Rainbows End

When Metaphors Are Real

For the next week Robert avoided UCSD, just to see if the Mysterious Stranger would react.

He was beginning to feel confident with Epiphany, although he might never be as skillful as kids who grew up wearing. Xiu Xiang was lagging behind him, mainly because of her self-doubts. She had refused to wear for three days after one particularly mistaken gesture had dumped her into — into she refused to say what, but Robert suspected it was some kind of porn view.

The language in the Gu/Orozco project, while not poetry, had risen above the level of egregious noise. Robert had a surprising amount of fun working with video effects and network jitter. If their project had been shown in the 1990s, it would have been taken as a work of genius. That was the power of the libraries of cliches and visual gimmicks that lay in their tools. Juan was properly afraid it wouldn't count for much with Chumlig. "We need some added value or she'll fred us." He Googled up some high schools with manual music programs. "Those kids think it's a tragic form of gaming," he said. In the end, Robert chatted up student musicians in Boston and southern Chile — far enough apart to really exercise his network ideas.

Sharif had returned to Corvallis, but they had several more interviews. Some of the guy's questions were a lot more intelligent than Robert would have expected from their first encounters.

He surfed the web a lot, to study up on security issues and — on occasion — to see what had become of literature. What was art, now that surface perfection was possible? Ah, serious literature was there. Most of it didn't make much money, even with the microroyalty system. But there were men and women who could string words almost as well as the old Robert. Damn them !

Still silence from the Stranger. Either he had lost interest, or he understood his power over Robert. It is so easy to win when your victim is desperate . It had been a long time since anyone had beaten Robert Gu at a stare-down… but then one Saturday he skipped his session with Juan. Instead, he took a car to UCSD.

Sharif showed up on the way. "Thank you for accepting my call, Professor Gu." The image sat down in the car seat, part of its butt disappearing into the cushions. Zulfi didn't look nearly as well put together as recently. "It's been hard to reach you lately."

"I thought we covered a lot of ground on Thursday."

Sharif looked pained.

Robert raised an eyebrow. "You're complaining?"

"Not at all, not at all! But you see, sir, it's possible that perhaps I've allowed my wearable to become, um, perhaps somewhat corrupted. It's possible that I'm subject to some degree of… hijacking."

Robert thought back on some of his recent reading. "That's like being a little bit pregnant, isn't it?"

Sharif's image shrank further into the upholstery. "Indeed, sir. I take your point. But frankly, my systems are sometimes subject to a small degree of corruption. I wager that is true of most users. I had thought the situation was manageable, but things have reached the point where… well, you see, I did not interview you Thursday. Not at all."

"Ah." So the Mysterious Stranger had had it both ways: bludgeoning Robert with silence at the same time he carried on as another player.

Sharif waited a moment for Robert to say more, then rushed forward with "Please, Professor, I do so very much wish to continue these interviews! Now that we know there is this problem, we can easily work around it. I beg you not to cut me off."

"You could clean up your system."

"Well, yes. In theory. I had to do that once in undergraduate school. Somehow, I ended up the zombie in a cheating conspiracy. Not my fault at all, but the University of Kolkata required me to fry-clean all my clothes." He raised his hands up in open-palmed prayer. "I've never been very good about backups; the debacle cost me more than a semester of progress toward my degree. Please don't make me do that again. It would be even worse now."

Robert looked out at traffic. His car had turned onto Highway 56 and was tooling toward the coast. Up ahead were the first of the bio labs. And perhaps the Mysterious Stranger was there too. By comparison, Sharif was a known quantity. He looked back at the young fellow and said mildly. "Okay, Mr. Sharif. Carry on in your slightly corrupted state." An old memory struck him, how the computer techs at Stanford had always badgered him about the latest antivirus updates. "We'll simply rise above all the petty vandalism."

"Quite so, sir! Thank you so much." Sharif paused, exuding profound relief. "And I'm more eager than ever to proceed. I have my questions here somewhere." Hesitation and a blank stare as he changed mental gears. "Ah, yes. Has there been any progress on the revised Secrets of the Ages ?."

"No," Robert replied a little shortly. But this was the sort of question you'd expect of the authentic Zulfi Sharif. Robert mellowed his answer with some half truths: "I'm still doing high-level planning, you know." He launched into a long discussion of how, even though Guian poetry was sparse, its creation required infinitely precise planning. He'd said things like that in the old days, but never laid it on quite as thickly as now. Sharif ate it up.

"So over the next few weeks, I'm going to be visiting my old friends — you know, in the library. That will give me some insights into the plight of the, er, vanquished aged. You're welcome to come along. If you watch carefully, you may learn things about how I work. And afterwards, I'd be happy to critique your conclusions."

The younger man nodded eagerly. "Wonderful. Thank you!"

Amazing the thrill it was to have someone look up to him, even if it was the sort of no-talent that he had shielded himself against all through his earlier life. This must be how poor Winnie worked it, using big words and pomposity to fool the even less inspired . Robert looked away from Sharif's image, and tried to keep his smile from turning predatory. And when Sharif gets smarter, I'll know it's the Stranger .

There were no demonstrators at the library today, but — surprise — there were lots of in-person students. This was heartwarmingly like his recollections of years past, with the library the center of the university's intellectual life. What good things had happened in the last week? He and virtual Sharif walked through the glass doors and took the elevator to floor six. The building interior was not visible to Robert, even with his new access skills. Okay, look for recent news items… but by then he was on the fifth floor. Lena — > Juan, Miri, Xiu: Hey! I've lost the view!

Juan — > Lena, Miri, Xiu: The sixth floor isn't publicly searchable today.

Miri — > Juan, Lena, Xiu: Maybe if I just ask Robert for forwarding.

Sharif had faded to a luminescent reddish blob. "I can't see anymore," he said. "And I'll bet you're the only person I can hear."

Robert hesitated, then waved permissions in Sharif's direction. Let's see what the cabal makes of that .

Winnie and Carlos Rivera were sitting at the window wall. Tommie was hunched over his laptop.

"Ní háo , Professor Gu!" said Rivera. "Thanks for coming."

Tommie looked up from his laptop. "But I'm not sure we want your little friend."

Sharif got support from an unexpected place. Winston Blount said, "Tommie, I think Sharif might be of some use."

Tommie shook his head. "Not anymore. Now that UCSD is shredded — "

"What?" The stacks were still full of books. Robert stepped back and ran his hand across the spines. "These feel real to me," he said.

"You didn't see the propaganda on the lower floors?"

"No. I took the elevator, and so far I'm not very good at seeing through walls."

Tommie shrugged. "We're on the last unshredded floor. Like we figured, the administration was just waiting for the fuss to die down. Then one night they swooped in with extra shredders. They were done with two floors before we had a clue. By then it was too late."

"Damn!" Robert settled into a chair. "So what's the point of protesting now?"

Winnie said, "It's true that we can't save UCSD. In fact, the clever SOBs have twisted things around so that the Librareome Project is more popular with the students than before. But so far, UCSD has the only library that's been shredded."

Rivera burst into Mandarin: "Duì, dànshi tāmen xūyáo huí diào qitāde túshūguān, yīnwèi — " He hesitated, seemed to notice the blank looks. "S-Sorry. I meant to say, they still need to destroy other libraries. For crosschecking. The data reduction and virtual reassembly will be an ongoing project, tending 'asymptotically toward perfect reproduction.'"

Robert noticed that Tommie Parker was watching with a faint smile. "So you do have a plan?"

"I ain't saying nothing while Sharif is here."

Winnie sighed. "Okay, Tommie. Go ahead and shut him down."

Sharif's rosy glow moved a little ways out from the stacks. "It's all right. I don't want to be a prob — " The glow vanished.

Tommie looked up from his laptop. "He's gone. And I've deadzoned the sixth floor." He pointed at an LED on the edge of his ancient-looking laptop.

Robert remembered some of Bob's claims: "Even the Homeland Security hardware?"

"Don't tell, Robert." He patted his computer. "Genuine Paraguayan inside, shipped just before they shut the fabs down." He gave them a shifty grin. "Now it's just us, unless one of you is wearing dirty panties."

Blount looked pointedly at Robert. "Or unless one of us is a fink."

Robert sighed. "This isn't Stanford, Winston." But what if the Mysterious Stranger were actually a cop? That should have occurred to him before. He pushed the thought away. "So what's your plan?"

"We've been reading the Economist ," said Rivera. "Huertas International is on shaky financial ground. Delays here at UCSD could force him to dump the whole project." He stared at Robert through his thick spectacles. You could see images flickering around in the things.

"Even though they've shredded almost everything here?"

"Duì ." The young man leaned forward, and his T-shirt showed a torrent of worried faces. "It's like this. The Librareome Project isn't just the video capture of premillennium books. It's not just the digitization. It goes beyond Google and company. Huertas intends to combine all classical knowledge into a single, object-situational database with a transparent fee structure."

Object-situational database? This was beyond Robert's newfound nerdliness. He stared over Rivera's head, trying to look up the term. Nothing was coming back. Tommie's deadzone, yeah.

Rivera took his stare as disbelief. "It's really not that much data, Dr. Gu. A few petabytes. The main thing is that it's very heterogeneous compared to similar-size datasets in most applications."

"Of course. Your point?" From the corner of his eye, he saw a smile come to Winnie's face. The guy knew Robert was blowing smoke.

"So," Rivera continued, "the Huertas collection will contain almost all human knowledge up to about twenty years ago. All correlated and connected. It's the reason Huertas is paying the State of California to let him commit this atrocity. Even the first rough compilation could be a gold mine. From the project start six weeks ago, Huertas International has a six-month monopoly on the Librareome they're creating. That's six months with sole access to real insight on the past. There are dozens of questions that such a resource might resolve: Who really ended the Intifada? Who is behind the London art forgeries? Where was the oil money really going in the latter part of the last century? Some answers will only interest obscure historical societies. But some will mean big bucks. And Huertas will have exclusive rights to this oracle for six months."

"But he has to get the data put together," said Winnie. "If Huertas loses a few weeks, there'll be hundreds of organizations that decide they might as well wait till the monopoly runs out — when they can get an even more complete answer for free. It's worse than that. Chinese Informagical has dibs on the British Museum and the British Library, using much better equipment than Huertas has. The Brits have shown more gumption than UCSD, but their digitization is due to begin any time now. If Huertas gets any further behind, he and the Chinese will be in a price war for the sale of first looks."

"A regular death spiral!" Tommie's amusement was without malice. He had always been fascinated by how things come apart. Robert remembered in the 1970 brush fires, teenaged Tommie had been out in East County, helping with communications — but also enjoying every minute of the disaster.

"So, unh…" Why does the Stranger want me in on this ? Blount chuckled. "Confused, Robert?"

Back at Stanford, Winnie wouldn't have dared such an open gibe, at least not after the first year. But now, the only comebacks Robert could imagine were adolescent sarcasm. So he replied mildly, "Yes, I'm still in the dark."

Blount hesitated, sensing one of the old-Robert traps. "The point is that we're talking about doing Huertas and the Librareome Project serious harm. We're past legal recourse, so anything that depends on delaying the enemy must involve criminal behavior. Got it?"

"Yes. We really are conspirators."

Rivera nodded. "And that by itself is a felony."

Tommie laughed. "So what? I just subverted the DHS snoop layer! That's a national-security rap."

"I don't care if we're talking high treason!" said Robert. If I can get back my song . … "I mean, you know what a lover of books I am."

The others nodded.

"So what is the plan?"

Blount gestured to Tommie. The little guy said, "Do you remember our underground hikes?"

"In the 1970s? Yes, they were fun — in a brain-damaged way."

Tommie's grin broadened.

"You're telling me the steam tunnels are still in use?"

"Yup. In the nineties that type of construction went out of style. There were lots of new buildings that weren't connected. But then in the oughts, folks wanted Extremely High-Rate comms. And the bioscience people wanted automatic specimen transport. These guys had lots of money."

"Even more so, nowadays," said Carlos.

Tommie nodded. "NIR lasers are not for them. They want xlaser and graser gear, trillions of colors per path, and trillions of paths. Nowadays, the 'steam tunnel' network is not for power or heat. Now there are branches extending under Torrey Pines Road to Scripps and Salk. I hear you can walk out under the ocean a short ways, though heaven knows what they're doing there. To the east, you can get into every one of the biotech labs."

Suddenly, Robert saw why the Mysterious Stranger was interested in the Elder Cabal. Aloud, he said, "What does this have to do with the Librareome Project, Tommie?"

"Ah! Well, you know that Max Huertas made his fortune out of biotech. He owns some of the biggest labs in North America — including one just a few thousand feet northeast of us. It was easy for him to modify his genome software to support the Librareome. Okay, so he's storing the shredda in vaults under the north side of campus."

"And?"

"And he's not done with them! The shredding got him plenty of images, but the coverage is not complete. He's got to scan and rescan where there were problems in the first pass. Now if there weren't this time limit, he'd be better just to wait till the next victim library goes up in shreds and use that for cross-checking, but he's in a rush."

"That storage is also part of the Huertas propaganda," said Winnie.

"When they're done with the rescans, the shredda will be 'safely preserved in the Huertas vaults, for the sake of the archaeologists of future generations.' Some of our faculty actually bought into that!"

"Well," said Rivera, "there's a small amount of truth to the claim. The paper will last longer in cool nitrogen than it would on library shelves."

Winnie waved his hand dismissively. "The point is, the books have been destroyed, and Huertas is going to destroy more libraries if he's not stopped. Our plan is — " He looked around, and seemed to realize that he was on the edge of prison time. "Our plan is to break into the steam tunnels and go to where Huertas is storing the shredda. Tommie has come up with a way to make that shredda unreadable."

"What? We're protesting the destruction of the library by destroying what's left?"

"Just temporarily!" said Tommie. "I've found an incredible aerosol glue. Spray it on and the shredda will be like a huge chunk of particle-board. But after a few months, the glue will just sublimate away."

Rivera was nodding. "So we are not making things worse. I wouldn't be here if I thought we were wrecking what's left of the books. Huertas's scheme is unnecessary brutality, trying to grab everything when a slower approach would be just as good. Maybe we can derail him long enough so that the old-time book-friendly digitizers can catch up — and no more libraries will be wrecked." Now his T-shirt was touting the American Library Association.

Robert leaned back and pretended to consider what they were saying. "You say the Chinese are about to shred the British Library?"

Rivera gave a sigh. "Yes, and they're going to whack the Museum, too. But the EU is looking for an excuse to stop them. If we make Huertas look bad…"

"I see," Robert said judiciously. He avoided Winnie's eyes. Blount was already suspicious enough. "Okay. The plan seems pretty feeble… but I guess it's better than nothing. Count me in."

A grin spread wide across Tommie's face. "Hey, Robert!"

Robert finally looked at Winston Blount. "Now the question is, why do you want me in?"

Blount grimaced. "Another pair of hands. Various errands — "

Tommie rolled his eyes. "The fact is, we couldn't dream of doing this before you showed up."

"Me? Why?"

"Ha. Think what we're talking about: breaking into the steam tunnels, walking a mile across one of the most secure bio labs on Earth. I bet I could get us in. But could I hike us undetected across the bio labs? No way. That only works in old Star Trek shows, where the Ventilation system' was designed mainly to drive idiot plots. This is the real world — and real-world security guys know about tunnels too."

"That still doesn't answer the 'Me? Why?'"

"What? Oh. I'm getting to that! Anyway, after our protest tactics fizzled, I began to do some research." Tommie patted his laptop. "Newsgroups, chat, search engines — I used them all, along with crazy stuff that looks more like online betting than anything else. Maybe the hardest part was to do it all without alerting the feds. That slowed me up, but eventually I got a pretty good picture of the labs' security. It's what you'd expect of a critical national security site. Serious stuff, but clunky. The system is password– and user-intrinsic-oriented, and mostly automatic. The intrinsic is a standard biometric — from certain officers in the U.S. protective services. And guess who happens to be nearby and on the access list?"

"My son."

"Not quite. Your daughter-in-law."

Alice. "That's ridiculous. She's some kind of Asian-affairs expert." When she's not a mental basket case . And then he thought about the Mysterious Stranger. "This is all too pat."

Winnie: "Since when are you the security expert, Robert?"

I should keep my mouth shut. They're going in the direction I want ! But he'd lost his old skills at verbal maneuver, and he blundered ahead: "Information like this doesn't turn up in a Google search ."

Tommie shook his head. But there was a look of pity in his eyes. "The world has changed, Robert. Nowadays, I can get answers in ways that would have been impossible twenty years ago. A hundred thousand people all over the world collaborated in my search, in little bitty parts of it that no one ever recognized. The biggest risk is that my results are simply bogus. Disinformation is king nowadays. Even when the lies are not deliberate, there are the various fantasy groups out there trying to torque reality around to their latest adventure game. But if we're getting fooled, it's not an ordinary con job. There are details and corroboration that come from too many independent sources."

"Oh." Robert made that sound impressed. In fact, he was impressed. Maybe the Stranger could deliver.

They talked for another half hour, but nothing more specific was said about the betrayal expected of Robert. Tommie had other tasks for them: They needed some university passwords and some voice fakery. The entrances to the steam tunnels were embedded in concrete now. There was no ground-level entrance as there had been fifty years ago, when construction was under way. And there was a problem with Tommie's "aerosol glue."

"The glue?" Tommie looked faintly embarrassed. "It doesn't exist yet. But it's almost been invented." Tommie had broached the concept on an ornamental gardening forum, crossed that with some VCs. The Ornamental Shrub Society of Japan was even now working with some Argentine biologists to create the final form of the aerosol. The product should exist in less than two weeks, its first showing to be in a Tokyo plant-training exhibit. A liter of advance product was to be UP/Exed to Tommie shortly before that. He looked back at Robert's incredulity. "Hey, this is just what hacking is like nowadays."

It was past 3:00 p.m. The shadow of the library had stretched into the east, drowning nearby buildings. The four conspirators were done for the day.

Tommie stood. "We can do it! We may not even be caught. But if we are, so what? It'll be just like the old days."

Carlos Rivera got up more slowly. "And it's not like we're harming anything."

Tommie put a finger to his lips. "I'm lifting the deadzone, gentlemen." He typed on his laptop, and the LED on the top edge of the case was extinguished.

They were all silent for a moment, trying to think of safe things to say.

"Ah, okay." Rivera glanced at Robert. "Would you like see what we — what the library has done with the empty stacks?"

"You mean, what Tommie said was propaganda?"

Rivera gave a wan smile. "Yes, but it's beautiful in a way. If it had been done after a gentler digitization, I would love it without reservation."

He led them around the floor, past the elevators. "The stairway entrance has the best ambience."

Winnie Blount grimaced, but Robert noticed that he was tagging along.

The stairwell was dimly lit. The naked-eye view showed concrete walls, seamed here and there with the silvery lines he had seen from the outside. As he stepped through the doorway, Robert's view shifted to some kind of standard enhancement: now the lighting came from gas mantle lamps set in the walls. The shadowed concrete was gone. These walls were built from large stones, squared with chisels, fitted together with scarcely room for mortar. Robert reached out to touch the wall, snatched his hand back as he felt slippery stone — not clean concrete!

Rivera laughed. "You're expecting the usual disappointment, right, Dr. Gu?" When touch contradicted visual illusion.

"Yeah." Robert let his hand trail over the stone blocks, trace out the softer patches of lichen.

"University administration has been very clever about this. They enlisted the belief-circle community — and encouraged them to install touchy-feely graffiti. Some of the props are impressive even without the visual overlays."

They went down two flights of stairs. This must be the landing for the fifth-floor entrance, but now the door was carven wood, gleaming darkly in the gaslight. Rivera pulled at the pitted brass handle and the eight-foot-tall door swung open. The light from beyond was actinic violet, wavering from dim to painfully bright. There were sparking sounds. Rivera stuck his head through and chanted something unintelligible. The lighting became more civil and the only sounds were distant voices.

"It's okay," said the librarian. "Come on."

Robert stepped through the half-opened door and looked around. This was not the fifth floor of the Geisel Library, Planet Earth. There were books, but they were oversized things, set on timbered racks that stretched up and up. Robert bent back. The violet lights followed the stacks upward, limned their twisted struts. It was like one of those fractal forests in old graphics. At the limits of his vision, there were still more books, tiny with distance.

Whoa . He slipped, felt Tommie steady him with a hand in the small of his back.

"Neat, huh?" said Parker. "I almost wish I was wearing."

"Y-Yeah." Robert steadied himself on a nearby rack. The wood was real, thick, and solid. He brought his gaze down to floor level and looked outward along the aisle. The path through the stacks was twisted — and it didn't end at the external wall that must be there, just thirty or forty feet away. Instead, about where the windows should be, there were sagging wooden steps. It was the sort of ad hoc carpentry he had loved in old used-book stores. Beyond the steps, the stacks themselves seemed to be tilted, as though gravity itself were pointing in a different direction.

"What is all this?"

The three were silent for a second. Robert noticed that they seemed to be wearing dark armor. Rivera's outfit had some spiffy insignia. It also looked suspiciously like a T-shirt and Bermuda shorts done in blackened steel plate.

"Don't you get it?" Rivera said finally. "You three are Knights Guardian. And I'm a Librarian Militant. It's all from Jerzy Hacek's Dangerous Knowledge stories."

Blount nodded. "You never read any of those, did you, Robert?"

Robert vaguely remembered Hacek from about the time he retired. He sniffed. "I read the important things."

They walked slowly down the narrow aisle. There were side paths. These led not only left and right, but up and down. Snakelike hissing sounds came from some. In others, he saw "Knights Guardian" hunched over tables that were piled with books and parchment; light shone into their faces from the pages of opened books. Illuminated manuscripts indeed. Robert stopped for a closer look. The words were English, printed in a cracked Gothic script. The book was some kind of economics text. One of the readers, a young woman with overgrown eyebrows, glared briefly at the visitors, and then gestured into the air above. High in the stacks, there was a thump, and a four-foot-wide slab of leather and parchment came tumbling down. Robert hopped backward, almost stepping on Tommie. But the falling book came to a hover just within the student's reach. The pages riffled themselves open.

Oh . Robert backed carefully out of the alcove. "I get it. These are the digitizations of what's been destroyed so far."

"The first-pass digitization," said Blount. "Bastard modern administrators got more good press out of this than all the rest of their propaganda put together. Everybody thinks it's so clever and cute. And next week they'll shred the sixth floor."

Rivera led them outward, toward the sagging wooden stairs. "Not everybody is happy. The Geisel estate — Dr. Seuss — didn't go along with the university on this."

"Good for them!" Blount kicked at the timbered stacks. "Our students might as well go to Pyramid Hill."

Robert gestured in the way that was supposed to revert vision to unen-hanced reality. But he was still seeing purple light and ancient, leather-bound manuscripts. He tapped the explicit reversion signal. Still no onset of reality. "I'm stuck in this view."

"Yup. Unless you take off your contacts or declare a 911, you can't see what's really here. And that's another reason for not using Epiphany." Tom-mie waved his open laptop like some talisman. "I can see the illusions, but only when I want them." The little guy walked down another side path, here poking at a book that lay groaning on the floor, there stepping into an alcove to look at what the patrons were doing. "This place is so cool!"

When they reached the wooden stairs, Rivera said, "Be careful. These things are tricky." About halfway down, the steps tilted and the perspective was all askew. Winnie went first. He hesitated at the twist. "I've done this before," he grunted, almost to himself. "I can do it." He stepped forward, started to stumble, and then stood straight — but tilted compared with Robert and company.

When Robert reached the threshold, he closed his eyes. The Epiphany default was to drop all overlays on "eyes-closed," so he was briefly immune to the visual trickery. He stepped forward — and there was no real tilt, just a simple turn!

Tommie came right after him. There was a big grin on his face. "Welcome to the Escher Wing!" he said. "The kids just eat this up." At the bottom of the stairs there was another ninety-degree turn. Parker said, "Okay, now we're walking back toward the building's utility core, only we have the feeling that we're still wandering through unending books."

Books ahead and behind, and off to the side, hidden in alleys. Books above, like chimneys disappearing in purple light. He could even see books below them, where rickety ladders seemed to drop off into the depths. If Robert looked at them with slightly averted vision, the lettering on the spines and covers gave back a blacklight glow, violet almost too deep to see, but very clear, with the Library of Congress codes cryptic and runelike. The books were the ghosts — or maybe the avatars — of what had been destroyed.

They made sounds, groaning, hissing, whispering. Conspiring. Deep in the alleyways, some of the books were in chains.

"Gotta watch out for Das Kapital ," said Rivera.

Robert saw one of the tomes — the word fits for once ! — pulling at its chains, the links ringing loudly on massive eyebolts.

"Yup, Dangerous Knowledge yearns to be free."

Some of the books must be real, touchy-feely props. The students in one alley were piling books together. They stood back and the texts nuzzled into each other in an orgy of napping pages. "So that's bibliographical synthesis?"

Rivera followed his gaze. "Er, yes. This started out as the scam Dean Blount said, something to endear the shredding project to the public. We represent books as near-living things, creatures that serve and bewitch their readers. Terry Pratchett and then Jerzy Hacek have been playing on that theme for years. But we really didn't appreciate the power of it all. We have some of the best Hacek belief circles helping with this. Every database action has a physical representation here, just as in Hacek's Library Militant stories. Most of our users think this is better than standard reference software."

Winnie looked back at them. He had gotten far enough ahead that he seemed foreshortened, as if they were seeing him through a telescope at some great distance. He waved in disgust. "That's the betrayal, Carlos. You librarians don't approve of the shredding, but look what you've done. These kids will lose all respect for the permanent record of the human heritage."

Tommie Parker was standing behind Robert. He muttered gleefully, "Winnie, the kids had already lost all respect."

Rivera looked down. "I'm sorry, Dean Blount. It's the shredding that's evil, not the digitizing. For the first time in their lives, our students have modern access to premillennium knowledge." He waved at the students down in the alley. "And it's not just here. You can reach the library from the net, just minus the touchy-feely gimmicks. Huertas is allowing limited access without charge, even during his monopoly period. This is just the first-pass digitization, and only HB through HX, but we've had more hits on our premillennium holdings in the last week than we had in the last four years. And much of the new business is from faculty!"

"Hypocritical bastards," said Winnie.

Robert looked at the students in their alcove. The sex-between-books had ended, but now the books floated in the air over the students' heads and the pages sang out in tiny voices to volumes still unsearched. Metaphor incarnate .

They trooped back toward the utility core. It turned out to be several times farther than Robert remembered. The staggered aisles must take them around the center of the real fourth floor.

Finally they were in sight of the eight-foot-tall doors. After everything else, the carven wood was quotidian reality. Even the floor had flattened into something solid and normal-looking.

And then that floor shifted under his feet.

"Wha — " Robert flailed out, fell against the wall. Books shifted on their shelves, and he remembered that some of those were as real and heavy as they looked.

Lightning flashed in pulsing arcs.

Rivera was shouting in Mandarin, something about a fake earthquake.

Whatever it was, the swaying and shifting were real .

A groaning sound came from below, and bats rushed back and forth in the air above. The swaying diminished, cycled around like a dancer doing a little jig.

And then it was over. The floor and walls felt as steady as they had been in Robert's grad-school years.

Tommie climbed back to his feet and helped Winston Blount up. "All okay?" he said.

Blount nodded dumbly, too shaken for sarcasm.

"It's never done that before," said Tommie.

Carlos nodded. "Āiya, duibuqi, wó gāng xiäng qilái tāmen jīntiān shi xin dōngxi ," he said, something about trying something new today.

Tommie patted the librarian on the shoulder. "Hey man, you're talking Chinese."

Rivera stared for a moment and then responded, still in Mandarin, but faster and louder.

"It's okay, Carlos. Don't worry." Tommie guided the young man down the stairs. Rivera was still talking, but in bursts, repeating, "Wǒ zài shuō yīngyü ma? Shi yīngyǓ ma ?" Am I speaking English? Is it English?

"Just keep going, Carlos. You'll be okay."

Robert and Winnie brought up the rear. Blount was squinting his eyes in that exaggerated way of his, searching. "Ha!" he said. "The bastards were using the stability servos to shake the building. See."

And for a wonder, Robert did see; all the practice was paying off. "Yes!" The Geisel Library was one of the few buildings not replaced after the Rose Canyon quake. Instead, they built active stabilization into the old frame. "So the admin thought this would give a little extra realism…"

"We could have been killed," said Blount.

They were at the third floor. Coming up the other way was a group of students; at least, Robert assumed they were students, since they were laughing and most had chosen monstrous forms. The two groups slid past each other, the oldsters silent until the students had disappeared above them.

Tommie said, "What triggers the rock and roll, Carlos?"

Rivera weaved around an armoire that was built into the wall. Now he shouted, "Am I speaking English yet?… Yes ! Oh, thank God. Sometimes I dream I get stuck forever." He walked several paces, almost crying with relief. Then the words came streaming out of him. "Yes, yes. I understood your question: I'm not sure what triggers our fake earthquakes. I was at the meeting where we decided to use the stability system this way. The trigger was supposed to be any attempt to 'open' a book that contains knowledge 'Mankind was not meant to know.' Of course, that's a joke — except when it's so deadly serious that Homeland Security shows up. So I think we just trigger the shakes at random."

They continued downward, Rivera all but babbling: "Our chief librarian is totally committed on this. She's also a big cheese in the local Hacek belief circle. She wants to implement Hacek-appropriate penalties for users who break library rules."

Tommie's look of concern was replaced by technical interest. "Jeez," he said, "Hacek torment pits?"

At the main floor, they stepped out onto the standard carpeting of the library's main foyer. An hour earlier, Robert and Sharif had gone through this area to get to the elevators. Robert had scarcely noticed the clean, open space, the statue of Theodor Seuss Geisel. Now it was a welcoming sanity. They walked through glass doors into the afternoon sunlight.

Winnie turned to look up at the overhanging stories of the library. "They've turned the place into a menace. That earthquake was, was…" Abruptly his gaze came down from the sky. "Are you okay, Carlos?"

The librarian waved his hand. "Yes. Sometimes getting stuck is a little like an epileptic seizure." He wiped his face; he was drenched in sweat. "Wow. Maybe this was a bad one…"

"You should get medical attention, Carlos."

"I am. See?" Medical flags had popped up around his head. "I alarmed out on the stairs. There's at least one real doctor watching me now. I — " He hesitated, listening. "Okay, they want me at the clinic. Some kind of brain scan. I'll see you next time." He saw the look on their faces. "Hey, don't worry, guys."

"I'll come along," said Tommie.

"Okay, but don't talk. They're prepping me for the scan." The two walked off toward the west-side traffic circle.

Robert and Winnie stared after them. Blount spoke with uncharacteristic uncertainty. "Maybe I shouldn't have hassled him about the Hacek stuff."

"Is he going to be okay?"

"Probably. Every time another veteran gets permanently stuck, the VA looks real bad. They'll do their best for him."

Robert thought back to all of Rivera's strangeness. Normally, his Mandarin was just short interjections, almost an affectation. If those had been in Spanish, he might not even have noticed. But now — "What's the matter with him, Winnie?"

Blount's gaze was abstracted. He shrugged. "Carlos is a JITT."

"What's that?"

"Huh? Christ, Gu! Look it up." He glared around the plaza. "Okay. Okay." He gave Robert a forced smile. "Sorry, Robert. JITT's an easy search topic. You'll find lots of good discussion. The important thing is, we have to keep our eyes on the ball. Um, Carlos would want that. A lot depends on you doing the right thing."

"But what is that? What — "

Winnie held up a hand. "We're working on it. We'll get you the details soon enough."

On the drive home, Robert looked up "JITT." There were millions of hits, in medicine, in military affairs, in drug enforcement. He picked the Global-Security summary off the top of "respected contrarian" sources:

JITT, "just-in-time-training" (also, "just-in-time-trainee", when referring to a victim of the procedure). A treatment that combines addressin therapy and intense data exposure, capable of installing large skill sets in less than 100 hours. Most famous for its tragic use in the Sino-American Conflict, when 100,000 U.S. military recruits were trained in Mandarin, Cantonese —

and a list of specialties that Robert had never heard of. In less than ninety days the Americans had made up their military language gap. But then there were problems —

This talent pool was decisive in ground operations; however, the human price of the procedure was apparent even before the end of the war.

Robert Gu — and perhaps every student — has dreamed of shortcuts. Learn Russian or Latin or Chinese or Spanish, overnight and painlessly! But be careful what you wish for …. He read the sections on side effects: Learning a language, or a career specialty, changes a person. Cram in such skills willy-nilly and you distort the underlying personality. A very few JITTs suffered no side effects. In rare cases, such people could undertake a second hit — even a third — before the damage caught up with them. The rejection process was a kind of internal war between the new viewpoints and the old, manifesting as seizures and altered mental states. Often the JITT was stuck in some diminished form of his/her new skill set… After the war, there was the legacy of the JITT-disabled veterans, and continuing abuse by foolish students everywhere.

Poor Carlos.

And just what is the Mysterious Stranger promising me?

This had definitely been one of those future-shock days. Robert rolled down the window and felt the breeze sweep by. He was driving north on 1-15. All around was a dense suburbia much like the most built-up parts of twentieth-century California, except that here the houses were a little drabber and the shopping malls were more like warehouse districts. Strangely, there were real malls, even in this brave new world. He had shopped in a couple of them. Some places had plenty of solid architecture. Shopping "for the old at heart" was their motto; that would not have worked in 2000.

Robert pushed away the mysteries (and the fear) and practiced with his Epiphany. Let's see the minimum adornment . Robert shrugged the familiar gesture. Okay so far . He could see simple labeling. Everything, even the ice-plant on the sides of the freeway, had little alphanumeric signs. Another shrug of the shoulder, and he was seeing what the objects he was passing — more accurately, the owners of the objects — wanted him to see. There was advertising. The malls had guessed he was an old fart, and tuned their ads accordingly. But there was none of the outright spam of some earlier sessions. Maybe he finally had his filters set right.

Robert leaned back from the window and reached out to wider universes. Colored maps appeared before his eyes. There were realities that were geographically far away, not overlaid upon San Diego at all. Those must be like the cyberspace crap of the eighties and nineties. Finally he got a window that promised "public local reality only." Yeah. Only two hundred thousand of them for this part of San Diego County. He chose at random. Outside the car, the North County hillsides were swept clean of the subdivisions. The road had only three lanes and the cars were out of the 1960s. He noticed the tag on the windshield of his car (now a Ford Falcon): San Diego Historical Society . Bit by bit, they were reconstructing the past. Big hunks of the twentieth century were available for people who wanted those simpler times.

Robert almost stayed with this view. It was so near his own grad-school years. It was so… comforting. It also occurred to him that these history fans might be allies of the Librareome Project. With Huertas's database in place they could proceed even faster with their reconstructed nostalgia.

He brought up the control window. There was something called "continuous paratime traversal." Or maybe he should pick on a particular writer. There was Jerzy Hacek. No, he'd seen enough of "A Little Knowledge" for today.

How about Terry Pratchett? Okay. The subdivisions were adobe now. His car was an artfully contorted carpet, swooping down a grassy slope that a moment ago had been the grade north of Mountain Meadow Road. In the valley ahead, there were colorful tents with signs painted in a cursive script that made the roman alphabet look vaguely like Arabic calligraphy. There was a scrap of ocean visible in the long, westward-tending valley. And sailing ships?

Robert Gu had read one Pratchett novel. His recollection was that the action mainly took place in a city that resembled medieval London. This was different. He tried to see into the tent city…

Miri — > Lena, Xiu: I have him again! See?

Xiu — > Miri, Lena: Wow. You're driving right next to him?

Miri –> Lena, Xiu: No, this is cobbled together from the hills, and various car cams.

Xiu — > Miri, Lena: He just seems to be looking around.

Miri — > Lena, Xiu: I have a lock on Sharif's persona. We've got Robert all to ourselves.

Lena — > Miri, Xiu: This is ridiculous.

Miri –> Lena, Xiu: Okay, so now I'm Sharif, sitting right beside Robert… oh darn!

Someone gave a polite cough. Robert twisted around.

It was Sharif, sitting on the far end of the passenger seat. "Didn't mean to surprise you, Professor." The vision smiled ingratiatingly. "I tried to reappear earlier, but there were technical difficulties."

"That's fine," said Robert, wondering vaguely if Tommie was still interfering.

Sharif waved at the landscape around them. "So what do you think?"

It was the land of San Diego with a little more water. And a different people, a different civilization. "I thought I was dialing into one of the Terry Pratchett stories."

Sharif gave a shrug. "You got the main Pratchett belief circle all right. At least for San Diego."

"Yes, but — " Robert waved at the grasslands. "Where's Ankh-Morpork? Where are the slums and the dives and the city guard?"

Sharif smiled. "Mainly in London and Beijing, Professor. It's best to fit one's fantasy to follow something like the underlying geography. Pratchett writes of a whole world. This here, is what fits San Diego." Sharif stared for a moment. "Yes, this is Abu Dajeeb. You know, the sultanate he put just south of Sumarbad in The Fiery Crow ."

"Oh." The Fiery Crow ? "Written after you lost, ah — "

After I lost my marbles, yeah . "It's, it's immense. I can imagine someone writing about such a place, but no one man or even a movie company could put together all the — " Robert shrank back from the window as a woman on a winged iguana flew by. (He slipped into the real view, saw a Highway Patrol cruiser speeding past.)

Sharif chuckled. "It's not the work of one man. There's probably a million fans who've contributed to this. Like a lot of the best realities, it was also a commercial effort, the most successful external cinema of 2019. In the years since, it has just gotten better and better, an act of love on the part of the fans."

"Hmm." Robert had always resented the millions that went into the film industry, and the writers who got rich from it. "I'll bet Pratchett made a pretty penny out of this stuff."

Sharif gave a smirk. "More than Hacek. Not as much as Rowling. But the microroyalties add up. Pratchett owns a rather large part of Scotland."

Robert shifted away from the Pratchett imagery. There were others: Tolkien views, and things he couldn't recognize even from their labels. What was SCA? Oh. In the SCA vision, the suburbs were transformed into villages behind walls, and there were castles atop the higher hills. The county parklands looked fierce and forested.

Sharif seemed to be following his imagery. He jerked a thumb at the Los Pumas Valley park just sliding by on the right. "You should see the Ren-Faires. They grab the whole park, sometimes run pretend wars between the barons of the hilltops. It's excellent, my man, truly excellent."

Ah . Robert turned and took a close look at Sharif. The match to his earlier appearance was perfect, except for the smartass grin on his face. "And you're not Sharif."

The grin broadened. "I was wondering if you'd ever catch on. You really must learn to be more paranoid about identity, Professor. I know, you've met Zulfi Sharif in person. That is the graduate student you think it is, and just the groveler he seems. But he doesn't have good control. I can show up as Sharif whenever I please."

"That's not what you said a few minutes ago."

Sharif frowned. "That was different. You've got other fans. One of them is not fully incompetent."

Huh ? Robert thought a second, then forced a smile. "Then perhaps you'd better have some password so I don't blurt all your secrets to the wrong Sharif, eh?"

The Mysterious Stranger didn't look amused. "Very well… When I first say 'my man,' that will trigger a certificate exchange. You don't have to do a thing." Now Sharif's face had a faint greenish tinge, and his eyes had a slant that had nothing to do with epicanthic eyefolds. He smiled. "You'll see your djinni and know it's really me. So what did you think of Tommie Parker's plan?"

"Ah…"

Sharif — Stranger-Sharif — –leaned toward him, but there was no feel of motion in the faux leather seat. "I am everywhere, and I appear however I wish, to produce the results that I wish. Despite all Tommie's cleverness, I was there." He stared into Robert's eyes. "Heh. At a loss for words, aren't you, Professor? And that's your whole problem, isn't it? I want to help you with that, but first you'll have to help me."

Robert forced a cool smile. A winning reply was nowhere to be found. The best he could do was "You're promising me a miracle, without showing me a particle of evidence. And if it's JITT you're offering, I'm not buying. That's not what creativity is about."

Sharif sat back. His laugh was open and pleasant. "Very true. JITT is a dread miracle. But happy miracles are possible nowadays. And I can make them."

His car had left the freeway. It drove the winding way along Reche Road. They were only a few minutes from West Fallbrook and Bob's place. The Mysterious Stranger seemed to watch the scenery for a few moments. Then: "I really wanted to get a head start on things today, but if you insist on hard evidence…" He gestured and something flashed in the air between them. Normally that indicated that data had been passed. "Take a look at those references. And here's proof that I was largely behind the breakthroughs described."

"I'll take a look and get back to you."

"Please don't take too long, Professor. What your merry crew is planning is dead on arrival without your prompt help. And I need that if I am to help you."

His car turned onto Honor Court and slowed to a stop just beyond Bob's house. It wasn't even 4:30, but the ocean haze had moved in and things were getting dark. Little clusters of children were playing here and there along the street. God only knew what they were seeing. Robert stepped into the chill air and — there was Miri pedaling a bicycle up the street toward him. They stared at each other awkwardly. At least, Robert felt awkward. Normally they didn't see each other except with Bob or Alice. In the old days, I never would have felt an instant's discomfort for blasting this child . But somehow the concerted anger of Bob and Alice — and Miri's own stiff-necked courtesy — made him very uncomfortable. I can't stay here, owing children who should owe me .

Miri slid off her bike and stood beside him. She was looking into the car. Robert glanced at the departing vehicle. He could see Sharif still sitting in the backseat; maybe she could too. "That's Zulfikar Sharif," Robert said, rushing into explanations like the guilty soul he was. "He's interviewing me about the old days."

"Oh." She seemed to lose interest.

"Hey, Miri, I didn't know you had a bike."

She walked the bike along beside him. "Yes," she replied seriously. "It's not good for transportation, but Alice says that I need exercise. I like to ride around Fallbrook and game out the latest realities."

Thanks to the miracle of Epiphany, Robert could guess what she was talking about.

"In fact, it's not really my bike. This is Bob's, from when he was younger than I am."

The tires looked new, but — his eyes traveled over the aluminum frame, the peeling green and yellow paint job. Lord . Lena had insisted they buy this bike for the boy. Memories of little Bobby came back, of when he was trying so hard to learn to ride. He had been such a nuisance.

They walked the rest of the way to the door in silence, Robert lagging a bit behind his granddaughter.

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