The Librarian

LIBRARIES AND READING ROOMS

A READING ROOM was the name given to a small group organized round some particular Book—of Joy, Memory or, more rarely, Endurance.

The entire Gromov world had begun with small communities like this. When a solitary individual who had penetrated the mystery of a Book turned up, a reading room would form around him, including those comrades whom he had decided to take into his confidence. If someone with a family became a member of a reading room, then soon his nearest and dearest became members too, and that was tolerated indulgently. But every piece of string comes to an end, and at a certain stage the community stopped expanding.

A reading room was the foundation or basis on which, in time, a library could spring up. The opposite also occurred. Following an armed clash a small clan might be reduced to a reading room.

All kinds of people were taken in, from all age groups and all professions. Every reader was free, both morally and—more importantly—financially. This was an advantage that reading rooms had over libraries, where people donated part of their income, the so-called “membership fee”, to fund the search for Books and support the administrative structures.

Just like a library, a reading room had a leader, who was known as the librarian. He or she was the owner of the Book or the person to whom the reading room had entrusted it. Reading rooms did not become involved in the search for Books; people were satisfied with what they had and honestly waited their turn to use it.

At first there were no points of intersection between the libraries and the reading rooms, although they knew about each other. Later the libraries built up their strength and accumulated more Books. The existence of competitors was incompatible with their totalitarian plans.

Reading rooms were blackmailed and intimidated. Suggestions were made that they should voluntarily give up their Book, and they were promised a place in a library if they did so. Sometimes Books were expropriated. There was an official explanation for this blatant banditry: the reading rooms were declared a hotbed of copyists and the leaders of large libraries called for copying to be halted at any price.

From out of a black void the “torch-bearers” appeared—hellhounds spawned by the will of the large clans. The torch-bearers attacked reading rooms, stole their books and burned them. These losses had practically no impact on the libraries, which had numerous spare copies in their depositories, but the wretched readers who had been deprived of their only Book were left with nowhere to go except into a library.

Against the background of this contradictory situation Mokhova’s star rose high in the Gromov firmament. Following several successful raids on the depositories of influential libraries it became clear that a major battle was inevitable. An appropriate field for it was found in the north of Russia, beside the abandoned village of Neverbino.

And then the members of several clans, including Lagudov’s and Shulga’s, appealed to the reading rooms for help in the struggle against Mokhova, promising them absolute immunity from all financial levies in the future. That was why so many volunteers assembled near Neverbino. They came from every corner of the country to bear arms and stand up for their own reading rooms and Books.