Chthon (16 page)

Aton took the book but did not open it. “I can’t use this.”

“You don’t know Galactic Coordinates? I thought you were a spaceman. That system is pre-§. Centuries old. But there are always the maps.”

“I know the system. But I don’t think the planet I want is listed here.”

“Of course not. These are stars. You have to use the subsector ephemerides for the planetary orbits. But why bother? They’ll message the information to you when you pull into the system.”

“This is a proscribed planet,” Aton said sourly.

Partner looked at him again, pupils momentarily colorless as the lenses shifted. “You do have a problem. You know where we’ll have to go first.”

Aton knew.

Eleven

Earth: home of humanity and of its legends for ten thousand times the time that race had been in space, and more; whose population thrust forth a hundred million human bodies to space in each sidereal year, and did not diminish—until the catastrophic chill imposed
de facto
quarantine upon the mother world. One month—to wipe out forty per cent of all its inhabitants, to bring the fusion bombs necessary to cremate the mountainous offal in the wake of that brief siege. Even so, Earth retained a population more massive than the rest of its empire combined, and still her lands and seas and atmosphere were crowded with carpets of living flesh.

Not even the chill could solve this problem.

But Earth had power. She was the irrevocable queen of a billion cubic parsecs of space, not through military, economic, or moral force, but through her surpassing knowledge. Here was technology beyond the rustic imagination of the colony worlds. Here was accumulated information of such detail and range that storage and referencing alone usurped the facilities of a small continent. Here was the Sector Library.

Computers organized and sorted the unthinkable complex, delivering any information known to man, to any party, in moments. A man had only to enter a booth and make known his desire.

Unless it was proscribed.

But there were the “stacks”—comprehensive files of printed documentation, of interest to hardly one seeker in a thousand, but sustained by ancient custom in the face of rising opposition. Some year the renewed pressure of population would abolish this monstrous relic. Meanwhile, it endured. Dedicated ancients maintained the archives in leisurely exactitude, and interest was the sole criterion for admission. Earth was after all free, and upheld the right of every person to search for knowledge and to discover as much as determination and ingenuity could provide. And the information was there, all of it—if the seeker could find it. The very awkwardness of the stacks created this advantage: the archives were far too cumbersome to purge selectively. They could not be expurgated.

The stacks occupied cubic miles of space. Never had Aton encountered an enclosure of such dimension: two hundred tiers of long, low hallways, each lined from floor to ceiling on either side with thick volumes, each extending so far into the distance that the walls seemed to meet. At regular intervals right-angled crosswalks cut off segments, making intermittent alternate passages whose staccato lengths also pressed into distant closure. Aton imagined that he could see the ponderous curve of the planet in the level flooring, and that it was the horizon that terminated the halls.

Chthon itself lost its novelty within these passages. Ever did the works of nature, he thought, bow before the works of man.

But how to start? Every volume looked the size of
LOE
—forty million words of print. Every shelf was tightly packed, with only occasional blanks: three books to the foot, six shelves to the wall, two walls to the hall. A ten-foot section of one hall would contain 360 books—more than fourteen billion words.

Aton was not a rapid reader in either Galactic or English. A solid day of intensive effort would get him through no more than a tiny fraction of a single volume. He would be here for decades, merely finishing what was in sight, no matter how he rushed. If he skimmed, he would run the risk of missing a vital clue.

He began to understand why these files were not restricted. Only by the wildest of blunders could a person come across dangerous information—if he recognized it when he saw it. Only through the computer could the library be used effectively.

Partner, always at his elbow, had been studying him. “You’ve never see a library before?”

“I thought I had.” But there had been librarians who listened to the problem and flounced off to generate a collection of books in some undefined manner. Never—this.

“Accept some advice, then. You do not visit the stacks to
read
, any more than you go to space to look at a vacuum. You research. You set up coordinates and adjust your course (I’m talking about space at the moment) and ignore what doesn’t concern you. You can’t locate your planet by blind reading here any more than you could do it by looking out the port at sublight to find it in space.

“First you need an index, a
library
index. You need to locate the specific section of the library you want, then the specific book. Right now you don’t even know where you are, although I thought for a while your wanderings had purpose. Take out a book. Look at it.”

Dumbly, Aton obeyed. “This is an analysis of the Oedipus complex,” he said. “A collection of essays on it.” He paused. “Why, the entire book is filled with alternate interpretations. Forty million—”

“And probably not one of those people really understands it,” Partner said, too sharply. “
We
certainly don’t. You let your wandering feet lead you to a section and a book that has no possible relevance to the riddle you have to solve. What did you think you were doing?”

“I suppose it
was
futile,” Aton said absently. He put the book back, his hand seeming somehow reluctant to let it go.

A melodious chord sounded, surprising him, A colored bulb set between shelves began to flash intermittently. “Pay attention to what you’re doing!” Partner snapped. “That’s the wrong place.”

Aton quickly withdrew the book and found the correct slot. The alarms subsided, but already footsteps beat their heavy tread nearby. Labored breathing paced that sound.

“What’s the matter with you now?”

Aton brought himself under control. “Something—something terrible, just then. A memory.” His face regained its color. “I don’t… seem to be myself, right now.” His whole body was shaking.

A fat, bearded man turned the corner. He wore the emblematic cap of the Sector Library, numbered 14. “Having a little trouble, gentlemen?” There was a curious quality about his accent. Then Aton realized what it was: native Earth English spoken by a man born to it.

“A mistake,” Partner replied. “Sorry to bother you.”

The attendant stayed, obviously not intending to trust any more books to their unsupervised carelessness. He was old, the wrinkles showing through the corpulent mounds of his cheeks, and the backs of his pallid hands were landscapes. “I may help you?”

“Yes,” Aton said. “I’m looking for a planet.”

“In a library?”

Aton smiled dutifully. “Its name is Minion.” Would the man react?

Caretaker 14 lifted his smooth beard thoughtfully. “Mignon. That would be one of the flower planets.”

“I don’t think so,” Aton said, but he looked upon the man with a certain dawning respect. There
was
a planet of Mignon; he had seen it in the ephemerides when he searched for the other. All the planets of that system had been named for flowers.

“Ah—I knew the term was familiar. Did you know that our standard typeface is Minion? Seven point print, about ten lines to the inch—”

Aton shook his head in negation. “This is a planet. An inhabited one. But I don’t know the name of its primary.”

“We’ll find it. The index, the Cyclopaedia, the ephemerides—oh, never fear, we’ll find it!” Number 14 spoke with subdued excitement and confidence, as though he had forgotten the origin of the request. It had become his own problem, and he would not be satisfied until he ran it down. Aton smiled at the man’s simplicity. “Proscribed, of course?” Aton frowned at the man’s insight.

“It may be. Frankly, I had heard about it, but didn’t seem to find it in the regular lists—”

“Yes. And you could not afford to use the computer, because it records all dubious requests. We get a number of similar cases. But don’t be concerned. Stack personnel are harmless and confidential. Generally.”

Was the man requesting a bribe for silence? Or trying to pry additional information to sate his curiosity? What were his terms? They followed him down interminable passages, ill at ease.

They arrived at somewhat wider halls. Lining one wall was a series of booths, each with a central table and bench. Number 14 settled them in one and began rounding up references.

Aton looked at Partner. “Can we trust him?” his glance inquired. “We have to,” Partner’s expression replied.

Number 14 returned with an armful of books and a small box. He piled them all on the table. “You have to approach a proscribed planet—don’t be alarmed, these booths are sealed private—deviously,” he said cheerfully. The primary has to be listed, of course, since you can hardly hide a star by ignoring it, but there may not be much evidence to link it to the planet you want. Now here we have the index of all the stars in the Earth Sector. If the sun we want is in it—and we’ll have to assume that it is, because there are a hundred thousand sectors in the galaxy, most of them impossibly alien—we can be certain that it is listed here. This reference does not indicate whether there are habitable planets, but they are not hard to spot: the early explorers named the habitables and let numbers do for the others. Unless they had a special interest in the system, in which case they named them all. But the point is that
all
inhabited planets are named, even though not all named planets are habitable. Are you with me so far?”

Aton and Partner nodded. Had this man
ever
appeared ignorant or naïve?

“Comes from a lifetime of spot researching,” 14 said in answer to the unspoken comment. “A good library assistant can locate things even the computer balks at.” He smiled, to show that this was a slight exaggeration, and fiddled with the box. It glowed, and the end wall lighted. “I’m going to project a sector map,” he said. “You are familiar with the type, of course—white for the front stars, red shift for the distant ones? And you’ve heard the joke about the color-blind navigator? Too bad. And you understand that only the established navigational beacons can be shown in such a comprehensive illustration. We’ll get on to the detail maps in a moment.” He touched a plate, and intricate networks appeared, linking the stars in curious patterns. Aton was reminded painfully of the Xest painting. Perhaps that was the origin of Xest art.

“This is an overlay showing the routes of exploration,” 14 said. “It does not occur to most people that all inhabited planets have to be discovered by someone, in order to get that way. We have records of all the early explorations. Now we can get a fair idea of the placement of your planet if you will answer a few questions. Is it settled?”

“Yes,” Aton said, fascinated by the dispatch with which the search was moving at last. “For several centuries, I think.”

“Good. That eliminates the recent colonies, which far outnumber the established ones.” The overlay changed and the majority of the threaded patterns disappeared. “This sets the limit at §100—much less complicated, as you see. By using this outline, we can reduce our list of prospects to several thousand. Do you have any navigational data at all?”

“No. It could be anywhere.”

“It can only be where it
is
. Are the natives modified?”

“They must be. At least, the women have a reputation—”

“Ah. This reduces the number again. Do you happen to know
why
it is proscribed?”

“Only the legend. The women are reported to be sirens that live forever. It is said to be—to be death to love one.”

“Ah,” 14 said, uncomfortably alert. “You love one of these sirens. I hope for your sake that the legend is not true. Even a normal woman is bad enough. But we shall assume that genetic engineering has granted the inhabitants longevity. Which certainly could be grounds for proscription. Earth is overpopulated, even now, and she long since decreed that colonization should be by export from the home planet; she deplores natural increase in population through longevity.”

“Earth can’t dictate—” Partner began. He had been quietly studying the projection.

Number 14 shrugged. “Have it your way. But the planet is out of circulation nevertheless. And this narrows the range further, because longevity is post-§ by about fifty years. It took a score more before it became commercially feasible—bad side effects, you know—and ten years after that the law cracked down. Or whatever unofficial euphemism did, since as you point out. Earth cannot dictate.”

“Ten years,” Partner said. “§70 to §80.”

The overlay changed again, and now the map enlarged and the routes were replaced by bright colony indicators. “Modified colonies for that period are few. A mere hundred or so, as you can see. We could look each of them up in the index now, if we could be certain that it listed all the planets. But planets, unfortunately, are not the navigational hazards that stars are. I think our time would be wasted.”

“There is no colony record?”

“Not for proscribed efforts. They simply aren’t mentioned, at least not by name, and not in the up-to-date volumes. We simply haven’t the space to preserve annual publications; the old books that predate proscription would list your planet, but they were thrown out centuries ago. We could run it down by elimination—but if there is more than one proscribed planet hidden in the list, we could not be certain which one is yours.”

Partner was busy with the index. “Get me the sector Cyclopaedia volume covering ‘Point’,” he said.

” ‘Point?’ As you say,” 14 agreed. “But the Cyclop’ doesn’t list stars.”

In a moment they were poring over the text. ” ‘Point, Jonathan R., stellar scout, §41-154,’ ” Partner read. “That should be our man.”