Sharif had returned to Corvallis, but they had several more interviews. Some of the guy's questions were a lot more intelligent than Robert would have expected from their first encounters.
He surfed the web a lot, to study up on security issues and — on occasion — to see what had become of literature. What was art, now that surface perfection was possible? Ah, serious literature was there. Most of it didn't make much money, even with the microroyalty system. But there were men and women who could string words almost as well as the old Robert. Damn them !
Still silence from the Stranger. Either he had lost interest, or he understood his power over Robert. It is so easy to win when your victim is desperate . It had been a long time since anyone had beaten Robert Gu at a stare-down… but then one Saturday he skipped his session with Juan. Instead, he took a car to UCSD.
Sharif showed up on the way. "Thank you for accepting my call, Professor Gu." The image sat down in the car seat, part of its butt disappearing into the cushions. Zulfi didn't look nearly as well put together as recently. "It's been hard to reach you lately."
"I thought we covered a lot of ground on Thursday."
Sharif looked pained.
Robert raised an eyebrow. "You're complaining?"
"Not at all, not at all! But you see, sir, it's possible that perhaps I've allowed my wearable to become, um, perhaps somewhat corrupted. It's possible that I'm subject to some degree of… hijacking."
Robert thought back on some of his recent reading. "That's like being a little bit pregnant, isn't it?"
Sharif's image shrank further into the upholstery. "Indeed, sir. I take your point. But frankly, my systems are sometimes subject to a small degree of corruption. I wager that is true of most users. I had thought the situation was manageable, but things have reached the point where… well, you see, I did not interview you Thursday. Not at all."
"Ah." So the Mysterious Stranger had had it both ways: bludgeoning Robert with silence at the same time he carried on as another player.
Sharif waited a moment for Robert to say more, then rushed forward with "Please, Professor, I do so very much wish to continue these interviews! Now that we know there is this problem, we can easily work around it. I beg you not to cut me off."
"You could clean up your system."
"Well, yes. In theory. I had to do that once in undergraduate school. Somehow, I ended up the zombie in a cheating conspiracy. Not my fault at all, but the University of Kolkata required me to fry-clean all my clothes." He raised his hands up in open-palmed prayer. "I've never been very good about backups; the debacle cost me more than a semester of progress toward my degree. Please don't make me do that again. It would be even worse now."
Robert looked out at traffic. His car had turned onto Highway 56 and was tooling toward the coast. Up ahead were the first of the bio labs. And perhaps the Mysterious Stranger was there too. By comparison, Sharif was a known quantity. He looked back at the young fellow and said mildly. "Okay, Mr. Sharif. Carry on in your slightly corrupted state." An old memory struck him, how the computer techs at Stanford had always badgered him about the latest antivirus updates. "We'll simply rise above all the petty vandalism."
"Quite so, sir! Thank you so much." Sharif paused, exuding profound relief. "And I'm more eager than ever to proceed. I have my questions here somewhere." Hesitation and a blank stare as he changed mental gears. "Ah, yes. Has there been any progress on the revised Secrets of the Ages ?."
"No," Robert replied a little shortly. But this was the sort of question you'd expect of the authentic Zulfi Sharif. Robert mellowed his answer with some half truths: "I'm still doing high-level planning, you know." He launched into a long discussion of how, even though Guian poetry was sparse, its creation required infinitely precise planning. He'd said things like that in the old days, but never laid it on quite as thickly as now. Sharif ate it up.
"So over the next few weeks, I'm going to be visiting my old friends — you know, in the library. That will give me some insights into the plight of the, er, vanquished aged. You're welcome to come along. If you watch carefully, you may learn things about how I work. And afterwards, I'd be happy to critique your conclusions."
The younger man nodded eagerly. "Wonderful. Thank you!"
Amazing the thrill it was to have someone look up to him, even if it was the sort of no-talent that he had shielded himself against all through his earlier life. This must be how poor Winnie worked it, using big words and pomposity to fool the even less inspired . Robert looked away from Sharif's image, and tried to keep his smile from turning predatory. And when Sharif gets smarter, I'll know it's the Stranger .
There were no demonstrators at the library today, but — surprise — there were lots of in-person students. This was heartwarmingly like his recollections of years past, with the library the center of the university's intellectual life. What good things had happened in the last week? He and virtual Sharif walked through the glass doors and took the elevator to floor six. The building interior was not visible to Robert, even with his new access skills. Okay, look for recent news items… but by then he was on the fifth floor. Lena — > Juan, Miri, Xiu: <sm>Hey! I've lost the view!</sm>
Juan — > Lena, Miri, Xiu: <sm>The sixth floor isn't publicly searchable today. </sm>
Miri — > Juan, Lena, Xiu: <sm>Maybe if I just ask Robert for forwarding.</sm>
Sharif had faded to a luminescent reddish blob. "I can't see anymore," he said. "And I'll bet you're the only person I can hear."
Robert hesitated, then waved permissions in Sharif's direction. Let's see what the cabal makes of that .
Winnie and Carlos Rivera were sitting at the window wall. Tommie was hunched over his laptop.
"Ní háo , Professor Gu!" said Rivera. "Thanks for coming."
Tommie looked up from his laptop. "But I'm not sure we want your little friend."
Sharif got support from an unexpected place. Winston Blount said, "Tommie, I think Sharif might be of some use."
Tommie shook his head. "Not anymore. Now that UCSD is shredded — "
"What?" The stacks were still full of books. Robert stepped back and ran his hand across the spines. "These feel real to me," he said.
"You didn't see the propaganda on the lower floors?"
"No. I took the elevator, and so far I'm not very good at seeing through walls."
Tommie shrugged. "We're on the last unshredded floor. Like we figured, the administration was just waiting for the fuss to die down. Then one night they swooped in with extra shredders. They were done with two floors before we had a clue. By then it was too late."
"Damn!" Robert settled into a chair. "So what's the point of protesting now?"
Winnie said, "It's true that we can't save UCSD. In fact, the clever SOBs have twisted things around so that the Librareome Project is more popular with the students than before. But so far, UCSD has the only library that's been shredded."
Rivera burst into Mandarin: "Duì, dànshi tāmen xūyáo huí diào qitāde túshūguān, yīnwèi — " He hesitated, seemed to notice the blank looks. "S-Sorry. I meant to say, they still need to destroy other libraries. For crosschecking. The data reduction and virtual reassembly will be an ongoing project, tending 'asymptotically toward perfect reproduction.'"