The Wandering Library of MirMarnia: A Series

Part 23: The Day the Library Grew Appendages

(I painted this in Procreate on my iPad. - Chaiga T. Cheska)
~~~

Being an account of an unexpected anatomical development, one very cold stream, and a brief ill-advised foray into aviation

Compiled by Bramwell Corin, who has updated the building’s inventory to include appendages

Preface

There are mornings in the Wandering Library that begin quietly, in the way that mornings in this particular building are occasionally permitted to begin quietly, when the Library is resting, and the staff are in the staff room eating breakfast and the worst thing happening is that Pip has burnt the toast again and is trying to pass this off as a personal preference rather than an error.

This was not one of those mornings.

At approximately a quarter past eight, the Library made a sound.

Not a creak. Not a settle. Not the ordinary architectural adjustments of a sentient building waking into its day. Something considerably more structural than that, and considerably more sudden, and coming from everywhere at once.

I have documented what followed to the best of my professional ability. I have tried to be accurate. I have not always succeeded in being calm.

Bramwell’s Log

I had my porridge in my lap before I understood what had happened.

The sound came up through the floor and through the walls and through the ceiling simultaneously, the sound of a building doing something it had not done before and finding the doing of it very significant indeed. The table shuddered. The crockery leapt. Mistress Spine’s tea described a short arc through the air and landed on my head. I sat for a moment with porridge in my lap and tea in my hair, and around me the staff room settled back into stillness.

Lyria was under the table. Pip had gone sideways into Thaddeus with sufficient force that Thaddeus had been propelled toward the open cupboard behind him and had caught himself on the door frame with both hands, which was the only reason he was not inside the cupboard. Mistress Spine was still holding her empty teacup with the expression of someone who intends to get to the bottom of this.

The Library was, now, completely still.

We looked at each other.

Pip got up first, because Pip always gets up first, and went to the window.

Pip’s Account

I looked out of the window, and there was an arm.

Not a small arm. Not an ambiguous arm. A very definite arm, approximately the height and width of a mature oak branch, growing from the side of the Library just below the second floor, made of what appeared to be pages and spines and words, all woven together into something that looked, unmistakably, like an arm with a hand at the end of it. The hand had fingers. The fingers were flexing, one at a time, in the exploratory manner of something that has just discovered it has fingers and is taking stock.

“Bramwell,” I said.

“Yes,” said Bramwell, who had followed me to the window and was standing behind me with tea still dripping from his hair.

“The Library has grown an arm.”

“How unexpected.”

We went to the opposite window. There was another one on that side. Same construction, same slow experimental flexing.

Mistress Spine’s Account

I convened the staff in the reading room at half past eight and called the meeting to order, which is to say I placed myself at the front and waited for everyone to stop talking. This took slightly longer than usual as Pip kept going back to the window.

“Notes,” I said. Bramwell opened his log. I looked at Pip. Pip opened his notebook.

The Library, whilst we assembled, was continuing to flex its hands outside. Through the windows one could see pages rippling slightly along the arms as the fingers extended and curled, extended and curled, like a very large and literary cat stretching in the morning.

Lyria, who had emerged from under the table, was watching this with considerable feeling as she began to move.

“Lyria says,” Bramwell said, translating as she went, “that this is a momentous occasion. That the Library has reached a new stage. That we should recognise it as such.” He paused, watching her. “She is also doing something I believe that represents the Library specifically, based on the way she is making herself taller and holding her arms out at the sides.” Another pause. “She says congratulations are in order.”

The Library responded to this by dropping a book from the ceiling onto Bramwell’s desk. He picked it up and read the title without expression.

“On the Happiness of Sentient Structures: The Role of Appendages in Architectural Wellbeing,“ he said.

I looked at Pip, who looked back at me.

“Go outside,” I said, “and show it what arms are for.”

Pip looked at Bramwell. Bramwell gave him a small encouraging nod. Pip looked back at me.

“Outside?” he said, giving me his typical baffled expression.

“Outside,” I confirmed.

Pip’s Account

I went outside and stood on the front steps and looked up, and the Library looked back at me, which I know because both arms slowly turned until the hands were facing in my direction, and there is no other way to interpret that except as attention.

I am the junior librarian. I shelve books. I take notes. I make tea when Bramwell forgets to. I have survived the Vorrith Market incident and a cartographer who called me Pop for eight straight hours, and I did not, at any point during any of that, expect that my career would one day require me to stand in a meadow in front of my colleagues and a sentient building and demonstrate what arms are for.

But apparently that is today.

I walked down the steps into the meadow and turned around and immediately wished I hadn’t, because now I could see all of them on the front steps watching me. Bramwell. Mistress Spine. Thaddeus with a footnote stuck on his forehead. Lyria with her hands clasped. All of them waiting and watching. Bramwell mouthed something at me. I squinted at him. He did it again, larger and slower. I still had absolutely no idea what he was saying. I turned back to the Library because at least the Library wasn’t making me feel like I was about to sit an exam.

I waved both hands in what I hoped looked intentional rather than helpless and suppressed an urge to laugh at feeling so silly.

The Library watched this with attentive scholarly interest.

I looked around to see what things I could do with my arms. Specific things. Demonstrable things.

A stick! You can pick up a stick with arms and hands! Perfect example!

So I found a stick, and made an extremely exaggerated show of picking it up, bending down slowly, lifting it with great ceremony, holding it aloft so the Library could clearly see that I had found a stick and was now gripping it in my hand and holding it up with my arm in what was, I was very aware, one of the more undignified moments of my professional life to date. I lifted it above my head with what I hoped looked purposeful rather than desperate. Then I walked to the edge of the stream with the air of a person who absolutely knows what they’re doing, and with great exaggerated deliberateness, dropped it in.

The stick floated away.

I turned around to see if the Library had grasped that arms are useful for picking up sticks and putting them in streams or wherever you want really, and that this is a valuable and dignified capability to have.

The Library’s hand closed around me before I had finished the thought.

IT JUST PICKED ME UP!!

The hand was made of pages and bindings and something not quite solid, and it was VERY FIRM about the whole business, and then I WAS IN THE AIR, which I had not been consulted about, and then I was being held OVER THE STREAM, which I had also not been consulted about, and then I was IN the stream, about which nobody had asked my opinion WHATSOEVER!!

The stream was from the mountains. The mountains had snow on them quite recently. The stream remembered this very clearly and wanted me to remember it too!

I went under! There were STONES! There was MOSS! There was an extraordinary amount of extremely cold water going absolutely everywhere! I came back up gasping, and there was moss on my head, and I was soaked through, and somewhere in the process I had acquired what felt like several small rocks in my boots!

I had demonstrated what arms can do!

AND THE LIBRARY HAD IMMEDIATELY DONE IT TO ME!!

Bramwell’s Log

I will say this for the Library: it was paying attention.

Whether it understood that the demonstration was meant to illustrate the general principle of arms and hands rather than the specific application of picking up Pip and putting him in the stream is something I am still considering. The result was, technically, correct. It used its arm and hand. It picked something up. It deposited that something in the stream. From a purely mechanical standpoint, the exercise was a success.

I went down to the bank.

Pip surfaced with the expression of someone who has just had a great deal of cold water explained to them very quickly and at length. His hair was flat against his head. His clothes were doing what wet clothes do, which is to say they were hanging off him with the defeated resignation of garments that had not anticipated the morning going this way. There was moss. A considerable quantity of moss, draped across his shoulders and caught in his collar and sitting on top of his head in a way that would have been quite jaunty under different circumstances. When he stood up, I could hear something shifting in his boots that was almost certainly not just water.

He was looking up at the Library.

I put a hand on his back and aimed him toward the steps.

“Go in,” I said. “Get dry and come back.”

He turned and looked at me with an expression that contained several things, most of them not professional.

“Come back?” he repeated questioningly.

“The experiment isn’t finished,” I reminded him and nudged him to get him moving.

He went, leaving a trail of stream water, stones and moss.

I turned back to the Library, which was sitting in the manner of something that has just done something interesting and is thinking about what it has learned. Mistress Spine came to stand beside me. We both looked at the Library for a moment.

“No more staff members in the stream,” she said sternly, wagging her finger at the Library, which I am baffled to admit, I found unprofessionally funny and had to work hard to suppress a snort of laughter. I blame starting the day wearing my breakfast as the excuse.

The Library’s nearest hand rotated slightly. I am choosing to file this under acknowledgement rather than the alternatives.

The Experiments Continue

Bramwell’s Log

Lyria went next.

She walked to the centre of the meadow and raised both arms above her head, slowly, and then let them fall to her sides, and then raised them again, moving through a sequence of positions that demonstrated the range of what arms can do when the person using them has spent years thinking carefully about movement. She was, as always, worth watching.

The Library tried this.

Several nearby trees did not survive the attempt unscathed. The Library’s reach is considerably greater than Lyria’s, and its understanding of its own armspan was, at this stage, optimistic. Three silver birches lost significant branches and a stand of elder was swept into a completely new configuration. The Library looked at what it had done, raised its hands, and held them very still in what appeared to be a pause for reflection.

“We’ll replant,” Mistress Spine said quietly, beside me.

I made a note.

Thaddeus went next. He walked down the steps, placed a footnote on his forehead, and turned to face us. It read: I will demonstrate structural capability. He sat on the ground, placed his palms flat on the grass with his legs straight out in front of him, and pressed himself up off the ground and held there, straight-backed, without apparent difficulty. He is, beneath his footnotes, considerably stronger than he looks.

He looked up at the Library.

The Library considered this for a long moment. Then it shifted its weight. Slowly, with the immense deliberateness of a building redistributing everything it is, it pressed both hands flat to the ground and lifted itself from its crossed legs in one long, ponderous movement and held there, the whole Library suspended above the meadow, before settling back down with a sound that I can only describe as a library settling back down.

From behind us in the doorway of the Library, Pip, now dry and in clean clothes and looking considerably more wary than he had that morning, began to applaud.

We joined him.

Thaddeus stuck a new footnote to his forehead: Satisfactory.

Bramwell’s Log (continued)

When Pip came back outside, I noticed the Library’s hands turn toward him with a quality of attention I can only describe as sheepish.

I put a hand on Pip’s shoulder. “Any ideas on other experiments we could try next?”

Pip considered this with the careful expression of someone who has already been in the stream once today and is weighing the risks of further contribution.

“Could it,” he said slowly, “grow other types of arms? For different things?” He looked up at the Library, which had gone very still in the specific way it goes still when it has heard something it finds interesting. “Wings, for instance.”

We all looked at Pip.

Pip looked at all of us looking at him, then at the Library, then stepped behind me.

I pointed one finger up at the Library.

“No,” I said clearly. “We are not becoming the Flying Library. We are not equipped for the hazards associated with a library learning to fly. No wings.”

“The liability alone,” started Mistress Spine quietly.

The Library’s hands remained very still in the air. Mistress Spine held its gaze for a long moment with the expression she reserves for the conclusion of discussions she is concluding.

Then she looked at Pip.

“Go inside and reshelve the Moontide Cognition shelf.”

Pip sighed from somewhere deep and philosophical.

He trudged up the steps and paused at the top.

“I don’t know why I always end up reshelving things,” he said to no one in particular.

He went inside.

One Hour Later

Bramwell’s Log

I was at my desk. Pip was at the Moontide Cognition shelf. Thaddeus was in the archive. Lyria was in the east corridor. Mistress Spine was in her office.

There was a very loud sound that came again.

Not the same sound as the morning. Bigger. With a quality to it that I can only describe as feathered.

I went to the nearest window.

Where the arm had been, there was a wing made of pages, covers, and spines, all layered into the unmistakable shape of a very large wing with paper feathers; it stretched from the second floor to the roofline and slightly beyond, trembling in the morning air.

I looked across to Pip, who was looking out of the window opposite. Before I asked, Pip nodded, and I understood we were now in a Library with two wings.

“HOLD ON TO SOMETHING,” I shouted, to the whole Library, which is to say to everyone in it.

Pip’s Account

I dropped the books I had been reshelving and grabbed the Moontide Cognition shelf with both hands, and the Library BEGAN TO FLAP.

The SOUND. And then the FEELING, which was considerably worse than the sound! Each downstroke sent a shudder through the whole building that started in the walls and finished in your back teeth, and the upstroke was a lurch that made the floor briefly forget what floors are supposed to do! Through the windows the meadow HEAVED! The stream flashed past! The silver birches, already in a reduced state from the arm experiments, bent sideways in the gust!

Across the reading room, Bramwell was holding his desk with both hands and the expression of a man who is not going to give this building the satisfaction of seeing him panic! Thaddeus had appeared from the archive corridor with a fresh footnote on his forehead that I couldn’t read from this distance but which I strongly suspected was not complimentary about me! Lyria was flat on the floor with her arms spread wide, which was either a coping strategy or the beginning of a dance and was probably both! Mistress Spine was holding her desk with one hand and looking at me with an expression that I am not going to describe in any document that might be read by other people, including future me!

“I SAID I WAS SORRY!” I shouted, across the room, over the sound of wings!

The Library was not quite flying. It was running through the meadow in great bounding strides with its wings out and beating, and every few strides it lifted briefly off the ground and came back down with a thump that redistributed everything on every shelf simultaneously, and then it lifted again, longer this time, and we all went sideways together, and then it came back down again!

This continued for an hour.

I counted every single minute of it.

Bramwell’s Log (continued)

At some point during the forty-third minute, the Library slowed.

Through the window I could see we were standing at the edge of the stream, wings half-extended, watching the water. The fish, presumably. The Library finds fish very soothing. I have noted this before and find I am noting it again.

I released my desk. My hands had left impressions in the edge of it that I will have to sand down later.

Then the sound came again.

I made my way to the window. The wings were gone. In their place, on each side of the building, were fins. Very large fins, made of pages layered into the broad flat shapes of something designed for water rather than air, waving gently in the light as the Library sat back down on its legs by the stream and regarded its own reflection.

I looked at the fins for some time through the window.

Then I sat down on the floor with my back against the wall beneath the window, held my stomach, and looked at the room.

Pip was in the knee well of his desk, looking up at the ceiling with his face a faint shade of green. Thaddeus had footnotes covering most of his visible surface area, which is his version of acute distress. Lyria was still on the floor, breathing with the focused deliberateness of someone conducting a private negotiation with their own stomach. Mistress Spine was holding her desk with both hands and looking at Pip through her office doorway. She had been looking at Pip for some time. She appeared to be in no hurry to stop.

Pip’s Account (continued)

I got up very carefully.

I breathed for a moment. Then I breathed for another moment. Then I concluded that standing was probably sustainable and went slowly down the steps and sat on the top one and looked up at the Library, and we sat this way beside the stream, as the Library waved its fins gently in the air and watched the fish as though nothing whatsoever had happened today.

“Library…” I started, forming my thoughts.

The Library’s nearest fin turned toward me slightly.

I sat there for a moment trying to find the words for what I actually wanted to say, which is not always a reliable process when you’ve spent an hour being flung about inside a building that was trying to become a bird.

“I know it seems fun,” I began. “Wings. Flying about. Fins and being a fish. The idea of it.” I looked at the fins. “But it’s not really for everyone, is it. Not every creature that wants to fly can fly, and not every building that wants to swim can swim.” I stopped. Then carried on because I was getting somewhere even if I wasn’t sure where. “And the thing about libraries is, that’s sort of the point of them. Books tell us about all the things we can’t do ourselves. You can read about flying without being a bird. You can read about the deep ocean without being a fish.” I paused. “Which is, now that I’m saying it out loud, quite remarkably wise considering I’ve just spent an hour hanging onto a bookcase whilst a library tried to become a seagull.”

I heard Bramwell behind me and instantly felt myself going red, having just declared myself to be wise. I swivelled round to look back at him.

He was standing at the top of the steps with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the stream.

“Wisdom comes from reading books,” he said, and I knew he meant it for the Library to hear.

The Library was very still.

Then two books came off the wall beside the front door and hit us both squarely on the tops of our heads in quick succession.

“OW,” I yelped, rubbing my head.

“Quite,” said Bramwell.

He bent down and picked up his book and read the cover without expression. He held it up so I could see: Why Reading About Flying Is Better Than Falling: A Philosophical Enquiry.

He picked up mine and read that one too, then passed it to me without a word. I looked at the cover: The Junior Librarian Was Right All Along: A Vindication in Several Volumes.

We stood there in the morning light holding our books whilst sitting beside the stream and hearing the Library as it waved its fins and the drainpipes along the roofline arranged themselves into something that was, if you were the sort of person who looked carefully at drainpipes, unmistakably a smile.

Closing Notes: Bramwell’s Log

I have updated the building inventory. Arms: two, currently resting along the sides of the building in a manner that suggests the Library is walking with its hands clasped behind its back, which is, given its general character, appropriate. Wings: briefly two, now absent. Fins: two, current.

I have noted in the margin that the wings were a phase and may return. If they do, everyone should hold on to something immediately, hope for the best, and avoid eating anything right before whatever may happen next.

Pip has dried out fully. The moss is gone. The stones have been removed from his boots. He seems, on balance, to have had a formative day, and to have arrived at something true by the end of it, which is not a bad outcome for a morning that began with him being dropped into a mountain stream by a building that was trying to be helpful.

Lyria performed something for the Library this evening that I translated, for the log, as: you are always growing into something new, and we are delighted to be here to witness it.

That seems, as closing statements go, sufficient.

Mistress Spine adds:

Three silver birches are to be replanted at the earliest opportunity.

The stream incident is logged under: Training Exercises, Unplanned.

Staff are reminded that suggestions made in the presence of a sentient building with a tendency toward literal interpretation should be considered carefully before being made aloud.

This reminder is directed at no one in particular.

Thaddeus left the following on the staff room door, distributed across a column of small papers, each stuck with precise equidistance from the next:

Today the Library grew arms. (1)

(1: Two arms. Made of pages and bindings. With hands. I have checked the inventory and can confirm that arms were not listed as a building feature when I arrived. They are now.)

(2: I was present for the press-up demonstration and wish to note for the record that the Library achieved this on its first attempt, which is more than can be said for certain members of staff who shall remain unnamed but who know who they are.) (2a: It is Pip. I mean Pip.)

(3: Pip was in the stream for forty seconds. He emerged with moss on his head and small rocks in his boots. I timed this. I did not feel it was appropriate to say so at the time, but I am saying so now.)

(4: The Library grew wings subsequently. Then fins. Then sat beside the stream looking at fish. I have filed this sequence under: Developmental Phases, Architectural, Sub-category: Things That Made Mistress Spine Hold Her Desk.)

(5: Pip said something wise on the front steps. I was listening from the doorway. I have not told him I was listening. I am not going to tell him. He will become insufferable.)

(5a: It was genuinely wise. The part about books being the way we experience what we cannot do ourselves. I may have written it down. For archival purposes only.)

(6: Two books fell on Bramwell and Pip from beside the front door. Both were about gratitude. The Library communicated something it could not say in any other way. I found this, briefly, quite moving. This footnote does not exist.)

(7: The drainpipes are smiling. I have documented this under: Architectural Expressions, Category: Contentment. It is the first entry in that category. I did not know there would be entries in that category when I created it. I am glad there are.)

Author’s Note:

I hope you found this latest instalment from the Wandering Library informative and that it has renewed your enthusiasm for limbs in general, regardless of which types you prefer to wear for yourself.
- Chaiga T. Cheska