I wasn’t sure where I was going, but I finally encountered what had to be a library. Out of curiosity, I went inside, wondering if there was an insurgent in the library waiting to put an end to me. The lights came on as I entered and my hand fell to my pistol, but nothing leapt out at me. It was an automated system. No one would use anything like it on an Earth city, not when it might put someone else out of work. I looked at the books, lying on the shelves, and felt an eagerness I hadn’t known since Kitty and I had made love for the first time. I’d never set foot in a library until I’d gone to school. There just weren’t any back in my hometown.
The next hour passed quickly as I browsed, wonderingly. There were books that shocked me — a sex manual for group orgies and detailed instructions on how to produce a nuclear bomb — and some that surprised me. One discussed, at length, the history of the United Nations and explained many things I hadn’t understood. There had been no grand unification, no final coming-together of the human race, but something far darker. As the colonists had fled to the stars, the UN had quietly taken over Earth and transformed itself into a vast bureaucracy that controlled every aspect of human life. It was a version of history I’d never heard at home…and that, too, was not surprising. The book explained how the UN censored everything, all from the purest of motives, until the human race had no past. There were nations, and people, I’d never heard of in the past, building humanity’s future, a future that had turned sour.
I pushed the book aside, finally, and looked for others. Some of them were fictional stories set in worlds that couldn’t exist, although the UN had always rather approved of fantasy novels. I don’t know why, but everyone knew that dragons, goblins and werewolves didn’t exist. Others were set in dreams of the future, ones created before the tawdry reality of real interstellar logistics and the Jump Drive had settled in. Several hinted at war with intelligent aliens, but we had never even seen signs of alien ruins, let alone massive cube-shaped starships. I doubted that anyone could build a wormhole generator large enough to transport a ship that size. The UN had been looking at a wormhole large enough to take an entire planet, but the power requirements would be literally astronomical.
And there were so many wonders in the library…
Something moved behind me. I spun around, my hand dropping to my pistol. “Can I help you, Citizen?”
I stared. I was looking at a walking mannequin, shaped like a nude woman with astonishingly large breasts. It was almost flawless. Only the eyes gave its real nature away. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. I’d never seen anything like it before. It looked so realistic that I wondered if young men ever tried to have sex with it.
“Ah,” I said, finally. “What are you?”
“I am a Susan Calvin Corporation Mark XII Automated Drone,” she — I couldn’t think of her as an ‘it’, somehow — said. “I am the librarian of this library. Can I help you, sir?”
I couldn’t grasp the implications at first, and then I felt pure rage. While the UN kept its people in crumbling cities and helplessness, the Planet of Heinlein was so rich that they could afford robot librarians! The UN distrusted AI for all kinds of reasons and I wasn’t sure that they were wrong, but surely…why couldn’t we have robots too? Or access to this treasure trove of information, or even political freedom? Why did we have to have Political Officers looking over our shoulder all the time? Earth starved, simply because the farms couldn’t produce enough food to feed the planet, while Heinlein… I would guess that life as a beggar on Heinlein was better than life in the inner circle on Earth.
“Yes,” I said, shaking my head. In the darkness, I would have mistaken her for a real woman. I wondered, with a near-giggle, if anyone got electrocuted trying to have sex with her. “Can you show me a good general history of Heinlein?”
“Of course, sir,” the robot said. She walked past me — I was captivated by the swaying of her ass, despite the growing sense of unreality surrounding me — and took a book off the shelves. “Here you are, sir. Is there anything else?”
I hesitated, and then took the plunge. “Do you do electronic texts as well?” I asked. “Something I can use on a UN-standard terminal?”
“Of course,” the robot assured me. “How many different formats would you like?”
I reeled again. The UNPF Academy used electronic texts as a matter of course, but they were so heavily protected that they could only be accessed on the library computers, apparently to prevent someone from copying them and distributing them on the deep Internet. The endless regulations had killed electronic books back on Earth, but here…she could fit an entire library on one terminal.
“UN-standard,” I said, finally. I knew that that would work on an isolated terminal and I doubted that I’d be allowed to take a Heinlein-grade personal computer, or would I? “Do you have electronic readers here?”
“Yes, sir,” the robot said. She leaned forward and this time I couldn’t resist. I reached out and touched her breast. It felt far too real. Her voice sounded real as well. “Please don’t do that, sir.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, absurdly. “Please could you fetch me the reader?”
“Yes, sir,” the robot said. I was astonished. I’d expected a demand for payment, but instead… I was just getting it for free! “What would you like to have loaded onto the reader?”
“Everything you can,” I said. Even a UN-grade terminal had thousands of terabytes worth of data storage capability. I had a feeling that Heinlein would be capable of producing something more capable than the UN. “How much can you fit on?”
“The entire contents of the library database,” the robot said. There was a long moment as she returned behind her desk and pulled out a small reader, before passing it to me. “Enjoy, sir.”
I rolled my eyes and opened the book on Heinlein. It was harder to read than the prior book, simply because I lacked some of the background information that the book’s writer assumed I would have. I still didn’t know who Heinlein had actually been — the book sang his praises, but didn’t say much about him — but it did provide a brief overview of Heinlein itself. The planet had been founded by people who’d believed in Heinlein’s vision — I wasn’t sure if they’d been contemporaries of Heinlein or if they’d come later — and had made it come true. It hadn’t all been wine and roses, but if the book was to be believed, it had worked better than the UN.
“Thank you,” I said, finally, and pocketed the reader. It was smaller than anything the UN had produced, which suggested worrying things about their military capabilities, and I could hide it easily. I thought about pointing others towards the library — I didn’t understand why it had been left alone, even — but I knew better. That would eventually bring security down on my head. “I have a lot of reading to do.”
The robot waved at me as I left. “Have a nice evening, sir,” she said. “I hope to see you soon.”
I was still laughing to myself when I boarded the shuttle to return to the Devastator.
Chapter Twenty
The UN’s position on rape is somewhat mixed, depending on the exact circumstances. On one hand, it’s a crime against the victim and all of womankind. On the other, there are times when it is accepted as a legitimate form of social protest, or even part of a working society. A young black man who rapes a white woman has the defence, assuming that he is ever brought to trial, that he is merely avenging slights committed against his race in ages past. A woman from a tribal society can be raped by her husband, after being married off by her father, and the UN regards it as part of their culture and therefore acceptable. The irony is that the UN has created perhaps the most racist community in centuries…and that is not unacceptable. The military principle of divide and conquer remains strong.