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Zay laughed. She typed in a few instructions and her display now filled with a map of the library complex. It was a complex pile of rooms and corridors, almost impossible to grasp. "This shows only this wing of the main building. Indexing is these four floors."
Four layers near the middle of the display turned to a brighter color.
"And here's where you are right now."
A small room on the first floor turned white. Looking at the labyrinth between the two lighted sections, Leyel had to laugh aloud. "Can't you just give me a ticket to guide me?"
"Our tickets only lead you to places where patrons are allowed. But this isn't really hard, Lord Forska. After all, you're a genius, aren't you?"
"Not at the interior geography of buildings, whatever lies Deet might have told you."
"You just go out this door and straight down the corridor to the elevators-- can't miss them. Go up to fifteen. When you get out, turn as if you were continuing down the same corridor, and after a while you go through an archway that says 'Indexing."
Then you lean back your head and bellow 'Deet' as loud as you can. Do that a few times and either she'll come or security will arrest you."
"That's what I was going to do if I didn't find somebody to guide me."
"I was hoping you'd ask me." Zay stood up and spoke loudly to the busy librarians.
"The cat's going away. The mice can play."
"About time," one of them said. They all laughed. But they kept working.
"Follow me, Lord Forska."
"Leyel, please."
"Oh, you're such a flirt." When she stood, she was even shorter and fatter than she had looked sitting down. "Follow me."
They conversed cheerfully about nothing much on the way down the corridor. Inside the elevator, they hooked their feet under the rail as the gravitic repulsion kicked in. Leyel was so used to weightlessness after all these years of using elevators on Trantor that he never noticed. But Zay let her arms float in the air and sighed noisily. "I love riding the elevator," she said. For the first time Leyel realized that weightlessness must be a great relief to someone carrying as many extra kilograms as Zay Wax. When the elevator stopped, Zay made a great show of staggering out as if under a great burden. "My idea of heaven is to live forever in gravitic repulsion."
"You can get gravitic repulsion for your apartment, if you live on the top floor."
"Maybe you can," said Zay. "But I have to live on a librarian's salary."
Leyel was mortified. He had always been careful not to flaunt his wealth, but then, he had rarely talked at any length with people who couldn't afford gravitic repulsion. "Sorry, " he said. "I don't think I could either, thege days."
"Yes, I heard you squandered your fortune on a real bang-up funeral."
Startled that she would speak so openly of it, he tried to answer in the same joking tone. "I suppose you could look at it that way."
"I say it was worth it," she said. She looked slyly up at him. "I knew Hari, you know. Losing him cost humanity more than if Trantor's sun went nova."
"Maybe," said Leyel. The conversation was getting out of hand. Time to be cautious.
"Oh, don't worry. I'm not a snitch for the Pubs. Here's the Golden Archway into Indexing. The Land of Subtle Conceptual Co
Through the arch, it was as though they had passed into a completely different building. The style and trim were the same as before, with deeply lustrous fabrics on the walls and ceiling and floor made of the same smooth sound-absorbing plastic, glowing faintly with white light. But now-- all pretense at symmetry was gone. The ceiling was at different heights, almost at random; on the left and right there might be doors or archways, stairs or ramps, an alcove or a huge hall filled with columns, shelves of books and works of art surrounding tables where indexers worked with a half-dozen scriptors and lectors at once.
"The form fits the function," said Zay.
"I'm afraid I'm rubbernecking like a first-time visitor to Trantor."
"It's a strange place. But the architect was the daughter of an indexer, so she knew that standard, orderly, symmetrical interior maps are the enemy of freely co
"Rearranged! The rooms move?"
"A series of random routines in the master calculator. There are rules, but the program isn't afraid to waste space, either. Some days only one room is changed, moved off to some completely different place in the Indexing area. Other days, everything is changed. The only constant is the archway leading in. I really wasn't joking when I said you should come here and bellow."
"But-- the indexers must spend the whole moming just finding their stations."
"Not at all. Any indexer can work from any station."
"Ah. So they just call up the job they were working on the day before."
"No. They merely pick up on the job that is already in progress on the station they happen to choose that day."
"Chaos!" said Leyel.
"Exactly. How do you think a good hyperindex is made? If one person alone indexes a book, then the only co
"To keep everybody off balance."
"Exactly. Your mind works quickly when you're ru
"By that reckoning, acrobats should all be geniuses."
"Nonsense. The whole labor of acrobats is to learn their routines so perfectly they never lose balance. An acrobat who improvises is soon dead. But indexers, when they lose their balance, they fall into wonderful discoveries. That's why the indexes of the Imperial Library are the only ones worth having. They startle and challenge as you read. All the others are just-- clerical lists."
"Deet never mentioned this."
"Indexers rarely discuss what they're doing. You can't really explain it anyway."
"How long has Deet been an indexer?"
"Not long really. She's still a novice. But I hear she's very, very good."
"Where is she?"
Zay gri
The sound seemed to be swallowed up at once in the labyrinth. There was no answer.
"Not nearby, I guess," said Zay. "We'll have to probe a little deeper."
"Couldn't we just ask somebody where she is?"
"Who would know?"
It took two more floors and three more shouts before they heard a faint answering cry. "Over here!"
They followed the sound. Deet kept calling out, so they could find her.
"I got the flower room today, Zay! Violets!"
The indexers they passed along the way all looked up-- some smiled, some frowned.
"Doesn't it interfere with things? " asked Leyel. "All this shouting?"
"Indexers need interruption. It breaks up the chain of thought. When they look back down, they have to rethink what they were doing."
Deet, not so far away now, called again. "The smell is so intoxicating. Imagine-- the same room twice in a month!"
"Are indexers often hospitalized?" Leyel asked quietly.
"For what?"
"Stress."
"There's no stress on this job," said Zay. "Just play. We come up here as a reward for working in other parts of the library."
"I see. This is the time when librarians actually get to read the books in the library."
"We all chose this career because we love books for their own sake. Even the old inefficient corruptible paper ones. Indexing is like-- writing in the margins."