Alexandrian Librarians Read online

  “What is it with these crazy vulk ers?” I grumbled angrily as I rechecked my envirosafe generator and waited for the lock to cycle through. First Captain Chandaveda acts more like she’s in the middle of a tax audit than an emergency, and now the over-educated yozos I’m supposed to rescue don’t even bother to show up. Was it something wrong with the Gibbon’s air?

  “Good afternoon, First Officer Ornish,” Shelby greeted me when the lock finally opened and I stepped out onto K’leven’s cold, inhospitable surface. “It is indeed a pleasure to see you again.”

  I wasn’t in the mood to swap pleasantries. “Where the hell is everybody?” I demanded.

  The aidroid smiled, impervious to my obvious pique. “Why, they’re inside the vault, of course.”

  I bit back the urge to yell that I wasn’t an idiot and knew there wasn’t anywhere else for them to be in this godforsaken place! “Why aren’t they ready to go?” I asked, trying for brusque but sounding more like my shorts were in a swiftly tightening slipknot.

  “Let me assure you that preparations are well under way.” Shelby gestured toward the tunnel mouth with a blue-steel hand. “If you would accompany me, I’ll take you to Dr. Xan.”

  I nervously looked up at the ghostly disc of K’leven’s moon, back inside the shuttle airlock, then at the aidroid. “Isn’t he coming out?”

  “Please,” he said, starting toward the tunnel mouth. “He is expecting you.”

  I followed after, grinding my teeth together and thinking that at least somebody would get what they expected.

  “Nice tunnel, Shelby,” I said to break the uneasy silence of the last few minutes, my voice echoing eerily along the rock-walled tube. The grade was gentle, but there was no mistaking that we were going down—and still farther away from the shuttle. If it hadn’t been for Shelby’s taglite the darkness would have been absolute.

  “Why thank you,” the aidroid replied, sounding pleased. “The newest generation of matter compactors are said to be faster, but I find that the old Mark Threes do just as good a job with considerably more modest power requirements. Now the Mark Fours draw—”

  “How much farther is it?” I asked to keep him from going on to tell me everything I ever wanted to know about matter compactors but was afraid to ask for fear of a lecture just like the one he was more than willing to give me.

  “Not far. Just a bit over 221 meters.”

  “They are getting ready to evacuate, aren’t they?”

  “Rest assured, preparations are well under way.”

  We were just passing through the templock set up between the tunnel and the vault when I got this nagging feeling that he hadn’t quite answered the question I’d asked. But I passed it off as just nerves.

  Dr. Xan looked up from the thinga-magrubby he was examining, chubby cheeks dimpling as he smiled. “Ah, there you are, Ornish! So glad you’re getting a chance to see our little treasure trove.” He surveyed his subterranean kingdom proudly. “Isn’t it remarkable?”

  Hoverlites drifting near the domed ceiling three meters above us cast a not particularly flattering light across the alleged treasure trove. The inside of the vault was a roughly thirty-meter square box made out of some sort of thick, mold-green concrete-like stuff. Either the effects of the earlier bombardments had been felt even this far underground, or the concept of level floors wasn’t one the K’leven had come up with before they turned each other to vaporized bisque, because the surface under my feet sloped slightly toward one corner.

  There was ton after ton of stuff in there, all in piles and heaps and drifts; shelving must have been another undiscovered concept. The only things I could see which appeared to have even the slightest intrinsic value were pieces of the equipment the Prezzies had brought with them, and most of that looked like it belonged in the scrapyard. For instance the areola tor which was keeping the air inside the vault breathable chuffed and wheezed as it did its work. Some of its exposed parts were repaired with tape and wire.

  My first inclination was to tell him it looked like the back room from Hell’s Thrift Shop. Instead I let his question pass, facing him with my shoulders back and what I hoped was a properly stern look on my face.

  “Dr. Xan,” I said, shooting for the authoritative tone of a ship’s first officer, “You and your people must evacuate this place immediately.” I’m afraid it came out sounding ever so slightly desperate, but at least I hadn’t gone to my knees and begged, an option I was considering.

  “Don’t worry, young man,” he said with a fatherly smile. “We are quite cognizant of the precarious nature of our situation. There are just a few last-minute tasks to be seen to, mostly a matter of completing the recordings we want to go on the shuttle.”

  “But this place is going to get smutched in—”

  “We are well aware of the time constraints. Serafina has seen to that. If you wish to hefp expedite the process, you might assist Clotilde.” He gave me an oddly conspirational smile. “You might even find what she is doing somewhat interesting.”

  “What is it?” I asked unhappily, looking around for her.

  Tarps had been used to create several work areas. We were in one, the Fritlanders were busy in the one nearest to where we stood. He pointed to another over in the far corner. “Why don’t you go ask her?”

  As I’ve mentioned once or twice, the Gibbon wasn’t exactly a state-of-the-art starship. It had taken 48.6 days for her sluggish old stardriver unit to carry us the measly 579 light-years from Sol to K’leven. That included twelve two-hour dropouts back into real-space to let her cranky old statex-citers calm down. We had learned about dropouts as an emergency procedure at the Academy, but plugging them into the flight-plan ahead of time the way Captain Chandaveda had done was something definitely not written into the curriculum.

  So it was a rather long trip, made longer by my knowledge of how much faster a decent ship could have covered the distance. By the end of my first week I was bored out of my skull. For the first few days, when I wasn’t standing watch—my orders were that if something went wrong I was to yell for help and for Shiva’s sake not touch anything!—or attending to my other duties, I went to the ship’s salon and tried to make conversation with our Prezzie passengers.

  Dr. Fu Xavier Xan was a nice man, and friendly in his way, but he spent most of his time communing with his percomp. Just once I asked what he was reading. Five hours later my head was literally spinning from the highly compressed three credit course I’d just been given on “rotational kak-istodemocracy,” a political system practiced by a race which had died out some half million years before I had been dumb enough to ask my question. After that I just left him to his reading.

  The tall, spindle-limbed T’thiggan who insisted that everyone just call him Elvis spent most of her time (T’thiggan’s are both) sprawled in a recliner, custom headphones over all four ears and his eyes rolled back in her head, listening raptly to presec-ondmill Earth music. Sometimes he sang along. Her voice was actually quite good, if a little strange. While I was tempted to ask what Lew-weeee lew-eye, whoa-ho meant, I had learned my lesson with Dr. Xan.

  Shelby spent most of his time plugged directly into the Gibbon’s systems, fighting simulated wars with the ship’s main computer. We could always tell when the ship was losing because it either overcooked our meals or served them still half-frozen. Shelby was quite the general, which meant that we ate badly most of the time. Nobody complained, they just offered tactical advice.

  The Fritlanders, Doctors Lars and Lessie, were a husband and wife team of linguists who had been together for so long that they had begun to look like each other. Lessie was the one with the shorter hair and bigger bust-line. They spent most of their time locked in their stateroom, and had remarkably little to say when they did come out. According to Dr. Xan they were translating a Langoozyle sex manual; an over thirty million entry compilation of every sex act performed by every member of that race over a one-year period. The noises that came from their room someti
mes suggested that parts of it might have been pretty hot stuff.

  Completing this scholarly sextet was the most junior member of the expedition. Dr. Clotilde Miskovitch was her name, she was about my age, and the reason why by the end of the second week of our voyage, I was spending most of my spare time hiding in my compartment with the door locked.

  The Prezzies were a bookish lot. Clotilde was built a little like one; kind of squarish and thick-bodied, a little frayed at the corners, and of course containing one hell of a lot of words.

  For the first few days she scarcely spoke to me. She just sort of observed me with an intensity which made me wonder if she was considering dissection as a route to further knowledge. Then suddenly about seven days out she turned up in the salon dressed to kill—or at least cause eye damage-wearing quite a bit of inexpertly applied makeup and even more perfume. She cornered me in a lounger, hung her modest, heavily fragranced breasts a few inches from my nose and began her studied seduction.

  Now I found Clotilde nice enough, and actually kind of cute in a sturdy, foursquare, overly bookish sort of way. The problem was, her idea of flirting was to combine her somewhat shaky concept of feminine charm and her insanely overdeveloped intellectual skills and use them to try to bludgeon me into submission.

  Except for the little lovetacxes she kept sending, I’d had a few Clotilde-free days while she and the others were down on K’leven. Any overture I made now would probably be seen as proof that Cupid had done his work, beating me senseless into compliant mush—probably using a couple dozen textbooks, a dictionary, and an entire set of Encyclopedia Astrica. But if offering to be her slave was what it took to get them in gear and off that damn planet, then duty demanded that I take the risk.

  Back behind the tarp she was examining something that looked like a fossilized turd with an old Omniscan. I took a deep breath to brace myself, then went and told her that Dr. Xan had sent me to help.

  “That’s very sweet of you, Tephillip,” she cooed, batting her stubby eyelashes at me. My guard immediately went up. Big words meant an intellectual assualt, small words meant physical persuasion. The fact that her coverall’s front closure gaped open halfway to her navel gave me further warning.

  I shrugged uncomfortably. “I just want to get you folks out of here as fast as I can.”

  “Of course you do.” She looked around at the heaps of stuff surrounding us. “We really hate the thought of quitting so soon. We’ve hardly begun to scratch the surface of what’s here.”

  “I wouldn’t want any of this crap under my nails,” I joked.

  That got me a blank look, then a slightly condescending smile. “I see, you’re making a joke.”

  “So what are we supposed to be doing?” I asked to get things moving and reduce the risk she’d bust a gut laughing.

  She showed me the brown blob in her hand. “Quick-scanning these.”

  “What are they?”

  “Something between a holopix and a kinesthetic sculpture.”

  I figured she probably knew what she was talking about, but it still looked more like a coprolite than a Cornavecchi. “Not very, um, evocative.”

  That did make her laugh. “The archived material is encoded inside it, silly.”

  “So you crack them open, or what?”

  More hilarity. “Here, I’ll show you,” she said when she got control of herself, moving the object into the scanner’s field.

  A holo sprang into being before us. It showed two of the lobsterlike K’leven wrestling. She turned it slightly. The one on top got a little closer to pinning the one on bottom.

  “So what is this, like the sports page?”

  She gave me that dissecting look, only this time she was smiling. “Actually, we believe it to be a form of erotica. There seem to be both textual and musical components encoded in the artifact s structure. I’d hoped to crack them and make fully translated recordings, but now it looks like the best we can do is take static scans and hope all the information will be preserved so it can be decoded later.”

  I gave the holo a closer look. “So you’re saying that this could be part of their Astra Sutra?”

  “Or a pillow book, or a religious text, or a honeymoon memento, or a school sex manual. We’re a long way away from understanding these people well enough to put what we’ve learned so far into any social or historical context.” She handed the thing to me, her fingers lingering on mine.

  I put it back in the scanfield for one more look, turning it this way and that to see if the lobsters did anything familiar. They didn’t. I wondered if maybe this was just foreplay, and the steamy stuff came later. “Do you know how they, you know…”

  “Yes.” Clotilde took the lobster porn back again. “Now if you’ll get more of these from that pile over there and scan them, I’ll tag and register them. All right?”

  “Sure.” Then I remembered that we were about to get flattened—after actually forgetting it for a couple minutes. “But we have to hurry!”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, fondling my shoulder reassuringly, “We’ll be done when it’s time for the shuttle to go”

  Before long we got a rhythm going. It was kind of mindless work—or at least my end of it was—and after a bit my mind began to wander. I found myself wondering if handling all this sexy stuff was making her feel, well, sexy. My mind being what it was at that age, this and occasional glimpses of her cleavage led me to wondering what she’d be like in a clinch, and I’m sure you can guess which gutter my thoughts headed for after that.

  The upshot was that I was caught completely by surprise when Dr. Xan came bustling around the tarp. “Time to give me your scan data, Clo,” he said as he joined us.

  I took a look at the dat on my wrist, my insides congealing when I saw what time it was. “We should have left an hour ago! ” I moaned.

  “Don’t worry, Tephillip. We’re right on schedule,” she said as she powered down the Omniscan and pulled a per-mem from its innards. “Here’s my data, Xav.”

  “Excellent.” He took it from her and slipped it into the battered metal briefcase he carried. “Shall we away?” Nobody needed to ask me twice. I headed out, looking around when I got past the tarp curtain. “Where are the others?”

  Clotilde and Xan came up behind me. “They are already up at the shuttle,” he said. “Our preparations are complete.”

  “Come on, Tephillip, you can’t hang around here any longer,” Clotilde said, making it sound like I was the one who was keeping them waiting. She hooked my arm in hers and began towing me across the vault toward the tunnel.

  Dr. Xan followed behind, wearing the benevolent smile of a man who is finally seeing a chance to marry off his spinster daughter.

  Much to my relief the others were waiting by the shuttle. By the time we got there, I’d realized that I was going to have to take control of the situation and keep it.

  “Good,” I said, sounding brisk and businesslike. “Everyone’s present and accounted for.” I pointed at the already open airlock. “Now if you will all get aboard we can get out of here.” Nobody moved, and a funny look passed between them. The Fritlanders shared small, identical smiles. Elvis shuffled her big flat feet and sang something like can’t get no uh huh hum in a low voice. Shelby looked mildly embarrassed. Clotilde would not meet my gaze, her expression almost guilty.

  Dr. Xan laid a chubby hand on my arm. “We’re staying here, Tephillip.”

  It took me a couple seconds to make sense of what he’d said, and another couple to make myself believe I’d heard it. “You’re what?”

  “Staying here. Holding the fort, as it were.”

  “Are you vulking nuts?” I wailed.

  A calm smile. “I assure you that we are all in complete command of our faculties. Our decision is a logical one. Our consensus is that the vault has survived everything thrown at it so far, and should come through one more barrage unscathed.”

  I shook my head in denial, disbelief and desperation. “No way! I order yo
u to get on that shuttle right this instant!”

  “I am afraid that’s logistically impractical, if not outright impossible. It is already carrying its maximum payload in artifacts. Shelby is quite the master at calculating payloads, you know. Our combined mass added to what is already aboard would take the craft far over its operating limit.”

  I looked around. Sure enough the big covered piles were gone. Loaded on while Clotilde kept me distracted. I shot her a black look, and she at least had the decency to blush.

  Inside I went from panic to anger to outrage to a weird sort of calm in three seconds flat. When I looked at Xan I was smiling myself. “So let me see if I have this straight,” I said. “I’m supposed to rescue a bunch of junk—”

  “Artifacts,” he corrected with a sniff.

  “Artifacts, then. I save that stuff and leave all of you here to risk that vault surviving another barrage. The logic behind this being that if you and the vault survive, no harm done. If it doesn’t, at least all the incredibly valuable artifacts you put aboard instead of yourselves will be saved.”

  They all nodded in unison. “You have an excellent grasp of the situation,” Dr. Xan said approvingly. “You are a most perceptive young man.”

  “Thank you, sir.” My smile began showing less humor and more teeth. “I also happen to be a very pissed off young man, and I have an excellent grasp of one other thing.”

  “What might that be?”

  I pulled out the gun Captain Chandaveda had given me.

  “This,” I said.

  The response to this gambit wasn’t all I’d hoped it would be. Nobody looked particularly frightened—or even impressed. I knew the gun looked scary, so it had to be me.

  “You wouldn’t shoot us, Tephillip,” Clotilde informed me in the tone you would use on a backward child. “Now put that thing away before you hurt someone.”