"Paul Di Filippo - The Reluctant Book" - читать интересную книгу автора (Di Filippo Paul)

"How so?" Sauvage blanched, as the meaning of the new number struck
home.
"Surely you don't mean--"
"Yes, I do mean precisely that which you are afraid to declaim. I
intend
to relink the neurons in the personal hemispheres of all my books, thus
effectively doubling my library's processing capacity."
"But the books were designed with autonomy and character for a specific
purpose. As thinking individuals, they maintain themselves in a stable
fashion, freeing the librarian from expensive homeostatic hookups. Plus
their sentience adds unqualifiable virtues to their results. What
you're
proposing would be worse than ripping the tooled leather covers off
antique books just to boil up more pulp!"
Stallkamp waved aside these quibbles. "I have plenty of factota to
minister to the minimum bodily needs of my books once they go mindless.
And I've never subscribed to your 'ghost in the machine' theories. All
I
want is the raw neurons, not some imaginary 'spirit'!"
"But you'll shorten their lives to practically nothing!"
"What does that matter, as long as I get results? More trade for the
knackers! And afterwards, I'll start fresh with new books. I'm sure I
could find a patron who'd appreciate a supercluster named after
himself,
once I've proved I can do it."
Reduced to meaningless threats, Sauvage said, "You'll be reviled by all
your fellow librarians, Stallkamp!"
MB Kratchko Stallkamp laughed. "Then I'll certainly know I did the
right
thing!" With a sharp stroke of his thumbnail, he severed the connection.
 The gripless satchel lay on the desk before him. From within, the
librarian took a specially marked hypo containing the omnipotent
delinkers
that would bypass the publisher's filters and reach the vulnerable
personal half of a book's brain. Then, yellow legs scissoring,
Stallkamp
left his study. Still in the battered case, the fine-assessor sat
ignored,
inconsequential to the glory-bathed sight of its owner.

The small dry but dirty cell into which the factotum deposited the
miserable Canto boasted a woe-faced, scraggly occupant already. Once
Canto
regained his breath and calmed himself, introductions were exchanged
between the two books.
"Canto. I don't have a UDC number anymore."
"Index Medicus. Me neither. Not that it much mattered, as all of us in
this library used to share practically the same string before. But now
we
don't even have that. The master downloaded all of our texts into