Well, that was only technically a concern for Lt. Daniel Leary. As a practical matter, he was a tourist visiting a planet which provided a range of unfamiliar culture, architecture, and wildlife.
Whistling again, he strolled off the bridge and along the broad avenue leading toward the palace.
Adele Mundy stood in the doorway, fingering a lock of her short brown hair as she surveyed what was only in name the Library of the Elector of Kostroma. Adele was an organized person; she would organize even this. The difficulty was in knowing where to start.
The room was large and attractive in its way; ways, really, because whichever Elector had been responsible for the decoration had been catholic in his taste. Time had darkened the wood paneling from its original bleached pallor. The enormous stone hood of the fireplace was carved with a scene of hunting in forests that looked nothing like Kostroman vegetation, and blue-figured tiles formed the hearth itself. The knees supporting the coffered ceiling imitated gargoyles.
The last were a singularly inappropriate choice for the interior of a library. The notion of figures gaping to gargle rainwater onto Adele’s collections made her shudder.
The chamber had probably been intended as a drawing room for Electoral gatherings smaller and more private than those in the enormous Grand Salon below on the second floor. There was quite a lot of space in terms of cubic feet since the ceiling was thirty feet above, but there would have to be a great deal of modification to make it usable for shelving books.
The modification was one of the problems Adele had been trying to surmount in the three weeks since she had arrived in Kostroma City to take up her appointment as the Electoral Librarian. One of many problems.
“Pardon, pardon!” a workman growled to Adele’s back in a nasal Kostroman accent. She stepped sideways into the room, feeling her abdominal muscles tense in anger.
The man hadn’t been impolite, technically: Adele was standing in the doorway through which he and his mate needed to carry a plank. But there was no hint in his tone that the off-planet librarian was his superior or, for that matter, anything but a pain in the neck.
A six-foot board wasn’t much of a load for two people to carry, but even that wasn’t why Adele became dizzy with frustration. That was a result of seeing the material, polished hardwood with a rich, swirling grain. It was probably as pretty a piece of lumber as she’d ever seen in her life.
Elector Jonathan Ignatius, Walter III’s immediate predecessor, was a member of the Delfi clan and an enthusiastic hunter. Jonathan’s absence on a six-month, multi-planet safari had permitted rivals in the Hajas and Zojira clans to prepare the coup that unseated him the night of his return.
Walter by contrast wanted to be remembered as a patron of learning, possibly because he had no more formal education than the Emperor Charlemagne. He’d decided to found an electoral library under the carefully neutral direction of a Cinnabar scholar living in exile on the Alliance world of Bryce. He’d assembled the contents of the library by the simple expedient of stripping books, papers, and electronic storage media from Delfi households and those of their collateral clans.
The loot—Adele couldn’t think of another word to describe it—was piled here in a variety of boxes and crates. Most of them weren’t marked, and she didn’t trust the labels on those which had them. The only order in the library was the view out the north windows, onto the formal gardens.
What Adele needed to start—what she had requested as many times and in as many ways as she could imagine—was three thousand feet of rough shelving. What she was getting from the carpenters Walter’s chamberlain had assigned to the project was cabinetry of a standard that would grace a formal dining room. At the present rate of progress, the job would be done sometime in the next century.
There was no doubt about the skill of the carpenters, these two journeymen and the master cabinetmaker who never left her shop on the ground floor and never touched a tool with her own hands that Adele had seen. They were simply the wrong people for the job. The twenty Kostroman library assistants whom Adele was to train to the standards of Cinnabar or the central worlds of the Alliance—these were with only a few exceptions the wrong people for any job.