Read The Lord of the Sands of Time for Free Online Page B

position to guess what she might mean.
    He returned her steady gaze and said the only thing he could say. “I’m not sure I understand what you mean.”
    “What? Oh.” Her tired laugh carried a hint of scorn. “Not your topic, is it? Well, I guess it’s not a subject for the table anyway.”
    “That’s not what I meant.”
    “Don’t sweat it. Let’s concentrate on the food. Ah, here come the Valencia crabs.”
    The conversation lost its rhythm. They fell silent. Finally Sayaka changed her tone and began expounding on the relationship between the spiciness of each region’s traditional cuisine and their distance from the Sun. But by the time dessert arrived, the conversation was still dragging. They finished the meal and parted with no talk of meeting again.
    Over the next two weeks, Orville made more new contacts, men and women both, than a normal human could count. Conversations never lagged, because he never felt the need to think deeply about what was said. Most of the talk revolved around the conflict with the ETs. As an AI, Orville had that sort of information at his fingertips. But when he was alone, he couldn’t stop wondering how a delicacy like Valencia crabs could have seemed so tasteless. What had Sayaka meant by “humanity”? Was it the same humanity he was sworn to protect? Perhaps there was some facet of meaning he still did not grasp.

    One day Alexandr, another Messenger, took Orville to visit a decommissioned ship docked in the depressurized zone outside the city. Alexandr brought along a little girl named Shumina, who had asked him to help her retrieve some books.
    “It’s a library ship,” enthused Alexandr. “They’ve got hundreds of thousands of volumes dating to the twenty-first century and even earlier. Can you believe it? Books made of paper. It’s astounding that they survived all the fighting.”
    “Are you sure you needed me to come along?”
    “Now don’t say that, Orville. Books are very heavy, you know. We’ll need help finding them and carrying them. We definitely need you here. Right, Shumina?”
    “I wouldn’t have minded just the two of us.” The coffee-colored little girl giggled. Alexandr, who dwarfed her in size, blushed.
    Shumina’s goal was to become a children’s writer. Alexandr had met her through a literary circle. Orville wanted to leave them and go back to the city immediately, but Alexandr begged Orville over his comm link not to go, and he reluctantly agreed.
    When they arrived at the ship, they discovered it crammed with books stored in a protective vacuum. It wasn’t exactly a friendly environment for humans, but with their enhanced physiology Orville and Alexandr made do with simple breathing gear and located Shumina’s ancient children’s books. Phase one of their mission accomplished, Alexandr and Shumina huddled together, absorbed in deciding which books to take back with them. With little to do, Orville set off for a walk around the ship.
    Paper books. Brittle, awkward, unbelievably low-density databases. Yellowing hunks of fiber piled up like relics in airless or dusty rooms. In fact, they really were relics. The ship’s contents were all that remained of the ancient British Library collection. Alexandr was drawn to such relics and so was probably drawn to humans with a fondness for such things. That at least was not difficult to understand. But Orville found it hard to share his enthusiasm. Books, and the wisdom they held, were nothing more than samples of humanity’s values. Somehow, trying to understand humanity through a mass of samples was not quite enough for Orville.
    Lost in thought, he was walking along a dimly lit corridor inside the ship’s hull when he sensed a human presence ahead. Someone was transferring books from a bank of shelves to a cargo loader. Whoever it was seemed to be in a hurry. Instead of placing the books in the loader one by one, he was sweeping entire shelves clean—certainly not the best way to handle