Tom Bruno
BIBLIOPHILE
Every morning Syd arrived for work, the boy was already waiting patiently at the door. It had been this way ever since he had first taken the job, such that to Syd the boy’s presence had become a kind of constant. The boy would not say a word when he approached the door, but would respectfully step back from the weathered stoop so as to permit Syd to place his right palm on the sensor plate, unlock the door, and step into the small concrete building. Only after Syd had entered himself would the boy follow at a respectful distance, shuffling idly and staring at his feet in the cramped atrium while Syd made the necessary opening rounds—turning on the lights, powering up the computers, and making sure the holo-printer was not jammed, as Larce Noel had been running the infernal machine well past closing last night and he was less than diligent about making sure the print heads were clean when he was done. Once Syd was convinced that he would not have to scrape dried substrate out of the machine he returned to the front desk, smiled at the boy, who was still standing silently, and flipped the antique sign from CLOSED to OPEN.
“May I help you?” Syd asked the boy, although he knew exactly what he wanted. The boy would ask him the same question every morning, as if he didn’t remember who Syd was, or as if Syd saw so many people in the course of the day that he couldn’t possibly recall the boy. Although neither of these things was true, Syd and the boy insisted upon this formality like some kind of ancient ritual, with neither of them willing to presume on the other’s behalf.
“Do you have any new books, sir?” the boy asked, smiling self-consciously as he did so. The boy’s teeth were jagged and chipped. Syd remembered that he had been surprised when he first learned that settlers on the Outer Worlds didn’t infect their children with shark genes so that their adult teeth replaced themselves constantly as they wore out, but by now he’d been on the periphery long enough that this no longer repulsed him. Indeed, he was coming to rather like the broken smiles of this planet’s inhabitants.
“You’re in luck today,” Syd replied, reaching under his desk for a rectangular parcel, which he set in front of the boy. “We downloaded the eighth book in the Robar Trilogy last night. I had a copy printed up and bound just for you.”
The boy’s eyes lit up. “I didn’t think Hesprus was going to finish this one until 4014!”
Syd winked at the boy as he unwrapped the book for him. “Consider it an early Harvest Day present. I took a peek at the first chapter—I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.”
“I’m sure I won’t!”
“Just promise me you won’t try to read it while you’re driving the thresher. Your father threatened to burn the library down when you plowed through your neighbor's rhinocattle fence last month.”
The boy beamed. “That’s what he gets for teaching me to read!”
Syd could only laugh at this. Of all the planet’s fifty thousand inhabitants, how many could read or write without the assistance of a computer? Indeed, it was the prospect of literacy outreach that made this posting so attractive to him at first, but the sad reality was that the settlers here were by and large too busy to learn how to read. Try as he might to lure people in, Syd could count the number of regular library users on one hand.
Sure, there was Larce Noel, but he only came in to print out spare parts for his tractor, which seemed to be in a perpetual state of broken-downness—other than him there was Rose Harrington, who volunteered to lead the weekly book discussion group, bless her heart, even when it was just she and Syd most of the time who attended; as well as Daved Ohi, the old Mormon who lived in the hills and had an insatiable craving for vampire-themed romance novels (“They’re for the wife,” he’d always say sheepishly when he picked them up, but whenever Syd asked him which wife he’d only mumble something inarticulate, his nose already buried into yet another tale of young undead love); then there was Dio Marmaluk, who was constantly ordering books about Imperial Law and using them to threaten his neighbors and the Settler government alike with one half-baked lawsuit after another.
There was also the boy, of course. Although the boy was partial to serial fantasies, he in fact read everything he could get his hands on. When Syd had taken over as librarian, the boy had already read his way through the library, which at the time consisted chiefly of vinyl-bound Imperial Digest editions of Old Earth classics and bestsellers from the Inner Worlds. Syd had never in fact met his predecessor, who had died suddenly in a grav car accident, but he’d heard that the former librarian took little interest in cultivating a collection and spent the majority of his time up in Twokay City drinking and gambling with the cattlemen. The Imperial Digests were standard issue for any branch library, books which were as indestructible as they were boring, whereas the other offerings came straight from Rose’s purchase suggestions, which were themselves informed by media critics here in the periphery who followed what precious few data feeds that made it out this far. Rose had come from a well-to-do Inner World family, the Harringtons of Proxima Centauri, and even after marrying a local rancher she took great pains to maintain a sophisticated air about her.
In retrospect Syd found it a miracle that the boy had read anything in the library at all, but apparently his father, who styled himself a farmer-philosopher of sorts in the Neotranscendantal tradition, had instilled in him an almost reverential respect for the written word. It had become a singular pleasure for Syd to satiate the boy’s appetite for books by opening his young horizons to the vastness of galactic literature. Plays by Abbo Ariens (i.e., “Shakespeare Reborn”), the war poets of Sirius, the love poets of Old Mars, treatises on quantum physics and hypermathematics, even the classic Neo Noir crime novels by Sylvie Balasubramanian set on the mean streets of New Bollywood in the 31st century—the boy devoured them all and demanded more.
After the boy had read his way through Syd’s bookshelves, which he’d added to the library’s paltry collection, the newly-hired librarian spent his nights on borrowed bandwidth searching the data feeds for new books that might tickle his youngest patron’s fancy. Syd had been particularly pleased with himself for discovering Hesprus, a fantasy writer from the Lesser Magellanic Cloud whose works had developed a small but cult following. His Robar Trilogy detailed the epic struggle of good versus evil on a planet where humanity had awoken from millennia of cryogenic slumber to find that their dreams had manifested themselves into reality while they’d slept. Writing in an elegiac style that pushed Imperial Standard to its very limits, Hesprus elevated genre fiction to its own form of art.
Syd had been entranced with his writing from the very first volume, and was glad to see that the boy agreed—as he took the parcel from the librarian, however, he made a face. “Isn’t it about time they stopped calling the series a trilogy?”
“It’s an Old Earth convention,” Syd explained. “You’re absolutely right, though. Maybe we can send the author an egram asking him to correct it. But that would mean he’d have to decide how many Robar books he was going to write.”
“Are you kidding? I hope he never stops! Only…”
“What is it?”
The boy clutched the book against his chest tightly. “Do you really think we could send Hesprus an egram? I’d love to tell him how much his writing means to me.”
Syd smiled. “How about this—you write the letter and I’ll figure out how to send it. I don’t know if the LMC is wired for egrams but I’m sure Hesprus’ publishers are. “
“Do you really mean it?” The boy looked beside himself at the prospect of communicating with his favorite offer.