Песах Амнуэль - Zion's Fiction - A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature

Shir and I exchanged looks. He nodded in the direction from which we had entered, just a slight, hardly perceptible nod, followed by raised eyebrows. We’ve known each other long enough for me to interpret this, and I nodded in reply. Even if we could have left, it was our duty to stay and find out what’s going on. The woman facing us was a Human Being. This time we were not dealing with an invading species. It was… it was…. I didn’t know how to comprehend what it was.

Nuphar cleared her throat. “But I am here now. So… we can begin.”

“Begin?” I echoed.

Nuphar nodded in the affirmative. “Begin. We’ll have a round of introductions, and then you may call in the rest of your delegation.” She sent a look behind my shoulder. “You are part of a delegation, I hope? We’ve left very clear instructions.” She didn’t even stop for a breath of air. “Don’t worry, you are in a time bubble. No time is passing outside, so you’ll have ample time to invite them.”

A time bubble. This explained the space-warp we were in, and why we couldn’t send messages out.

“There is no delegation.” Shir shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He looked plain against the elegance surrounding us, dressed in his hodge-podge of fabrics, exactly like me.

Raising her hands, Nuphar sighed. “I can’t believe this is happening again!” She said. “I just can’t believe it. What’s wrong with humankind? We bring you knowledge, and culture, and… and….” She adjusted her glasses and passed her glance between Shir and myself. “Well, never mind, let’s do it properly.” She pointed at herself. “I, as I said, am Nuphar the Literate. And you are…?”

Shir and I exchanged looks again. He raised an eyebrow, tilting his head in Nuphar’s direction. I nodded. Once. She was Human, and we had the strictest orders regarding Human Beings. Shir tightened his lips, and I imagined I could hear the sigh he would have made, had we been in a place where he could afford to sigh.

“Oh, don’t tell me this stupid belief—that vouchsafing your name to a stranger allows someone to steal your soul—has survived to your time.” Nuphar was talking fast, and a lot, and I could hardly find my way among the words that were piling up atop each other.

Shir’s internal processor was faster than mine. “I am Shir Ben-Yair,” he pointed at himself, “Assistant Regional Inspector, Silence Unit, Northern Region.” He pointed at me. “And this is Romi Potashnik, Deputy Regional Inspector, Silence Unit, Northern Region.”

“Silence Unit?” Nuphar frowned. “Is this a librarians’ thing? Sounds offensive, really. Have you considered a name change?”

Shir laughed. Briefly. “Librarians.” He turned to me, tilting his head toward Nuphar. “Did you hear that? Do you want to be a librarian?”

I smiled. “Sounds like fun. What do librarians do?”

Nuphar gave me a searching look. “You don’t have any librarians?”

I shook my head.

“Who points book-lovers at the books they could love? Who cross-files information? Who keeps the records straight?” Nuphar was stressing each and every word now. “Who takes care of the libraries?”

This one I could answer. “Each person takes care of their own, of course. If you’re very close to someone, you can join your libraries.”

“And even then, not everything,” said Shir, quietly. I took care not to look at him. This was too personal. Yonit was still with me. Shir had lost his entire family before complete backups of them could have been created. I knew he used to go out from time to time to look at what was left of them, torn pieces of consciousness floating in a container that was unable to reconstitute them properly.

Nuphar turned her eyes from me to Shir, then back again. “But you don’t have places, physical places, to go to in order to find specific kinds of knowledge?”

We both shook our heads in unison. Nuphar looked through me, at the back wall, and sighed. I felt like I’d failed a test. She returned her eyes to me and straightened her back. “Very well. Come along, and I’ll show you what you’re missing,” she said, and the brightest smile I’ve ever seen appeared on her face.

The Great Unified Consolidated Library of Planet Earth, from Alexandria, 3067 by the common calendar, encompassed anything imaginable in mazes so complicated they could hardly be mapped. Papyruses locked in exquisite time-bubbles, shards of pottery preserved in climate-controlled rooms, figurines of ancient deities, shrouds, paintings, clothes, musical instruments, and dance simulations. And books. Lots of books. This was a full, complete record of Human history.

Nuphar was striding along, her robe swirling around her legs, occasionally exposing the colorful garments she wore underneath. It seemed that fashion in whatever place Nuphar came from included phosphorescent rhomboids and purple leggings. “We stop every three hundred years, give or take, and collect anything that needs to be documented. This is a compromise between our desire to document everything and the fact that it’s simply impossible to document everything,” she said. She pointed to a room full of animals, frozen in a variety of positions. “There were supposed to be people outside, waiting for us with your documentation, but seeing as you never got our instructions….” She left the rest of it hanging.

Shir slowed down. I pulled his arm. We had to keep up with Nuphar.

He cleared his throat and whispered in my ear, “How do they contain all these rooms?”

I shrugged. “Space-warp? We know they enclosed their ship in a time-warp field.”

Nuphar smoothed her hair with one hand and tucked a tuft of it behind her ear. She said, not looking at us, “We are not here at all. Just the vestibule is here. I mean, at your place. Meaning, in your space-time. As soon as we left that room we moved into my space-time.”

Shir cleared his throat. “Which is…?”

Nuphar stopped in front of a featureless round door and smiled again. “The Eighth Library of Alexandria. Established 3067, in existence for one hundred fifty-seven years now.”

Shir and I stopped in our tracks. I looked at Shir swiftly, noticing a slight grin showing in the corner of his lips. She brought us back in time. That explained everything. The hologram’s archaic speech, the strange globe in the vestibule, even the sumptuous décor. We could prevent the invasion. We could warn Humankind. We could fix the future in which we blow up again and again just to rise again in backup and continue to defend Earth from invasion, in the only way we had been able to devise.

I felt a similar grin stretching my own lips.

“We are inside a gigantic structure. Well, not one structure really, more like a collection of museums and libraries interlinked by bridges. All wrapped up in a single space-time bubble, and time here is disconnected from your time, but we do move forward in time, although at a different pace. And it is possible to come out, but only forward, to the time in which the vestibule is located.” Nuphar made a little bow. “I am a sixth-generationer. But we do have some who joined from the outside, not born here.”

“Born here….” said Shir. I felt a little better realizing that he too couldn’t follow her. All I could figure out was that we didn’t move back in time. We were in an isolated time-bubble, and we shall reemerge to the time from which we came. At least, I hoped this was the correct interpretation. We had little knowledge about space-time fields.

Nuphar nodded. “At the Library. It is too gigantic to be kept entirely out of the space-warp field. We only come out on stoppage duty, like now. Well, not exactly like now. Now you came in, but I didn’t get out, not yet. But I shall, and we’ll collect information about the current civilization. Let’s hope at least some of your information is properly cataloged, otherwise it will take us years, and then we’ll renew the instructions.” She turned back to the door and opened it, murmuring to herself, “I’m sick and tired of having to renew the instructions on each stoppage.”