Whoa . He slipped, felt Tommie steady him with a hand in the small of his back.
"Neat, huh?" said Parker. "I almost wish I was wearing."
"Y-Yeah." Robert steadied himself on a nearby rack. The wood was real, thick, and solid. He brought his gaze down to floor level and looked outward along the aisle. The path through the stacks was twisted — and it didn't end at the external wall that must be there, just thirty or forty feet away. Instead, about where the windows should be, there were sagging wooden steps. It was the sort of ad hoc carpentry he had loved in old used-book stores. Beyond the steps, the stacks themselves seemed to be tilted, as though gravity itself were pointing in a different direction.
"What is all this?"
The three were silent for a second. Robert noticed that they seemed to be wearing dark armor. Rivera's outfit had some spiffy insignia. It also looked suspiciously like a T-shirt and Bermuda shorts done in blackened steel plate.
"Don't you get it?" Rivera said finally. "You three are Knights Guardian. And I'm a Librarian Militant. It's all from Jerzy Hacek's Dangerous Knowledge stories."
Blount nodded. "You never read any of those, did you, Robert?"
Robert vaguely remembered Hacek from about the time he retired. He sniffed. "I read the important things."
They walked slowly down the narrow aisle. There were side paths. These led not only left and right, but up and down. Snakelike hissing sounds came from some. In others, he saw "Knights Guardian" hunched over tables that were piled with books and parchment; light shone into their faces from the pages of opened books. Illuminated manuscripts indeed. Robert stopped for a closer look. The words were English, printed in a cracked Gothic script. The book was some kind of economics text. One of the readers, a young woman with overgrown eyebrows, glared briefly at the visitors, and then gestured into the air above. High in the stacks, there was a thump, and a four-foot-wide slab of leather and parchment came tumbling down. Robert hopped backward, almost stepping on Tommie. But the falling book came to a hover just within the student's reach. The pages riffled themselves open.
Oh . Robert backed carefully out of the alcove. "I get it. These are the digitizations of what's been destroyed so far."
"The first-pass digitization," said Blount. "Bastard modern administrators got more good press out of this than all the rest of their propaganda put together. Everybody thinks it's so clever and cute. And next week they'll shred the sixth floor."
Rivera led them outward, toward the sagging wooden stairs. "Not everybody is happy. The Geisel estate — Dr. Seuss — didn't go along with the university on this."
"Good for them!" Blount kicked at the timbered stacks. "Our students might as well go to Pyramid Hill."
Robert gestured in the way that was supposed to revert vision to unen-hanced reality. But he was still seeing purple light and ancient, leather-bound manuscripts. He tapped the explicit reversion signal. Still no onset of reality. "I'm stuck in this view."
"Yup. Unless you take off your contacts or declare a 911, you can't see what's really here. And that's another reason for not using Epiphany." Tom-mie waved his open laptop like some talisman. "I can see the illusions, but only when I want them." The little guy walked down another side path, here poking at a book that lay groaning on the floor, there stepping into an alcove to look at what the patrons were doing. "This place is so cool!"
When they reached the wooden stairs, Rivera said, "Be careful. These things are tricky." About halfway down, the steps tilted and the perspective was all askew. Winnie went first. He hesitated at the twist. "I've done this before," he grunted, almost to himself. "I can do it." He stepped forward, started to stumble, and then stood straight — but tilted compared with Robert and company.
When Robert reached the threshold, he closed his eyes. The Epiphany default was to drop all overlays on "eyes-closed," so he was briefly immune to the visual trickery. He stepped forward — and there was no real tilt, just a simple turn!
Tommie came right after him. There was a big grin on his face. "Welcome to the Escher Wing!" he said. "The kids just eat this up." At the bottom of the stairs there was another ninety-degree turn. Parker said, "Okay, now we're walking back toward the building's utility core, only we have the feeling that we're still wandering through unending books."
Books ahead and behind, and off to the side, hidden in alleys. Books above, like chimneys disappearing in purple light. He could even see books below them, where rickety ladders seemed to drop off into the depths. If Robert looked at them with slightly averted vision, the lettering on the spines and covers gave back a blacklight glow, violet almost too deep to see, but very clear, with the Library of Congress codes cryptic and runelike. The books were the ghosts — or maybe the avatars — of what had been destroyed.
They made sounds, groaning, hissing, whispering. Conspiring. Deep in the alleyways, some of the books were in chains.
"Gotta watch out for Das Kapital ," said Rivera.
Robert saw one of the tomes — the word fits for once ! — pulling at its chains, the links ringing loudly on massive eyebolts.
"Yup, Dangerous Knowledge yearns to be free."
Some of the books must be real, touchy-feely props. The students in one alley were piling books together. They stood back and the texts nuzzled into each other in an orgy of napping pages. "So that's bibliographical synthesis?"
Rivera followed his gaze. "Er, yes. This started out as the scam Dean Blount said, something to endear the shredding project to the public. We represent books as near-living things, creatures that serve and bewitch their readers. Terry Pratchett and then Jerzy Hacek have been playing on that theme for years. But we really didn't appreciate the power of it all. We have some of the best Hacek belief circles helping with this. Every database action has a physical representation here, just as in Hacek's Library Militant stories. Most of our users think this is better than standard reference software."
Winnie looked back at them. He had gotten far enough ahead that he seemed foreshortened, as if they were seeing him through a telescope at some great distance. He waved in disgust. "That's the betrayal, Carlos. You librarians don't approve of the shredding, but look what you've done. These kids will lose all respect for the permanent record of the human heritage."
Tommie Parker was standing behind Robert. He muttered gleefully, "Winnie, the kids had already lost all respect."
Rivera looked down. "I'm sorry, Dean Blount. It's the shredding that's evil, not the digitizing. For the first time in their lives, our students have modern access to premillennium knowledge." He waved at the students down in the alley. "And it's not just here. You can reach the library from the net, just minus the touchy-feely gimmicks. Huertas is allowing limited access without charge, even during his monopoly period. This is just the first-pass digitization, and only HB through HX, but we've had more hits on our premillennium holdings in the last week than we had in the last four years. And much of the new business is from faculty!"
"Hypocritical bastards," said Winnie.
Robert looked at the students in their alcove. The sex-between-books had ended, but now the books floated in the air over the students' heads and the pages sang out in tiny voices to volumes still unsearched. Metaphor incarnate .