Rainbows End (24 page)

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: Hey! I’ve lost the view!

Juan — > Lena, Miri, Xiu: The sixth floor isn’t publicly searchable today. Miri — > Juan, Lena, Xiu: Maybe if I just ask Robert for forwarding.

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.’”

Robert noticed that Tommie Parker was watching with a faint smile. “So you do have a plan?” “I ain’t saying nothing while Sharif is here.” Winnie sighed. “Okay, Tommie. Go ahead and shut him down.”

Sharif’s rosy glow moved a little ways out from the stacks. “It’s all right. I don’t want to be a prob — ” The glow vanished.

 

Tommie looked up from his laptop. “He’s gone.
And
I’ve deadzoned the sixth floor.” He pointed at an LED on the edge of his ancient-looking laptop.

 

Robert remembered some of Bob’s claims: “Even the Homeland Security hardware?” “Don’t tell, Robert.” He patted his computer. “Genuine Paraguayan inside, shipped just before they shut the fabs down.” He gave them a shifty grin. “Now it’s just us, unless one of you is wearing dirty panties.” Blount looked pointedly at Robert. “Or unless one of us is a fink.”

 

Robert sighed. “This isn’t Stanford, Winston.” But what if the Mysterious Stranger were actually a cop? That should have occurred to him before. He pushed the thought away. “So what’s your plan?”

“We’ve been reading the
Economist
,” said Rivera. “Huertas International is on shaky financial ground. Delays here at UCSD could force him to dump the whole project.” He stared at Robert through his thick spectacles. You could see images flickering around in the things.

“Even though they’ve shredded almost everything here?”

”
Duì
.” The young man leaned forward, and his T-shirt showed a torrent of worried faces. “It’s like this. The Librareome Project isn’t just the video capture of premillennium books. It’s not just the digitization. It goes beyond Google and company. Huertas intends to combine all classical knowledge into a single, object-situational database with a transparent fee structure.”

Object-situational database? This was beyond Robert’s newfound nerdliness. He stared over Rivera’s head, trying to look up the term. Nothing was coming back. Tommie’s deadzone, yeah.

Rivera took his stare as disbelief. “It’s really not that much data, Dr. Gu. A few petabytes. The main thing is that it’s very heterogeneous compared to similar-size datasets in most applications.” “Of course. Your point?” From the corner of his eye, he saw a smile come to Winnie’s face. The guy knew Robert was blowing smoke.

“So,” Rivera continued, “the Huertas collection will contain almost all human knowledge up to about twenty years ago. All correlated and connected. It’s the reason Huertas is paying the State of California to let him commit this atrocity. Even the first rough compilation could be a gold mine. From the project start six weeks ago, Huertas International has a six-month monopoly on the Librareome they’re creating. That’s six months with sole access to real insight on the past. There are dozens of questions that such a resource might resolve: Who really ended the Intifada? Who is behind the London art forgeries? Where was the oil money really going in the latter part of the last century? Some answers will only interest obscure historical societies. But some will mean big bucks. And Huertas will have exclusive rights to this oracle for six months.”

“But he has to get the data put together,” said Winnie. “If Huertas loses a few weeks, there’ll be hundreds of organizations that decide they might as well wait till the monopoly runs out — when they can get an even more complete answer for free. It’s worse than that. Chinese Informagical has dibs on the British Museum and the British Library, using much better equipment than Huertas has. The Brits have shown more gumption than UCSD, but their digitization is due to begin any time now. If Huertas gets any further behind, he and the Chinese will be in a price war for the sale of first looks.”

“A regular death spiral!” Tommie’s amusement was without malice. He had always been fascinated by how things come apart. Robert remembered in the 1970 brush fires, teenaged Tommie had been out in East County, helping with communications — but also enjoying every minute of the disaster.

“So, unh…”
Why does the Stranger want me in on this
? Blount chuckled. “Confused, Robert?”

Back at Stanford, Winnie wouldn’t have dared such an open gibe, at least not after the first year. But now, the only comebacks Robert could imagine were adolescent sarcasm. So he replied mildly, “Yes, I’m still in the dark.”

Blount hesitated, sensing one of the old-Robert traps. “The point is that we’re talking about doing Huertas and the Librareome Project serious harm. We’re past legal recourse, so anything that depends on
delaying
the enemy must involve criminal behavior. Got it?”

“Yes. We really are conspirators.”
Rivera nodded. “And that by itself is a felony.”
Tommie laughed. “So what? I just subverted the DHS snoop layer! That’s a national-security rap.”

“I don’t care if we’re talking high treason!” said Robert.
If I can get back my song
. … “I mean, you know what a lover of books I am.”

The others nodded.
“So what
is
the plan?”
Blount gestured to Tommie. The little guy said, “Do you remember our underground hikes?” “In the 1970s? Yes, they were fun — in a brain-damaged way.”
Tommie’s grin broadened.
“You’re telling me the steam tunnels are still in use?”

“Yup. In the nineties that type of construction went out of style. There were lots of new buildings that weren’t connected. But then in the oughts, folks wanted Extremely High-Rate comms. And the bioscience people wanted automatic specimen transport. These guys had lots of money.”

“Even more so, nowadays,” said Carlos.

Tommie nodded. “NIR lasers are not for them. They want xlaser and graser gear, trillions of colors per path, and trillions of paths. Nowadays, the ‘steam tunnel’ network is not for power or heat. Now there are branches extending under Torrey Pines Road to Scripps and Salk. I hear you can walk out under the ocean a short ways, though heaven knows what they’re doing there. To the east, you can get into every one of the biotech labs.”

Suddenly, Robert saw why the Mysterious Stranger was interested in the Elder Cabal. Aloud, he said, “What does this have to do with the Librareome Project, Tommie?”

“Ah! Well, you know that Max Huertas made his fortune out of biotech. He owns some of the biggest labs in North America — including one just a few thousand feet northeast of us. It was easy for him to modify his genome software to support the Librareome. Okay, so he’s storing the shredda in vaults under the north side of campus.”

“And?”

“And he’s not
done
with them! The shredding got him plenty of images, but the coverage is not complete. He’s got to scan and rescan where there were problems in the first pass. Now if there weren’t this time limit, he’d be better just to wait till the next victim library goes up in shreds and use
that
for cross-checking, but he’s in a rush.”

“That storage is also part of the Huertas propaganda,” said Winnie.

 

“When they’re done with the rescans, the shredda will be ‘safely preserved in the Huertas vaults, for the sake of the archaeologists of future generations.’ Some of our faculty actually bought into that!” “Well,” said Rivera, “there’s a small amount of truth to the claim. The paper will last longer in cool nitrogen than it would on library shelves.”

Winnie waved his hand dismissively. “The point is, the books have been destroyed, and Huertas is going to destroy more libraries if he’s not stopped. Our plan is — ” He looked around, and seemed to realize that he was on the edge of prison time. “Our plan is to break into the steam tunnels and go to where Huertas is storing the shredda. Tommie has come up with a way to make that shredda unreadable.”

“What? We’re protesting the destruction of the library by destroying what’s left?”

 

“Just temporarily!” said Tommie. “I’ve found an incredible aerosol glue. Spray it on and the shredda will be like a huge chunk of particle-board. But after a few months, the glue will just sublimate away.”

Rivera was nodding. “So we are not making things worse. I wouldn’t be here if I thought we were wrecking what’s left of the books. Huertas’s scheme is unnecessary brutality, trying to grab everything when a slower approach would be just as good. Maybe we can derail him long enough so that the old-time book-friendly digitizers can catch up — and no more libraries will be wrecked.” Now his T-shirt was touting the American Library Association.