Up ahead, Nicole could make out a squat structure at the end of the path, the last of House 48’s buildings that didn’t seem to fit in with the others. Light showed through the slender windows, evenly distributed around the circumference of the octagonal building, reaching from about waist-high nearly to the roof over the second-story.
“My home away from home,” Reza announced, gesturing toward the revolving door. It looked almost like an airlock, and was intended to keep the dust of the fields out of the building.
“What is it?” Nicole asked as Reza ushered her through the door, the cylinder swishing closed behind them.
“It’s the House 48 Library,” he answered.
Nicole was about to laugh until she realized that Reza was completely serious. As they emerged through the door and into the light of the interior, she saw the look of unabashed wonder on his face. Her smile slipped as she thought of how many times he must have come through that door, and yet his expression was as if this was the very first.
“Reza,” she asked, following after him into what must have been the lobby, “what is so important here?” She looked around at the meager collection of holo displays and the disk racks. “These devices are very nearly antique!”
Reza favored her with a quizzical look, as if her question had revealed a stratum of incredible, if easily forgivable, ignorance. “This,” he said disdainfully, pointing to the disk racks and study carrels arrayed around the lobby, “is junk: old periodicals, some of the new literature, and other stuff. I stopped bothering with that a long time ago.” He led her around the front desk as if he owned the place, which she suspected he might, in a way. Then he punched in an access code to a locked door. She noted that there appeared to be no one else here, a thought that was not entirely comforting. “This,” he explained quietly, “is why this place is important.”
Pushing open the door, they found themselves in a darkened room, but there was still enough light for Nicole to see angular shapes that radiated away into the darkness. Reza closed and locked the door behind them. Only then did he switch on a light.
“Oh,” Nicole gasped. In the gentle light that flooded the room, she saw row after row of books, real books, with pages and bindings. Some were made of the micro plastic that had found its way into favor over the years, but most were made of genuine paper, the exposed edges yellowed with age, their covers and bindings carefully protected with a glistening epoxy sealant.
“Besides being real antiques,” Reza told her, “and having some monetary value for anyone who can waste the transport mass charge to haul them around, they can be a real brain saver in this place.” He picked up a volume, seemingly at random – although he knew by heart the place of every book in the room – and held it up for her to see. Hamlet, the book’s binding said, followed by some strange symbols and then the author’s name: Shakespeare.
She took the book from him, careful not to drop it. It was terribly old, and one of the few such books she had ever seen. Every major publisher had long since done away with physical books. Electronic media were so much cheaper and more efficient.
But it was not the same, as her own father, a devoted book reader himself, had often told her. Watching the action on a holo screen left too little to the imagination, he had said once, holding one of his own precious volumes up as if it were on an imaginary pedestal. The screen fed the mind, but its calories were empty ones, bereft of the stuff on which thought depended. She had thought him quite comical at the time, her own young life having evolved around the holo images that invaded their home daily. But perhaps, as was most often the case, his words had more than just a kernel of truth in them.
“You asked why this place is so important to me,” Reza said, watching as she turned the pages, his ears thrilling to the sound. “I’ll tell you why. When you come in from the fields, you eat, you sleep, and then you get up to go to the fields again. Over and over, for as long as you have until you can leave here.
“And every day that you let yourself do just that, just the stuff you have to do to get by, even when you’re so tired you can’t see straight, you die just a little bit. Not much, not so much that you notice that day, or even the next, but just a little. Your mind starts eroding, and you start forgetting about anything that you used to think was interesting or important, whether anyone else thought it was or not. Pretty soon, all the useless crap that we do here becomes more and more important to you, as if it really had some meaning.” He spat out the last few words, disgust evident on his face and in his voice. “After a while, you start finding yourself in conversations about how many kilos of rocks people dug up. There’s even an official contest. Did you know that? People talk about how many blisters so-and-so got, and who had sex with whom, what kind of stunt Muldoon pulled today, on and on and on. Remember the porridge you liked so much?” Nicole grimaced, the tasteless paste still coagulating in her stomach. “That’s what your brain starts turning into around here. Mush.
“And the worst part is that they start not to care about anything or anyone, even themselves. Why should they, when the most important thing they did today is clear a few more meters for some farming combine that doesn’t even give us a percentage of the grain they grow?”
Nicole’s mouth fell open at that.
“That’s right,” Reza told her, his eyes burning with anger. “All of our food is imported from Peraclion, because the grain there has a higher bulk than stuff grown here, for whatever reason, and so it’s more expensive to ship long distances. So all our stuff goes out-system, and Peraclion feeds us… after a few kickbacks get paid off to some of the admins here.
“So,” he shrugged, “here we all sit, droning our lives away until we’re old enough to either enlist directly or apply for an academy assignment. We’re slave labor for the farming combines that need the land cleared but are too cheap to send machines to do it.”
His expression turned grim. “But the worst part for most of the kids here is that, regardless of how bright they were when they came, they fail the entrance exams because they haven’t gotten the right schooling, or can’t even figure out what abstract means, let alone come up with an abstract thought.” His face twisted in an ironic smile. “No fighter jocks coming out of that group.”
Reza had no way of knowing at the time, but his last remark struck Nicole to the core. She loved the thought of flying, and had always secretly dreamed of piloting one of the tiny, darting fighter ships she saw in the movies. And in that instant, she knew what she wanted to do with her life, now that the old one was gone, washed away.
“And what of you, Reza?” she asked, her thoughts returning from her own hoped-for future. “Your mind has not turned to mush, I take it?”
“No,” he told her, his expression softening as he lovingly ran his fingers along the spine of a book, “not yet, anyway. Thanks to this place.”
“I still do not understand, mon ami.” She still could not see what Reza was driving at.
“When you come in here and pick up one of these,” he gestured at Hamlet, “or even watch one of the crappy holos out in the main room, you’re not just an orphaned kid marooned on a dustbowl planet anymore, with no more rights than any slave might have. It’s a way out of here. You’re a hero, or a villain, or anything else you could imagine, and a lot of things you probably can’t. Every time you turn a page you can go somewhere, even someplace that’s never been. But anywhere you go is somewhere far away from here. And the best part about it, the part that keeps me alive and sane, is that the words in the books leave a lot of blanks that your mind has to fill in. It makes your mind work without you forcing it to, and you get better and better at it without killing yourself like you have to sometimes in the fields.”