Year's Best Scifi 3 Part 8

"It was open, sir," Qent said. He had always been quick and Klair supposed his answer was technically correct. She had opened the door.

"How the h.e.l.l-? Well, get out. Out!"

He was confused and worried and hardly gave them more than a brief search.

Qent asked to see the zapper, imitating a dumbo kid, and the guard brushed them off, still puzzled.

Until the vault she had not realized that her hard-won trick was anything more than a delicious secret. Klair was a scholarly type and enjoyed her hours of scanning over the decaying sheets she found in the Historical Sector's archives.

The fat ones she learned were called "books" and there was even an entry in the Compendium about them. The Voice recited the entry to her in its soft tones, the ones she had chosen for her daily work. She used a more ornate voice for social matters and a crisp, precise one for directions. In normal life that was all anyone needed, a set of pleasing Voice agents.

There was hardly any delay when she requested the book entry and the Voice told a marvelous tale. There were many kinds of books, including one called "novel."

This meant new the Voice said. But the one novel Klair found in the dank, dark Antiquities Vault was obviously old, not new at all. Such confusions were inevitable in research, she realized.

Books were known also as buchs in some ancient sources, it said, in the confusing era when there were competing Voices. Not really even Voices, either, but whole different speech-methods, before Standard was discovered.

All that happened in the Narrow Age, as antiquarians termed it. A time of constrained modes, hopelessly linear and slow. People then were divided by their access to information. Thank goodness such divisive forces were now banished.They now lived in the Emergent Age, of course. The Voice had emerged from the evolution of old style Intelligent Agents, on computers. Those would perform fetch-'em tasks. Gradually, people let their Agents do more and more. Agent merging led to more creativity, coming from the overlap of many voices, many threads in a society where all was open and clear to all, available through the Voice.

"What sop!" Qent said to this, and she sort of agreed. The Narrow Age sounded fascinating, with its books and reading. The tingling thrill of being able to hold a year's worth of Voice talk in your hand, opening it to anywhere you chose, picking out lore at will-it captivated her.

Of course, she knew the Voice was superior. Instantly it could skip to any subject or even word you liked in any record. It would explain in private, sounding just like an enormously smart person speaking to you alone, in your head. Everybody had one and could access it with an internal signal.

She looked up the Voice itself in one of the old books. The words were hard to follow and she began to wish for some way to find out what they meant. Sounding them out was hard because, even when she knew the word, the mapping from letters to sounds followed irregular rules. "What's the point of that?" Qent asked often, but he kept at it with her.

The books said that the Voice had started as an aid to people called "illiterates"-and Klair was startled to find, consulting the Voice, that everybody was one. Except her and Qent, now.

Once, lots and lots of people could read. But as the Voice got easier to use, a certain cachet attached to using only the Voice. Independence from linear "print-slavery" became fashionable, then universal. After all, the Voice could pipe the data you needed on fast-flow, a kind of compressed speech that was as fast (or in fact, by that time, faster) as people could read.

Most people got their information by eye, anyway. In a restaurant, they ordered chicken by touching the drumstick icon, or fish by the fishstick icon. And of course most of their time they spent at entertainments, which had to be visual, tactile, smell-rich-sports, 3Ds, sensos, a-morphs, realos.

She found it quite delicious to have an obscure, secret talent that none of her friends even guessed. She was going to have a party and show them all, but then she saw the big letters in the Boulevard of Aspiration, and things got complicated.

Qent said, "I make it to be- SAVVY THIS? MEAT 13:20 @ Y.".

Skeptically he eyed the poorly printed letters written in livid red on a blue wall.

"Somebody did that by hand," Klair marveled.

"Writing by yourself? How?"

"I hadn't thought anybody could. I mean, machines make letters, don't they?"

"You're the one who read all those historical books. Printing machines gave wayto Voice machines, you said."

Klair traced a hand over the misshapen letters. "It's like making a drawing, only you try to imitate a machine, see? Think of letters as little art objects."

"This isn't an art exhibit."

"No, it's a message. But maybe I can..."

By luck she had in her side-sack her latest cherished discovery, a fat book called "Dictionary." It had many more words in it than the Voice, approximating and vernacular. Big words that n.o.body used any more, hadn't used for so long even the Voice didn't know them. It even told her that "@" meant "at," but not why.

"Here," she pointed forcefully at the tiny little entry. "Meat is the flesh of an animal."

"Animals do that. I heard that people used to."

"Primitive!" she said scornfully.

"It may mean that in there, but it sounds like 'meet.'"

"Somebody made an error? Confusing the sound with another word?"

"Somebody wants people who can read the sign to meet them."

"Other readers."

"Where?" He frowned.

"It says 'Y.' That's not a word."

"Maybe it's an abbreviation, like that "MANUFAC DIST?"

"No, too short."

He snapped his fingers. "Remember where the Avenue of Aspiration branches?

You can look down on it from the balcony of the Renew building. From above, it looks like that letter."

"Let's be there, then."

They showed up, but n.o.body else did. Instead, at the Y another crude hand-lettered sign said MEAT CORRIDOR 63, 13:30 TOMORROW, BLOCK 129.

They went home and turned off their Voices and talked. Most couples silenced the Voice only during s.e.x. This was merely polite, even though of course no other person could be sure it was off nowadays, what with the new neuroactivated models.

They went home and sped-read some ancient texts. There was a thick book t.i.tled The l.u.s.t of the Mahicans that Qent had seen on senso. She read it-her speed was a lot higher than his-but it wasn't anything like the senso he had seen. There was no s.e.x in it at all. Just stares of infinite longing and heavy breathing and pounding pulses and stuff like that. Still, she found it oddly stirring. Reading was funny that way.They could not get their minds off the sign. Qent was out of sorts, irked that others had mastered their discovery. He groused about it vaguely and found excuses to change the subject.

Klair didn't see it possessively. After all, the higher moral good was to share.

Reading was wickedly single-ist. Was that why she liked it so much? A reader was isolated, listening to a voice no one else could take part in. That led to differences and divisions, friction and clashes.

Still, the rapture of reading-of listening to silent sounds from ages past-was too, well, perhaps the right word was t.i.tillating.

She was excited by the prospect of other readers. Inevitably, they went to the site.

The man who slouched beside a rampway was not impressive. Medium height, his crimson codpiece was three years out of date. His hair was stringy and festooned with comically tattered microbirds. He said nothing, simply handed them a sheet.

Miserably printed sentences covered both sides. The first paragraph was enough for Klair.

THE SECRET a.s.sEMBLY OF READERS MUST UNITE! WE HAVE A.

TALENT THE Ma.s.sES CANNOT UNDERSTAND. THEY WILL FEAR US IF.

THEY KNOW. A BROTHERHOOD AND SISTERHOOD OF READERS IS.

THE ONLY SOLUTION TO OUR ISOLATION. ARISE!.

"What cliche sop!" She thrust the sheet back at him.

"True, though."

Qent said sharply, "Just tell us what you-"

"You never know when the Voice is on," the man said mysteriously.

Klair said, "And your printing is awful."

"Better than yours," he said shrewdly.

"That's not the point," Qent said. "We demand to know-"

"Come on. And shut up, huh?"

They were in a wildness preserve before the man spoke. "I'm Marq. No Voice pickups here, at least according to the flow charts."

"You're an engineer?" Klair asked, admiring the oaks.

"I'm a philosopher. I make my money engineering."

"How long have you been reading?"

"Years. Started with some old manuals I found. Figured it out from scratch."

"So did we." Qent said. "It's hard, not being able to ask for help from the Voice."

Marq nodded. "I did. Dumb, huh?""What happened?"

"Some Spectors came by. Just casual talk, y'know, but I knew what they were after."

"Evidence?" she asked uneasily.

"When I asked the Voice there was a pause, just a little one. A priority shift, I know how to spot them. So I broke off and took the books I had to a hiding place.

When I got back there were the Spectors, cool as you like, just kind of looking around my room."

"You didn't tell them... ?" she asked.

"You got to give them something. I had a copy of this thing about books that I couldn't understand, Centigrade 233. Kept it buried under a pseud-bush bed. They were getting funny on me so I took it out and gave it to them."

She blinked, startled. "What did they do? Arrest you?"

Marq gave her a crooked grin. "Reading's not illegal, y'know. Just anti, that's all.

So they let me off with six weeks of grouping."

"Wow, do I hate those," Qent said.

Marq shrugged. "I did the time. They poked at me and I had to pretend to see the light and all. They kept the book."

"You're brave," Klair said.

"Just stupid. I should never have asked the Voice."

Qent said earnestly, "You'd think the Voice would encourage us to learn. I mean, it'd be useful in emergencies. Say the Voice goes down, we could read the info we'd need."

Marq nodded. "I figure the Voice reads. It just doesn't want compet.i.tion."

She said, "The Voice is a machine."

"So?" Marq shrugged again. "Who knows how smart it is?"

"It's a service," Qent said. "That's all."

"Notice how it won't store what we say?" Marq smiled shrewdly.

Qent nodded. "It says it's trying to improve our memories."

"Reading was invented to replace memory," Klair said. "I read it in a history book."

"So it must be true?" Marq shrugged derisively, a gesture that was beginning to irk Klair a lot.

She hated politics and this was starting to sound like that. "How many books have you got?"

"Lots. I found a tunnel into a vault. I can go there anytime."

Qent and Klair gasped at his audacity as he described how for years he hadburrowed into sealed-off chambers, many rich in decaying doc.u.ments and bound volumes. He spoke of exotica they had never seen, tomes which were nothing but names in the Dictionary: Encyclopedias, Thesauruses, Atlases, Alamancs. He had read whole volumes of the fabled Britannica!

Would he trade? Lend? "Of course," Marq said warmly.

Their friendship began that way, a bit edgy and cautious at the margins, but dominated by the skill and secret lore they shared. Three years of clandestine reading followed before Marq disappeared.

He wasn't at any of their usual meeting places. After all this time, they still did not know where he lived, or where his h.o.a.rd of books might be. Marq was secretive.

They searched the sprawling corridors of the complexes, but were afraid to ask the Voice for any info on him.