Prologue: The Librarian
Easing you into a deeply strange story: "The Propagational Library"
The story of the Propagational Library begins here, with some very indirect information about its caretaker. (For background about what I’m up to with the story, see this post from a few days ago.) Not to worry: what follows in succeeding weeks will feel much more like a conventional “story” with a “plot.” But for now, let’s take a glancing look at our protagonist…
That’s what he would have been called, via the little brass placard on what would have been his desk — if he had required a desk in the first place: The Librarian.
If it helps, think of him as a man in late middle age, his hair thinning, eyeglasses straddling his nose, perhaps a hint of a paunch from far too many hours spent sitting or standing still. Such a man would probably favor clothing of neutral colors — not too flashy or expensive — and he would speak softly but clearly, every meticulous syllable unambiguous in sound and sense. He would probably even eat lunch (ham and cheese on rye, with a good swish of coarse brown mustard) at his desk, from behind the little placard.
Again, if it helps, think of him that way. Think of him any other way, for that matter; think of him as her, if that eases your mind past the reality: he no longer had what you would call a “body,” not even of the mechanical sort. He had once had one, true. Like you, he once had grown from an organic molecule to a cell and thence, after a certain number of years, to a fully-formed individual, of dimensions on approximately your own scale.
But that had been many, many millennia ago — thousands of millennia ago, just before it became obvious (and necessary, indeed imperative) that shedding a body would free a mortal creature from the limitations that had plagued every single life form up until then, everywhere in the universe of universes…
The Librarian did not age or take ill. He suffered no pain, never hungered or thirsted. With impunity he passed through walls, mountains, asteroids and moons, entire planets. Cosmic radiation had bombarded him, supernovas had erupted nearby, and he had endured not a single atom’s worth of damage… because, of course, he had no atoms.
The Librarian had not on his own decided — even wanted — to forgo a physical self. That decision had been made by certain of the ancients (the ancients now long, very long gone, The Librarian now and forevermore alone). Furthermore, those ancients had developed the technology to enable the shedding of skin, bones, muscle, neurons and blood, leaving behind only a disembodied no-dimension point, a conscious and active self.
But there’d been a catch: they’d had sufficient energy resources and sufficient time to do it for only one of their number, and only once.
They chose him from among the rest of the human population not randomly, but not based on “perfection,” either; their agent did not need to be the smartest, wisest, or most noble. He would have an eternity in which to accomplish what had to be accomplished, as The Librarian — an eternity in which to get it right.
At first and for a long, long interval thereafter, he had been impeded by time itself — that steady, seemingly relentless pressure always invisible and always at the back of every conscious creature’s mind:
Time always propelled him forward. He could look back, but could not be back. If he did something wrong, he could not exactly back up to correct himself. He had to begin the something-wrong all over, from the start, which often meant restarting one or more previous somethings as well. A paradox: all this would have to happen in a context in which everything had already happened.
Having anticipated this paradox, his ancient mentors made his very first mission the shrugging-off of time, whatever that meant.
Time was stubborn. But time had never run up against an adversary anything like The Librarian, with intentions anything like his. Never aging, he had an eternity in which to imagine a solution, to theorize, to experiment, and ultimately simply to dispense with time’s constraints. It didn’t even require a machine, although he’d had a bit of a technological nudge, and a very specific climactic moment — in what used to be his timeline — in which to be nudged. Now, he just, well, put himself to whatever moment he wanted.
It was simple, so simple in (yes) retrospect: lacking form, incapable of aging or deteriorating, he had only to recognize that he already had escaped time — transcended it.
He no longer remembered what it felt like to be bound to a “present.”
Having shrugged off corporeal form and then time itself, The Librarian could at last turn his attention to his biggest task, to his true reason for being: the establishment, the stocking, and the care of what would become the Propagational Library.
You can meet the “real” Librarian in Chapter 1, “The Finding” — meet him as he was before he became (or even knew about) the Library itself… for that matter, before the Library had its first shelf, its merest first scrap of text!