We stand at the tower’s third floor landing. The door’s tiny circular frame presents a fine pencil drawing of numerous concentric spherical shells, each with a quarter cut away to reveal another inside it. The door sticks somewhat and I must shoulder it open. The color of my garb is indistinguishable from the forest green of the door, with only texture and sheen to distinguish one from the other.

The door dispenses us into an octagonal room, at the center of which is an octagonal bookshelf, populated solidly with the bone-white volumes that collect and summarize the fates of ecumenes across the Universe. Six walls of the chamber are covered completely with bookshelves: twelve shelves from bottom to top, all bearing forest-green volumes. A narrow aperture in the central bookshelf leads to a niche within, at the center of which is a pedestal, toward which the very floorboards’ seams and grain point. The pedestal bears an ultramarine volume: the Book of Earth.

One wall affords the door we entered from; another affords passage to a chamber concentrically encircling this one. In the larger chamber are shelves bearing forest-green volumes, and two doors to an even larger concentric chamber. That third encircling chamber contains even more shelves, plus two doors outward, one stair upward, and one stair downward. Progressing in this fashion, a spherical volume is defined by ever larger chambers balancing shelf space for green volumes with open space for passage to other chambers.

This space maps geometrically to the volume of space known to Earth as the Observable Universe. Proceeding out the east door from the central chamber is equivalent to proceeding to a galactic “east”, chosen semi-arbitrarily as the direction from the Earth through the Milky Way’s center at the moment of Humanity’s end. Going upstairs is equivalent to traversing above the Milky Way’s galactic plane, and contrariwise for going downstairs.

Each chamber’s volumes collect roughly one galaxy’s worth of worlds, with a compression scheme eliding away the mostly empty space between galaxies, and with extraordinarily, vanishingly rare special pedestals bearing volumes for worlds between galaxies. “Worlds”, for the purposes of this Library, are bodies bearing any sort of self-replicating phenomenon, generously definable as “life”. A world bearing life is bound in forest green. Very occasionally, a volume bound in bronze, significantly thicker than the rest, catches your eye: the record of an intelligent civilization.

Each volume contains a combination of standard forms and narrative. Much of the distinctive existence of a world can be captured by checking boxes, since so many attributes commonly recur from one world to another. What can’t be captured thusly is instead written as a narrative of the world’s distinct characteristics and history: the color of the algae, the details of how long it took the chemical composition to shift from one formula to another after the inundation with meteors ended, the log of magnetic field reversals, the conquests of continents, the religious idiosyncrasies, and so on.

The peregrination of this Library shall be the primary focus of our time together.

Please accept my highest regards,

V.F.