Vocation
by Jessica Snell
It didn't bother me that the library I lived in was sentient.
It was that it kept assigning me book reports.
I knew I was lucky to live here. Our House covered one of the smallest continents, and so it only had a thousand rooms, and only three of those rooms were libraries.
I would rather live in a library than, say, a bathroom (there were over a hundred of those in our House). Though even a bathroom would be a better place to live than the Yard outside.
That’s where I’d grown up and of course I didn’t miss it at all.
***
I thought that was a bit on the nose.
But I read the whole thing and started writing my report.
I wrote about the sculleries and drawing rooms and water closets that they’d had back on Earth. I wrote about how they captured wild yeast for their beers and their breads, and how they maintained habitats for the fish and the fowl they ate. I wrote about how they hauled in water and sluiced out chamber pots and eventually piped in real plumbing.
(I thought about how I missed going to the bathroom—or, rather, squatting over a hole, since that’s all we had in the Yard. But, as everyone knows, people are made for Houses and not Houses for people, and so once I’d been assigned to my Room, all of my functions that did not fit that Room’s purpose had been taken away.)
I wrote about dovecots and brewhouses and stables and wondered at how many elements of historic houses were not actually a part of any of our Houses. Back on Earth, the big estates—the households—had included not just scores of people, and one huge, sprawling stone residence, but also all the land and outbuildings and agriculture that supported the estate.
Our Houses weren’t fragmented like that. Our Houses were whole.
It was a much more sensible arrangement, and so I noted in my report.
But the library didn’t seem overjoyed at my conclusion. It simply said, “Thank you,” and assigned me next month’s book.
***
Humans.
I swallowed and closed the book when I got to that part. I closed my eyes too, but I could still see the faces.
That book was near the beginning of a series. When I finished my report, I went and found the rest.
I was not sure I liked what I learned.
***
And then I stopped talking. Because reading was my vocation, and if I couldn’t read, then I was in the wrong Room, and this was my only Room, it was the only one I would ever get, and if I could not fit myself to this Room, I could not fit myself to the House, and then all I was fit for was the outside, for the Yard, for the scrabbling and the rocks and the scratching and the cold and the—
***
It did not have houses in it.
It had a university.
***
I was so far away from the doorway through which I’d come in. I wasn’t even on the library’s first floor anymore. I was up the curving wooden staircase that led to the second story of bookcases. The second floor was like the deck on a ship, opening up into the air above the first floor as if it were cresting over the top of a wave.
I had seen waves, from the Yard.
The Yard was made up of the odd bits of our continent’s border—the scrapes and scraps of land that flopped out from under the edges of the House, like an uneven circle of dough protruding out from under the clean, crisp edge of a biscuit cutter.
There wasn’t much to eat there. There wasn’t much to do. We scrambled around on the rocks of the shore like tiny, helpless crabs, snapping at each other and scrounging for food to fill our mouths with, for holes to live in.
It wasn’t like Earth had been. Earth had miles and miles and miles of land. Earth had lakes and rivers.
Of course, it was all poisoned now. We’d been doing it to ourselves—polluting our water and air, causing the inevitable rise of the atmosphere’s temperature. We knew it was coming, the gradual disaster that we’d decided not to avoid.
But we were wrong. The actual disaster came swiftly, like a hammer blow. The aliens’ migratory stop on our planet left us reeling, and the waste products they left behind crippled our ecosystem quickly and permanently.
We began to die.
***
Our next disaster was that we were rescued.
Some other aliens had pity on us. They brought us here.
And they tried to make us shelter like what we’d had before. But they were so different from us that we couldn’t quite use the Houses they’d built, even though we tried.
So they took pity on us again, and they arranged for us to change so we’d fit the shelters they’d made. There weren’t quite enough Houses for all of us, so some of us still lived outside, at least for the beginning of our lives. And when we finally got to enter the Houses, the way we were changed was… not quite what we were used to, I suppose.
But they did their best.
***
Their best, of course, is much better than our best ever was. Of course, I didn’t say that before because of course it’s obvious. It’s obvious. Of course.
We never used to have houses so grand that we had to fit ourselves to them, rather than the other way around.
But great gifts require great sacrifices. How else can you make yourself worthy to receive the gift?
They’d given us so much.
***
I changed my mind. I did mind that the library was sentient.
I minded that it had read all its own books.
I minded very much indeed.
***
And because the library asked me to, I kept writing it reports.
I read and I wrote and I read.
“Jeeves kept house for Wooster,” I wrote. “But not a proper House.”
The library assigned me another book.
“Irene and her consort made merriment and feasts for all their guests in their great palace,” I wrote. “But it must have been awful. So crowded.”
The library assigned me another book.
“Clan Korval was a Tree and some ships and their cats. How could they even call themselves a House?”
The library assigned me another book.
Another, and another, and another.
***
I don’t think you understand, I told the library. You’re not being fair to me.
Those things in those books—they don’t exist. There never was a Shire and a Barrayar and a Hundred Acre Wood, but even if there actually was once an Ivory Coast and a Persian Gulf and an India, there isn’t anymore! I can’t go to the cool green quadrangles of Oxford or the high glass towers of Hong Kong or the rain-sweet slopes of Costa Rica. They aren’t there. They haven’t been for years.
There is the outside and there is the Yard and there is the House.
Even if I went to another continent, there would be, on that continent, the outside and the Yard and the House.
There is nothing else anymore and you are making me want these things that I cannot have.
***
But they looked like oak. The knots and whorls of the wood were large and the posts of the stairs were thick and plain, which made them easy to lean against as I sat and stared, unseeing, at the ceiling.
How long could I sit and stare without reading?
I sat.
I sat, and I tried to ignore the small, quiet, persistent voice in my head.
I asked myself, How long can I sit here, inactive, before the House decides to give my place to someone more worthy?
And the small, quiet, persistent voice in my head answered, Let it.
***
Not a house this time, and not a university.
A monastery. An ordered life. A garden and all the healing goodness that came from it. A place to worship and be human together, in the sight of a God that was somehow less alien than the aliens who had rescued us, because he had been human himself.
(He hadn’t changed us? He’d changed himself instead? That was… oh help me and hang me for a heretic, that was comforting.)
This book had songs and friends and tasks worth doing.
And the hero was an herbalist-monk who had once been a warrior, had been lover and fighter all at once, but who had given it up for the call of something he loved even more and would fight for even harder.
The people in his town needed healing, and he would heal them.
His God had preserved him, and so he would worship his God.
I sighed, and I shut the book, and I didn’t just stare unseeing at the ceiling this time.
Instead, I looked all around me, looked hard, looked on purpose. I looked at all of the shelves, every one packed full of books, full of stories and histories from a world left behind. Stories full of a humanity that built not just Houses, but households. Not just one room per person, but rooms shared. Not just an inside divided like a honeycomb, but an outside full of gardens.
A humanity that cultivated not just the fruit of the ground, but a humanity that had the inherited knowledge to turn that fruit into wine, that wheat into bread.
A humanity that could break bread together.
Those shelves of stories stretched back, rank on rank, further than I could see.
I could read for years, and not come to the end of them.
My enemy’s arsenal was infinite.
And I knew I could not stand against it.
***
(Could we grow gardens in that waste? Build houses? Remember how to pray? We didn’t know. With the security of the Houses in front of us, we’d never tried.)
(But the library had showed me: security was not enough.)
I left.
I left, still lacking the things that had been taken from me.
I left, too, with everything that had been given to me. I left with the task that had been laid on me. I would have the time now—the time to tell everyone else: we were humans, and maybe even made in the image of a God who wanted us to stay that way, and we were not meant to be alone.
I knew now what we had lost. I knew now what we must rebuild.
(Buildings, but not just buildings. Homes.)
And yet.
And yet.
I left, leaving my dearest enemy behind.
(Oh my library. Oh my friend.)
And I went outside, weeping.
It didn't bother me that the library I lived in was sentient.
It was that it kept assigning me book reports.
I knew I was lucky to live here. Our House covered one of the smallest continents, and so it only had a thousand rooms, and only three of those rooms were libraries.
I would rather live in a library than, say, a bathroom (there were over a hundred of those in our House). Though even a bathroom would be a better place to live than the Yard outside.
That’s where I’d grown up and of course I didn’t miss it at all.
I thought that was a bit on the nose.
But I read the whole thing and started writing my report.
I wrote about the sculleries and drawing rooms and water closets that they’d had back on Earth. I wrote about how they captured wild yeast for their beers and their breads, and how they maintained habitats for the fish and the fowl they ate. I wrote about how they hauled in water and sluiced out chamber pots and eventually piped in real plumbing.
(I thought about how I missed going to the bathroom—or, rather, squatting over a hole, since that’s all we had in the Yard. But, as everyone knows, people are made for Houses and not Houses for people, and so once I’d been assigned to my Room, all of my functions that did not fit that Room’s purpose had been taken away.)
I wrote about dovecots and brewhouses and stables and wondered at how many elements of historic houses were not actually a part of any of our Houses. Back on Earth, the big estates—the households—had included not just scores of people, and one huge, sprawling stone residence, but also all the land and outbuildings and agriculture that supported the estate.
Our Houses weren’t fragmented like that. Our Houses were whole.
It was a much more sensible arrangement, and so I noted in my report.
But the library didn’t seem overjoyed at my conclusion. It simply said, “Thank you,” and assigned me next month’s book.
Humans.
I swallowed and closed the book when I got to that part. I closed my eyes too, but I could still see the faces.
That book was near the beginning of a series. When I finished my report, I went and found the rest.
I was not sure I liked what I learned.
And then I stopped talking. Because reading was my vocation, and if I couldn’t read, then I was in the wrong Room, and this was my only Room, it was the only one I would ever get, and if I could not fit myself to this Room, I could not fit myself to the House, and then all I was fit for was the outside, for the Yard, for the scrabbling and the rocks and the scratching and the cold and the—
It did not have houses in it.
It had a university.
I was so far away from the doorway through which I’d come in. I wasn’t even on the library’s first floor anymore. I was up the curving wooden staircase that led to the second story of bookcases. The second floor was like the deck on a ship, opening up into the air above the first floor as if it were cresting over the top of a wave.
I had seen waves, from the Yard.
The Yard was made up of the odd bits of our continent’s border—the scrapes and scraps of land that flopped out from under the edges of the House, like an uneven circle of dough protruding out from under the clean, crisp edge of a biscuit cutter.
There wasn’t much to eat there. There wasn’t much to do. We scrambled around on the rocks of the shore like tiny, helpless crabs, snapping at each other and scrounging for food to fill our mouths with, for holes to live in.
It wasn’t like Earth had been. Earth had miles and miles and miles of land. Earth had lakes and rivers.
Of course, it was all poisoned now. We’d been doing it to ourselves—polluting our water and air, causing the inevitable rise of the atmosphere’s temperature. We knew it was coming, the gradual disaster that we’d decided not to avoid.
But we were wrong. The actual disaster came swiftly, like a hammer blow. The aliens’ migratory stop on our planet left us reeling, and the waste products they left behind crippled our ecosystem quickly and permanently.
We began to die.
Our next disaster was that we were rescued.
Some other aliens had pity on us. They brought us here.
And they tried to make us shelter like what we’d had before. But they were so different from us that we couldn’t quite use the Houses they’d built, even though we tried.
So they took pity on us again, and they arranged for us to change so we’d fit the shelters they’d made. There weren’t quite enough Houses for all of us, so some of us still lived outside, at least for the beginning of our lives. And when we finally got to enter the Houses, the way we were changed was… not quite what we were used to, I suppose.
But they did their best.
Their best, of course, is much better than our best ever was. Of course, I didn’t say that before because of course it’s obvious. It’s obvious. Of course.
We never used to have houses so grand that we had to fit ourselves to them, rather than the other way around.
But great gifts require great sacrifices. How else can you make yourself worthy to receive the gift?
They’d given us so much.
I changed my mind. I did mind that the library was sentient.
I minded that it had read all its own books.
I minded very much indeed.
And because the library asked me to, I kept writing it reports.
I read and I wrote and I read.
“Jeeves kept house for Wooster,” I wrote. “But not a proper House.”
The library assigned me another book.
“Irene and her consort made merriment and feasts for all their guests in their great palace,” I wrote. “But it must have been awful. So crowded.”
The library assigned me another book.
“Clan Korval was a Tree and some ships and their cats. How could they even call themselves a House?”
The library assigned me another book.
Another, and another, and another.
I don’t think you understand, I told the library. You’re not being fair to me.
Those things in those books—they don’t exist. There never was a Shire and a Barrayar and a Hundred Acre Wood, but even if there actually was once an Ivory Coast and a Persian Gulf and an India, there isn’t anymore! I can’t go to the cool green quadrangles of Oxford or the high glass towers of Hong Kong or the rain-sweet slopes of Costa Rica. They aren’t there. They haven’t been for years.
There is the outside and there is the Yard and there is the House.
Even if I went to another continent, there would be, on that continent, the outside and the Yard and the House.
There is nothing else anymore and you are making me want these things that I cannot have.
But they looked like oak. The knots and whorls of the wood were large and the posts of the stairs were thick and plain, which made them easy to lean against as I sat and stared, unseeing, at the ceiling.
How long could I sit and stare without reading?
I sat.
I sat, and I tried to ignore the small, quiet, persistent voice in my head.
I asked myself, How long can I sit here, inactive, before the House decides to give my place to someone more worthy?
And the small, quiet, persistent voice in my head answered, Let it.
Not a house this time, and not a university.
A monastery. An ordered life. A garden and all the healing goodness that came from it. A place to worship and be human together, in the sight of a God that was somehow less alien than the aliens who had rescued us, because he had been human himself.
(He hadn’t changed us? He’d changed himself instead? That was… oh help me and hang me for a heretic, that was comforting.)
This book had songs and friends and tasks worth doing.
And the hero was an herbalist-monk who had once been a warrior, had been lover and fighter all at once, but who had given it up for the call of something he loved even more and would fight for even harder.
The people in his town needed healing, and he would heal them.
His God had preserved him, and so he would worship his God.
I sighed, and I shut the book, and I didn’t just stare unseeing at the ceiling this time.
Instead, I looked all around me, looked hard, looked on purpose. I looked at all of the shelves, every one packed full of books, full of stories and histories from a world left behind. Stories full of a humanity that built not just Houses, but households. Not just one room per person, but rooms shared. Not just an inside divided like a honeycomb, but an outside full of gardens.
A humanity that cultivated not just the fruit of the ground, but a humanity that had the inherited knowledge to turn that fruit into wine, that wheat into bread.
A humanity that could break bread together.
Those shelves of stories stretched back, rank on rank, further than I could see.
I could read for years, and not come to the end of them.
My enemy’s arsenal was infinite.
And I knew I could not stand against it.
(Could we grow gardens in that waste? Build houses? Remember how to pray? We didn’t know. With the security of the Houses in front of us, we’d never tried.)
(But the library had showed me: security was not enough.)
I left.
I left, still lacking the things that had been taken from me.
I left, too, with everything that had been given to me. I left with the task that had been laid on me. I would have the time now—the time to tell everyone else: we were humans, and maybe even made in the image of a God who wanted us to stay that way, and we were not meant to be alone.
I knew now what we had lost. I knew now what we must rebuild.
(Buildings, but not just buildings. Homes.)
And yet.
And yet.
I left, leaving my dearest enemy behind.
(Oh my library. Oh my friend.)
And I went outside, weeping.
Jessica Snell is a writer whose work has appeared in Compelling Science Fiction, Tor.com, Christ and Pop Culture, Focus on the Family and more. She is also a freelance editor who loves helping other writers polish their books till they shine! In her free time, she gardens, knits, and spends time with her husband and their four children. You can follow her on Twitter at @theJessicaSnell, where she tweets about books, faith, and family. Her website is jessicasnell.com.
“‘Vocation’ is (pretty clearly) a love letter to the books that have shaped me. (The protagonist’s critiques are not mine; the library’s taste in literature is.) I’m a sucker for libraries and always have been—even before I spent six years working in one. I’m also a sucker for any story that has a strong picture of what home means. After the first two lines of this story popped into my head, the rest of it followed quickly. I hope you enjoyed it!”
“Vocation” by Jessica Snell. Copyright © 2021 by Jessica Snell.
Support Mysterion on Patreon!
“‘Vocation’ is (pretty clearly) a love letter to the books that have shaped me. (The protagonist’s critiques are not mine; the library’s taste in literature is.) I’m a sucker for libraries and always have been—even before I spent six years working in one. I’m also a sucker for any story that has a strong picture of what home means. After the first two lines of this story popped into my head, the rest of it followed quickly. I hope you enjoyed it!”
“Vocation” by Jessica Snell. Copyright © 2021 by Jessica Snell.
Support Mysterion on Patreon!
Very belatedly, thank you for this gorgeous story! This left me wanting to laugh and cry and think and read this story again.
ReplyDeleteRead your devotion on the Advent Project and ended up here. Thank you for writing this. Amazing story and very appropriate for the Christmas season! Like
ReplyDeleteJoanna, it made me stop and think.