Syd was so engrossed in the painstakingly joined slate that he almost missed a low hump just to the right, where one of the walls zigzagged suddenly, then veered off towards the brush in a line as straight as a laser beam. How odd that the builder did not run the fence over the mound, but clearly went out of his way not to touch it. His curiosity piqued, the librarian stepped gingerly over the slate row and examined the hump more closely as dogs barked and rhinocattle lowed in the distance. Nightfall took its time on this planet to arrive, but it would not wait forever; even in the failing light, however, Syd could tell that this mound was not a naturally-occurring feature. An old forgotten bunker, perhaps, long since grown over with bramble and wild strawberry? He pulled a few vines aside in an exploratory fashion and realized with a start that he had not discovered a building, but a vehicle.
Judging from the size of the hulk, it was one of the old Settler wagons—glorified tractors, really, but these trucks had trundled across the face of the planet, depositing here and there their precious cargo of pioneers and thousands of different species of flora and fauna either as seeds or in vitro. A colonization ship had brought ten thousand of these wagons, of which only a dozen survived to this day in various museums and private collections. That one would just be sitting here, forgotten in a field, less than a few kilometers from the original landing site was nearly impossible to believe. Surely the ancient rancher who had laid down the wall here knew of it. Maybe it belonged to his family? For it to have been overgrown suggested that the property had changed hands at least once over the intervening generations, if not many times over. Syd wondered exactly how long it had taken for this priceless artifact to have been forgotten. If Jon Devlin had his way and the planet turned its back on the Empire, would his library suffer a similar fate?
Against his better judgment Syd kept investigating the ruined wagon, removing more and more of the overgrowth until he could make out its characteristic features that he remembered from the holovids and his visits to the Settlers’ Museum when he first arrived planetside. The front of the vehicle had big tracked wheels that rose taller than a mature adult rhinocattle, and the trailer it pulled was easily half the size of the main room of the library. He tried the door to the trailer and found that it was not locked, merely jammed with a thick root that he was able to slice away with his pocket knife. Forcing the door all the way open, he practically fell into its dark innards, just righting himself before his head connected with the hard metal of the trailer’s interior shell. Who knows how long he would lay here undiscovered, should he become incapacitated? Syd shuddered at the thought of moldering dead in this cramped space for years or even decades until he found the light fob on his knife and illuminated the room.
Whether by neglect or design, the trailer was surprisingly neat on the inside, its specimen shelves empty but showing no sign of having been ransacked or vandalized over the years. It was actually more roomy than Syd had thought it would be from the outside, so he had no difficult whatsoever in stepping forward to see if he could access the operator’s cabin. That door, too, was unlocked. No sooner had the librarian opened it, however, than the red emergency lights turned on, almost causing him to drop his own lamp. The wagon still had power! It must be keeping the main battery charged with a solar cell. Syd pushed into the cabin to find a lone diagnostic panel glowing up at him, indicating a fatal error in the machinery and listing the parts needed to fix it. Although this was backlit by solar power, he remembered reading that these so-called “crash panels” were displayed in electronic ink so that they could be read even if all power was lost.
What a find, Syd thought to himself. He wondered if he should share his discovery with the rancher who currently owned the property, or contact the Settler authorities in Twokay City first. Then he remembered the situation he was in along with the rest of the sector, and despaired if anyone would even care with Jon Devlin and his pirate armada out there in space. Surely someone would still recognize the find for what it was! Maybe Rose Harrington, or even Ezekiel Manda. He did his best to replace the bramble so as not to attract undue attention to the site until he could return, then stumbled back to his dormitory in the twilight.
Syd did not sleep well that night. At first he was too wired to fall asleep, his head buzzing with the events of the day, his dinner with the Manda family, and the artifact he’d found in the fields; then when sleep finally did take him it did so in wild staccato dreams that woke him several times in panic, his heart racing and his bedsheets soaked with sweat. Although he could not remember any of his dreams that night, he could not forget the anxiety which had run through them like a primal theme, such that by sunrise he was more exhausted than when he had first gone to bed.
His communicator was buzzing. So early? It was only then that Syd remembered the staff meeting. Damn it, he had been so preoccupied when he got home that he neglected to set his alarm. Damn damn damn! The librarian sprung out of bed, pulled on a shirt and pants, and dashed out the door, down the dormitory stairs, and up the gravel road to the Relay. At this point he almost hoped the sentries would mistake him for a hostile and shoot him, but neither the local tank nor the Imperial guards seemed nonplussed by his panting arrival.
“The director said you’d be coming,” the talkative one of the two guards deadpanned. “You’re late.”
“Tell me something I don’t know!” Syd gasped, running a hand through his sleep-matted hair in vain as he entered the station and went straight into Telepresence Alcove 3, where he saw two dozen ghostly forms flickering. As soon as he crossed the virtual threshold the ghosts registered his sudden arrival, some of them instinctively taking a step or two back although their avatars were not enabled for physical feedback.
A couple of librarians snickered while Rossi, one of the Sector Chiefs, finished his update as if Syd’s interruption had not occurred. He probably had uploaded his report in advance and wandered away from his office, unaware of the fact that his colleague’s dramatic last-minute pratfall would give him away. The Director hated it when his staff didn’t give their undivided attention, so Syd had a chance to compose himself while the aquiline matron gave Rossi a thorough dressing down once he’d taken his avatar off autopilot.
(Nice entrance!) One of his colleagues messaged him on a private channel. It was Penny. Syd looked over his shoulder to see her avatar smiling back at him. Penny ran a series of branch libraries in the Cruickshank Belt, an asteroid field so prosperous that it was home to several Imperial mining colonies and even a couple of hydroponic farms on the larger rocks.
(Thanks, Pen.) Syd wrote back. (I think I really stuck the landing there.)
Penny’s avatar was stunning, as always. Whereas the other librarians either appeared as chunky bits or overly scripted avatars that lagged against the tight data limits, hers was a fractal composition chosen to complement the bandwidth available. As a result, aside from Syd himself Penny was the only person who seemed real within the confines of the Telepresence Alcove. He could only wonder what his avatar looked like, given the local strictures and the fact that he still hadn’t modified his virtual appearance from its stock settings. Other librarians had virtual social obligations as part of their assignments and therefore had to worry about such things, but Syd only donned his avatar for staff meetings.