Libropolis

The ship shuddered around the group that stood at the primary airlock of the Vast Meridian. There were more than a few airlocks on a transluminal yacht of this caliber. Service entrances. Maintenance hatches. Freight bays. But the Countess and her entourage wait impatiently at the garish, self-important receiving chamber reserved for dignitaries and guests. The size of the room alone was a proud assertion of wealth in the space-limited realm of shipbuilding. The walls glimmering with gold and brilliant glowing wood. Every square inch was intricately crafted with ornate patterns that elicit an organicism of the underlying materials.

There likely wasn’t a space quite like this room anywhere on her homeworld. And yet, Sa’li found herself shoulder to shoulder with the Countess in this profession of her wealth and status. They were surrounded by an entourage of aides who had become her friends over the past weeks of travel. But she stood there as a guest of the Countess, not as one of the entourage. And she wondered what she had done to garner such inclusion in the affairs of someone whose morning meal came with decisions that would impact millions of lives just like her own.

The airlock door hissed and untangled itself. Any other airlock might just be described as having opened. But the opulence of this chamber didn’t stop at the interior, even the mechanism was overly engineered to tell everyone coming and going that this vessel bled status and wealth. For a moment Sa’li felt an even more extreme sense of displacement. Then the iris of the door dilated fully and the world beyond spilled into her consciousness, abating any unease with the wonder of being on another planet than her birth that wasn’t a barren rock.

“Come child, we have much to do,” the Countess tapped her cane on the floor and held her hand protectively over the pocket which held the small book they had come to this libropolis to decipher.

They stepped onto the landing pad and the air was oozing rich organic sweet smells. Sa’li looked around and found elaborate and diverse gardens, unlike anything she had ever seen in the blocs back home. No flora was recognizable to her, a rainbow of colors of flesh, mostly greens, purples, and blues, but some warm tones pockmarked the landscape. There were pillars of thorned blue flesh. Purple leaves larger than her body. Branching red structures with floral clusters at the terminating points. Green vines writhing around, seemingly moving to spite the idea that plants shouldn’t.

The cane tapped twice on the steel of the path leading from the pad, and Sa’li looked up to find she had locked in place a few meters from the ship. The others were waiting aboard a small open air shuttle, an impatient guide at the helm. She half-jogged to catch up.

“I’m sorry Countess, I’ve just… never seen so much life.”

“There will be plenty of time for that once our mission is completed, child, but time is of the essence this day.” Sa’li nods agreeably as the shuttle lifts off the pad to carry the entourage to the city erupting from the earth on the far side of the garden complex.

Apis was a large moon that orbited a gas giant in the Alphatauri system. The gravity was close enough to standard that Sa’li felt comfortable on her feet, not clumsily loping around, nor weighed down. It was an ancient planet for the people of the confederation, settled thousands of years before, it had gone through many iterations before settling on the incarnation Sa’li read about in the ship databases while waiting for arrival. Apis had become a university moon, drawing the best academics from all of the confederated worlds. At least the best of privilege. She would have never even heard of the system if she hadn’t stumbled her way out of her bloc and onto the Countess’ ship by necessity.

They were headed to the library city of Libropolis on Apis. According to the records on the ship, Libropolis contains all of the records and information available in the entirety of the confederation. It also was home to millions of Librarians, Archivists, and Researchers. Many of the best in all the worlds. Sa’li was still in the dark as to which aspect of Libropolis they were seeking.

The city was awe-inspiring as they approached. The central spire stood over a kilometer tall and was surrounded by a gentle slope of lesser spires. The city was made of over a million buildings elegantly reaching out of the earth, glimmering in the slightly pink evening light. The spaces between the buildings were a neatly orchestrated prostration of shuttles and trams moving people and media from place to place. But the thing that stood out most profoundly to Sa’li was the complete and utter lack of holos and adverts on the buildings. Growing up in the blocs, if her eyes were open, they were being drowned in photons convincing her to buy whatever new or old thing the corpos were pushing. But Libropolis was clean of all of that. Pure metallic and white.

The shuttle veered up and landed on a mid-tier pad on the central spire. The pad was ornately decorated with archaic ideograms and flora, like a little piece of some ancient site had been transported to Apis and lodged into the side of this tower half a kilometer above the ground. The decoration was nothing in comparison to the Countess’ airlock, but Sa’li assumed it was a reception area for important visitors.

The group proceeded off of the shuttle and were guided through the small courtyard into a grand atrium. More of the resplendent foliage spilled along the pathways, a rainbow of bioluminescence beginning to show through as the solar light dwindled. The path opened into a courtyard that surrounded a large golden sculpture of a bull, it stood with its head bowed, horns projecting out into the space, a posture of reverence.

In front of the statue stood a woman, middle-aged, and dressed like an adventurer. A soft pleasant look on her face. Her hair pulled back in a braid. Her holobrace projected a cacophony of symbols, illustrations, and organizational matrices. They looked reminiscent of what Sa’li had seen in the Countess’ book before she had turned it over. She looked up at the entourage walking into the courtyard and swiped away the work floating in front of her.

“Sybil, nice of you to come meet me, it’s good to see you old friend,” the Countess announced across the space.

“Tyriel! I was starting to wonder if I had your arrival time wrong, it isn’t like you to be tardy,” the woman replied back before walking up to the group.

“Yes, well it has certainly been an interesting journey,” the Countess retorted with a soft bow of her head, “are you ready to help me decipher this journal?”

“So the thing about that is… going off of the scans you sent me, it isn’t all here.”

“What do you mean it isn’t all here?”

“I remember a book I found years ago, a Lost Ones tome I came across in an Antiquities site I shouldn’t have been snooping in. I shared it with my colleague there, and she insisted we hide it to keep it safe. It went missing. I was furious. But I did get a chance to study some of it before that happened. I am almost certain that your notebook contains half of what was in that tome.”

“So where is the other half?”

“Don’t have an answer to that, but I suspect she copied it down into another book like the one you have and hid it away somewhere else. How she talked about it, she wanted to destroy it, but something so rare, she probably couldn’t bring herself to not keep some record somewhere.”

“And where is this colleague now?”

“She returned home not long after the incident, I don’t recall where. Her name was Rivington, Octavia Rivington if memory serves,” the Countess’ face flamed with impotent rage at the unexpected difficulty.

“Rivington? I actually might be able to help with that,” Sa’li spoke up as the group turned to her, “there was a Rivington family in the Aristos of the blocs I came up in. Matron Octavia, my mum worked for her.”

“Excellent, child, it seems we will be taking you for a visit home next.”