INTERMEZZO

FROM THE DIARY OF THE REVEREND DOCTOR NORA PIERCE, ONEMONTH- THROUGH THREEMONTH, 269 A.U.

The Archivist lives in a compound, of sorts, at the heart of the Grand Library’s campus. It is a space of several houses and rooms, connected by narrow causeways and paper screens, commanding a flowering corner of the Library’s space—a total square footage that would be unseemly, even irrational, had they been dedicated to some lesser cultural light.

But I am ahead of myself.

My escort paid the cabman and sat with me in the open arms of the steam car, chill midday air sliding past us as we drove from the anchorages to the city proper.

And then I saw for the first time in person the phenomenon that has prompted so many scholars and architects and civil engineers to stagger away from Kyo-Tokai, quaking with awe and uncertainty.

I have no skill for sketching. My words must suffice. I will try to make of them something sensible.

Corma, metropolitan queen of Amidon’s western coast, began as a river town and grew, swelling toward the sea as it learned how to build up its shoreline with tow-heads of refuse, paving a landscape above it. Now, the city hugs the seashore as if it had always done so, with very little of it recalling its earlier days miles back from the tides and their erosive touch. Westgate Bridge serves as its only reminder. That easternmost neighborhood’s baffling name has never been changed.

The building materials of Nippon are not suited to the Amidonian style. Thus, its urban spaces do not spread vertically but laterally. Yew and bamboo and oiled paper, with the blessing of mortar and brick reserved only for structures that must be permanent—the Emperor’s palace; the Protectorate’s ministries; the Grand Library and its surrounding campus; the Tower of Water.

As we rode into Kyo-Tokai, I had the decided impression of driving deeper and deeper into the core of an onion. The city began as a little sphere of humanity, laced with roads winding aimlessly among its squat boroughs. After the coming of the Logicians and the argument for Unity, the Nipponese saw the wisdom of taming their islands, taking them back from the kitsune and kappa and other genetic oddities that thrived in its isolated spaces. The cities expanded in smooth circles, each layer spoked to the original, ambling center, until those cities, like drops of oil, touched and flowed into one.

I’ve heard that only three thousand square miles in total of Nippon are not, by law or custom, part of this mega-metropolis today. It seemed an absurd claim but I know now it must be true. Everywhere, humanity presses against itself. The women are most selective about bearing children, for the island can only support so many, and each couple is assigned the duty to bear either son or daughter, as the census of a given period dictates. The orphans of Nippon are more populous in the streets of Indine across the narrow sea than the Indine peoples’ own progeny. Once, the Nipponese put those surplus births onto rafts of bamboo and sent them down rivers to the sea, where luck and the tide would bear them to their mainland neighbors. Now, they have the resources to carry on the practice, but with properly kitted galleons.

And so, the Grand Library’s campus, without that familiar concentric, ordered style boasted by the rest of Kyo-Tokai, resembles the Emperor’s palace more than the city surrounding it. The Logicians scoured the Asiatic continent for its wisdom and, after the treaty that brought Nippon under the Protectorate, enshrined it here, in their nearest expansionist stronghold. Since then, the Nipponese have made their own seminaries and given their own Reverend Doctors their orders. They do as their Logician allies taught them, finding scholarship wherever it shelters and bringing it back to their redoubts. The Grand Library is usually described as more than six million volumes in size. I see now that figure is far too humble. It occupies a compound so vast, three Westgate Bridges might be settled into it comfortably. And it is a building of three stories. Three! I should hardly be impressed, but in less than a day the image of an urban flatland has so burned itself into my eyes, it takes very little to seem monstrously tall.

But my welcome dinner. I have forgotten the direction of my musings, and time is quickly waning.

The Grand Librarian, Madame Curator, is assisted by one Madame Kurowa, a woman I would be well advised not to—[excerpt ends here with a torn page]