“Again, Syd. I am sorry.”
“Not as sorry as Jon Devlin will be if I can’t get new books for my best patron!”
Next morning the boy was waiting outside of the library as he always was, clutching the novel by Hesprus in his gloved hands. Although cold mornings were the norm for this part of the planet, where the atmosphere was thin and the slopes ideal for ranching, it was an unusually chill day, as if Nature had gotten the memo that Jon Devlin was at the world’s doorstep. The boy, however, seem unperturbed by the comings and goings of space pirates in the general vicinity—he allowed Syd to open the library in peace before asking him the same question as he always did.
“Do you have any new books, sir?” the boy said, placing the eighth volume of the Robar Trilogy onto the desk.
Syd dodged the question with one of his own. “Finished already then? I should have liked to think that you would have savored this one!”
“But I did, sir.” The boy almost looked crestfallen. “I still couldn’t put it down until I’d finished reading it.”
The librarian smiled. “Very well, then. It may take a few days for some of us mere mortals to read something as dense as Hesprus.”
“Oh, but he’s not that hard!”
“No?”
The boy paused, uncertain if he was being mocked. “Not compared to Plato, for example.”
“You’ve read Plato?”
“Yes, sir. In the original Greek.”
Syd laughed. “Now where did you learn Ancient Greek?”
“My father taught me,” the boy answered with a blush. “He used to be a professor before he became a farmer.”
The librarian suddenly had an idea. “Do you think I could speak with your father this evening?”
The boy mumbled something into his personal repeater, then nodded enthusiastically a moment later. “He says you should come over for dinner!”
“Tell him I accept the invitation.”
“I will,” the boy answered. “Does this mean you don’t have any new books for me, sir?”
Syd shook his head. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s okay. I heard about Jon Devlin.”
There was a long and uncomfortable silence. When the boy spoke again, his voice was tiny: “Do you think the library will close?”
“Not if I can help it,” Syd said. “In fact, that’s why I want to talk to your father.”
Although the day turned out to be surprisingly busy, Syd felt like it was dragging on forever nevertheless, his mind already preoccupied with tonight’s conversation. He knew that he would only get this one chance to lay out his proposal, so he thought long and hard about what he was going to say, outlining the benefits as best he could when the library patrons weren’t busy asking him for help. Larce’s tractor had made up for its full day of performance with a series of breakdowns, each requiring a series of specialized parts. Syd was just thankful for the fact that he had taken the liberty of downloading the entire maintenance catalog a few months ago, or else the Noel farms would be in real danger of losing their harvest without access to the relay station.
Helping the hapless farmer find the right parts in the database and keeping the holoprinter supplied with substrate as he ran off job after job would have been more than enough work for one day, but as luck would have it Rose Harrington had returned from Twokay City that morning as well, and couldn’t stop talking the librarian's ear off about how the benefit went and what fabulous ideas she had for next week’s book club. Syd tried to get some new information about Devlin and his pirate armada out of Mrs. Harrington, but it seemed that the planet’s socialites (for what they were) were blithely unconcerned about the looming threat. So much for that.
No sooner had Rose finally excused herself for the day than one of the local grammar school teachers brought her class for an unexpected library visit to learn more about the exotic flora and fauna that was indigenous to the planet and still flourished at sea level, where the atmospheric pressures were too strong to support human settlement and agribusiness. Normally Syd delighted in showing kids the library’s impressive collection of three-dimensional diorama books that the first scouts and exobiologists had made centuries ago, but today he felt leaden and relied instead on the teacher’s enthusiasm to get him through the rest of the afternoon.
As if the day couldn’t get any more draining, about fifteen minutes before closing there was an incoming message from the Imperial Library Corps. There would be a mandatory staff meeting for all librarians in the sector first thing tomorrow morning—the Librarian General had secured the necessary bandwidth on the tachyon pulse, so Syd would be expected to attend as well. Though given recent events such a meeting was not entirely unexpected, he couldn’t help but have a feeling of dread, as he always did whenever the Corps required his official presence. No small part of the allure of the periphery was the thought that he was his own librarian, in charge of his own little library at the edge of the galaxy, when in fact it was Empire calling the shots just as surely as if he were back in the Inner Worlds.
Syd sighed as he closed up the library for the evening. There was some extra tidying to be done, as Mrs. Jen-Lee’s kids had made a mockery of the Dewey Decimal System in just a few hours of running amok, but the librarian decided to come in early the next morning and reshelve the mess. Tomorrow’s staff meeting already meant an ungodly wake-up call, so he might as well take advantage of being up and about at such an early hour. He did one last sweep of the building to make sure that everyone had gone home, extinguished the lights, then locked the front door with his palm. Syd was so accustomed to exiting his library to an empty boulevard that he almost blundered into the track of a grav tank that was powering its way up the street.
“GET OUT OF THE ROAD, MORON!” a voice blared, causing Syd to whirl about and lose his footing, sprawling headfirst to the pavement. He propped himself up on skinned palms as the tank passed, its operating laughing at him over the loudspeaker.
Syd considered hefting a rock at the tank, but thought twice about giving the soldiers an excuse to shoot someone, as they were probably already eager to do. He wondered if the tank wouldn’t be the first of many reinforcements. While it pleased him that the Empire was finally taking a stand against the seemingly unstoppable Jon Devlin and his armada, Syd was less than thrilled at the prospect of his library being caught in the crossfire. He had just gathered his wits enough to note that the grav tank which had just passed him wasn’t bearing the Imperial standard, but that of the local militia. Uncertain of what to make of this, Syd almost had half a mind to follow the vehicle and see what was going on, but his personal communicator was beeping to remind him that he was expected somewhere for dinner.
Ezekiel Manda was known for two things—his work ethic and his lamb, both of which were the stuff of legend. While most of the Settlers here had opted to raise rhinocattle, a genetically-engineered safe bet on virtually any planet, Manda had decided to take a chance on mutton and profited handsomely from the gamble, or so he explained to Syd over the evening meal. The librarian had arrived at the ranch just in time for the breaking of the bread, and from the relieved look on the boy’s face when he finally showed up Syd intuited that he had narrowly avoided causing grave insult. Ezekiel nodded and ripped a huge boule of peasant bread into chunks with his calloused hands, which the boy then dispensed to the other diners in order of importance: first the guest, then the matron of the house, Mrs. Manda, followed by the boy’s elder siblings (five in total—three boys and two girls), himself, then lastly his father, who closed his eyes and spoke some words in what Syd recognized as a snippet of Old English—Emerson, he was sure of it. Only then did the family set themselves upon dinner, which consisted of various courses set on the table simultaneously, each on its own platter.