This last was met with total silence. Winston Blount smiled thinly. "I don't suppose you've seen our website?"
"Ah, not as yet." He paused and his eyes seemed to be looking far away. "Okay, I see what you're saying." He smiled. "I suppose I should be on your side — what you want will keep my 411 job safe! See here, I love the old poets, but old-time literature is so hard to get at. If your interest is in post-2000 topics, critical sources are everywhere and research gets results . But for the rest, you have to search through that ." Sharif waved at the orderly ranks of books, the stacks that filled the library's sixth floor. "It can take days to gain even trivial insights."
Lazy bum , thought Robert, and wondered at Sharif's earlier enthusiasm for "real books." But he had noticed the trend even in his own teaching days. It wasn't just the students who refused to get their hands dirty. Even so-called researchers ignored the universe of things that weren't online.
Winnie glowered at the young man. "Mr. Sharif, you don't understand the purpose of the stacks. You don't go into the stacks expecting the precise answer to your burning-question-of-the-moment. It doesn't work that way. In all the thousands of times that I've gone hunting in the stacks, I've seldom found exactly what I was looking for. You know what I did find? I found the books on close-by topics. I found answers to questions that I had never thought to ask. Those answers took me in new directions and were almost always more valuable than whatever I originally had in mind." He glanced at Rivera. "Isn't that so, Carlos?"
Rivera nodded, a little weakly, Robert thought.
But Winnie was absolutely right, so right that Robert had to say something on the same side. "This is insanity, Sharif. Apparently, the Librareome Project is someone's idea for photographing and then digitizing the Library. But — " suddenly he was remembering things from his last years at Stanford " — didn't Google already do that?"
"That's true," said Rivera. "In fact, that was our first argument, and perhaps still the best one. But Huertas is a great salesman, and he does have arguments in his favor. What he has in mind is fast and very, very cheap. Past digitizations have not been as global or as unified as this will be. And Huertas has lawyers and software that will allow him to render microroyalty payments across all the old copyright regimes — without any new permissions."
Winnie vented a sour laugh. "The real reason the administration people bought into this is that they like Huertas's money, and maybe even the publicity. But let me tell you, Mr. Sharif, shredding destroys the books. That is the bottom line. We will be left with a useless jumble."
"Oh, no, Professor Blount. Read the overview. The pictures coming from the camera tunnel are analyzed and reformatted. It's a simple matter of software to reorient the images, match the tear marks and reconstruct the original texts in proper order. In fact — besides the mechanical simplicity of it all — that's the reason for the apparent violence. The tear marks come close to being unique. Really, it's not a new thing. Shotgun reconstructions are classic in genomics."
"Oh, yeah?" Robert picked up the much-abused page that he had rescued from the PZ stacks. He held it out like some limp murder victim. "So what perfection of software is going to recover something that was torn from its binding and never photographed?"
Sharif started to shrug and then saw the expression on Robert's face. "Sir, it's really not a problem. There will be some loss, true. Even where everything is properly photoed, the programs will make some mismatches. Potentially, the error rate can be less than a few words per million volumes, far better than even hardcopy republishing with manual copyediting. That's why other major libraries are participating in the project, to get accurate cross-checking."
Other major libraries ? Robert realized that his mouth was hanging open. He shut up; he couldn't think of anything to say.
Tommie stared into his laptop. "You seem suddenly well informed, Mr. Sharif."
"But… well, I am wearing," the young man said.
"Hmpf. And all you really want is to pursue your love of literature."
"… Yes! My thesis advisor has based her entire career on Gu's Secrets of the Ages . And now I find out that the great poet is back from Alzheimer's! It's the opportunity of a lifetime… Look. If you don't believe the Google bio, check in the 411 directories. I have lots of satisfied customers, many of them literature students at UCSD — not that I give them an unethical degree of help! Not at all." Aha. Maybe ghostwritten homework was still a no-no, even in this brave new world. "I don't know what happened with Professor Gu today, but didn't it slow down the Librareome Project? Isn't that what you want?"
Blount and Rivera were both nodding agreement.
"Yup," said Tommie. "You're a horse of some kind."
"I am simply a Lit-in-English student!"
Tommie shook his head. "You could be almost anything. You could be a committee. When you want to sound like a lit-lover, we get chat from a member who knows about poetry." Tommie tilted back his chair. "There's an old saying: The beginning of trust has to be an in-person contact. I don't see any usable chain of trust in your biography."
Sharif stood and walked partway through the table. He looked upward, waving his arms at the sky. "You want in-person? That I can supply. Look down here, at the bench by the footpath."
Tommie tilted his chair still farther back and glanced over his shoulder. Robert walked to the window and looked down. Much of the crowd had dispersed, leaving just a few knots of die-hard demonstrators. The footpath was a tiled serpent that wound its way up the hillside, its head reaching just to the edge of the library terrace. It was a very real mosaic, new artwork since Robert's years at UCSD.
"I came all the way from Corvallis just to see Professor Gu. Please don't turn me away now."
And there by the path was a second Zulfi Sharif, this one not virtual at all. He was looking up at them and waving.
13
The Miri Gang Is Born
For as long as Miri could remember, she'd had this problem with grandparents. Alice's parents — and Alice's grandparents, too — had all been living in Chicago; not one of them had survived. On Bob's side of the family, Robert had been almost dead, but then he came back! Now Miri was afraid she was losing him all over again. And then there was Lena…
Lena Gu was only dead on the record. Lena had persuaded Bob to set up that lie with the Friends of Privacy. Lena even ordered him to keep the details from Miri. But Bob had told Miri what he was doing. That was smart, because Miri would have figured it all out anyway. This way, Miri was imprisoned by her promises to Bob. She hadn't breathed a whisper of the truth to Robert, even when they were still talking and he had been so desperate.
But now Miri was getting desperate. She hadn't seen Lena in five months. Almost, she had called Lena after the Ezra Pound Incident. But that would have only confirmed Lena's opinions of Robert. Bob just wanted to ignore Robert's problems; coward. Alice was no coward, but she was deep in training these days and it wasn't going well. Okay, I can handle this on my own , Miri had told herself. She conceived a clever rehabilitation plan, working with Zulfi Sharif. At first, that had been great. Sharif's wearable had been easy to subvert; she had direct access to Robert. But after Robert's trip to UCSD, she realized that someone else was using Sharif, too.