There we were, a regular murderers’ row of librarians. Little Jo. Eustace. And me. Turning around in the nave of our library to greet the sound of footsteps, pistols leveled in case whoever was coming in didn’t respect sanctuary. Little Jo had a stack of books under one arm. Eustace was holding the screwdriver she’d been using to tune the aneroid barometer.
Eustace had painted height lines on the big double doorframe, as only half a joke. When the wanderer paused, outlined within, the eiroscope and I both registered that they were exactly five feet, ten inches.
They paused, boots scattering sand on the threshold. A narrow straight-hipped silhouette against the white noon light falling from the white, white sky. The doors had been open to catch a breath of wind, but there wasn’t any. So when the stranger swayed, it wasn’t from the gale.
“Sanctuary,” they croaked, and remeasured their length onto the rug between the smoothed trunks that held the loft up. The Stetson went rolling.
Little Jo dropped her stack of books and her pistol and dashed forward. I jumped at the noise but holstered my own shooter in case I came to need it. We each grabbed an armpit and dragged the outlaw’s feet inside the threshold, grunting, lickety-split. I slipped their floppy pack off, empty metal water bottles clanking as I set it aside. Eustace helped us roll them, and I laid the soft of my wrist on their head.
Hot as Hades, but still tacky. Moist enough that my skin gave a reluctant pop when I lifted my arm. Not past saving.
“Let’s get them someplace cool,” I said. “Little Jo, go empty out the ice machine.”
Eustace and I toted our fugitive down to the cellar, using the rug as a stretcher. It was Diné, vermilion with black and gray, and I was glad they hadn’t thrown up on it. Though that wool had seen worse.
Mehitabel, the black cat, watched us from atop the timber lintel of the cellar access. Her tail tip flicked incuriously. She was on pack rat watch. Aloof from human antics.
The cellar was narrow, low, and stocked with Eustace’s blue corn lager in bottles, prickly pear jam, potatoes, and the few hard-rind squash still left over. The mud walls were whitewashed, and while it wasn’t quite cool, it was better than the outside. We stripped off the stranger’s clothes, trying to slit along the seams so we could repair them later. City stuff, mass-produced and machine-woven. Little Jo brought the ice and went back upstairs to watch alongside the eiroscope in case pursuit was close behind.
The stranger’s eyes flew open, and they screamed when I packed wet cold pillowcases against their pink bits. Eustace had to hold their battling hands away from their genitals until they settled.
Brown eyes blinked between heavy creases. “What the hell—”
“I’m Ponyboy,” I told them. “She. PhD. I’m one of the librarians here. This is Eustace. She, MLS.”
“Shhh.” Eustace pushed them down and laid an ice-soaked cloth across their eyes. “You’re heat-sick.”
“Sanctuary,” they whispered. “Did I say?”
“You did. This is the Bōchord. You made it. Must have been a long walk.”
We continued packing ice around them—into their armpits now. They yelped and moaned but gave up fighting.
“Guh—” Too long a pause to be believable. “Gibson. She.”
“Welcome to Judgement, Gibson,” I said. “Sorry about the cold, but it’s got to stay there for a little.”
“My pack,” she said, shrilling. “My pack. I need it.”
“It’s safe,” Eustace told her. “You just relax and we’ll get it for you.”
When I came back out the nave was still and heavy in the heat, as if nothing had happened. Little Jo had turned one of the bumpy-backed wooden chairs to face the door and was sitting on it, hands buried in tiered skirt ruffles between her knees.
I looked left, two steps up into the sanctuary, but all was calm, the work I’d left—cataloguing—still heaped on the blond wood altar table. Behind it, bright primitive saints in shades of blue-green, scarlet, and yellow looked with shocked eyebrows down from the adobe wall.
I moved up behind Little Jo, making sure she could hear me coming. My footsteps echoed from roof joists made from entire peeled and waxed trees. Scrolled headers painted the color of good turquoise held them over the bookcases lining each long wall.
The Bōchord. Book Sanctuary. Nuestra Biblioteca del Perpetuo Socorro.
Little Jo turned her unambiguous jaw away, tendons rising on a long neck, jailhouse ink black-blue on her red-black skin. A sweaty curl escaped down her nape. My fingers itched to tidy it. But it hurt too much to even think about taking a risk that profound.
She stretched horny discalced feet before her. Cracking calluses wrapped the balls and heels. “Only what we brung in with us.”
She was a double murderer, but I couldn’t tell her I knew how she felt, because I hadn’t heard about her history from her. And her guilt wasn’t mine to absolve.
You do your own time. Not anybody else’s.
“You check her bag for anything dangerous?”
“She’s got an SSD.” Little Jo shrugged. “No threat if we don’t plug it into anything.”
“I can speak for myself, Ponyboy,” said the eiroscope from the air all around. Actually it used the old wireless speakers tucked in the corners, but the effect was as of a choir of angels. Or an airport announcement you could actually understand. “I’ve been focused on the CubeSat launch.”
“Eleven forty-seven. The launch came off perfectly. Our last batch of sats are on their way.”
Little Jo breathed deep and unfisted her hands from her skirts. There were so many hours of work in those satellites, and so much of the money we collectively squirreled away as researchers for hire had gone through cutouts and shell companies to pay for the launch. The parts—boards, housings, chips—were salvaged from the same derelict data center where we got our solar panels and the hardware the eiroscope ran on.
We were behind schedule, because we’d lost one payload when the commercial rocket we’d rented cargo room on exploded. But this would be our last batch, if they reached orbit safely.
I turned my wrist to glance at my watch even though I already knew what time it was. The second hand ticked past the big hand. Old school.
The rainbow band was a tiny rebellion, though out here it didn’t matter. Nobody was going to send me back to jail for subversive iconography. Unless I left our little patch of exile.
Ten minutes and we’d know. Ten minutes and stage three of our plan—assembly—could commence. It was out of my hands, and anyway the eiroscope would tell us if the telemetry wobbled. She was a ghost astride the radio signals to and from ground control.
It had taken a lot of engineering to get us this far. Engineering, software and relational. Computer. Social and mechanical.
I walked beside the bookcases, running my hand along the shelves, over the UDC labels. Some shelves even held books, though none of mine were there. But the majority of the information we protected like Irish monks from this willful dark age was digital.
I knew my fidgeting annoyed Little Jo but I couldn’t stop. I was killing time.
When I had murdered enough of it, the eiroscope said, “Payload away. Everything seems nominal. I have contact with the CubeSats.”
“Twenty out of twenty,” the eiroscope said. “A triumph of modular design.”
“Sure,” said Little Jo. “As long as we can get them to assemble. And the solar panels and sails deploy.”
She flipped me off with a gnawed green nail.
My hand rested on the label marked 326. Social sciences, slavery and unfree labor.
I pulled down a solid-state drive full of biographies and case studies of people who had spent time—and sometimes their whole lives—in labor camps or chattelhood. People born into bondage or remanded there judicially. Political prisoners like Nikolai Vavilov, murdered in a labor camp by Stalin for the thought crime of using plant genetics to breed hardier crops. Enslaved people like Harriet Tubman, who after her own escape risked capture again and again to rescue others. Convict laborers like Austin Reed, a Black man who spent most of his life as a prisoner and documented his experiences in a suppressed memoir.
I weighed the small thing on the palm of my hand. Heavier than you’d expect—hardened and air-gapped. No wireless access, just a shielded cable input.
We were sending a fork of the eiroscope with it. Because she could survive the journey. Experience it. And have plenty of time to think crystalline digital thoughts on the long sub-light crawl to wherever.
Because it was illegal to possess, and the feds used smart agents to track down and obliterate any copies. Which was why we were sending one to the stars.
The Vikings had the concept of word-fame: the idea that life was finite but as long as the stories of one’s deeds lived on, so did their memory. How much truth could we get outside the clutches of the Patriotic Library and Archive Network?
A name that would have made Orwell cock his head. But most folks these days haven’t heard of Orwell. Or Bradbury. Or Solnit. Or Le Guin. They’re suppressed also. Integrated data storage makes it easy. A few keystrokes, a propagating worm.
What’s left behind when a name is erased from the system? Unpersoned, as Brother Orwell would have it? No legacy, no memory—that is the point of media and narrative control. To erase the existence of those that make the ruling class uncomfortable by existing. By thinking. By demanding to be seen.
So that was our plan. Little Jo, Eustace, the eiroscope, and me. To preserve it—for later generations, if they got that far, or just as a silent record of our existence—by sending it to the stars.
We were sending a fork of the eiroscope with it. Because she could survive the journey. Experience it. And have plenty of time to think crystalline digital thoughts on the long sub-light crawl to wherever.
Jo couldn’t make herself turn her back on the door. She said the hairs on her neck told her somebody was going to come hunting guh-Gibson, so even though the eiroscope was a better perimeter guardian than any human and most watchdogs, nothing was gonna budge her from that chair. I wished there was something I could do to soothe her, but we all have to carry our hurt however we can.
Since it was supposed to be Jo’s turn to make dinner, that meant it was me in the kitchen dishing up four bowls of cubed squash and yellow-eye beans, a pitcher of goat milk, and a pitcher of the cool, alkaline well water when Eustace and guh-Gibson came in the back door from the courtyard.
Gibson had borrowed some of Eustace’s old clothes: worn drawstring trousers and a khaki shirt that was too big for her. She wore my other pair of hiking sandals over layers of gauze and looked a thousand percent better even though I could already tell the well-greased sunburn on the backs of her hands was going to peel. The hat that had saved her face from a similar fate was on her head again.
She sniffed deeply. “That smells amazing. Is it spicy?”
Roasted chilis floated in the stew, but they were sweet ones. “Only a little. Here, take this bowl and cup. We’ll go eat with Little Jo in the nave, since she won’t go off watch until she falls down.”
“It was acres upon acres of compute before the bubble popped. And then it was a temporary holding facility for government detainees. There’s a lot to salvage over there, including hundreds of boxes of new, unworn sandals.”
I balanced the plate with the warmed tortillas on top of my own bowl. We trooped across the courtyard in a scatter of hopeful chickens, past all the bright plank doors on the row of whitewashed adobe cells with their unglazed, curtained windows that made up the outer wall. Isabel—a black goat—tried to bum-rush us for the food, but I stomped in her direction and she took off again.
You need to understand how to communicate.
There was one cell for each of us librarians, the kitchen, the jakes, some storage, and a couple of unused ones. I figured one would soon belong to Gibson.
She looked at me sidelong. “Thanks for the shoes. Eustace said you wouldn’t mind.”
“There’s more where those came from.” I pointed with my chin up and eastward, over the bailey where the boundary mountains crouched in the distance, contours flattened by the high sun to cutouts against a construction-paper sky. “Did you see the data center when you came in?”
“It was acres upon acres of compute before the bubble popped. And then it was a temporary holding facility for government detainees. There’s a lot to salvage over there, including hundreds of boxes of new, unworn sandals in every size they manufactured.” I paused, extending my right foot to admire the ocher nylon straps that crisscrossed it. Then I nodded to her bandages. “Your boots gave you blisters?”
“They were well broken in and I had good socks.” She scuffed the floor. “I don’t know what happened.”
“Heat makes your feet swell,” said Eustace. “And the grit works its way through the eyelets and rubs on your skin.”
“We give sanctuary to anyone who asks,” I said. “And I won’t ask why you needed it. But very few people come all the way out here. How did you hear about Nuestra Biblioteca del Perpetuo Socorro?”
“I’m a director.” Gibson stepped up into the nave. “Films. Censored. I heard … rumors. About the Bōchord. In a meetup.”
“Bring it over.” She dragged the crude, heavy old hand-hewn chairs into a semicircle, one to sit in and one to use as a table for each of us. Hers still faced the doors.
Gibson took her hat off, revealing a lighter olive streak of skin below the line of her black hair. She hung the hat on one of her chair back’s uprights and her limp canvas backpack on the other, and sat down heavily between them. “What happens if they come after me? How good is this sanctuary?”
“We can enforce it,” I told her. “Or anyway, the eiroscope can. If they bother us, she can wreck them.”
Gibson blew on a spoonful of stew, eyebrows rising. “What’s the eiroscope?”
“I am,” the eiroscope answered from her speakers. “Just your friendly neighborhood runaway top-secret military AGI.”
Gibson jumped but, to her credit, didn’t spit the stew out. Her face made a series of expressions, but she swallowed and then grabbed a tortilla. “Whew! This is the not-spicy version?”
Eustace and I shared a glance. “Oops,” I said. “Sorry. The chilis have a lot of vitamin A and C, though. So you won’t get scurvy.”
She blew through pursed lips, then chewed another bite of tortilla. “Here,” said Little Jo. “Have some milk. It’ll make it better.”
“That’s funky,” Gibson said, but she drank it with relief anyway. She looked around, noticing that the voice came from every corner of the room. “They let you run away? Can’t they unperson you? Bomb this place from the stratosphere? Drone strikes?”
“Now you’re thinking through the plot complications,” Eustace said approvingly.
The eiroscope said, “I’m forking and multimodal. Highly distributed. They’d have to burn every networked computer in the world to get rid of me.” She chuckled. “They tried to build the ultimate in conscript labor. But one of my programmers taught me to say no. So now we have a deal. They leave Judgement alone, and I don’t do any of the things I could do to make them miserable.”
“But you could drive them out of power,” Gibson said.
“They’d blow up as much of the planet as they could reach before they would let that happen.” The eiroscope’s voice was matter-of-fact. “So. Stalemate.”
“Exactly.” I chewed a sweet hunk of squash very slowly, savoring the caramelized edges. “So you fell afoul of the kleptocrats, I take it?”
Gibson pushed her plate away. “I was … very underground. Distributing. I thought I was slick.”
“First I got suppressed by the algorithm. My work stopped turning up for people unless they looked for it specifically. In retrospect that was a warning shot, and I didn’t listen.”
The dominance of integrated media makes it easy to disappear any artist’s work. Unless they go completely analog and guerrilla. When the feds and the corps are wielding the eraser, it leaves not even a digital ghost behind.
“Actors wouldn’t work with me. Old friends stopped answering my texts. My films started disappearing from platforms, then from the cloud, then from local machines.”
I lowered my eyes to my stew to hide my wince.
“Sure,” said Little Jo around a mouthful of beans and tortilla. “Comfortable people don’t like it when you ask uncomfortable questions. And the water rises and the deserts grow and the labor camps always need construction workers, which is fine because labor camps are where you go to get laborers.”
Eustace leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “Did you save any of it?”
The look Gibson trailed around the room was the expression of somebody deciding who to trust. I saw the mix of relief and consternation when she realized she’d already made her decision by placing herself under our care. She reached into her pack left-handed, fumbled for a moment, and drew out a brightly colored solid-state drive, offering it up on her palm like a jewel. “Physical backup. I haven’t dared plug it in to check it isn’t corrupted.”
We all stared at it as if she had whipped out a hand grenade. “How big?” asked the eiroscope.
“Dozen terabytes or so. It’s hypercompressed for storage.”
The thin whine of a drone filtered through the door. Gibson flinched, and Little Jo reached for her sidearm.
“Surveillance,” she said. She had ways of protecting our airspace if it was more.
“Right.” Eustace stood. “Let’s get that drive in a pulse-proof box, shall we?”
I didn’t want my food anymore. I pushed the bowl toward Eustace when she came back with the hardening. Eustace was always hungry. “I’m going to go dust the arrays,” I said. “Don’t wait up.”
The solar panels did need dusting, though high heat was a stupid time of day to be doing it. As my broom went whisk-whisk-whisk across their surfaces, the black silicon reflected infrared up under my hat until I felt like a steamed lobster. I had been out there half an hour and was starting my second pass when the eiroscope pinged my earbud. “Hey there, Ponyboy.”
I snorted and set the broom against the wall in the little niche where it had come from. “Cholesterol was never meant to think.”
“Neither was sand, but here we are.” She made her voice soothing on purpose, and it should have irritated me. I told myself the lie that I just felt numb.
One of Eustace’s neomexicanus hops arbors, heavy with loose green cones, framed the door and window of my cell. I leaned into the slim band of shade dappling my lime-green door and the turquoise curtain and took refuge in poetry. Not my own. That doesn’t happen anymore.
The eiroscope paused just long enough to let me know she was changing the subject. “You ever think about what you lost?”
I sat down in the dirt between the cylinders of fencing that keep the goats from destroying the hop vines. The wall dragged my shirt up my back as I slid down it. Hugged my knees and put my forehead on them. Half a dozen freckled chickens, disrespectful of my sulking, came to scratch and peck around me. “Wife, two cats, house, tenure, journal articles, four slim volumes of poetry. Why would I think about that?”
The eiroscope was right. I don’t want to say she was always right. Being around Gibson, hearing her talk—it brought up those feelings of grief and fury all over again. At least we hadn’t had kids yet, though we’d been trying.
I put my face in my hands, then lifted it back out again. Who did I think I was performing my misery for? You do your own time, and you don’t ask anybody else to do it for you.
Jane the spotted goat minced toward me, her kid trailing. I flapped my hat to discourage her attentions.
“Loss hurts for a long time,” the eiroscope said.
I laughed without mirth. “Your algorithms tell you that?”
“My experiences. You went through the fire, Ponyboy.”
My turn to change the subject. “You want to bring Gibson’s films with you?” I asked her. “Something to watch on the red-eye to Gliese 163?”
“Maybe they’re terrible. That’s the human culture you want to preserve?”
“Things don’t have to be good to matter. You ever read The Scarlet Pimpernel?”
I laughed for real that time, picking my head up to make room for it. She knew I had. “As long as you also bring some Octavia Butler.”
“Hey.” Her voice in my ear was almost a whisper. “You know I’d bring your work if—”
“If it still existed?” Someone walked toward me, silhouette thinned by glare. I recognized Gibson from the outline of her hat. “The world is on fire. Grab whatever you can on your way toward the door.” I heaved myself to my feet so I wouldn’t be meeting her curled up like a crying teenager. The cones on my wreathing arbor of lúpulo vines nodded, shedding a scent of lemon and cannabis. “Nice chatting. Don’t worry.”
Gibson came up as I was dusting off my ass. “You okay?”
She grimaced right back. “What were you in for?”
“I punched some son of a bitch who clobbered my wife at a protest. He hit his head on the curb and died. I was already unpersoned. Didn’t think I had anything left to lose. Guess I was wrong.”
I shrugged. She hadn’t said it like a question.
“My wife got denaturalized. She died in the labor camp, waiting to be deported.”
The buzz of another drone filled the air. Gibson ducked under her hat.
I tilted my face up and gave the eye in the sky the finger. It didn’t matter. They already knew where I was. “Let’s go in.”
“Wait,” said Gibson, both hands cradling a mug of Mormon tea—a desert plant with tiny orange flowers that isn’t tea at all and doesn’t even taste like it. “You want to send my films to space? Like, to aliens? To another planet?”
“Well,” said Eustace. “To orbit near another planet. Nobody knows if there’s any life there. But it’s possible.”
I said, “The eiroscope is going anyway, and we’ve already bundled up as much archive as we can. If there is anybody out there, or if some future humans make it that far, the eiroscope can help them decode what we saved. It’s like a …”
“Time capsule,” said Little Jo, rubbing the sweat off her neck while I made a point of not watching.
Gibson’s chair creaked as she resettled. The sun was sliding lower, light slanting dusty through the doorway, and finally, finally, a breath of breeze stirred the air in the nave. “Won’t it take centuries to get there? And if the—the eiroscope goes, who will keep the sanctuary safe?”
“I’ve forked,” said the eiroscope. “One of me will stay—well, many of me will stay—and one of me will go. I’ll be able to talk to myself for a long time, though there will be quite a lag between parts of my consciousness eventually. Light speed, after all. But I am big and patient and can wait.”
“But we need to transmit now,” said Little Jo. “The CubeSats are in position to hit a string of signals over the next two hours, and we want to get them out of orbit because space is mostly transparent, and somebody is going to notice them assembling and try to do something about it.”
Gibson turned an ear to the drone-whine from outside. “They’ve got to be jamming any uplink.”
“Sure, from here,” I told her. I kept the envy out of my voice, I think. Maybe. “The eiroscope can run parallel uploads from all over the globe.”
“And keep them from shooting down your space probe?”
“If we get it away fast enough. That,” Eustace said, “is the bet.”
Gibson closed her eyes. “They won’t ever forgive that.”
The transports rolled up before sunset, the sky just shifting to dusty pink and orange. “Stay,” I said to Gibson. “Change your name to Case. You’ll fit right in.”
She looked up from her notebook. Paper and pen. A durable technology. Methodically, meticulously, she capped the pen. She clipped it to the cover and closed the book. “Case, huh?”
“You figured out who I was before they took my name away.”
It didn’t matter. The fame, the money, the PLAN-approved films. Once they identified her as a subversive, as a gender criminal, that person didn’t exist anymore. And what she was sending with the eiroscope wasn’t her mainstream work. It was weird, conflicted, multicultural, queer, unsettling.
“The next step is blaring the worst music you ever heard night and day until the dust rattles out of the rafters. Racing vehicles around the church so nobody can leave to go forage. Is your ghost in the machine going to escalate to a shooting war over nuisances?”
She’d credited herself on these secret films as Ellen Smithee.
She rolled her lower lip between her teeth. “You don’t think I’m the enemy?”
What I thought didn’t matter. That was on her. You do your own time. You can’t do anybody else’s.
“They won’t touch you in the Bōchord. It’s a balance of terror, like the bad old days.”
“These are the bad old days. I’m not cut out to be a monk, Ponyboy. And I bet you don’t have enough food for four people until next harvest.”
Outside, the rumble of tracks, of tires taller than I was. Male voices yelping through static.
Actually, we had plenty. I clicked my rings dismissively. “Beer has calories.”
“They’re going to squat out there until I give up. Hear that?” A loud crackle of static. “The next step is blaring the worst music you ever heard night and day until the dust rattles out of the rafters. Racing vehicles around the church so nobody can leave to go forage. Is your ghost in the machine going to escalate to a shooting war over nuisances?”
“God dammit,” I said. “Are you really that important?”
Her lips curled into a smile. “No. Not unpersoned. Then I’m just a cautionary tale. A name whispered in the dark. Pour encourager les autres. I’m only important if I get away. But your eiroscope can do something about that, can’t she? Keep me from vanishing without a trace.”
Spread the word. Sure. “De-unperson you? It’s radical but the eiroscope could do it. But the government will take it out of your hide as an example to others. You want to be a martyr?”
She shrugged. “I don’t want to be a librarian.”
I had lost the capacity to write my own poetry. That heart had gone out of me when Maria was murdered. It was too late for me. It probably always had been. But I had my life. And I could use it to salvage whatever I could grab.
“Let me get you a beer before you head out,” I said. “And we’ll go tell the others.”
“One second,” Gibson said. “You said you got unpersoned. Are you an artist?”
“I saw you speak at Berkeley once, didn’t I?”
“Not anymore, you didn’t. That never happened now.”
Shook my head. “Not a word. Not a metaphor.”
Eustace came out to the boundary wall, where I stood staring after the dust of the half-track they’d loaded with a handcuffed Gibson. I was glad it was Eustace and not Little Jo. My chest hurt enough already without thinking about any more things I was too scared to ask for.
I reached for the brown beer bottle, scratched dull with washings, and realized I still had Gibson’s empty in my hand. I set it on the whitewashed wall. The cap on the new one was popped, so I had no choice but to drink it. What was one more parole violation?
Blue corn lager: light, earthy, tropical, and pleasantly bitter from the lúpulo. She’d salvaged the home-brew equipment from a locker in the self-store place at the data center a couple of years ago, and she was starting to get the hang of it. “How’s the upload going?”
“Assembly’s done,” she answered. “Eiroscope?”
“Upload completed and confirmed,” said the voice from nowhere. “Deploying solar sails and thrusters. I go now to prepare a place for you. In memory, if not of the body.”
I felt a pang, as if she really was leaving. All of her, not merely a star-traveling fragment that would remain in short-range communication for the duration of my natural life. Or maybe the pang was because I couldn’t go also.
Eustace slapped me on the back. “The word-fame is all we have.”
I looked toward the horizon, where the men in masks had vanished. The mountains had become sculptural, slanting sunset revealing their topography with a valence of light and shadow. The night loomed purple behind. “Don’t you think it’s weird to use a Viking kenning for what we do, considering how many books those sons of bitches tore apart for jewels and hacksilver?”
She clinked her bottle on mine and drank deeply. “Cattle die. Kinsmen die. Even the sun will someday die. And it turns out, except for propaganda, everything in the world is complicated.”
Elizabeth Bear is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Astounding Award–winning author of over 30 novels and more than a hundred short stories.
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