Chthon 01 - Chthon by Piers Anthony

Author:Piers Anthony
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780738811512
Publisher: Xlibris, Corp.
Published: 1967-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

Eleven

Earth: home of humanity and of its legends for ten thousand times the time that race had been in space, and more; whose population thrust forth a hundred million human bodies to space in each sidereal year, and did not diminish—until the catastrophic chill imposed de facto quarantine upon the mother world. One month—to wipe out forty per cent of all its inhabitants, to bring the fusion bombs necessary to cremate the mountainous offal in the wake of that brief siege. Even so, Earth retained a population more massive than the rest of its empire combined, and still her lands and seas and atmosphere were crowded with carpets of living flesh.

Not even the chill could solve this problem.

But Earth had power. She was the irrevocable queen of a billion cubic parsecs of space, not through military, economic, or moral force, but through her surpassing knowledge. Here was technology beyond the rustic imagination of the colony worlds. Here was accumulated information of such detail and range that storage and referencing alone usurped the facilities of a small continent. Here was the Sector Library.

Computers organized and sorted the unthinkable complex, delivering any information known to man, to any party, in moments. A man had only to enter a booth and make known his desire.

Unless it was proscribed.

But there were the "stacks"—comprehensive files of printed documentation, of interest to hardly one seeker in a thousand, but sustained by ancient custom in the face of rising opposition. Some year the renewed pressure of population would abolish this monstrous relic. Meanwhile, it endured. Dedicated ancients maintained the archives in leisurely exactitude, and interest was the sole criterion for admission. Earth was after all free, and upheld the right of every person to search for knowledge and to discover as much as determination and ingenuity could provide. And the information was there, all of it—if the seeker could find it. The very awkwardness of the stacks created this advantage: the archives were far too cumbersome to purge selectively. They could not be expurgated.

The stacks occupied cubic miles of space. Never had Aton encountered an enclosure of such dimension: two hundred tiers of long, low hallways, each lined from floor to ceiling on either side with thick volumes, each extending so far into the distance that the walls seemed to meet. At regular intervals right-angled crosswalks cut off segments, making intermittent alternate passages whose staccato lengths also pressed into distant closure. Aton imagined that he could see the ponderous curve of the planet in the level flooring, and that it was the horizon that terminated the halls.

Chthon itself lost its novelty within these passages. Ever did the works of nature, he thought, bow before the works of man.

But how to start? Every volume looked the size of LOE—forty million words of print. Every shelf was tightly packed, with only occasional blanks: three books to the foot, six shelves to the wall, two walls to the hall. A ten-foot section of one hall would contain 360 books—more than fourteen billion words.

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