Vernor Vinge - Rainbows End

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."