Glasshouse - Charles Stross [63]
I learn over the course of the morning that “library work” covers such an enormous area of information management that back during the dark ages, before libraries became self-organizing constructs, people used to devote their entire (admittedly short) lives to studying the theory of how best to manage them. Neither Janis—nor I—is remotely qualified to be a real dark age librarian, with their esoteric mastery of catalogue systems and controlled information classification vocabularies, but we can run a small municipal lending library and reference section with a bit of scurrying around and a lot of patience. I seem to have some historic skills in that direction, and unlike my experience with arc welding, I haven’t erased all of them. I can remember my alphabet and grasp the decimal classification scheme immediately, and the way each book has a ticket in an envelope inside the front cover that has to be retained when it’s loaned out makes sense, too . . .
It’s only by midafternoon, when we’ve taken a grand total of five returns and had one visitor who borrowed two books (on Aztec culture and the care and feeding of carnivorous plants), that I begin to wonder why YFH-Polity needs anything as exotic as a full-time librarian.
“I don’t know,” Janis admits over a cup of tea in the staff room, her feet stretched out under the rickety white-painted wooden table. “It can get a bit busy—wait until six o’clock, when most people are on their way home from work, that’s when we get most of our borrowers—but really, they don’t need me. A zombie could do the job perfectly well.” She looks pensive. “I suspect it’s more to do with finding employment for people who ask for it. It’s one of the drawbacks of the entire experiment. We don’t exist in a closed-circuit economy, and if they don’t constantly provide jobs for people, it’ll all fall apart. So what we’re left with is a situation where they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work. At least until they merge the parishes.”
“Merge the—there are more?”
“So I’m told.” She shrugs. “They’re introducing us in small stages, so that we know who our neighbors are before we get linked into a large community and everything goes to pieces.”
“Isn’t that a bit of a pessimistic attitude?” I ask.
“Maybe so.” She flashes me a rare grin. “But it’s a realistic one.”
I think I’m going to like Janis, her ironic sense of humor notwithstanding: I feel comfortable around her. We’re going to work well together. “And the other stuff? The restricted archive? The computer?”
She waves it off. “All you need to know is, once a week Fiore comes and we unlock the closed room and leave him alone in it for an hour or two. If he wants to take any papers away, we log them and nag him until he brings them back.”
“Anyone else?”
“Well.” She looks thoughtful. “If the Bishop shows up, you give him access to all areas.” She pulls a face. “And don’t ask me about the computer, nobody told me much about how to use it, and I don’t really understand the thing, but if you want to tinker with it during a slack period, be my guest. Just remember everything is logged.” She catches my eye. “Everything,” she repeats, with quiet emphasis.
My pulse quickens. “On the computer? Or