Hellflower (v1.1) Read Free Page A

-since we’d been together, and neither one involved a real working Library. I guess there aren’t any more but Paladin, and when I found him on Pandora he’d been a box of spare parts for so long he didn’t even know we had a Emperor. Imperial History goes back a solid kiloyear, and Paladin told me he comes from the Federation before that. It took the two of us about six minutes to find out what kind of laws there was against Old Fed artifacts.
    That was the year Pally made me do a darktrade deal just to get that old history book. He read it to me, and said it was obviously censored. It didn’t make any sense whatever’d been done to it, and it didn’t tell about Libraries or why they had to be killed. Funny way to talk about 20K of crystal and a black box-or, as talking-books say, "a machine hellishly forged in the likeness of a living mind." But Paladin isn’t a machine. I’ve talked to machines. Pally’s a Library.
    Paladin says "library" is just a old word for a building where they keep books-sort of like a bibliotek, but different someway. I’ve seen books, too, but damned if I know why anybody’d want to murder a building. And Paladin isn’t a building either, with or without books. Sometimes Paladin doesn’t make any sense a-tall.

Insert #1: Paladin’s Log
    I am not human. I am not a machine. I am Library Main Bank Seven of the Federation University Library at Sikander Prime, an honorable estate.
    At least I was. Now I am Paladin, a new name for a new age. Many of my books are gone from my memory. The world in which I lived is gone. My "friends" and "relatives" are all a millennium dead, and the profession for which I was trained no longer exists. I run Firecat, a converted intrasystem shuttle used for smuggling. I pursue researches for books I will never write, that no one would understand. Without Butterfly, there would not even be that much to occupy me.
    ###
    I was originally very disturbed when I discovered that my human rescuer was biologically female. As a creature of my own culture-as who is not?-I had never considered that a possibility. Person and male were synonymous. An autonomous female outside of a breedery, her genetic inheritance exposed to random mutating factors, was a dismaying indication of how long I had been unconscious.
    But Butterfly was not dissimilar to humans I had known before. I ignored her gender, as I could not survive without her help. Eventually it ceased to obtrude itself on my notice-but the fact of her humanity did not. Butterfly was as human as any person in what had become, as I slept, the semi-mythical Old Federation. Of the war that destroyed it, or the reason "Libraries," as all fully-volitional logics are now called, are held in such despite, I remember nothing.
    (Fortunately Butterfly lacks curiosity about the Federation. I do not know what I would tell her about the way we lived then, or what she would understand of it. Would she think it odd for an entire species to declare one of its genders nonsentient for the sake of convenience? Or would she, in a culture that declares random organics nonpersons for financial consideration, think it rational? It is unlikely that I will ever know.)
    What began as a purely random intersection became an alliance necessary for the survival of both of us. It was a long time after my "rebirth" before I realized how very dangerous my mere existence was to Butterfly, and even longer until I cared about anything beyond my own survival. But every year I become more aware that we are "farcing the odds," and that the "good numbers" become more and more scarce. Our illusion of safety grows unconvincing, and I fear more and more for Butterfly’s survival.
    The culture of the Phoenix Empire would doubtless find it unbelievable that "a machine hellishly forged in the likeness of a human mind" could care for something outside itself. The dogma of their technophobic age holds that created beings cannot have emotions, but while it is true