“Got to have somebody to keep tabs on things,” said HG, though how, concretely, any report of this was to be accomplished, given the absence of any direct communications means, was unclear to The Librarian.
The Librarian did have a name: Colchis Barthes. A long-limbed man with silver hair, Barthes would appear quizzically unruffled and immaculately pressed in the midst of a hailstorm. Or, more appropriately, as the case might be here on New Utah, in the midst of a dust storm.
Barthes had distinguished himself as head of American Collections at the Imperial Library on Sparta. It was an odd sort of division within the library: The “Americas” were a grab-bag of worlds that shared only one common denominator: their names were derived from millennium-old names of states and territories on Earth.
Actually, this implied a second (and really, a defining) denominator: these worlds tended toward self-styled traditionalisms, linguistic revivals, and archaic information preservation societies. Hence The Librarian’s slow, patient rise through the ranks. He could read Old and Middle Anglic fluently, and was an adept at locating and recovering the flotsam of a previous information age. It was amazing what people had, figuratively speaking, tucked into their shoes across thirty generations; what church records they had defended with their lives; or what just plain turned up in long-forgotten archives. One entire city library had been miraculously preserved on a thousand-year-old flash drive, disguised (or designed?) as a piece of jewelry. Of course, no machine now existed that could decode the thing, but that’s where Colchis came into it.
As the home world of the Imperial line, New Washington had naturally been of special collector interest, and that is where Barthes had earned his reputation. After the Imperial Restoration, interest also surged in archival recovery on New Chicago—his first assignment in the Trans-Coal Sack sector. Naturally, that work done, he’d been handy, so it seemed useful that he be assigned to the second New Utah accession mission.
But New Utah was a far cry from his previous patrician career postings. He had, of course, been assigned to a Cultural Attaché here or there several times during his younger years, but always during less interesting times. He had enjoyed rambling through street markets and media stalls, rifling through junk and stumbling upon entire collections turned out of some grandmother’s locker.
To his credit, he was appalled at the state in which he’d found New Utah’s (well, Saint George’s) Zion University library. He stood, hand pressed to his face in horror, before the melted wreckage of one Scriptorium—Scriptorium!—Actual, hand-lettered manuscripts, pre-dating First Empire!—now reduced to a gutted, ash-filled shell, inhabited by mangy dogs.
Three small boys appeared with rocks. They pelted the dogs. His guide pointed to what had been: There was the melted slag of a stained glass wall that had once soared above the foyer, casting flower fields of light on the reading benches on every floor. There was where the genealogical archives had stood: the papers, diaries, notes and bibles that hung flesh on the bare bones of the begats. There had been an alcove, where the notes and diaries and unfinished research plans of retired and deceased professors had been stored. Colchis stood aghast, contemplating a massive charred beam, a double-hand span wide to a side, adze-marks preserved in charcoal. It was all that remained of the timbered ceiling. He reached out and shoved it with his foot. Unsteady on its bed of rubble, it rolled lazily over.
Colchis scuffed absent-mindedly through the incongruously unburned stripe of shattered brick and mortar that had been insulated by the timber. Clearly, the fireball had exploded though from the floor above, collapsing the ceiling before consuming all below it. He traced the grey stripe, amazed at the intensity of heat that had reduced everything else around it to white ash. Then he stopped. A charred edge poked through the wrack. Expecting a flake; a fragment, he was surprised when a light tug failed to dislodge it. He brushed away the fist-deep overburden. The charred edge belonged to a clipped sheaf of hand-written paper, miraculously preserved.
It was a conference paper, a little over eighty years old. Something to do with the biology of something called a Swenson’s Ape. Sad, that of all the things that might have been saved, all that remained of the vast collection was a random draft of a minor bit of academic arcana. There was no name on it, just the date.
“Any idea who wrote this?” He showed the title to his guide.
The student shrugged. “Some dead professor or other. Hard to know now. The catalogue went up with the library. You might check with the Temple archivist. Some of our collections were backed up there. Not all of them.”
Barthes handed her the paper. She shrugged again, then swiveled, hands out, to take in the ruin. “If you’re going to the Temple, you might as well hang onto it. I have nowhere to put it. Maybe they can find a related file.”
A week passed before Barthes thought of the paper again. The reconstruction effort itself had been all-consuming. It wasn’t just that New Utah had a different language and business culture for all things informatic (which it did). It was not just that it had its own mature bureaucratic system, accounting methods, and paperwork (there were bitstreams of that, too). The biggest impediment was that it was clearly a post-war reconstruction zone.
He couldn’t just pop in a ‘tooth and call anyone, because the dish system still didn’t work, and anyway most people didn’t have them. He couldn’t just set an appointment, because that would tell the assassins (yes, he discovered, there were assassins) exactly the time and place to murder whomever he was meeting. So he had to just show up, and hope that the office he was visiting was open, and that whomever he needed was there.
When he did that, traffic was utterly unpredictable. Whenever the TCM, private security teams, or a True Church VIP was moving (unannounced of course), they closed half the roads through the city, turning freeways into parking lots. About half the time—and an unpredictable half of the time—offices were just closed. Whenever there was a big security alert, which happened in unpredictable clusters, everything just shut down. At Zion University, there were no summer classes, so to save salary and electricity the campus was closed. If contractors showed up, they were turned away three times out of four, for lack of guides.
And the big True Church construction contractors and projects—Titan-Van Zandt, Tumbridge, Orcutt Land and Mining—were sucking the city dry of qualified managers. There was just a lot more money to be made working for them than for one stray Librarian. So there might have been plenty of workmen, but there were few to direct them, and even fewer to manage routine back office matters like invoicing.
Then there was the 130-degree heat. That was not an exaggeration. The city electricity cycled in two-hour on, (hopefully only) four-hour off increments, on an unpredictable schedule. Usually it cycled off-phase, which meant that it wouldn't actually run many appliances, like air conditioners, and it fried computational electronics. So, everyone sweated through the night and arrived to work exhausted. There were backup generators, but in Saint George most of those were True-Church contracted, meaning that they ran on fuel cells, not solar, and the hydrogen extractors down on the coast were only operating at about twenty percent capacity. You couldn’t legally fill fuel cylinders (to prevent black marketing), so to refuel the cells you had to wait in line, fill a FLIVR, drive it home, and in a bloody dangerous operation siphon the fuel out of the FLIVR’s tank and into the generator’s.
Colchis was buffered from this somewhat at his hotel—they managed to keep the air conditioning going some of the time, so his room temperature at night stayed down to around 90 degrees, which was livable with a fan—but the people working for him did not have that luxury. Compared to those unpredictabilities, sorting through a budget variance felt pretty minor, and tracking down the long-dead author of a paper presented at a Xenobiology plenary session was nowhere on his charts.
Lying on his bed one night, spread-eagled to enjoy the full cooling effects of his fan, Barthes glanced again at the title page. It was dated 2867, for a conference somewhere in New Caledonia. He amended his assessment. For a paper never even presented at a conference. That was the year of the True Church uprising on Maxroy’s Purchase. That’s when its newly-hatched military wing had burned and looted cities across that planet, destroyed their churches, withdrawn its Temple to Glacier Valley, proclaimed itself primate, transported thousands into exile, and established its Security Zone on New Utah.