A Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Proposed Trade-Offs for the Overhaul of the Barricade by John Chu Page B

under my direct command. Understood?”
    â€œBut what about …” Ritter ran out of words and resorted to pointing at the section of barricade he was sworn to watch.
    Father rolled his eyes. “I’ve already ordered the signalers on either side to split your territory. If they need help, they know to ask.”
    â€œUnderstood, sir.”
    â€œOn my desk. Tomorrow at dawn.” Father’s gaze shifted past Ritter to the cart, then back. For a moment, a smile might have crinkled his face. “Fix Deck’s cart. Camp Terminus is on his way back to civilization.”
    Father hefted the dead body of Ritter’s partner across his shoulders, then literally flew away. A transparent flying machine had surrounded him the instant before he leapt into the air.
    Ritter stared, jaw agape, at the prone figure growing smaller in the distance. He gave in to the urge to understand how the flying machine worked, letting it fill his mind for as long as he could still sense it.
    Sandstone cliffs stood in the distance, clearly visible through the barricade. The occasional tent dotted the field of rock and sparse brush that lay on either side of the road to Camp Terminus. Engineers monitoring the barricade all stared at the library galloping behind the cart as it passed them. Libraries were black, massive beasts with thick legs and transparent tusks. They didn’t normally gallop and, frankly, it never looked possible.
    The cart rattled as if it were shaking itself apart. The doors and the hood clattered against their fittings and latches. Deck’s long legs kept bumping against the steering column. The power train, though, was silent. Ritter had replaced it entirely with one he’d built out of imagined parts. After the cart’s trip through Turbulence, the original power train would have disintegrated long before they reached Camp Terminus.
    Ritter wished he’d had time to refit the body too, but one was never late for an appointment with Father. Between the racket and the library bombarding his mind with invitations to climb its book walls, the analysis Father wanted was going slowly. Dense symbols covered only scant pages of the thick pad on his lap.
    Deck was doing an admirable job of not commenting on Ritter’s repairs. Veteran engineers, not fresh graduates, had the capacity to rebuild an entire section of the barricade. That Ritter could also reconstruct most of a cart afterward was odder still. Father had been training him since before he could walk. Despite an additional course load in librarianship, studying at the academy seemed like a vacation compared to Father. Explaining this never convinced anyone that he was normal, not that Deck needed any convincing one way or the other.
    The archivist had long ago rifled through Ritter’s mind as if he were some library that needed to be cataloged. All librarians were at least slightly telepathic. Otherwise, they couldn’t enter a library or know which book to retrieve when the best description a patron could muster was “a detective novel about mushrooms whose title is a type of bird.” The ability that interfered with Ritter’s sense of machines was a prerequisite for them. Some archivists were considerably more than slightly telepathic.
    Vast walls crammed with books occluded the pad of paper on Ritter’s lap. Deck had already started to catalog the beast and Ritter could sense the shelves and shelves devoted to chaotic dynamics. Just because Turbulence had wiped out the civilization that had created this archive didn’t mean they hadn’t had good ideas. A citation Father would actually have to look up was irresistible.
    â€œJunior, just go.” Deck took Ritter’s pad of paper away from him. “You’ve thought through your analysis so many times, I practically have it memorized.”
    Inside the library, Ritter stood on a book wall as broad and rugged as a cliff face. His fingers pinched