Chapter 10 — Too Many People

By the third week, people had stopped asking where the water was.

They knew which room held the cups and which basin ran slowly when too many people used the others. Blankets were folded against the walls after people woke, though some remained spread where an old person or a sleeping child still needed them. Clothes hung from cord tied between shelves. A row of boots stood outside one room because its floor had become a sleeping place for two families and nobody wanted mud brought inside.

I passed children in the same corridor most mornings. They knew which doors opened onto rooms that were being used and which ones led somewhere they could run without stepping over anybody. One of them moved aside when he saw the papers in my hands. He did it before I asked.

My table remained where it had been. Someone had moved the nearest sleeping blanket far enough away that a chair could pass behind me. People left the manuscript pages alone, and when I needed another chair, one appeared before I found out who had given it up.

Two people carried sacks past me toward the storage room, stepping aside when someone came through the manuscript.

Frigg’s room was across the hall. It had three tables now. Tablets covered two of them. The third held cups that had been used and forgotten while reports were being given.

A messenger stood in front of Frigg with dust dried in the lines of his face.

“The western road is open again,” he said.

“Since when?”

“This morning. They pushed them back beyond the bridge.”

Another man beside the table shook his head. “The bridge will not hold carts.”

“I crossed it.”

“On foot.”

Frigg looked from one to the other. “Can people cross it on foot?”

“For now,” the first messenger said.

She pointed to a tablet near her hand. “Then send those close enough to reach it. No carts. Nothing they cannot carry.”

The messenger left. A woman waiting by the door took his place.

“The gate road is lost,” she said. “They are falling back to the lower wall.”

“How long can the wall be held?”

“Thor said until dark.”

Frigg looked toward the Library manuscript, though it was several rooms away. “How many are still between the wall and the Book?”

The woman did not know. She knew three groups had passed her. One had children. Another had stopped because a cart had broken an axle across the road. The third had gone toward a gate that might no longer be open.

“Find who saw them last,” Frigg said. “If the lower wall holds until dark, those hours are for getting people through.”

Someone at the second table asked how many people had arrived in the Library that day.

The first answer was two hundred.

“That is the count at the manuscript,” a woman said. “It does not include the ones who had left the Lazaret this morning.”

“Those already crossed once.”

“They still need somewhere to be.”

Another tablet was brought over. Its count was smaller. Nobody knew whether it had been started before or after breakfast. Two families had moved rooms without telling anyone. A group that had been waiting beside the Asgard manuscript had gone somewhere during the night, but no one knew whether they had entered the Lazaret, found relatives, or moved deeper into the Library.

Frigg put the two tablets beside each other.

“How many people are here now?”

No one answered.

The argument began in a room that was barely large enough to justify an argument.

Someone came to find me because Gina was at the Asgard manuscript and Frigg was receiving a report. By the time I reached the room, eight people were speaking and four more had stopped in the passage to listen.

A bench had been pushed against one wall. Blankets covered most of the floor. Two wooden boxes had been placed beneath a table, and a child’s shirt hung from the back of a chair.

“This was our place,” a woman said. She stood in the doorway with a basket in one arm and a girl holding her free hand. “We have slept here six nights.”

A second woman stood inside the room. Her family had moved the first family’s things into a careful stack near the shelves. Nothing had been opened. The blankets had not been thrown into the passage.

“It was empty,” she said. “We asked the people outside. They said no one was using it.”

“We went for food.”

“You were gone.”

“For an hour.”

The second woman’s father was sitting on the bench. He kept one leg straight and held the other knee with both hands. Two boys sat beside him, pressed close because there was no room for their feet anywhere else.

“He cannot sleep in the corridor again,” the second woman said. “He could not stand this morning.”

“My children slept beside the water room before we found this place,” the first woman said. “People walked past them all night.”

“My brother is at the lower wall.”

“My husband has been gone twelve days.”

The voices from the passage joined in.

“They were here first.”

“Nobody owns a Library room.”

“The children need it.”

“Look at the old man.”

When someone said children, the second woman looked at her father. When someone said the old man, the first woman looked at her daughter.

I looked at the stacked belongings. “There are other rooms.”

The first woman turned toward me. “Where?”

“Farther along this corridor.”

“Show us.”

It should have been easy.

The first room I opened had no blankets, boxes, or people in it. It also had two doors and had become the shortest passage between the water room and the main hall. Three people crossed it while we stood there. One carried a bucket and did not slow down.

“We can close one door,” I said.

“Then everyone will use the other,” the second woman said.

The next room was empty because the wall stayed cold. I had noticed it before and thought nothing of it. The old man sat on the nearest chair while we looked. When he tried to rise, the second woman had to pull him up by both hands.

The third room held sacks, sealed jars, and folded cloth. Someone had written numbers on a tablet beside the entrance. The person keeping them there refused to move food into a corridor where anyone could take it.

“There are more rooms,” I said.

“How far?” the old man asked.

He had spoken for the first time. His voice was quiet. I did not have an answer that made the distance shorter.

We went back.

The girl had sat down on one of the first family’s blankets. One of the boys was standing in the passage, holding the chair with the shirt on it as if he expected someone to take that too.

“They had this room first,” I said. “Their things were here. They left for food and came back.”

The second woman looked at me for a long moment.

“Where do we go?”

“I will find somewhere.”

She helped her father from the bench. The boys carried their blankets. They did not argue again.

The first family moved their boxes back beneath the table. The woman with the basket put it down where the second family’s bag had been.

The passage cleared. The people who had been watching went away.

I found the other family later near a wall two corridors over. They had placed one blanket beneath the old man and folded another behind his back. He sat with his bad leg stretched into the passage. Each time someone came through, one of the boys lifted his foot out of the way.

Two men were arguing over a bench before I reached Frigg’s room the next morning.

One had slept on it. The other needed it beside a cooking pot because his wife could not sit on the floor. A pile of clothing blocked half the corridor behind them.

I kept walking.

Cloth had been tied between shelves to give families a little privacy. People cooked where smoke could reach a doorway, which meant the doorway stayed open and everyone nearby complained about the cold. Boxes, baskets, and rolled blankets marked sleeping places. A child had drawn on the corner of a blank sheet and pinned it beside the room where his family slept.

Some rooms had no sign or guard, but everyone nearby knew which family used them. People stayed close to the Asgard manuscript even when there was better space elsewhere. They wanted to see each new arrival. A woman who had waited there for nine days could tell from the sound when someone appeared, and she looked up every time.

The wounded no longer filled the nearest rooms. They went to the Lazaret when they could be moved. The rooms they left did not remain empty for long.

Frigg was reading a report when I entered. She held one finger against a place on the tablet while a messenger tried to remember whether he had passed the same tower before or after the road divided.

She sent him for water and looked at me.

“I need more rooms,” I said.

“There are rooms.”

“Usable ones. We can clear some of the storage farther from the main hall.”

“And when those are full?”

I looked toward the doorway. The two men and the bench were out of sight, but I could still hear them.

“I can make somewhere else.”

Frigg set the report down. “For tonight?”

“For as long as they need it.”

“Then write for that.”

Someone entered with another tablet before I could ask what she expected that to include. Frigg turned to the new report.

I went back to my table.

My first attempt was a building large enough to hold everyone.

I gave it apartments, kitchens, water, sanitation, storage, and common rooms. The first page made it sound efficient. By the third, it sounded like a place I would not know how to leave during a fire.

How many floors could I describe before stairs became the main thing people used? If there were elevators, what moved them? If there were no elevators, how did the old man from the corridor reach his room? Water had to go up. Waste had to go down. Air had to move through rooms holding thousands of people.

One corridor was simple. A hundred corridors needed signs, light, maintenance, and ways to keep one blocked door from trapping everyone behind it.

I knew what an apartment building looked like from the inside of one apartment. I knew where the rubbish went after I carried it out. I did not know what happened after that.

The Lazaret had answered questions I had barely known to ask. I had written supplies that could be replenished and found a pharmaceutical unit preparing medicine after Eir chose it. That had been useful. It had also been far beyond anything I could have described.

I read the line I had written about safe operation of the entire complex.

It covered too much.

I crossed it out. The next sentence did the same thing with different words.

By evening, I had pages describing a building and more pages listing things I did not understand about it. I could have written that all necessary systems worked. I could have called the building safe and finished.

The manuscript stayed on the corner of my table, unsigned.

The answer came from trying to avoid looking at the failed manuscript.

I had once stayed in a resort made of separate buildings. The room had been in one block, breakfast in another, and everything important had repeated farther down the path for guests who did not want to walk back.

I did not need one building with a thousand different parts. I needed a few kinds of building that could be used many times.

The first notes were simple: smaller blocks for families, larger blocks for groups, separate kitchens and dining rooms, storage buildings, and shared rooms where people could gather or work. None of them removed the need for water, drainage, safe walls, or maintenance. They did keep me from designing one tower where a single failed stairwell affected half the population.

I made the buildings low enough that I did not need to describe elevators. I gave them broad stairs where stairs were needed and ordinary paths between them. I wrote them as the kind of warm-climate accommodation I had seen, not as an architectural invention.

Then I wrote the island around them.

Tropical sounded right until I remembered that tropical islands had storms. I crossed out pleasant climate and wrote what I could actually use: warm enough for ordinary habitation, with local weather that did not bring destructive storms through the settlement. Fresh water had to be reliably available in the residential areas, kitchens, and shared buildings. I did not describe the machinery. I did describe what had to be available.

Gina stopped beside my table while carrying a bundle of tablets toward Frigg’s room. A man with a box under one arm was trying to get past her in the narrow space behind my chair.

“An island?”

“A resort. Empty.”

She stepped aside for the man. “Will two people carrying those fit on the paths?”

I added width to the main paths and left space around the place where people would arrive.

The coast was pleasant in the first version. That word survived less than an hour. A pleasant beach could still have something large enough to take a swimmer. I made the inhabited coast suitable for ordinary use and excluded large dangerous marine predators from its waters. Then I went on to the land: no large predators near the settlement, and no dangerous venomous or poisonous local species in the places people would normally live, walk, and gather food. The island still had birds, fish, insects, and plants. I had not written a clean stone platform in the sea.

The island itself needed another pass. I added geological quiet, no nearby active volcano, and limited dangerous seismic activity in the settlement area. I did not write that the ground could never move for as long as the world existed.

The built resort had become detailed enough that I could imagine arriving there.

That was when I imagined someone opening a door from the other side.

An empty resort might be empty for a season. The workers might live elsewhere. The owner might be absent. Empty did not mean free for me to fill with people from Asgard.

I changed it again. No one already living there would have to leave. There could not be people elsewhere who expected to return to those rooms, buildings, or land, or who still had a claim on using them, only for us to arrive and take them.

I rewrote it twice, then left the clumsy version on the page.

I included a return book before I finished. It would lead to the Library point where I signed the manuscript. On the island, both the arrival space and the return book’s approach had to remain open enough for people to move without stopping everyone behind them.

I read the manuscript twice.

I still found phrases that could have meant more than I wanted. Some I changed. Some I could not make smaller without writing things I did not know.

I moved the manuscript into another side room where the floor around the table could be kept clear. Then I signed it.

The island smelled of salt and damp leaves.

Wind moved across the open arrival court and caught the front of my tunic. For several seconds, I heard nothing made by another person. There was surf beyond the buildings, birds somewhere among the trees, and a loose shutter tapping at the end of a covered walk.

The sky was wide enough to feel wasteful after the Library.

Low buildings stood around the court. Their pale walls were not identical, but they belonged to the same few designs. Paths led between them toward more roofs and, farther away, a line of blue water.

I did not inspect the beach.

The return book was where I had placed it in the description, inside a small open-sided building off the arrival court. The floor around it was clear. I opened it, put my hand against an internal page, and returned to the Library.

The side room appeared around me. The island manuscript remained on its table. No one had moved into the clear part of the floor while I was gone.

Gina stood outside.

“It works?”

“It brought me back.”

I entered again. Gina followed separately.

She stepped away from the arrival place at once and turned in a slow circle. Then she walked the distance to the return-book building and back.

“People will stop here,” she said, pointing just beyond the place where we had appeared.

“Why?”

“Because they will look at the sea. Then the person behind them will arrive.”

We moved the obvious stopping place toward the side of the court by choosing where someone would stand to give directions. Gina checked the main path and the turn toward the nearest residential blocks. Two people carrying a box could pass. A family could move away without crossing the line of someone coming back toward the Return Book.

Frigg joined us after I returned for her.

I showed her the nearest water point. I opened a family room and a larger room. I pointed out the kitchens and the storage building visible from the court.

Frigg stepped into the family room and looked through the window toward the arrival court.

“Who decides who lives here?”

“There is room. They can take whichever rooms are open.”

“That room is larger,” she said, pointing across the path. “Those are nearer the water. These are nearest the Book.”

“There are enough of each.”

“How many people are on this island?”

“Three.”

She looked at me.

“When the first hundred arrive, who knows which rooms are theirs?”

Frigg approved the island before we returned to the Library.

She did not move her tablets there.

“Reports come to the Library,” she said. “The wounded pass through it. Anyone who reaches us from Asgard reaches it first. I will remain there.”

She spent the rest of that day crossing between the Library and the island. She brought no council and gave no one an impressive title. She chose people who were already keeping counts, moving supplies, or ending arguments before they blocked a corridor.

One table in a shared building became the place where arrivals were written down. Another tablet recorded which family had been sent to which residential block. Food and cloth would be received near the storage buildings. Disputes that could not be settled by the people present would be carried back to Frigg’s room in the Library.

“The rooms are assigned,” Frigg told the people who would keep the records. “They are not gifts of land. If a family leaves for the water or the Library, their room remains theirs to use until it is reassigned.”

The first rule for the Book area was shorter.

“Nothing is stored here. No one sleeps here.”

Two guards remained near the island Book building. They were there to keep children from opening it out of curiosity, stop people from wandering into the Library without being recorded, and keep a frightened crowd from closing the approach. On the Library side, two more people began keeping the island manuscript room clear and directing those allowed to enter.

The guards had no special equipment. A cord marked where boxes and waiting people should stop. The records were ordinary tablets carried through by hand.

“No one outside knows the Book is here,” I said while Frigg watched a guard move a bundle away from the return-book approach.

“They do not know yet.”

I looked at the open-sided building. From the residential path, the Book was easy to reach. A child could reach it. So could anyone who learned which room in the Library held the source manuscript.

I helped move the bundle to the storage building.

The first group did not fill the arrival court.

Frigg selected families who had been sleeping in passages, older people who needed rooms near water, children whose families had no immediate reason to remain beside the Asgard manuscript, and two people who had left the Lazaret but were still tired after walking across one Library hall.

Some refused at first.

“My daughter has not come through,” a man said. “If I leave, how will she find me?”

The woman at the records table asked his name, his daughter’s name, and where he would be assigned on the island.

“If she arrives, this tells us where you went,” she said.

“Who tells her?”

“Whoever is at this table.”

He watched three new arrivals from Asgard before he agreed to move.

The first families carried what they owned. Blankets were tied around clothing. Cooking pots hung from cords or knocked against knees. Children carried smaller bundles and put them down whenever the line stopped. Food, sealed jars, cloth, and other supplies went through with people assigned to take them to the island storage and kitchens.

At the manuscript, a man had to shift a box and catch a jar beneath his arm before the next family could step forward.

Families crossed one at a time. On the island, they were moved away from the arrival place before the next person appeared. Gina directed the first group toward the record table and then toward their assigned blocks.

The second family from the room dispute was among them. Before they joined the line, the woman gave the records table her brother’s name and told them he had been at the lower wall when she last knew where he was. She made sure they wrote down where the family was going.

The old man reached the manuscript with one person on either side of him. He touched the page himself. When I saw him again on the island, he was sitting on a bench while one of the boys held the record tablet with both hands.

Their assigned room was on the ground floor. It was smaller than some and farther from the sea than others. It had enough beds, a table, and space for the old man’s leg without putting it into a passage.

The woman put one blanket on a bed. She did not open the bundle in her hand.

“If we go back to the Library,” she asked, “do we take everything?”

“You can leave it,” the person recording the room said.

“And no one takes the room?”

“It is assigned to your family.”

The woman set the bundle on the floor.

One of the boys put his beside it and ran to choose a bed. The other stayed near his grandfather until the old man was sitting down.

Outside, more people followed the path from the arrival court.

Doors opened. Bundles were carried inside. For the first time since I had seen that family, both boys left their blankets unattended.

Relocation continued for the next several days.

Blankets disappeared from the main corridors. The cloth partitions came down one by one. Boxes that had marked sleeping places moved to island rooms or into storage. A passage that had required people to turn sideways became wide enough for two stretchers to pass, though only one normally used it now.

Several rooms near the main hall were cleared of bedding. Frigg’s tables remained covered in reports, and the storage rooms stayed full. People still waited for missing relatives, but they waited near the records table or against a wall instead of building a sleeping place around the Asgard manuscript.

A wounded arrival was checked and directed toward the Lazaret manuscript. Families staying in the Library were recorded. Those ready to move were sent toward the island room. Messengers went to Frigg.

Names were misspelled. Two families were assigned the same room and one had to be moved. A supply bundle reached the island without the tablet saying who had sent it.

Near the end of the fourth day, a messenger arrived from Asgard with a torn cloak and mud to his knees.

“The lower crossing is still held,” he told Frigg. “They said four more hours. Perhaps five. Another group is coming now.”

Frigg sent someone to clear the Asgard manuscript approach and someone else to the island records table with the expected arrival.

The group came before the message reached everyone who needed it.

A family appeared together only in the sense that each arrived after the one before. The mother came first, then a boy, then an older girl carrying a bundle against her chest. The father appeared last and turned at once to count them.

No one asked which corner they wanted.

The woman at the table wrote down their names.

“Island,” she said, and pointed them toward the next room.