Vernor Vinge - Rainbows End

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."