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A couple of months ago a librarian asked what ibraries mean to me. Libraries made me. I grew up in a home without books: we loved books, but we couldn't afford to buy them. When I left home, I couldn't afford to buy them. When I first moved to this country I couldn't afford to buy them. So I borrowed them from the library.Without libraries I would never have stumbled across a 60-year old book on Norwegian architectue shelved right next to another on Norwegian history--which led to the creation of Aud, narrator of three of my novels.Without libraries I would not be Dr Nicola Griffith. Working in Seattle four thousand miles from my sponsoring institution in Cambridge, I could borrow academic texts that would have bankrupted me in about a month--and I could do it all digitally.And without libraries, Hild would not exist. The research I did in librarires was crucial; interlibrary loan mattered more than any keyboard or software. And that's what libraries make possible: access to the delight, excitement, analysis, stories, humour, cautionary tales, and joy of many cultures.Without libraries I would't be a writer. Without libraries I wouldn't be me. Marghe, tented inside her felt cloak, knelt on the patch of moss she had swept free of snow and contemplated the gong. It hung by two weathered ropes and was made of hammered metal that caught the light like copper but turned buttery silver in the centre where the hammer dents of its making were almost worn smooth from generations of use. Thin morning light cast a blurred reflection of her face onto its uneven surface. Like a moon.The cavity formed between a planetary body and its ionosphere acts as a natural resonator; most people who live on Earth are unaware that they live on a gigantic gong that booms out exactly sixty-nine times every day. Here on Jeep, the people knew. Three times a year a woman of Ollfoss was chosen to sit by the gong all day and all night, sounding it in time to the pulse of the world. The rhythm, Thenike said, helped the crops. It would also help Marghe; if she could still herself enough to hear.Marghe knew it would not be sound that she would hear but something she would sense. She sat by the gong and breathed gently, slowly, long, long inhalations and steady exhalations, and sank her awareness down into her own electromagnetic field; when this world rang, her body would tell her.At the right moment, when she felt her lungs would fill forever with the no longer alien sticky resin smell of green and dirt and small mammals' nests, when it seemed the world waited for just a brief hitch of time, when she heard and felt and was the electromagnetic pulse of Jeep, its laugh, its breath, she rose up onto her knees, lifted the wooden rod she held in her right hand and struck the gong with the padded end. Vibration seeped through Ollfoss like the smell of grass after rain, resonating with the pulse of the world, its heartbeat.The metal's vibration slowed. She listened to the waiting green silence of Moanwood, to the slow breath of the world: the muscle of its dirt, the bones of its rock, the blood of its seas. She heard the world humming deep in its throat and, when it rang with its soft pulse, she leaned forward to strike the gong.She raised her head. The sky was covered with endless round humps of dark cloud, like a shoal of blue-backed salmon broaching the sea--clouds made of her breath and the breath of a million women who had made peace with the world; women she had set out to study, like seashells.No longer.It was possible now for her to put aside that person she had been and choose to accept the women she had met as nothing more and nothing less than equals from whom she could learn and derive comfort, to whom she could offer advice or a strong hand. If she chose.She struck the gong harder than she needed and set it dancing on its rope. The sound clashed and jarred around the clearing. Choose, it seemed to be saying. Choose. But there was no real choice; that decision was made already. All she had to do was accept it: Jeep the world, Jeep the virus would become part of her now whether she wanted it or not. There was no more vaccine. The virus was going to invade her, sliding cold fingers into every cell and curling around her genes. And then she would change, or die. ................
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