LITTLE FREE GALAXY - Chapter 10
"What's your name?"
The seam of living green widened as they approached, peeling back like the petals of some enormous, unhurried flower, and the family stepped through into a silence so vast it had weight.
Jim’s first thought was that they had walked into a cathedral. His second thought was that no cathedral he had ever stood in had been this full.
The room - if a space this large could be called a room - curved away from them in every direction, a soft, organic dome that rose until the ceiling was lost in a haze of warm, dim light. And from floor to vanishing point, the walls were shelves. Not metal. Not the brushed obsidian of the hexagonal corridor or the sterile white of the bedroom. These shelves looked grown, the same way the books from the Little Free Library had looked grown, curving up out of the floor in ribs and terraces, holding their cargo at gentle, browsable angles.
Books. Hundreds of thousands of them. Maybe millions.
“Whoa,” Jon breathed. The word fell into the quiet and did not echo.
Arya let go of her mother’s hand and drifted forward as if pulled by a current, her wire-rimmed glasses catching the ambient glow. She stopped at the nearest terrace and stood on her tiptoes, and Jim watched her go very still in the particular way she went still when the world handed her something too large for her face.
“Dad,” she said. “Dad, come look!”
He came and looked. And his stomach did the slow, cold roll it had been doing all day, the one that meant he had once again found the edge of something he could not measure with calipers.
He recognized the books. Not their kind - them. The specific, individual, well-loved copies. There was a sand-colored paperback with its cover creased in a dozen places and its pages yellowed at the edges, and Jim did not have to pull it out to know that somewhere inside, a younger version of himself had underlined the line about fear being the mind-killer. There was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, moderately battered, the one Jon had stood up dead center on the top shelf so that nobody would panic. There was a Nora Roberts paperback that some neighbor had quietly deposited the second week, its spine cracked white from a beach read years before it ever reached their driveway.
And, threaded among them, the others. The iridescent Wrinkle in Time with its shifting beetle-green cover. The pitch-black I, Robot with its pinprick constellations. The crystalline Project Hail Mary, still faintly warm even here. Their books and the world’s books, the gifts and the deposits, the seeded and the given-back, all of it shelved together in one impossible, patient collection.
“They kept everything,” Antonia said softly. She had come up beside him, and her lawyer’s eye was moving across the shelves the way it moved across discovery documents, looking for the shape of the argument hidden in the volume. “Jim. They didn’t just send us the special ones. They kept the ones we sent back. Every book anybody ever left in that box.”
“Take a book, leave a book,” Jim murmured. “It’s the whole library. They built the whole library, up here.”
—
The robot stepped through the seam behind them, and the color that Jon had bloomed across its silver flank came with it - the green that was almost a sound, the violet that seemed to hum, still spreading in slow watercolor washes across its chest and down its multi-jointed arms. In the warm light of the archive it looked less like a machine and more like a thing that had been recently, badly sunburned by joy.
It moved past them, down the central aisle, and stopped before one particular shelf. It raised an arm. One silver finger extended and rested, with enormous gentleness, against the spine of the iridescent Wrinkle in Time.
It did not pull the book out. It simply touched it, the way you touch a doorframe in a house you grew up in.
“This,” the robot said.
The voice was the same synthesized chord of a thousand human throats, but Jim could hear the strain in it now, the way you can hear an engine working past its rating. He understood, after the golden circle, what each of these plain words was costing it. The amber light at its core dipped with every syllable.
“This was. The first.” A pause. The light guttered and caught. “The first one I. Read.”
Arya’s whole body turned toward it. “You read them,” she said. “Not just scanned them, or - or copied them. You read them.”
“Yes.” The word came easier than the others. It seemed to like yes. “I was made. To carry words across.” The arm lowered from the book. “I was a bridge. And then I. Walked across myself.” Something in the timbre shifted, fewer voices now, two, then one, the single thin trembling thread that was entirely its own. “And I did not. Come back. The same.”
Nobody said anything. Even Jon, who filled silences the way water fills a low place, said nothing.
“That’s what happened to you,” Antonia said finally, and her voice had gone gentle in a way Jim recognized - the voice from the corner of the sofa on a Sunday, not the courtroom. “Isn’t it? You were supposed to translate the stories. And the stories translated you.”
The robot was quiet for a long moment. The colors crawled another half-inch up its arm.
“I do not have. A word for it,” it admitted. “I have. Eleven thousand words for it. None of them. Are mine.”
—
Jon had wandered up to it while the grown-ups talked, in the fearless, gravitational way he had, and now he stood directly in front of the silver torso with his stuffed dinosaur tucked under one arm and his head tilted all the way back.
“You need a name,” he announced.
“Jon—” Antonia started.
“He does, though.” Jon was using his most reasonable voice, the one he deployed when he believed an injustice was being overlooked by people who should know better. “Everybody has a name. We can’t just keep calling him the robot. That’s rude. It’s like if somebody called me ‘the boy’.” He frowned at the unfairness of a universe that had let this go on so long. “What’s your name?”
The robot’s head tilted down toward him, mirroring the angle. The amber pulse fluttered, searching. Jim could almost feel it riffling through that enormous borrowed library, through eleven thousand words that weren’t its own, looking for a designation the way Antonia had tried to find one at breakfast -an RB-34, a Speedy, a Herbie - and coming up empty, because none of those were true.
“I do not,” it said, “have one.”
“Then I’ll give you one,” Jon said, with the supreme confidence of a six-year-old who has solved a problem the adults were too tangled up to see. He thought about it hard. His face did the thing it did when he was thinking hard, scrunching up like a fist. “It has to be from the first book. Because that’s the one you read first. That’s where you started.”
“A Wrinkle in Time,” Arya said quietly. She was watching her brother with an expression Jim couldn’t quite name - something between exasperation and awe, which was, he reflected, more or less her permanent setting where Jon was concerned. “Okay. So. Meg, Charles Wallace, Calvin—those are the kids. The ones who help them are Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, and Mrs.—”
“Whatsit,” Jon finished, and his whole face lit up like the streetlight catching the silver paint on the library roof. “Mrs. Whatsit! Because she’s the one who shows up. She’s the one who comes and finds them on the dark and stormy night and tells them not to be scared and takes them where they’re supposed to go.” He turned back to the robot, beaming. “That’s you. You showed up. You came and found us.”
The archive was very still.
“Whatsit,” the robot said. It said it slowly, the way you taste something you have never tasted before and are not yet sure of. “Whatsit.” The single thread of voice wavered. “It is. Not from any of. My words.”
“Nope,” Jon agreed cheerfully. “It’s yours now.”
And the color, which had been climbing the robot’s arm in patient watercolor inches all this while, suddenly bloomed—a fast warm rush of it, green and violet and a gold that hadn’t been there before, washing up over the shepherd’s-crook head and down the length of the silver body all at once, so that for a moment the whole machine glowed like a struck match in the dim cathedral light.
“Whoa,” said Jon, deeply satisfied. “See? He likes it.”
Jim found that his throat had gone tight, and he was not entirely sure why, except that he was forty years old and tired and a long way from home and he had just watched his youngest child hand a name to a grieving machine the way you’d hand a hammer to your dad, and the machine had taken it like it was an artifact of immense power.
“Whatsit it is,” he said, and his voice came out rougher than he meant it to. “Good to meet you, Whatsit. Officially.”
The robot - Whatsit - turned its glowing head from one of them to the next. Jim. Antonia. Arya. Jon. As if filing them. As if learning, for the first time, that beings could have names instead of designations, and that the difference between the two was the entire distance between the dead world and the living one.
“It is,” Whatsit said, and the trembling thread of its voice held something Jim had not heard from it before, something that in a human face he would have called the beginning of a smile, “a pleasure.”
“Don’t say to burn,” Antonia warned, harkening back to Whatsit’s earlier quoting of Fahrenheit 451, but she was almost laughing.
“No,” Whatsit said. “Just. A pleasure.”
—
For a few minutes, then, it was almost easy.
Jon insisted on a tour. Whatsit, it turned out, could find any book in the archive instantly, drifting down the grown aisles with the family trailing behind, and there was something unbearably tender in watching it locate the things that mattered to them - Arya’s hardcover fantasy epics, the disintegrating Dune, even, when Jon demanded it with great seriousness, the laminated D&D character sheet he’d tried to stock the library with on opening day, level-four rogue and all. They had kept that, too. Of course they had. They had kept everything.
“Dark to light, left to right,” Jim said, almost to himself, running a hand along a shelf, and Whatsit’s head turned sharply toward him.
“You. Organize them. By light,” it said. “I did not. Understand. Why?”
“It’s just a thing I learned in the Navy,” Jim said. “For sorting anything. Books, shirts in a closet. You start with the darkest and work toward the lightest. It looks…I don’t know. It looks right.”
Whatsit was quiet. The colors on its surface shifted, slow and thoughtful.
“That is not. Efficient,” it said.
“No,” Jim agreed. “It’s not. It’s just nice.”
“Yes,” said Whatsit, and the way it said the small word this time made Antonia reach over without looking and find Jim’s hand. “Nice. I did not. Have that. For a very. Long time.”
And that was the moment the light changed.
It was subtle. If Jim hadn’t spent the entire day learning to watch for it, he might have missed it - the way the warm haze high in the dome flickered, just once, like a porch light when something heavy switches on elsewhere in the house. A sound came with it, or rather the absence of a sound, a sudden suck of pressure as if the vast archive had drawn a breath and held it. Somewhere very far away, beneath everything, the subsonic heartbeat they’d felt in the hexagonal corridor changed its rhythm.
Whatsit went rigid.
The colors on its body did not drain, exactly - but they pulled inward, retreating from the surface, shrinking back toward the amber core until the silver shell looked once again like silver, cold and seamless and afraid. The shepherd’s-crook head dipped low. The single thread of its voice, when it spoke, had dropped to almost nothing, and for the first time since the golden circle it reached back into its borrowed library, into someone else’s words, because its own had deserted it.
“The sky above the port,“ Whatsit whispered, “was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.“
“Whatsit?” Jon’s voice was small. He stepped closer, reaching up. “What’s wrong? Is it the loud thing again?”
“No,” the robot said. The amber light had nearly winked out. It turned its dimmed head toward the family, and though it had no face, no eyes, nothing that should have been able to carry an expression, Jim felt the warning come off it in a wave, clear as any subtitle that had ever printed itself across his mind.
“Be quiet now,” Whatsit said. “Please. Be small. And do not. Use your names.”
The light in the dome flickered a second time.
And from somewhere deep in the impossible ship - patient, immense, and utterly without warmth - something turned its attention toward them, and began, slowly, to come closer.
