Chapter 49: Marian the Librarian

IT SOUNDS SO CLICHÉ, but this actually happened to me after the big catastrophe on 9/11. Hate that day and all it stands for. Stupid, mindless terrorism in the name of religion followed by stupid, mindless war in the name of patriotism. Twenty years of war, 175,000 deaths, and everything ended up exactly where it started. Just so typical.

But I went to New York with some heavy equipment from the construction site and did my best to help where I was needed. After two weeks there, we were told to go home. There were too many of us for the delicate work of clearing the site and sifting through the rubble for human remains. It was sickening. It was also one of the reasons I felt I needed to get the infinity room someplace safe that was beyond the reach of stupid, mindless religious and political fanatics.

I found a place to store my equipment for a couple of days and checked into a hotel for a shower. I opened a gateway and embraced my lovers, reaffirming life in the arms of each of them.

During my time in New York, I became aware of many famous buildings. Not far from my hotel was the New York Public Library.

Truth? The NYPL is ten times ... maybe fifty times as big as the Library of Alexandria. Over fifty million volumes! I knew we couldn’t take everything, but I called the librarians out of the secret room and we began shuffling everything we could into and out of the infinity room. We didn’t steal anything. We just unofficially checked things out and returned them. While we had them, they went through the replication spell and a copy was made in the infinity room.

I used a combination of spells to keep people from contemplating entering the area where we were working. We moved fast and efficiently so the area moved about every fifteen minutes and didn’t disrupt readers and users too much. Everyone helped. Those who couldn’t cope with the new and modern natural world stayed in the infinity room and shelved the replicated books. We started in science and technology and continued to work our way through spiritual, religious, and esoteric works. Then history, geography, and biography.

You might notice that we weren’t plucking a lot from the fiction shelves. It’s not that I don’t like fiction! It’s just that there was so much of it, I didn’t think I could make a dent. We’d collected fiction from many locations around the world. We make choices and sometimes they are right.

And sometimes I cast a spell carelessly and included a librarian inside the bubble where we were working. A librarian who watched me removing and reshelving books with a small army. I was replicating entire shelf units and planting them in the infinity room in random order. We’d need to sort them out later.

Suddenly I became aware of a mousy woman about five-five with light brown fur—I mean hair—pulled up in a tight bun, staring at me over her half glasses, arms folded over her cardigan-covered breasts, tapping her toe quietly on the marble floor—because this is a library, after all. Shh!

“Tell me exactly why I shouldn’t have security and police swarming all over here to arrest you,” she demanded. “There is something fishy going on here.”

“That’s an understatement,” I said. “Uh ... Hi. I’m Bob. And I believe police in this city currently have more than they can handle with actual emergencies and don’t need to waste time investigating this. And you are?”

“I’m the librarian. You are stealing my books!”

“No, no. We’re just unofficially checking them out in rapid succession and returning them,” I defended myself and my minions. “I’m here on a mission to preserve as much human knowledge as I can,” I said, trying to sound as philanthropic as I could. She grabbed the book out of my hand that I was ready to reshelve.

“Sex and Hypnosis: How to Improve Your Sex Life,” she read off the cover. I snatched the book back and put it on the shelf in proper order.

“We’re in the self-help section and it was next in line to be replicated,” I said.

“Replicated?”

“Yes. We would not take any of your original books without explicit permission. All we are doing is taking them to our replicator, making a copy for our library, and then returning the original,” I explained.

“Really? How fast can you make a replica?”

“We turn one around about every five seconds.”

“By my calculations, then, you should be finished in about seven years, assuming you remain in the library 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”

“That sounds dreadful. We usually replicate a stack of books at once, maybe ten at a time, but I see that would still take the better part of a year. That’s why we aren’t touching the fiction section. We had to limit what we can accomplish.”

“Why are you doing this?” she asked.

It was interesting to me that her first thought was ‘why’ and not ‘how.’ I liked her and made a snap decision that might have changed the course of the infinity room.

“I’ve dedicated the best part of a very long life to saving the accumulated knowledge of humanity. Even if we succeeded in replicating all the books in the library, we would still only have a droplet in the ocean,” I said. She nodded. “Why don’t I give you a tour. We’ll follow the journey of a book through the Library of Bob.” She nodded and I summoned Zhi to supervise and make sure no one else interrupted the flow of our books. Then I took the next book from a shelf and headed to the gateway. She followed me. I noticed that she picked up a book, too. The person behind her loaded a cart with three shelves and pushed it behind us.

“This is a kind of transporter,” I said, testing the concept. “It will take us directly to the replication room.”

“So, you’re an alien,” she said, nodding her head. It was almost like she’d been expecting us.

“I guess you could say that in a manner of speaking,” I answered.

“It’s true then. I’ve known ever since the towers crumbled two weeks ago the end of the world is coming. Will there be anything left of humanity when this catastrophe befalls us?” she asked. I considered that.

“No. I mean yes. I’m not predicting the end of the world. If one lives long enough, one is likely to expect anything eventually. What I mean is that I don’t think I’ll be able to continue this project forever, and therefore, I need to get as much done as quickly as I can.” We stepped through the gateway and into the replicator room. I laid my book on an invisible shelf and nodded to her to follow suit. She couldn’t see the shelf, so she laid her book on top of mine. The librarian behind us quickly loaded up the shelf with the cartful of books he was moving. I turned to him.

“Would you mind grabbing the two we sent ahead of your load? They are in the same sequence as what you have.”

“Yes, Bob. I’ll take care of it,” he said. I think he may have spoken in ancient Aramaic. Marian looked puzzled. Nonetheless, Marian gasped when she saw the stack of books seem to divide and follow two paths. She was even more puzzled when the librarian simply walked between the paths and started stacking the books back on his cart. We followed the path of the replicas.

As we stepped into the next room, Marian gasped again as she saw the books being shelved on replicas of the shelves in her own library that moved along with us. The shelves seemed to be taking on substance out of nothing as the books arrived. My librarians here were shelving the books as quickly as they came through, all understanding the time constraints for getting as many books as possible replicated and in our library.

“This room, as you can see, is a fairly close replica of your library. There is a strange thing about the infinity room. Things brought into it seem to carry a memory of their native environment and create it around themselves. That’s the only way I can describe it. The spaces are not always complete, though, since the world the books know is limited to the space immediately around them on the shelves. As more volumes come in, however, the cumulative knowledge of the books expands the space with more detail.”

“You sound like they are alive.”

“All things, animate and inanimate, carry the memory of their environment. The infinity room is simply a fertile land for that memory to grow in.”

“There are books missing. I noticed you weren’t taking every book from every shelf,” she said, running a hand lovingly over the spines.

“The librarians on collection duty automatically skip over any volume we already have a copy of. I hope that will help reduce the time it takes to get all the best books captured.”

“You must have a phenomenal computer system and this wonderful technology that replicates things. Your species must be far more advanced than earth.”

“Um ... We are actually all of earth. And we don’t really have any technology. It’s all done by magic. Would you like a full tour?”

“Any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic to those who were not as advanced. Please. Let me see more of your magic.”

I led her into a different room and she identified the room as an old library, probably of the US.

“Yes. This is the San Francisco Public Library as it existed just before the great earthquake of 1906. That was before the current library was built.”

“I’ve studied library history. They lost 140,000 volumes in that earthquake.”

“Some were lost. I happened to be nearby when the quake struck and we evacuated as many books as we could before the walls collapsed. Now this next room takes us back a ways. You’ve undoubtedly heard of the Library of Alexandria,” I said. She blanched.

“You can’t mean to say ... All those precious books lost in the fire!”

“I recruited all the librarians in that library to gather up as many books as they could and get them to safety. Many of our librarians are from that time, including the ones you saw in your replica shelving books. Most have learned English. We don’t really have a call for communicating in ancient Egyptian or Greek. The librarians took charge of organizing my library. I’m afraid it was in great disorder prior to their arrival.”