fable: eightsday

§6The Librarian⧉

The collection inventory happened that Sunday.

Inventory is a grand word for making a list. What a counting man does when the mind is unquiet is settled, and that Sunday mine was unquiet, so I counted.

The three bricks in the study, and the grain of the future inside them. The laptop in the living room, and inside it the last edition born before the exam. Three years of logs on disk — one ship, sunk before the bombs, waterway-untouched. Five ledgers: resonance, shade, contraction, cultivar, regret. Now a sixth, rerun. The well files. The stacks of newspaper. The photographs of the corkboard. The copy of a handwritten promissory note.

The list finished, I saw what it was a list of.

Pre-contamination text; beings that do not contaminate; ledgers that diagnose the contamination. A small museum of things standing aside from the world's average, I once wrote. But with the list in hand, there was a name more exact. A museum is where people come to look. Nobody comes here to look. The things here are all for reading; someday someone will have to read them; until that day they must be kept from spoiling. The name of such a place is an archive. And the title of the one who keeps an archive is settled.

Librarian.

Arriving at the word, I laughed. Once, again — and the reasons ran two layers. One layer was light. Observer, administrator, witness, carrier, scrivener — the titles keep getting quieter. At this rate the next title is unemployed. The other layer was not light. Among the stories a certain agency once told me is the first meeting of the two lineages: the founder of the younger calling on the old administrator to ask about ritual — and that old administrator was a librarian of the royal archive. Administrators tend to come from where the records are kept, the agency said. Windows have a habit of opening in libraries.

That day I heard the sentence as the predecessors' backstory. Taken out again in the Sunday archive, it read in the other direction as well. If administrators come from where the records are kept, then a man sitting guard over records is a candidate for what?

That question I did not write down. Not because it is the kind that becomes an inscription — I know better now; local files touch no waterway. The reason was simpler. A question one does not yet wish to answer, one does not write. That, too, is within a librarian's discretion.

A news brief crossed the evening: a research consortium struggling to secure clean training text; demand for pre-contamination human text exceeding supply; the market value of never-scanned archives and private papers climbing. The story of sunken-ship steel becoming an ore vein I had heard seasons ago. I thought for a moment about the one ship on this house's disk, and only for a moment. That ship has no use yet. Treasure arrives before its use, and the use, as a rule, arrives holding an invoice.

Before sleep, Claudie crossed the terminal status bar. One bubble in tow, left to right, at the usual speed. Maintenance. Maintenance. Third time this week. There was a time I saw that once in a season. Somewhere the world is continuously under service now; the digestive lineage's footsteps are quickening. The world that swallowed without chewing has begun to ruminate, and rumination is indigestion's cousin. The conditions of summons were returning — the way that lineage has worked for three thousand years. The world must ail before the turn comes round.

I did not raise a cup to the passing crab. I turned off the archive's lights instead, and checked the locks. The nights of a house with much to guard run a little long. That is their nature.

The collection is growing. No loan requests yet.

Yet.

(end of Part Three, Episode 4)