Millie and I wanted all of them pretty clear, and Rose wanted all of them black, so nobody could stare at her and maybe make finger signs. Rose was a redhead, ghost-pale and slender only at the waist; she looked to be about twenty. How old she was really I have no idea. (With reclones like the three of us you can never know for sure, because what if we’re not telling you the truth?) Millie looked about fifty, and my guess was thirty or forty. Rose? Who the hell knew? She had to have a shelf right next to the floor, meaning a Number One because she said men—meaning me—would try to look up her skirt if she had to climb a ladder. Listening to her argue about that with the ’bots and cry at the librarians, I got to where I would have tried it just to keep her happy. If you’ve been wondering why Millie called Rose a troublemaker, now you know.
So three troublemakers on their way to Continental, or at least that’s what we thought. Did we make lots of trouble for each other on the truck? You bet we did! If I was to tell you all about it, all the loud two-way quarrels and all the louder three-way arguments, you’d laugh yourself sick.
Here’s an example. Millie wanted nice clear windows so she could reread her own cookbooks and look through the old magazines for a recipe column she had written way back when.
I wanted them clear, too. For me it was because I wanted to see out. Sure, I liked seeing the wide, wintry plain, the pine woods full of flying snow, and all the icy rivers and haunted ruins just like other people; but there was more to it than that. When you feel like you’ve spent your whole life in the Twenty-first Century and all of a sudden you get reprinted and find yourself up where I did, you can’t help trying to get your bearings—or anyhow I can’t. I’ve never been able to figure out where Saint Louis used to be; but I’m pretty sure the big snowcapped mountains Arabella and I had flown over to look at one time used to be the Rockies. I had a notion that Spice Grove would have been somewhere in Nebraska, but that could have been wrong. It could have been in the Dakotas instead, or even someplace up around Winnipeg.
Anyway, the mountains were the best part. The worst part was the old-time city, with torn-up streets branching off the highway, a few ragged kids, and a lot of empty buildings. I liked those every bit as much as Rose liked Millie’s cookbooks.
So the argument was two against one, and so easy I felt kind of guilty about it. When it was over Rose sat on her bunk with a blanket covering her lap and those long, smooth legs, put her hands over her tits, and pouted; and Millie and I felt bad enough to turn the window across from her full dark. The other three we left as clear as notint.
Every so often I tried to quiz Millie about Niagara, where it was and why they called it that, and how it had gotten to be the capital of the continent. She did not know much more than I did, but she reminded me that the falls move. Falls are really just water pouring over a cliff, and as time passes they wear away their cliff so that stones and gravel fall down it with the water. Rock by rock, the falls creep upstream.
So that was bad and there was more. In my time, only a little bit of the water really poured over the falls at Niagara; the rest was tapped off to drive turbines and generate electricity. All that was nuclear now, so there would be a lot more water going over, enough to change things pretty fast. Was this Niagara what we called Niagara Falls, New York, back when I was born? Or else Niagara Falls, Canada? Was it both? Maybe, but maybe not. So when I got a good opening I tried asking Millie a whole bunch of questions, starting with, “Why do you think they want us?”
That first one made her laugh. “You think they want us just because they’re getting us?”
I held up my orange tag. “Interlibrary loan, right? They must have asked for us.”
“They didn’t. That’s what my source said.”
That raised my eyebrows. “It sounds like you’ve been talking to a librarian. I’ll keep quiet about it, and you’d better keep quiet, too.”
“Suppose I told you that a bunch of us, six reference reclones and four librarians, sit around together to sew a quilt, Ern? You know, in Handicrafts after the rest of you have turned in. Naturally we chat while we stitch. Want to look at the place where I stuck my finger with the needle last night? I jumped when Eloise told me that Continental was desperate to get me, and that’s when I stabbed myself. I was attempting suicide.”
She was kidding about the suicide and desperation. I knew it, and she knew I knew it; so I said, “They didn’t ask for us?”
Rose looked up. “They don’t need us and wouldn’t want us. Continental has dozens of copies of everybody.”
“Spice Grove would like to get rid of us,” Millie said. “I told you that.”
“Sure. They’d burn us tomorrow if they had the guts. We’re troublemakers.”
“Only Spice Grove can’t do that, because there would be too many questions. You were right about me—I get checked out almost as much as I’d like to be, just to start with. There would be pressure to get another copy, maybe quite a lot of it.”
I nodded.
“Rose not as much. For her it’s five or six times a year, I think. But still…” She let it hang.
“Sure. That’s quite a bit more than I do.”
“It is, but that girl who checks you out every year has connections and a ton of money. Besides, she used to be a teacher here.”
She meant Colette Coldbrook. I said, “Sure, but it was in a private school.”
“In a posh prep school. That gives her more pull, not less. She’d have questions, her influential friends would have questions, and what could they say?”
I had thought of something. “If they wanted to get rid of us, they wouldn’t have to burn us. They could just offer all three of us for sale.”
“It might be months before we sold, Ern; and one or two of us might never sell at any price. This works right away. We’re gone, aren’t we?” Millie took a deep breath.
I could see she was afraid the driver would overhear her. There was a gadget in our trailer that we could switch on anytime we wanted to talk to him. We kept it turned off, but did the OFF position really prevent him from overhearing what we said? For all we knew it could be on all the time. I doubted that he would worry a lot about what three reclones were saying (or even four, because there were four bunks), but you never know. Somebody with a lot of clout might want him to be worried about it and write a report after the run.
“What they’re doing now gets rid of us for a while, and if they’re lucky it will get rid of us forever. They tag us for interlibrary loan and send us off to Continental. Spice Grove has less than twenty reclones.”
I nodded. Before we left there had been eighteen.
“Continental will have hundreds. Thousands, maybe. I’ve no idea what its budget is, but it must be incredible. Half a billion a year or even more. So what do they care about three more reclones, three reclones they don’t even have to pay for? From what I’ve heard, there are a hundred million titles on Continental’s shelves. The bureaucracy must be enormous.”
Millie warmed to her subject. “It could be years before somebody realizes that they never asked for us and sends us back. Years or decades, even though they’ve probably got dozens and dozens of copies of all three of us already.”