“Not tidy,” Denbord said.

“Do not stop here,” their armor told them. “Move on.”

“What’s wrong?” Tiadba asked.

“Unknown disturbances. We are being followed.”

“By what?” she asked.

“Echoes are possible.”

Tiadba tried to reason through to what that could mean, based on what Pahtun had told them in training.

“We’re following ourselves?”

“Unknown.”

CHAPTER 71

The Broken Tower

Jebrassy looked up from the book he had been reading, stood away from his pretty golden desk, and saw the Great Door open.

Here, he could never tell what was an instructive illusion and what might be solid and real. Fear could not grip him, nor hunger, grief, or anticipation. He was comfortable in both mind and body. All was smoothed and welcome, small challenges and large explorations equally and curiously invigorating. He was happy.

Sometimes the epitome of the Librarian walked with him, sometimes he explored alone, though he did not feel lonely. It was a new childhood, and it seemed to last a long, long time. He was learning much about the Kalpa, and some of the simpler secrets of those who lived within the upper levels of the city. Mathematics, for example—never his strong suit, beyond the shopkeeper’s necessities trained into all breeds.

But always thisdoor had been shut: the Great Door, more like a wall, easily as tall as a bloc of Tiers; curved like a crest or shield and covered with deeply engraved words, some of which he could read. He seemed to understand many more languages and signs now.

Jebrassy stepped through the breed-sized gap in the door, expecting something marvelous. He was not disappointed. He looked up and up at walls of shelves rising overhead and—he leaned over the parapet on which he stood—dropping down for as far as he could see. All the shelves were packed tight with books, too many to count, not uniformly bound, but a crescendo of colors leaping from the shelves, as if demanding to be inspected. Dark bindings neutral, untouched and unread; pale bindings touched once or twice; colored bindings, particularly blue and red, announcing greater degrees of interest. These colors attracted the attention of many figures, small and slender, but not breeds. More like the angelins he had already met, but solid and dedicated. They flocked joyously up and down the spiral stairs, searching the shelves along all the levels.

“This must be a Babel,” Jebrassy murmured to himself. “All of it packed inside a minicosm, a Shen invention, no bigger than a pebble. And these people are out exploring.”

Up close—walking the parapet beside and around him, mostly ignoring his presence—their skin was smooth and eternally young, their faces serene or amused. Some glanced at their intruder with welcome but no speech. All here used signs, flashes of fingers and arms, changes of expression, to convey most of what they needed to say to one another.

Within the Babel, all was quiet, until a useful text was found, and then, throughout the immense spaces,

along the galleries and the radiant walls of shelves stretching off forever, great songs and shouts would ring out, and all gathered to celebrate. Platforms expanded into circuses, and the searchers—members of the team that had made the discovery—would stand surrounded by admiring crowds. The readable text would be announced, and its binding color-coded.

The volume would then be cataloged, given a number—and that number would roll out like a dazzling silver ribbon across the plaza, only to be magically rewound and reduced to a folded paper octagon, soberly delivered to a shrouded, dark-robed figure that moved sometimes among the bright seekers…

The songs would fade, plazas empty and shrink, spiral stairs grow and reconnect. All would return to what had been before.

Jebrassy understood this much: to live in a Babel was to be endlessly fascinated by the slow, steady drama of prolonged search. Still, his fingers itched to walk with these happy figures in their knee-length robes, to lose himself in the blessed anonymity of the greatest quest of all, in the greatest library of all—

The library that contained all possible stories. All histories. And all nonsense. A Babel, a name as old as life itself, out of the Brightness, where all possible languages gathered. A place of confusion, seeking, and very, very rarely, illumination.

He tried to stop one of the searchers, clumsily signing a question: How long?But the seeker shrugged loose and went back to its search. So Jebrassy climbed a spiral stair, then hiked for what could have been days or years along a parapet.

Every now and then, he would stop and tug loose a volume, count through the thousand or more pages, and attempt to read—only to find the seemingly random text impenetrable. That did not disappoint him, not in the least. There was always the next volume. And so he would replace the book and move on. Lovely work, peaceful, fulfilling.

But this existence was not for him.

When he realized he did not know his way back, would never be able to find the Great Door—which in any case might have already closed behind him—somehow, even that did not concern him. He pulled from his own robes a number folded in an octagon and held the paper over the railing, then tricked it open, letting it unfold and uncoil, laughing as it dropped into the abyss between the walls of shelves.

A searcher approached, queried with signs: Who had assigned him the task of seeking this specific volume?

Jebrassy expressed some confusion. The searcher helped him read the first few digits printed on the long strip, then led him to that very volume, which had been discovered and cataloged quite early on. Jebrassy pulled down the book, opened the sturdy blue cover, and read. At that moment, the dark figure approached and pulled back its hood and Jebrassy saw that it was the Librarian—the epitome he was most familiar with, at any rate.

“It’s all an illusion, isn’t it?” Jebrassy asked.

“I thought you’d appreciate the adventure,” the epitome said.

Jebrassy scowled at the approaching end of this blissful adventure. “Why did I find this particular book?” he asked.

The epitome took the volume from his hands and seemed to weigh it. “A biography,” he explained. “Not all the text is accessible. Some is garbled. Perhaps there is another volume that completes it—somewhere!” He waved at the endless shelves. “But no matter. This volume, for you— isyou, for now, until we find the others—and thus holds great interest.”

“Is it my story?” Jebrassy asked.

“Not precisely. And not completely.”

Then Jebrassy understood. “It’s hisstory, too,” he said. “The one I’m entangled with.”

“I wondered how easily you might find it,” the epitome said, and waved a hand at the immensity. “You have excellent instincts.”

“How does anybodyfind anything here?” Jebrassy asked. “I mean, is this really all compressed into something the size of a pebble? A small place, to hold so much.”

“True. All these seekers—their greatest joy is to perform their task over and over, across lengths of their own special chronology so vast even my full self can hardly imagine them. But all this—within the pebble, as you say—is not infinite. It is limited. Like the Babel itself.”

“There’s a number called pi,” Jebrassy said, proud of this knowledge. “It begins three decimal one four one five…and so on, forever. It isn’t represented in here, is it?”

“Nothing infinite can be represented completely in here. There are segments of pi, of course, printed in a great many of these books—I suppose you could find them all, arrange them end to beginning, and then keep carrying some of the volumes to a place in the line, push them in—over and over again, but thatwould take you forever, longer even than time within the pebble. No. Pi is not contained here, nor any other infinite number or constant—not even infinitely long stories, which have been assumed to exist somewhere.” The epitome again showed breed amusement, finger to nose. “A story in need of an infinite editor, no? But all the equations that can produce pi exist here. And if you desired, you could take one such equation—or all of them—and generate that number to whatever length, without further benefit of what is printed in these books. And that is both the glory and the sadness of this Babel. It is unfinished. The stories it contains are not alive—they do not reverberate with the unpredictability, the infinity, the repetition of a true existence. Even in its immensity, a Babel is only a seed. A map. As a master lost in the mists of the Brightness once said, ‘The map is not the territory.’”