Spin Control
Pierce stood
uncertainly before the door in the dome. It glowed blue-green with
an inner light, and when he looked around, his shadow stretched
into the night behind him.
“Don’t wait outside for too long,” someone said
waspishly. “The air isn’t
safe.”
The air? Pierce wondered as he entered the doorway.
The glassy slabs of an airlock slid aside and closed behind him,
thrice in rapid succession. He found himself in a spacious
vivarium, illuminated by a myriad of daylight-bright lamps shining
from the vertices of the dome wall’s triangular segments. There
were plants everywhere, green and damp-smelling cycads and ferns
and crawling, climbing vines. Insect life hidden in the undergrowth
creaked and rattled loudly.
Then he noticed the
Librarian, who stood in the clearing before the doors, as
unnaturally still as a plastinated corpse.
“I haven’t been here
before,” Pierce admitted as he approached the robed figure. “I’ve
used outlying branches, but never the central Library
itself.”
“I know.” The
Librarian pushed back the hood of his robe to reveal a plump, bald
head, jowly behind its neat goatee, and gimlet eyes that seemed to
drill straight through him.
Pierce stopped,
uncertain. “Do I know you?”
“Almost certainly
not. Call me Torque. Or Librarian.” Torque pointed to a path
through the vegetation. “Come, walk with me. I’ll show you to your
reading room, and you can get started. You might want to bookmark
this location in case you need to return.”
Pierce nodded. “Is
there anybody else here?”
“Not at present.”
Torque sniffed. “You and I are the only living human beings on the
planet right now, although there may be more than one of you
present. You have the exclusive use of the Library’s resources this
decade, within reason.”
“Within
reason?”
“Sometimes our
supervisors—yours or mine—take an interest. They are not required
to notify me of their presence.” There was a fork in the path,
around a large outcropping of some sort of rock crystal, like
quartz; Torque turned left. “Ah, here we are. This is your reading
room, Student-Agent Pierce.”
A white-walled
roofless cubicle sat in the middle of a clearing, through which ran
a small brook, its banks overgrown with moss and ferns. The walls
were only shoulder high, a formality and a signifier of privacy;
they surrounded a plain wooden desk and a chair. “This is
everything?” Pierce asked, startled.
“Not entirely. Look
up.” Torque gestured at the dome above them. “In here we maintain a
human-compatible biosphere to reprocess your air and waste. We
provide light, and heat, although the latter is less important than
it will be in a few million years hereabouts. We’ve turned down the
sun to conserve mass, but it’s still radiating brightly in the
infrared; the real problems will start when we work through the
last bunker reserve in about eighteen million years. The dome
should keep the Library accessible to readers for about thirty
million years after that, well into Fimbulwinter.”
Fimbulwinter: the
winter at the end of the world, after the last fuel for the
necrosun’s accretion disk had been consumed, leaving Earth adrift
in orbit around a cold black hole, billions of light-years from
anything else. Pierce shivered slightly at the thought of it.
“What’s the problem with the outside air?”
“We were losing
hydrogen too fast, and without hydrogen, there’s no water, and
without water, we can’t maintain a biosphere, and without a
biosphere the planet rapidly becomes less habitable—no free oxygen,
for one thing. So about thirty billion years ago we deuterated the
biosphere as a conservation measure. Of course, that necessitated
major adjustments to the enzyme systems of all the life-forms from
bacteria on up, and you—and I—are not equipped to run on heavy
water; the stuff ’s toxic to us.” Torque pointed at the stream.
“You can drink from that, if you like, or order refreshments by
phone. But don’t drink outside the dome. Don’t breathe too much, if
you can help it.”
Pierce looked around.
“So this is basically just a reading room, like a Branch Library.
Where’s the real Library? Where are the
archives?”
“You’re standing on
them.” Torque’s expression was one of restrained impatience:
Weren’t you paying attention in class the day
they covered this? “The plateau this reading room is built
on—in fact, the entire upper crust—is riddled with storage cells of
memory diamond, beneath a thin crust of sedimentary rock laid down
to protect it. We switched the continental-drift cycle off for good
about five billion years ago, after the last core cooling cycle.
That’s when we began accumulating the Library
deposits.
“Oh.” Pierce looked
around. “Well, I suppose I’d better get started. Do you
mind?”
“Not at all.” Torque
turned his back on Pierce and walked away. “I’
ll be around if you call me,” he sent.
Pierce sat down in
front of the empty desk and laid his hands palm down on the
blotter. A continent of memory diamond? The mere idea of that much data
beggared the imagination. “It’ll be in here somewhere,” he
muttered, and smiled.