The library we’re assembling here will be the biggest and best in the world, and when it’s finished that’s where you’ll find me, doing what I do second best; reading, researching, gradually putting things together into orders and patterns, figuring a way out of here, a way home. I shall be wasting my time, because the Great Queen, She Stamps Them Flat, has given strict orders that I’m never to be allowed to leave this place. I’ll be safe here, she says. That’s a poor translation, because in Robur it can only mean one thing: here I shall not be in danger. In Apiru it’s ambiguous. It can mean
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