Free Brightness Reef by David Brin

of so many, and lowered her eyes.
    That was the sort of thing Lark would do. Boldly taking over a meeting at the last minute, compelling others to act. Joshu had that impulsiveness, too-till the sickness took him in those final weeks. . . .
    Gnarled fingers grasped hers, halting the bleak gyre of her thoughts. She looked up and saw that Nelo had aged in the last hour. Now the fate of his beloved mill rested on news from above.
    As the slow duras passed, the full import of her prediction sank in.
    Biblos.
    The Hall of Books.
    Once already, fire had taken a terrible toll there. Even so, the remaining archive was humanity’s greatest contribution to the Commons and a cause of both envy and wonder among the other races.
    What will we become, if it’s gone? True pastoralists? Gleaners, living   off remnants swiped from ancient Buyur sites? Farmers all?
    That was how the other five had seemed, when humans first came. Bickering primitives with their barely functioning commons. Humanity introduced new ways, changed the rules, almost as much as the arrival of the Egg several generations later.
    Now shall we slide downslope faster? Losing the few relics that remind us we once roamed galaxies? Shucking our books, tools, clothes, till we’re like glavers? Pure, shriven innocents?
    According to the Scrolls, that was one path to salvation. Many, like Jop, believed in it.
    Sara tried to see hope, even if word came back of flames and dust in the night. At any time, hundreds of books were outside Biblos, on loan to far-flung communities.
    But few texts in Sara’s specialty ever left their dusty shelves. Hilbert. Somerfeld. Witten and Tang. Eliahu- names of great minds she knew intimately across centuries and parsecs. The intimacy of pure, near-perfect thoughts. They’ll burn. The sole copies. Lately her research had swung to other areas-the chaotic ebb and flow of language-but still she called mathematics home. The voices in those books had always seemed soul-alive. Now she feared learning they were gone.
    Then abruptly, another notion occurred to her, completely unexpected, glancing off her grief at a startling angle.
    If Galactics really have come, what do a few thousand paper volumes really matter? Sure, they’ll judge us for our ancestors’ crime. Nothing can prevent that. But meanwhile, aboard their ships . . .
    It occurred to Sara that she might get a chance to visit a completely different kind of library. One towering over the Biblos cache, the way the noon sun outblazed a candle. What an opportunity/ Even if we’re all soon prisoners of the galactic Lords of Migration, destined for some prison world, they can hardly deny us a chance to read!
    In accounts of olden days she had read about “accessing” computer databases, swimming in knowledge like a warm sea, letting it fill your mind, your pores. Swooping through clouds of wisdom.
    / could find out if my work is original! Or if it’s been done ten million times, during a billion years of Galactic culture.
    The thought seemed at once both arrogant and humbling. Her fear of the great starships was undiminished. Her prayer remained that it was all a mistake, or a meteor, or some illusion.
    But a rebel corner of her roiling mind felt something new-a wakened hunger.
    If only . . .
    Her thought broke against an interruption. Suddenly, high overhead, a boy stuck his head through a slit window. Hanging upside down, he cried—“No fires!”
    He was joined by others, at different openings, all shouting the same thing. Chimps joined in, shrieking excitement across the crowded meeting hall.
    “No fires—and the roof-of-stone still stands!”
    Old Henrik stood, then spoke two words to the elders before departing with his son. Amid the flustered babble of the throng, Sara read the exploser’s expression of resolve and the decisive message of his lips.
    “We wait.”
    Asx
    OUR CARAVAN OF RACES MARCHED TOWARD where the alien ship was last seen-a blazing cylinder-descending beyond a