Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon
49
Marian the Librarian
IT SOUNDS SO CLICHÉ, but this actually happened to me after the big catastrophe on 9/11. Hate that day and all it stands for. Stupid, mindless terrorism in the name of religion followed by stupid, mindless war in the name of patriotism. Twenty years of war, 175,000 deaths, and everything ended up exactly where it started. Just so typical.
But I went to New York with some heavy equipment from the construction site and did my best to help where I was needed. After two weeks there, we were told to go home. There were too many of us for the delicate work of clearing the site and sifting through the rubble for human remains. It was sickening. It was also one of the reasons I felt I needed to get the infinity room someplace safe that was beyond the reach of stupid, mindless religious and political fanatics.
I found a place to store my equipment for a couple of days and checked into a hotel for a shower. I opened a gateway and embraced my lovers, reaffirming life in the arms of each of them.
During my time in New York, I became aware of many famous buildings. Not far from my hotel was the New York Public Library.
Truth? The NYPL is ten times… maybe fifty times as big as the Library of Alexandria. Over fifty million volumes! I knew we couldn’t take everything, but I called the librarians out of the secret room and we began shuffling everything we could into and out of the infinity room. We didn’t steal anything. We just unofficially checked things out and returned them. While we had them, they went through the replication spell and a copy was made in the infinity room.
I used a combination of spells to keep people from contemplating entering the area where we were working. We moved fast and efficiently so the area moved about every fifteen minutes and didn’t disrupt readers and users too much. Everyone helped. Those who couldn’t cope with the new and modern natural world stayed in the infinity room and shelved the replicated books. We started in science and technology and continued to work our way through spiritual, religious, and esoteric works. Then history, geography, and biography.
You might notice that we weren’t plucking a lot from the fiction shelves. It’s not that I don’t like fiction! It’s just that there was so much of it, I didn’t think I could make a dent. We’d collected fiction from many locations around the world. We make choices and sometimes they are right.
And sometimes I cast a spell carelessly and included a librarian inside the bubble where we were working. A librarian who watched me removing and reshelving books with a small army. I was replicating entire shelf units and planting them in the infinity room in random order. We’d need to sort them out later.
Suddenly I became aware of a mousy woman about five-five with light brown fur—I mean hair—pulled up in a tight bun, staring at me over her half glasses, arms folded over her cardigan-covered breasts, tapping her toe quietly on the marble floor—because this is a library, after all. Shh!
“Tell me exactly why I shouldn’t have security and police swarming all over here to arrest you,” she demanded. “There is something fishy going on here.”
“That’s an understatement,” I said. “Uh… Hi. I’m Bob. And I believe police in this city currently have more than they can handle with actual emergencies and don’t need to waste time investigating this. And you are?”
“I’m the librarian. You are stealing my books!”
“No, no. We’re just unofficially checking them out in rapid succession and returning them,” I defended myself and my minions. “I’m here on a mission to preserve as much human knowledge as I can,” I said, trying to sound as philanthropic as I could. She grabbed the book out of my hand that I was ready to reshelve.
“Sex and Hypnosis: How to Improve Your Sex Life,” she read off the cover. I snatched the book back and put it on the shelf in proper order.
“We’re in the self-help section and it was next in line to be replicated,” I said.
“Replicated?”
“Yes. We would not take any of your original books without explicit permission. All we are doing is taking them to our replicator, making a copy for our library, and then returning the original,” I explained.
“Really? How fast can you make a replica?”
“We turn one around about every five seconds.”
“By my calculations, then, you should be finished in about seven years, assuming you remain in the library 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”
“That sounds dreadful. We usually replicate a stack of books at once, maybe ten at a time, but I see that would still take the better part of a year. That’s why we aren’t touching the fiction section. We had to limit what we can accomplish.”
“Why are you doing this?” she asked.
It was interesting to me that her first thought was ‘why’ and not ‘how.’ I liked her and made a snap decision that might have changed the course of the infinity room.
“I’ve dedicated the best part of a very long life to saving the accumulated knowledge of humanity. Even if we succeeded in replicating all the books in the library, we would still only have a droplet in the ocean,” I said. She nodded. “Why don’t I give you a tour. We’ll follow the journey of a book through the Library of Bob.” She nodded and I summoned Zhi to supervise and make sure no one else interrupted the flow of our books. Then I took the next book from a shelf and headed to the gateway. She followed me. I noticed that she picked up a book, too. The person behind her loaded a cart with three shelves and pushed it behind us.
“This is a kind of transporter,” I said, testing the concept. “It will take us directly to the replication room.”
“So, you’re an alien,” she said, nodding her head. It was almost like she’d been expecting us.
“I guess you could say that in a manner of speaking,” I answered.
“It’s true then. I’ve known ever since the towers crumbled two weeks ago the end of the world is coming. Will there be anything left of humanity when this catastrophe befalls us?” she asked. I considered that.
“No. I mean yes. I’m not predicting the end of the world. If one lives long enough, one is likely to expect anything eventually. What I mean is that I don’t think I’ll be able to continue this project forever, and therefore, I need to get as much done as quickly as I can.” We stepped through the gateway and into the replicator room. I laid my book on an invisible shelf and nodded to her to follow suit. She couldn’t see the shelf, so she laid her book on top of mine. The librarian behind us quickly loaded up the shelf with the cartful of books he was moving. I turned to him.
“Would you mind grabbing the two we sent ahead of your load? They are in the same sequence as what you have.”
“Yes, Bob. I’ll take care of it,” he said. I think he may have spoken in ancient Aramaic. Marian looked puzzled. Nonetheless, Marian gasped when she saw the stack of books seem to divide and follow two paths. She was even more puzzled when the librarian simply walked between the paths and started stacking the books back on his cart. We followed the path of the replicas.
As we stepped into the next room, Marian gasped again as she saw the books being shelved on replicas of the shelves in her own library that moved along with us. The shelves seemed to be taking on substance out of nothing as the books arrived. My librarians here were shelving the books as quickly as they came through, all understanding the time constraints for getting as many books as possible replicated and in our library.
“This room, as you can see, is a fairly close replica of your library. There is a strange thing about the infinity room. Things brought into it seem to carry a memory of their native environment and create it around themselves. That’s the only way I can describe it. The spaces are not always complete, though, since the world the books know is limited to the space immediately around them on the shelves. As more volumes come in, however, the cumulative knowledge of the books expands the space with more detail.”
“You sound like they are alive.”
“All things, animate and inanimate, carry the memory of their environment. The infinity room is simply a fertile land for that memory to grow in.”
“There are books missing. I noticed you weren’t taking every book from every shelf,” she said, running a hand lovingly over the spines.
“The librarians on collection duty automatically skip over any volume we already have a copy of. I hope that will help reduce the time it takes to get all the best books captured.”
“You must have a phenomenal computer system and this wonderful technology that replicates things. Your species must be far more advanced than earth.”
“Um… We are actually all of earth. And we don’t really have any technology. It’s all done by magic. Would you like a full tour?”
“Any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic to those who were not as advanced. Please. Let me see more of your magic.”
I led her into a different room and she identified the room as an old library, probably of the US.
“Yes. This is the San Francisco Public Library as it existed just before the great earthquake of 1906. That was before the current library was built.”
“I’ve studied library history. They lost 140,000 volumes in that earthquake.”
“Some were lost. I happened to be nearby when the quake struck and we evacuated as many books as we could before the walls collapsed. Now this next room takes us back a ways. You’ve undoubtedly heard of the Library of Alexandria,” I said. She blanched.
“You can’t mean to say… All those precious books lost in the fire!”
“I recruited all the librarians in that library to gather up as many books as they could and get them to safety. Many of our librarians are from that time, including the ones you saw in your replica shelving books. Most have learned English. We don’t really have a call for communicating in ancient Egyptian or Greek. The librarians took charge of organizing my library. I’m afraid it was in great disorder prior to their arrival.”
“The librarians… are replicas, too?”
“Oh, no. These are those very librarians who tended the library in Alexandria. You see, people and things don’t age here. These scrolls are in exactly the same condition they were two thousand years ago.” I led her through Nebuchadnezzar’s library, the library of Vedic writings, the Japanese texts, and the Mayan texts. Marian was awed.
“Let me help. I want to work here,” she breathed. I looked at her and saw tears streaming from her eyes. “Please hire me to help take care of your libraries. I don’t care if I never go back to that filthy city again. I could live here among the books forever. Please.”
I took her hand and led her outside. It was a beautiful day—as all days in the infinity room were. I’d designed the palace district much the same way I’d designed temples and castles through the centuries. I led her past the pool where there were, of course, a number of concubines lazing contentedly, naked as they always were. Inside the palace, I introduced her to my wives and my possessions, who scurried about preparing a luncheon for us. Before we sat to eat, though, I led her to the magic room, exactly as I remembered it from Pinaruti’s house in Knossos. I didn’t bring many people here, but I thought she would especially appreciate it.
“This is where it all started,” I said. “Actually, where I started, 4,000 years ago. When I had to flee Knossos, I scooped up all the old mage’s scrolls of magic and took this room with me.”
“It’s beautiful in a way,” she said, “though a bit… um… primitive.”
“To our twenty-first century way of thinking, yes, it is. But this was a house of modest luxury in Knossos. I keep this room exactly the way it was when I came into the world, though I have added areas for the most dangerous magical texts so that people in the libraries don’t stumble upon them accidentally and try something that would hurt them.”
“You ban books?”
“No. But just as people need instruction on how to use tools, computers, and household appliances, people need instruction on using magic, too. When a person shows the aptitude and desire to learn magic, I will help him or her to study these scrolls. Simply reciting a spell, even if one has the talent to manifest it, doesn’t mean they won’t be hurt by it. There is one book I have sequestered here that gives very careful and very good instructions on how to turn yourself into an animal. However, the book has no instructions on how to return to human form. It is a book of traps. Turn yourself into a bug and you are stuck as a bug for the rest of your life. Which may be short if someone happens to step on you.”
“You’ve said several times ‘when you started’ or ‘when you came into the world.’ What are you exactly?”
“I am a free demon, summoned from the primordial mass by an unfortunate wizard who died of shock when I actually answered his summons.”
“A demon,” she breathed. “I thought demons were mythical.”
“Everything is mythical. That’s what we all arose from at one time or another.” I led her into our dining room and we sat with my four wives. I didn’t have Peninnah at the time.
“Wives, Marian the Librarian would like to come and work in our libraries. Perhaps you would like to tell her about what life is like in the infinity room.”
I left Marian in the care of my wives and returned to the work of replicating the New York Public Library. Marian quickly joined our force in helping to copy the books and got us access into the rare books collections where we even managed to replicate their copy of the Gutenberg Bible. She did not return to her former life after that.
We didn’t immediately read out the results of our cooking competition. The meals ranged from the exquisite to the disastrous. On Saturday night, we all loaded into a bus and were taken to a concert hall where Rin was joined by other members of her string quartet and we were treated to Brahms’ “String Quartet in C Minor.” It was exquisite and I was so glad we had Rin as one of our crew contestants. After the late-night concert, we went out to enjoy some of the nightlife in the resort where we were treated to a nightclub comedy act with an interpreter. I have no idea if the comedian was any good, but the interpreter was hilarious. Occasionally, she would look at the comedian as if she had said something truly strange and then interpret it in such a way that brought us to tears.
On Sunday afternoon, we called everyone together in the living room of the penthouse.
“We’re having a party,” I said. “This is a party to honor one of our number who will no longer be with us after today. We’ve counted the votes and tabulated the results. Now everyone grab a drink and some snacks and tell each of the other women in the contest how you feel about her and how much you hope she is not eliminated.”
I’d chosen this method for a couple of reasons. First, I thought the person eliminated deserved more than just to be shoved out the door. And second, I wanted the girls to have a real opportunity to show their bonding and caring for each other. I wasn’t disappointed in either instance. The girls did care about each other and showed it in every way they could, without being encumbered by saying goodbye. Eventually, we all sat and the expectations were tense.
Valerie’s dinner was, as expected, delectable. She was a chef by profession and knew how to plan a meal and how to judge portions so she had exactly the right amount of food. She also effectively used Julie as her sous chef and assistant. Julie scrubbed and peeled vegetables, set the table precisely the way Valerie directed, and helped serve the meal when we were all seated.
Valerie got high marks all the way around and won the week’s competition.
“And now, we have to say goodbye to someone we all love,” I said. “The crew has voted and our school teacher, Linda, has lost this competition.”
Poor Linda had attempted an elaborate meal that left nearly every pot in the kitchen dirty. It might even have turned out okay if she had been serving dinner. But it was totally inappropriate for breakfast and when the final scores were tallied, she came out on the bottom.
She’d captured all our hearts with her sensual eroticism during the audition and then her blatant stripping and telling us that if she found out it was all real, she’d never wear clothes again and I’d never have to ask to fuck her. Well, we had come very close to fucking, but had never quite gone the last few inches.
After her goodbye party, she came into my study with tears running down her face. I held her gently in my arms and comforted her. No one else was allowed in the room, except the camerawomen from Areola who stayed discreetly hidden. Linda immediately came to me and threw herself into my arms. It could have been a point of recrimination, complaint, or anger. Instead…
“I’m so sorry I disappointed you, Bob,” she sniffed. “I really wanted to be the best and be with you forever. Or at least not the worst.”
“Linda, how would you like to continue on the journey with us?” I asked.
“Really? Do you have, like, amnesty for losers? Please, Bob, don’t tease me. I’d do anything to stay with you and our family,” she said.
“It’s not quite like that,” I said. “In fact, you will find this very hard to believe.” I pointed toward the door and opened a gateway that shimmered beside the door. “Linda, the door on the right leads outside where a limo is waiting to take you wherever you want to go. You will have plenty of money and transportation, literally to anyplace in the world. The driver will give you a ticket and everything else you need. All your belongings will be packed up here and in California and sent to you right away. But if you choose to leave by that door, you will never see us again, unless you happen to watch the TV special.”
She froze, contemplating the possibilities.
“The alternative is on the left.” The portal began to glow. “I have in my possession a transporter. It is powerful enough to bring everyone in my palace, where they are waiting, to join us when we arrive at our destination. When you walk through that portal, you stop aging. You simply wait for me to call you and bring you with me. I promise, it isn’t a difficult wait. But it’s all unknown, Linda. You don’t know where you’ll be. You will never again have contact with the earth you’ve known all your life. You’ll have our dream. It’s your choice to make, Linda. Just walk through one door or the other.”
Linda didn’t say anything. She stood up in front of me and slowly and meticulously peeled off her clothes, just as she’d done at her audition. She left them in a pile on my desk. Then she bent over the desk and spread her legs.
“Any time, Bob. You’ll never have to ask to fuck me. Take me. I believe it’s all real.”
I stepped up behind her and ran a finger through her pussy to make sure she was really ready. With that much lubrication, I was surprised she hadn’t already orgasmed. I unfastened my pants and slotted my cock at her entrance and pushed. She groaned as I filled her with more than she’d ever crammed in there before. I pulled back and thrust again, and then she started coming. It was non-stop as I fucked her for a good ten minutes before I bellowed out my own release and filled her with my spend.
After we’d recovered a bit, I pulled myself back and she stood in front of me with come running down the inside of her thighs. She kissed me and turned toward the portal, leaving her clothes on the desk.
“See you on the other side, Bob,” she said, and stepped through.
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