(This is your Director speaking. Penny’s back-door communication system has been discovered and neutralized. Before I sever this link for good, however, I wanted to give you one last chance.)
(One last chance at what?)
(Don’t be stupid, boy. I am familiar with your career. I know what happened on Earth.)
Syd opened his mouth and shut it, a gesture that was of course completely lost on his interlocutor. He’d been assured that his personnel record was sealed, off-limits to anyone save for the Librarian General himself, but it appears that he had been misinformed. He was just fresh out the Academy back then, ready for his first tour of duty as a real librarian, and as luck would have it he’d drawn a plum position at one of the ancient universities on Earth, where he got to work not with nanoprinted simulacra but actual books that had been printed from dead trees or pulped cotton rags. A couple of the items in his charge had actually been made from papyrus that had been pounded thin and carefully layered by some nameless artisan who’d lived and died several thousand years ago. Syd was in heaven, until everything went to hell.
(You have problems with authority.)
(I have problems with authority when the people in charge have their heads up their asses!)
(Is that what happened at the University? Your file suggests otherwise.)
(Don’t you dare presume to understand what happened there!)
Syd had caught a high-ranking University library administrator stealing rare manuscripts and reselling them on the black market, but absent any hard evidence his accusations fell on deaf ears, with the result that not only did the official remain in power, but he spent every moment harassing Syd until he could no longer bear it. After receiving a scathing independent performance review ordered by the thieving administrator, he marched straight into the man’s office and punched him in the face. If not for the fact that evidence of the official’s wrongdoing was discovered during his suspension, Syd most assuredly would have been drummed out of the Library Corps altogether; however, because the record of the administrator’s criminal dealings implicated several other powerful University figures, the library dared not pursue the matter beyond demanding the official’s resignation. Syd’s personnel record was never cleaned up to reflect the reality of the situation, but simply sealed along with the files of anyone else even tangentially involved in the affair.
(Very well. The fact of the matter is that sordid little episode will pale in comparison to your actions now. Do you understand, Syd? This isn’t just the end of your career. If you fail to report to Sector headquarters for reassignment you will be accused of treason.)
(What about the patrons out here? Don’t their needs mean anything?)
(If they choose to turn their backs on the Empire, let them find their own librarians.)
(Surely the Library Corps could work something out with Jon Devlin.)
(That’s not my decision to make, Syd. And you know it. Instead of walking out on staff meetings maybe you could be sending ideas like this up the chain of command to the Librarian General.)
(Fat lot of good that would do.)
(See? You can make yourself out to be as much of a hero as you’d like to be, but unless you learn to show some respect for your superiors you are only deluding yourself.)
(I’m not a hero, Madame Director. I’m just a librarian.)
(Not if you fail to show up at Sector headquarters in 72 hours, you’re not. This is your final warning, Syd. I hope you know what’s good for you and do the right thing.)
Syd cut the connection before the Director could issue any additional threats. Although he bore her no personal ill-will, he found himself growing increasingly angry, and anger wasn’t going to help him at this point. The Director and Library Corps may have had a point that Syd demonstrated little time or patience for authority. When his suspension had been lifted, the librarian had been given his choice of any assignment in the Galaxy as an attempt to make up for the miscarriage of justice which had happened back on Earth, and what did he end up choosing? This planet, of all places, so far out on the Periphery that even most of the other Outer Worlds considered it remote. The previous librarian having died, the Library Corps had allowed the position to stay vacant, and was contemplating shutting the library down altogether before Syd chose it for his own.
Did he take this position out of love for his vocation or spite for his profession? Syd wasn’t sure, but now that events had forced his hand he understood that there was more on the line here than his own petty personal conflicts. As soon as the printer interface informed him that his last part was loaded into the buffer and queued for printing he crammed as many books as he could into a rucksack and left his dormitory for what he assumed would be the last time.
Fortunately he spotted the plainclothes Imperial agent as he passed through the lobby, his Inner Worlds fashion sense sticking out like a sore thumb here, so instead of exiting through the front door he doubled back through the cafeteria and took the emergency exit in the back of the laundry room. The door alarm had been broken for as long as he’d lived here, a fact the dorm residents took advantage of to get in and out of the building after curfew. After hastily verifying that he had not been followed, Syd ran down the alley and hailed the first grav cab in sight.
He hoped Larce Noel wouldn’t be too confused when he stopped by his ranch. “I figured they must have been for you, because I know all the parts to my tractor by heart.” The farmer offered his librarian friend a glass of ice cold limeade, but Syd begged off, promising to return at a later date. Taking the freshly-printed spare parts with him, he got back into the cab and directed the driver to a nameless intersection in the countryside.
The wagon was still there, exactly as he had left it. Or so he had thought. After paying the cabbie and sending him on his way Syd poked his head into the cabin to find a fresh set of fusion cells and a box full of books.
Astonished, the librarian also discovered a handwritten note tucked into the top book in the pile—a rare Old Earth edition of Plato’s Republic—written in a neat Imperial script:
“When the boy told me you were printing up parts, I figured you found this old bucket of bolts as I'd hoped. Consider these books the start of your new collection. Yours, Ezekiel.”
Syd smiled. He had made the right choice, after all.
Every month the Bookmobile arrived in town, the boy was already awaiting patiently at the stoop where the old library had once stood. Both it and the Tachyon Relay tower just a little further up the hill were long gone now, early casualties in the Settlers’ bid for independence from Imperial rule. Lead by the Manda patriarch, who still had some fight in him after all of these years, the Settler militia had overwhelmed the Imperial garrison and managed to pull down the relay station before the Empire could obliterate it from space. The library sadly had been lost by accident, when a stray grav tank shell hit the building and leveled it where it stood. Once the battle had been settled the Settlers came back and tried to salvage something from the wreckage, but alas, all of the books had been destroyed.
The wagon already contained twice as many titles than its fixed counterpart, however, and added more books with each pass it made around the cities of the planet. Syd had proven to be not just a competent librarian but a halfway decent spokesperson as well, so that whenever he drove his giant bookmobile into town he managed to wrangle a few dozen books out of the locals for the permanent traveling collection. Rose of course helped with an annual fundraiser in Twokay City for fuel, parts, and maintenance, and Ezekiel Manda treated the librarian to a hero’s welcome whenever he returned to this part of the planet. No sooner did Syd open the hatch of the bookmobile than he could smell the lambs already roasting on the spit, in preparation for what would no doubt be an epic feast later that evening.