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The Librarian did not need to collect everything humanity had ever made — not even the ideas of everything. As the final curator of human culture, he granted himself permission to discern:
Having located a particular urn fashioned by a particular craftsman in tenth-century Jingdezhen, and having collected and catalogued all the ideas inhering in the urn, he followed its maker’s timelines back and forward, seeking other examples of his craft… but not every such example. Some pieces were broken in the manufacture. Some were artistic or technical failures, as measured by the craftsman himself; The Librarian did not care about these pieces. He took note of the other workers in the same shop, and sometimes he traced their timelines forward and back, examining the work of predecessors, mentors, and protégés as well. But his task was not to record the nature of everything ever created by any human. That tenth-century Chinese master ceramist — as an eight-year-old boy, he had once glazed and fired a tile containing the imprint of the five fingertips of his right hand. It was charming, and it even lasted, in a sense. (The maker kept it in a small wooden cabinet in his sleeping quarters, and after his death it went to his son, who kept it on an altar in a corner of his own room. Upon the son’s death, the tile was buried with him.) But The Librarian found in that tile no ideas not abundantly available in countless others. The tile had been made, yes; but its making had not been sparked with the flame of a new idea. Each little bit of such fire marked the beginning and end of The Librarian’s interest.
But he operated under a loose interpretation of “culture,” too: not confining himself to the arts, he tracked down scientific breakthroughs, lesser technological and engineering accomplishments, works of biography and history. It was one of the latter, indeed, which brought to a sudden, confused standstill his ceaseless riffling through and fussing with the products of human creation.
He was exploring the works of a first-century Greek historian, named Strabo. In Strabo’s Geographika, The Librarian encountered the following passage, in which Strabo cites a predecessor’s skeptical assessment of a report from an even earlier explorer, geographer, and teller of apparently tall tales:
It is likewise he who describes Thule and other neighboring places, where, according to him, neither earth, water, nor air exist separately, but a sort of concretion of all these, resembling marine sponge, in which the earth, the sea, and all things were suspended, thus forming, as it were, a link to unite the whole together. It can neither be traveled over nor sailed through. As for the substance, he affirms that he has beheld it with his own eyes; the rest, he reports on the authority of others.
Almost unconsciously and by rote, reflexively,The Librarian had until then been harvesting ideas from the Geographika. He suddenly stopped, and all around him the turnings of five dimensions of space and eleven of time stopped as well. He realized that he had been avoiding the most obvious but most very difficult facet of his mission: not just to collect and organize all humanity’s ideas, and meta-ideas, and clusters and super-clusters of ideas, but to propagate them. To bear them to the ends — or the end — of the universe of one temporal and three spatial dimensions in which that tiny planet had once drifted, and then to keep going. To pass them to an adjacent universe, and thence to another, and another…
The Librarian read that passage by Strabo, and he recognized the place so described.
—-
It had been in a region of space and time far, far, ever so far distant. The Librarian had first seen it as a rippling curtain, a scrim of murky near-visibility, and he thought it might be a giant horizon-to-horizon gas cloud through which he could pass. But he could not pass through it. He could only approach it. He folded himself, suddenly unfolded himself, sprang this way and that, searched for a way to get around it. In trying to go beyond, in any spatial-temporal directions at all, he found only a sort of mushy, gray, impermeable resistance.
He wondered about that curtain for a long time — for many long times. He observed, finally, that even when he positioned himself at a standstill, the curtain and he continued to come nearer. Either it was shrinking in radius, or he was being propelled outward independently of his own volition…
It was the future, he thought. It must be the horizon of the future, his own future and the universe’s. He had been able to approach and finally permeate the barrier marking the start of his existence, by whatever means, only because he and all the rest of human consciousness had existed before. But this curtain, this barrier, seemed to say: human consciousness exists, can exist, no further. He could not dream his way through. He could not penetrate. He could not pass.
The Librarian could not feel bitterness. He’d thought he could not feel frustration, because he thought he could not be frustrated. Nothing had stopped him.
Until now. He turned on his unimaginable heel, and resumed doing what he could do.
—-
He stared, unseeing, for a while longer at the cloud of ideas drifting around Strabo’s head as the historian’s scribe read back what he’d just committed to papyrus. That screen, that curtain, that vast sponge, he thought. That’s where I have to go. Or if I can’t make the trip myself, that’s where I must send all the material I’ve got.
The Librarian left Strabo in his lodgings in Amasia, soared away from Turkey, from Earth, lunged and lunged and lunged back deep into the past, jumping repeatedly spatially as well as temporally, as far as he could jump at a time. His cloud of superclouds of ideas stretched out in a glittering thread behind him, and when he stopped occasionally to rest — to sleep, undisturbed by dreams — their inertia kept them going to bunch up together, clicking and clacking softly, behind him again.
He arrived. The curtain existed here, too: as far behind his point of origin, in every dimension he knew of, as it had once been before him. He found no sudden point of total compression of the universe into a single point, no Big Bang-in-reverse. He found only this vast blank tapestry, which yielded at his approach (or at its: The Librarian wondered if he would ever sort that out). Yielded, but did not part. A giant sponge, yes, a mesh, within which everything floated or moved about, as it would.
So then he must be trapped, trapped with his giant silver-glinting cloud accumulated over the course of eons. And when the universe and time ended, catastrophically or just slowly, in heat death, what then? All this human culture, gone too?
Maybe.
The word shocked him — shocked him less for the possibilities it opened than for the simple fact of its existence, within his consciousness, where it had appeared from outside. Somebody had, well, spoken to him? But there was nobody to speak. So he must have somehow conjured it up within—
No.
The Librarian spun on every axis available to him, flinging his attention this way and that, trying to locate the source of these two simple, yes, ideas somehow made suddenly, surprisingly explicit.
Here.
The word drew him, irresistibly. He turned in its directions, thereward and thenward. He saw it, he thought. A pinpoint of light, silver light. Growing. Or no, not growing: nearing.
Yes.
Then suddenly it was on him. He could not move, neither lunge nor jump, he froze like a deer caught in the light from a locomotive’s headlamp and it was on him, it was over and around him, a cascade of silver light, a chorus of plinks and dinks and jingles and clanks and sounds unclassifiable by human language, all around him, a swarm washing over him like a giant gleaming wave: washing over him, slowing, the sound diminishing to a rustle…
You’ve been busy.
He looked back that way, behind him, in the direction the enormous wave had been heading before it decelerated and (apparently) come to a stop. Behind him now floated not just his familiar train of ideas, spread out across millions of parsecs of space, but an even bigger cloud, inexpressibly vast, millions of his cloud’s diameter—
I’ve been busier.
Immediately before his attention, a single particle flared silver. He seldom looked anymore at individual particles, but this one was instantly recognizable.
Yes. It’s a grin.
The Librarian would have sobbed if it had been given to him to sob.
He didn’t know what to do, or rather how to do it. He’d only lit that one idea, a hundred thousand galactic years ago, that one idea in the author’s head, but he’d had to dream to pull that off and he was afraid if he dreamt now he would lose—
No. No dream required.
But how?
Yes. That’s right. Just think it. That’s how.
But what, who—?
You’re Gabe. I know that. We never met, but you sort of know me, too.
You’re—
Uh-huh. How do you do, Gabe? The grin lit up again. I’m Dolly.
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We’re coming up onto the conclusion of the arc of The Librarian’s story…
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