I said, “A couple dozen of you, anyway.”
“And dozens and dozens of me,” Rose put in.
No way was I sure of that and I doubt that Rose was either, but I said, “Right. One hell of a lot of you both.” Anything to keep the peace.
Outside our trailer, snowbanks, leafless trees, and snow-covered ruins—plus fully humans wearing what were probably heated hats and mufflers—flashed by. Especially leafless trees. There were a heck of a lot more trees than fully humans and their farmhouses put together. I had a good many more questions for Millie; but they were not all that interesting, my questions or her answers either. I’ll skip those.
Miles, kilometers, and furlongs down that lonely, winding road our truck finally pulled in someplace for the night. Stopping for the night meant supper for everybody and a nice warm room close by for the driver. As I may have mentioned, I still had quite a bit of the money I’d taken from Colette Coldbrook’s shaping bag; but I kept it in my pocket, feeling pretty certain I would need it later.
So all three of us ate the supper the driver bought for us, which meant a cup of chicken noodle and a club sandwich on white toast. I told him he didn’t have to take us back to our trailer, we would take care of it ourselves. No deal on that—he marched the three of us back and locked us in.
It was pretty dark in there with the lights off and all four windows dialed to BLACK; but undressing was a problem anyway, one that all of us had most likely seen coming. I undressed first, telling the ladies they could look if they wanted to. I don’t think either of them did. After that, I climbed into one of the top bunks and turned my face toward the wall. In the morning I found out that Rose had slept in her clothes; it was something I ought to have seen coming, but I had not. That much modesty in one of us seemed pretty silly.
We got to Niagara the next day. I already knew that most of the Continental Library was underground in tunnels and big shadowy underground rooms that were almost three hundred years old; so I expected only a small building up on the surface. Wrong! It was huge, the pale stone nightmare of somebody who had seen the pyramids once, and it had too many levels for me to count before we rolled inside. We stopped; before long our driver unlocked our door and all three of us got out. What happened next was simple, quick, and quiet—and it caught me flat-footed.
He locked it behind us. I had not been expecting to get back in, and I do not think Millie or Rose had either; so it struck me as kind of strange. He, or more likely his boss, thought we might try to get away from something.
Pretty soon after that, one of the ’bots who had been unloading the truck and the first trailer came over and said, “Come with me.” Then it herded the three of us ahead of it the way they do, arms extended and spread wide. We hiked down rough corridors without windows for an hour or so, with me wondering where the hell we were going. When we finally got there, I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.
The ’bot put us into another truck parked in another part of the building, a truck that was smaller and quite a bit older than ours had been, and nearly empty. Later I counted the books and disks in there with us: seventeen. So fewer than two dozen books and disks, two or three cubes, a slop bucket, and the three of us reclone resources.
Do I have to tell you we were locked in? We were, of course. That wasn’t too bad, but we’d left our coats back in the trailer. All three of us had, and I imagine the women felt as dumb about that as I did. When our new truck (which was really a pretty old one) began rolling, I stared at them and the two of them stared back at me. After a while Rose managed to say, “I imagine we’re going home to Spice Grove.” She tried to smile.
Millie held up her tag. It was dark in the back of the truck, but not too dark for me to see that. She said, “They would have given us new tags.”
So this was planned from the beginning. No truck ran from Spice Grove to wherever we were going, but there was one to Continental. So ship us off to Continental, and they would put us on the right truck for wherever it was that we were wanted. That was Polly’s Cove, as it turned out. I’ll have quite a bit more to say about Polly’s Cove later.
All right, I was getting ahead of myself; but there is not much more to tell. Our truck went to various libraries and unloaded a few books and disks and so forth, and loaded a few new ones at each of them. When we finally stopped for the first night, I was able to talk the driver into letting me buy us blankets. Coats would have been better, but nice warm coats for all three of us would have cost twice what I had. Blankets were cheaper, and I could afford three of them. It left me a little over, but not much. A blanket—even a cheap one—is pretty warm if you wrap yourself up in it.
By the third night I felt like we were never going to get wherever we were going; the libraries would just ship us here and there until we wore out or went crazy. We reclone resources do go crazy pretty often, but most of us had been writers the first time around; the rest had been artists, nearly all of them. With writers it can be hard to tell, and with artists it is next to impossible.
When we got out of the truck, we did not even know we were about to walk into the Polly’s Cove Public Library. We were a mess, all three of us, with dirty faces and dirty, wrinkled clothes. Millie apologized to the head librarian for the way we looked, and Rose and I tried to explain. While we talked, the head librarian stared at us without saying a word; to tell the truth I was not sure she had understood anything any of us said.
When she had gone, I looked at Millie and she looked at me. I said, “I guess she speaks French.” I was trying to be witty.
“She didn’t look French.” That was Rose.
It made me think of Georges; I smiled and shut up, and wished to God that Georges were there with us.
Later we found out that the head librarian was stone deaf. She had been reading lips and had not talked because she knew she was hard for strangers to understand. We saw more of her after that than we wanted to, so I might as well tell you that she was taller than I am and as thin as a rake. She wore a lot of black and had dyed black hair. Her name was Prentice. Probably she had a first name, too; but I don’t think I ever heard it. I don’t know about you, so maybe you’re like me. Do you wonder sometimes about people like Prentice? Had she ever been in love, ever had a child, ever played on a jumpball team? All librarians read, but what kind of books did Prentice like?
I was still thinking about that stuff when she left and another librarian, blond, pretty, and at least thirty years younger, came in and introduced herself; this one’s name was Charlotte Lang. I said something about being glad to find a librarian we could talk to, and she said, “Oh, I’m not a real librarian, Mr. Smithe. I only work here part-time. I’m just a volunteer, but Ms. Prentice said for me to look after you.”
Of course she had made two mistakes right from the start. For one thing, a part-time librarian is a real librarian, just part-time. The other was that instead of calling me “Smithe,” she had called me “Mr. Smithe.” The librarians are not supposed to do that. So two mistakes, and I liked her for both of them. So I gave her my nicest smile and introduced Rose and Millie.
“Oh, I’m so glad you’re here, Ms. Baumgartner! I asked for you, and Ms. Prentice finally got you. She said she couldn’t buy us a copy—we don’t have nearly enough money for that—but she promised she’d borrow one. She said she could get you from the big library in Niagara or someplace like that.”