Millie started to say something then, but Charlotte wasn’t through. “And you, Ms. Romain! I read you all the time before I got married, only now I read Ms. Baumgartner more because I’m not a very good cook, not really half as good as my mother even, and I’ve learned ever so much from reading Ms. Baumgartner. The library has The Pleasures of Pork and Game Can Be Fun. Well, really I’m reading that one now. I’ve finished reading ‘Duck and Goose,’ and I’m halfway through ‘Pheasant Can Be Pleasant.’ That’s Chapter Four, isn’t it?”
Millie agreed that it was.
“People liked my duck, too. I had to use chili powder instead of allspice and I didn’t care for it much myself, but Bub and his friend said it was good—great is what they said—and your roast pheasant with chestnuts! Oh, my! It was perfectly scrumptious.”
Millie smiled and said, “That wasn’t my roast pheasant you enjoyed so much, Ms. Lang. It was yours.”
Charlotte actually blushed. “Well, you—you’ll want baths, I know. Everybody will. Baths and clean clothes. I’m afraid only one can bathe at a time here; it’s all we’ve got facilities for, so you’ll have to take turns. I’ll be fetching your clean things while you’re washing. Would you like to go first, Ms. Baumgartner? Will that be all right with everybody?”
Naturally I nodded and said sure; I suppose Rose did, too. After that Rose and I sat and waited, me wishing that I could have a quiet look around and get the layout of the library, but knowing it was way too early for me to make any kind of trouble—and snooping around would probably turn out to be big trouble if Prentice caught me. After ten minutes or so, Charlotte came back with a short stack of clean clothes for me, but I didn’t want to strip and put them on with Rose sitting there. Besides the embarrassment, I was grimy and sweaty from the truck. That library was worse if anything, dusty and overheated and then some.
When Millie came out and Rose went in, Millie wanted to know if I had met some of the other reclones. I said no, I hadn’t even seen them.
“Have you had a look at the shelves? They must have shelves for us or they wouldn’t have borrowed us.”
I shook my head. “I’ve been right here the whole time. How do you like your new clothes?”
“I want an apron. If I can get a good one, the rest will do.” Millie clammed up for a bit, maybe because my watch was striking; then she said, “You can hold the fort until Rose comes out, but I’m going to sneak around.”
The idea of Millie sneaking around just about made me laugh. Millie would have made some country a terrific spy, because nobody would ever suspect her of anything. I said, “I’ll sneak along with you. Rose is good for a solid hour. Maybe more.”
Our bathroom opened on the dusty little hall I had already walked down behind Charlotte. I pointed to the way we had come and told Millie to go that way. I would go the other way and have a look. After that we’d meet back in the bathroom and compare notes. Ten or twelve strides brought me to the end of the hall, and a door there opened on a good-sized room with high shelves and a lot of empty space. There were more shelves on the other side of them. No labels on anything anywhere, but opening a couple of the books told me I was in History. Maybe Ancient History, because that was what all the books I looked at seemed to be about: Ancient Greece or Egypt or Babylon. Those books were pretty ancient themselves. The paper was yellowing, and somebody had made notes in the margins of one, in neat cursive. Cursive made it a hundred and fifty years old, minimum. Probably quite a bit more.
So another tall case, this one almost entirely empty. Which was good, because looking between its empty shelves I saw something I had not seen since I died the first time. It was an iron staircase of piece-of-pie-shaped steps coiled tight around an iron pole.
The History Room—I could see everything in it as soon as I had climbed up the first half dozen steps—was even smaller than I had thought. It had a nice high ceiling, though, and a couple of tall windows that would have been a whole lot more interesting if they had not been blocked by tall bookcases.
Upstairs was what they probably called the Stacks. That’s where you keep the stuff that patrons cannot just walk up to and pull off the shelf. Here, though, there were no shelves but actual stacks of books and disks and cubes and whatever, some stacked on a couple of tables and the rest on the floor. At the moment none of those things interested me. What did were the windows, two again; tall, narrow, dirty notint windows. Looking out I saw the roofs, roofs of red or brown tile, of what might have been houses or shops.
And way out on the other side of those red and brown roofs, boats.
2
WHAT THE SHIRT SHOWED
Three of them looked like fishing boats, and there were four or five sloops (rich men’s toys) bored but resigned to it. All these were moored. Beyond them stretched an ocean of seawater that looked like it went clear around the planet. Just empty salt water, and more salt water, and nothing else; seawater in smooth dark swells as far as my eyes could see. Featureless seawater that looked as smooth as olive oil, and wheeling, moaning seagulls, all under the great curved dome of a clear blue sky without a single cloud. I ought to have looked out at all that for a minute or two, seen what was to be seen, and gone back to my own part of the library. I ought to have, but I didn’t. The boats, the gulls, and most of all the water seemed to be telling me that there was a thousand times more to life than I had ever supposed, ten thousand times more to life than being treated like a thing, just a library resource, another battered book standing idle on one of a million slightly dusty library shelves. So I looked and looked and drank it all in, feeling that I could never be just another bipedal book again. The sea and the sky spoke slowly; but in quiet chorus they told me about life, warmth, friendship, and love. Told me in tones that kept me standing there until my legs ached, tired and stiff, spellbound while I drank in all that they had to say.
When I got back to the third-rate restroom where Millie and I were supposed to be waiting for Rose to get out of the tub, Millie was already there. She looked troubled, but she managed a nice friendly smile for me. So I smiled back and made my smile as friendly as I could.
“I found out where we are, Ern.” Millie hesitated. “Do we care?”
It was a slippery question the way I felt just then, but I kept my smile while I told her I did.
“This is Polly’s Cove.” She paused, waiting for some reaction she didn’t get. “I’ve been talking to a patron, a nice kid named Chandra.” Millie drew a deep breath. “All right, I know we’re not supposed to talk to patrons unless they’re consulting us. But under the circumstances it seemed to me that it was time to … well, you know. Do something.”
I tried to say sure, but what came out was “Certainly.” Like I told you, I have to talk like that. Pretty often it sucks, but I can’t help it.
“Chandra has been looking through all the cookbooks.” Millie hesitated again, then decided to back up a little bit. “I had turned up the ones she needed, but there’s no copy of Game Can Be Fun. What I mean is that there’s none shelved—a screen told me it’s out. Do you think that was mean of me? Checking up on a nice young part-time librarian like that?”