imagery from within the monster: The shredded fragments of books and magazines flew down the tunnel like leaves in tornado, twisting and tumbling. The inside of the fabric was stitched with thousands of tiny cameras. The shreds were being photographed again and again, from every angle and orientation, till finally the torn leaves dropped into a bin just in front of Robert. Rescued data.

BRRRRRAP ! The monster advanced another foot into the stacks, leaving another foot of empty shelves behind it. Almost empty. Robert stepped into the aisle and his hand caught on something lying on a shelf. It wasn't dust. It was half a page, a remnant of all the thousands of books that had already been sucked into the "data rescue" equipment. He waved it at the white-suited workers and screamed words that were lost in the noise of their shredder and the worm tunnel fans.

But the two looked up and shouted something back.

If the body of the glowing worm hadn't been between him and them, Robert might have rushed the pair. As it was, they just waved impotently at each other.

Then a third guy appeared, behind Robert. This one was an overweight thirty-something wearing Bermuda shorts and a huge black T-shirt. The young man was shouting at him in — what, Mandarin? He waved pleadingly for Robert to follow him back toward the stairwell, away from the nightmare.

The sixth floor of the library was not part of the nightmare. In fact, it looked pretty much as Robert remembered from the early 1970s. The guy with the big T-shirt led him through the stacks to a study area on the south side of the building. There was a short fellow with an ancient laptop computer, sitting right by the windows. The little guy stood and stared. Then suddenly he laughed, and stuck out his hand. "I'll be damned. You really are Robert Gu!"

Robert took the proffered hand, and stood uncertainly for awoment. Book shredders below, mystery man up here. And the crazy choir. He could finally see the singers in the plaza.

"Ha. You don't recognize me, do you, Robert?" No . The guy had lots of blond hair, but his face was as old as the hills. Only his laughter was familiar. After a second, he shrugged and waved for Robert to sit down. "I don't blame you," he chattered on. "But recognition the other way is easy. You lucked out, Robert, didn't you? I'd guess the Venn-Kurasawa treatment worked a hundred percent for you; your skin looks better than when you were twenty-five years old." The old man slid an age-spotted hand across his own features and smiled ruefully. "But how's the rest of you? You look a little twitchy."

"I — I lost my marbles. Alzheimer's. But — "

"Hey, right. I can tell."

It was the heedless frankness that Robert suddenly recognized. Behind the stranger's face, Robert recognized the freshman who had made his

UCSD years significantly more exciting. "Tommie Parker!" The young squirt who could never be put down, who had been a computer-science jock at UCSD before he had even graduated from high school, before there had even been such a major. The little guy who couldn't wait for the future.

Tommie nodded, chuckling. "Yup. Yup. But it's been 'Professor Thomas Parker' for a long time. You know I got my doctorate from MIT? Then I came back here and I taught for almost forty years. You're looking at a Member of the Establishment."

And seeing what time had done… for a moment Robert was silent. I should be immune by now . He looked out the window at the crowds, away from Parker. "So what's going on, Tommie? You're camped up here like some grand commander."

Parker laughed and typed at his keyboard. From what Robert could see of the display, it was some ancient system, worse than his view-page — and nothing like what he could get from Epiphany. But there was enthusiasm in Tom Parker's voice. "It's this protest demonstration we set up. Against the Librareome Menace. We didn't stop the shredding, but — jeez, look at that. I got your break-in on video." Tommie's display showed what looked like a telephoto image shot from north of campus. A tiny figure that might have been Robert Gu was entering the library's freight area. "I don't know how you got past security, Robert."

"Management wonders that too," said the young man who rescued Robert. He had sat down behind the front desk and brushed flakes of paper dandruff off of his hair and T-shirt. Suddenly the "Chad is Bad" slogan on his shirt made a lot of sense. He noticed Robert's regard and gave him a little wave. "Hi, Professor Gu. I'm Carlos Rivera, library staff." His T-shirt morphed to white, which at least made the little bits of paper less obvious.

"You're part of this destruction?" He suddenly noticed the half page he had saved from the shredder. He laid it gently on the table There were words there; maybe he could figure out what they had been part of.

"No, no," said Parker. "Carlos is helping us. In fact, all the librarians oppose the shredding — excepting the administrators. And seeing that you got past library security, I think we have allies even there. You're a famous guy, Robert. And we can use the video you got."

"But I — " Robert started to say he didn't have a camera. Then he thought of the clothes he was wearing. "Okay, but you'll have to show me how to give it to you."

"No problem — " began Rivera.

"You're using that Epiphany junk, aren't you, Robert? Yeah, you'll have to get some wearer to help you. Wearables are supposed to be such a convenience, but mainly they're an excuse for other people to run your life. Me, I'll stick with the proven solutions." He patted his laptop. Through some fluke of memory, Robert recognized the model. Twenty-some years ago, this gadget had been at the cutting edge of power and miniaturization, barely eight inches by ten, with a brilliant, millimeters-thin screen and a fancy camera. Now… even to Robert it was a ponderous behemoth. How can it even talk to the modern magic ?

Parker's glance slid across to the librarian. "How did he make it into the building, Carlos?"

Rivera said, "Wó bù zhidào ."

Tommie groaned. "You're talking Chinese, Carlos."

"Oops, sorry." He glanced at Robert. "I was an army translator during the war," he said, as if that explained everything. "I don't know how he got in, Professor Parker. I saw him walking down from Warschawski Hall. I was using the same viewpoints as our security does. But you notice that even after he got to the shredders, there was still no one to stop him." He turned, looked expectantly into the stacks. "Maybe the dean has other people working on this."

After a moment, an old man stepped out from behind the books. "You know I don't, Carlos." He walked to the window without looking at Robert. Aha , thought Robert, so this is where Winnie's disappeared to the last couple of weeks . Blount stared down at the plaza for several seconds. Finally he said, "The singing has stopped. They know about Gu's arrival, don't they?"

"Yes, sir. Even though we haven't published our own video, there's plenty of journalists floating around. At least three popular sources have IDed him." Outside, the crowd was cheering.

Robert tried the little shrug that Juan said would bring up local news. All he got was advertising.

And Sharif was still silent.

After a moment, Blount walked back to the head of the table and sat down with a wheeze. He hadn't looked directly at Robert; Winnie didn't seem nearly as confident as in Chumlig's class. How long has it been since we last played our little political games ? Robert gave Blount a steady look. That should cause Epiphany to search on him. Also, in the old days, that look had always unnerved the guy.

"Okay," Blount nodded at Tom Parker, "tell our protestors to start the windup. You know, the interviews and opinion pieces."

"What about Mr. New Development here?" Tommie jerked a thumb in Robert's direction.

Blount finally looked at Robert. And Epiphany began streaming information across his view: Google BioSource: Winston C. Blount, MA English from UCSD 1971, PhD English Literature from UCLA 1973, Associate Professor of English at Stanford 1973-1980, Professor of Literature and later Dean of Arts and Letters at UCSD 1980-2012. [Biblio, Speeches, Favorite things] …

"So, Winnie," he said, "you still wheeling and dealing?"

The other's face paled, but his reply was evenly worded. "Call me Winston, or Dean Blount. If you please." There was a time when he had gone by "Win." It was Robert who had cured him of that.

They stared at each other silently for another second. Finally, Blount said, "Do you have an explanation for how you got in the service entrance?"

Robert gave a little laugh. "I just walked in. I'm the most ignorant of all, Winston." What had become of Zulfi Sharif?

Tommie Parker looked up from his laptop. "There is recent public information on Robert Gu. Robert's been in deep Alzheimer's for almost four years. He's one of the late cures." He glanced up at Robert. "Jeez, man, you almost died of old age before you got well. On the other hand, it looks like you've had great medical luck otherwise. So what brought you to UCSD on this of all days?"

Robert shrugged. It was surprising how much he did not want to go into his problems with Bob and Miri. "The timing is just coincidence. I came down to UCSD because… because I wanted to see the books."

A not-so-friendly smile came to Blount's face. "How very like you, that you come the day we start burning them."

Rivera protested, "It's shredding, Dean. I mean, technically speaking. Except for the chad, all the shredda is preserved."

Robert looked at the torn paper he had brought from downstairs: shredda that had escaped its final resting place? He held up the forlorn slip of paper. "Honestly, I don't know what's going on. What was this? What madness explains destroying the book this was part of?"

Winnie didn't answer immediately; he waved at Rivera to pass him the fragment. He set it on the table and stared for a second. His bitter smile grew a little wider. "What pleasant irony. They're starting in the PZ's, aren't they, Carlos?"

"Duì ," the young man replied, hesitantly.

"This," Winnie waved the paper in the air, "is from a science-fiction book!" A grim chuckle. "Those sci-fi bastards are just getting what they deserve. For thirty years they had literature education hijacked — and this is what all their reductionism has gotten them. Good riddance." He crumpled the paper and tossed it back at Robert.

Tommie grabbed the little ball of paper and tried to resuscitate it. "It's just an accident that science fiction came first, Dean."

"Actually," said Rivera, "there are rumors the shredders started with science fiction because there would be fewer complainers among the geeks."

"It doesn't matter," said Tommie. "They were scheduled to be well into other stuff by the end of today."

Winnie leaned forward. "What do you mean 'were scheduled'?"

"You didn't know?" Parker patted his laptop again; was he in love with the ancient device or what? "The shredding ran into a minor technical problem. They've shut down for the day." He grinned. "The popular press says the 'minor technical problem' is the sudden appearance of Robert in the middle of their operation."

Rivera hesitated, and light glinted in the depths of his thick eyeglasses. "Yes," he said. So the crowd outside had something to celebrate after all. Winnie got up, looked out the window again, and sat down. "Very good, we've earned our first victory! Relay our congratulations to the troops, Tommie."

Robert raised his hands, "Will somebody please explain this madness to me? There may be nothing burning, but this does seem like Fahrenheit 451 . That's another science-fiction story, Winston."

Rivera waved vaguely. "Search on keyword Librareome, Professor Gu."

Robert gestured and tapped. How does Juan manage to do this without looking like an idiot ?

"Here, use my laptop. You'll never figure out how to drag news out of Epiphany."

Winston Blount slapped the table. "He can do that on his own time, Tommie. We have serious work to do."

"Okay, Dean. But Robert has changed things. We can use his reputation."

Rivera nodded. "Yes. He's won practically every literary prize there is."

"Stuff it," said Blount. "We already have five Nobelists on board. Compared to them, Gu is nothing special." Blount's glance flickered across Robert's face. The putdown he directed at Robert was accompanied by a minute hesitation, probably too short for the others to notice.

The most important things about Winston Blount were not in his Google bio. Once upon a time, Winnie had thought himself a poet. But he wasn't; he was merely articulate and the owner of a large ego. By the time they both arrived as junior faculty at Stanford, Robert had lost patience with the poseur. Besides, committee meetings would have been deadly dull if not for his hobby of needling Winnie Blount. The guy had been an unending source of amusement because he seemed to think he could outwit Robert. Semester after semester, their verbal duels became more pointed, Winnie's failure more obvious. It hadn't helped the other's cause that Blount had no talent for what he wanted most, to create significant literature. Robert's lighthearted campaign had been devastating. By the late 1970s, Poor Winnie was the laughingstock — quietly the laughingstock — of the department. All that was left of his claims to significance was his pomposity. He had departed Stanford, and Robert remembered feeling the satisfaction of having done the world a good deed when Blount found his proper place in the scheme of things, becoming an administrator…

But he was probably just as good a poet as the new Robert Gu. I wonder if Winnie really knows that ?

Of course, Tommie Parker was oblivious of such undercurrents. He responded to Blount's comment as though it were a neutral statement of fact. "Someone thinks he's important, Dean. Someone who had the power to slip him past some fairly good commercial security." He turned to Gu. "Think back, Robert. I know you're new to the information scene — and Epiphany obscures an awful lot — but did you notice anything strange today? I mean, before you got to the library?"

"Well — " He looked into the air above them. His web search was just beginning to show results, text and pics about the "Librareome Project: rescuing prehistory for the students of today." That was certainly strange stuff. Otherwise… there were the floating lights that meant various things. He tried to remember Juan's explanations. Ah . Sharif was back, a ruby icon that hovered just around the corner of the stacks. "I've had some help, a grad student named Zulfikar Sharif."

"Were you in contact with him as you came down toward the library?"

"Yes. Sharif thought I could get in easier if I didn't try to walk through the crowd at the main entrance."

Rivera and Parker exchanged glances. "You didn't see the security ribbons? They should have guided you to the south side of building."

"Professor, I think you were hijacked."

Parker nodded. "Don't feel bad about it, Robert. That sort of thing happens a lot with wearables. We should track down this 'Zulfikar Sharif character."

Robert pointed to the ruby light. "I think he's still here."

The gesture must have been taken as a cue by his Epiphany — somehow making the light a public thing: Rivera looked in the direction he was pointing. "Yes! See that, Professor Parker?"

Tommie looked down at his laptop and massaged the touchpad. "Of course I see him. I'll bet he's been listening via Robert. What say we invite him out for a chat?"

Blount was squinting around, hopelessly. Evidently, he couldn't see the ruby glow. Nevertheless he took the question as directed at him. "Yes. Do it."

Robert tapped a release. A second passed. The ruby tinkerbell floated down to the edge of the table — and abruptly became a full-sized human being, dark-skinned, with earnest eyes. Sharif smiled apologetically, and shuffled through the edge of the table to "sit" on a chair on the other side. "Thank you so much for invoking me, Professor Gu. And yes," nodding to the others, "I have been listening. Apologies for my various communication problems."

"I call that taking advantage of a beginner's ignorance," said Parker.

Blount nodded emphatically. "I would say so! I — " He hesitated, seemed to think it over. "Ah, hell. What does it matter, Tommie? Everything we're doing today is perfectly open."

Tommie grinned. "True! But one thing I've learned is you always look a gift horse in the mouth. Sometimes they turn out to be the Trojan variety." He looked at the image in his laptop. "So, Mr. Sharif, I don't care if you've been eavesdropping or not. Just tell us what you've been doing with Robert Gu. Someone led him down to the service entrance and through all sorts of security."

Sharif smiled hesitantly. "In all honesty, I was as surprised as you about that. Professor Gu and I were talking freely when he arrived on campus. He got rather quiet as we came down the slope from your Warschawski Hall. And then for no apparent reason, he turned left and we went around the north side of the library. The next thing I knew he was walking into the freight entrance — and I lost contact. I don't know what more I can say. My own wearable security is of the highest order, of course. um." He hestitated a moment and then changed topic. "Aren't you taking this whole thing in the wrong way? I mean, the Librareome Project will open up all past literature to everyone — and faster than any other project could do it. What is wrong with that?"

This last was met with total silence. Winston Blount smiled thinly. "I don't suppose you've seen our website?"

"Ah, not as yet." He paused and his eyes seemed to be looking far away. "Okay, I see what you're saying." He smiled. "I suppose I should be on your side — what you want will keep my 411 job safe! See here, I love the old poets, but old-time literature is so hard to get at. If your interest is in post-2000 topics, critical sources are everywhere and research gets results . But for the rest, you have to search through that ." Sharif waved at the orderly ranks of books, the stacks that filled the library's sixth floor. "It can take days to gain even trivial insights."

Lazy bum , thought Robert, and wondered at Sharif's earlier enthusiasm for "real books." But he had noticed the trend even in his own teaching days. It wasn't just the students who refused to get their hands dirty. Even so-called researchers ignored the universe of things that weren't online.

Winnie glowered at the young man. "Mr. Sharif, you don't understand the purpose of the stacks. You don't go into the stacks expecting the precise answer to your burning-question-of-the-moment. It doesn't work that way. In all the thousands of times that I've gone hunting in the stacks, I've seldom found exactly what I was looking for. You know what I did find? I found the books on close-by topics. I found answers to questions that I had never thought to ask. Those answers took me in new directions and were almost always more valuable than whatever I originally had in mind." He glanced at Rivera. "Isn't that so, Carlos?"

Rivera nodded, a little weakly, Robert thought.

But Winnie was absolutely right, so right that Robert had to say something on the same side. "This is insanity, Sharif. Apparently, the Librareome Project is someone's idea for photographing and then digitizing the Library. But — " suddenly he was remembering things from his last years at Stanford " — didn't Google already do that?"

"That's true," said Rivera. "In fact, that was our first argument, and perhaps still the best one. But Huertas is a great salesman, and he does have arguments in his favor. What he has in mind is fast and very, very cheap. Past digitizations have not been as global or as unified as this will be. And Huertas has lawyers and software that will allow him to render microroyalty payments across all the old copyright regimes — without any new permissions."

Winnie vented a sour laugh. "The real reason the administration people bought into this is that they like Huertas's money, and maybe even the publicity. But let me tell you, Mr. Sharif, shredding destroys the books. That is the bottom line. We will be left with a useless jumble."

"Oh, no, Professor Blount. Read the overview. The pictures coming from the camera tunnel are analyzed and reformatted. It's a simple matter of software to reorient the images, match the tear marks and reconstruct the original texts in proper order. In fact — besides the mechanical simplicity of it all — that's the reason for the apparent violence. The tear marks come close to being unique. Really, it's not a new thing. Shotgun reconstructions are classic in genomics."

"Oh, yeah?" Robert picked up the much-abused page that he had rescued from the PZ stacks. He held it out like some limp murder victim. "So what perfection of software is going to recover something that was torn from its binding and never photographed?"

Sharif started to shrug and then saw the expression on Robert's face. "Sir, it's really not a problem. There will be some loss, true. Even where everything is properly photoed, the programs will make some mismatches. Potentially, the error rate can be less than a few words per million volumes, far better than even hardcopy republishing with manual copyediting. That's why other major libraries are participating in the project, to get accurate cross-checking."

Other major libraries ? Robert realized that his mouth was hanging open. He shut up; he couldn't think of anything to say.

Tommie stared into his laptop. "You seem suddenly well informed, Mr. Sharif."

"But… well, I am wearing," the young man said.

"Hmpf. And all you really want is to pursue your love of literature."

"… Yes! My thesis advisor has based her entire career on Gu's Secrets of the Ages . And now I find out that the great poet is back from Alzheimer's! It's the opportunity of a lifetime… Look. If you don't believe the Google bio, check in the 411 directories. I have lots of satisfied customers, many of them literature students at UCSD — not that I give them an unethical degree of help! Not at all." Aha. Maybe ghostwritten homework was still a no-no, even in this brave new world. "I don't know what happened with Professor Gu today, but didn't it slow down the Librareome Project? Isn't that what you want?"

Blount and Rivera were both nodding agreement.

"Yup," said Tommie. "You're a horse of some kind."

"I am simply a Lit-in-English student!"

Tommie shook his head. "You could be almost anything. You could be a committee. When you want to sound like a lit-lover, we get chat from a member who knows about poetry." Tommie tilted back his chair. "There's an old saying: The beginning of trust has to be an in-person contact. I don't see any usable chain of trust in your biography."

Sharif stood and walked partway through the table. He looked upward, waving his arms at the sky. "You want in-person? That I can supply. Look down here, at the bench by the footpath."

Tommie tilted his chair still farther back and glanced over his shoulder. Robert walked to the window and looked down. Much of the crowd had dispersed, leaving just a few knots of die-hard demonstrators. The footpath was a tiled serpent that wound its way up the hillside, its head reaching just to the edge of the library terrace. It was a very real mosaic, new artwork since Robert's years at UCSD.

"I came all the way from Corvallis just to see Professor Gu. Please don't turn me away now."

And there by the path was a second Zulfi Sharif, this one not virtual at all. He was looking up at them and waving.

13