"Yes. I was getting worried about you. Are you all right?"
"I've been sick today. And to tell the truth, I didn't feel like coming in. Do you mind?"
I look around. "No, the place is dead as a" I stop myself just in time. "Listen, why don't you take a couple of days off? You were going to be leaving in a couple of months anyway, there's no point overdoing it. If you want, I'll drop round with some books on my next day off, day after tomorrow. How about that?"
"That sounds great," she says gratefully, and after a bit more chat I hang up.
I'm just shifting the CLOSED sign back to OPEN when a long black limousine draws up at the curb outside. I manage a sharp intake of breathWhat's Fiore doing here today? before the Priest gets out, and then, uncharacteristically, holds the door open for someone else. Someone wearing a purple dress and a skullcap. I realize exactly who it must bethe Bishop: Yourdon.
The Bishop turns out to be as cadaverously thin and tall as Fiore is squat and bulbous. A stork and a toad. There's a peculiarly sallow cast to his skin, and his cheekbones stand out like blades. He wears spectacles with thick hornlike rectangular frames, and his hair hugs his scalp in lank swatches the color of rotten ivory. He strides forward, skeletal-looking hands writhing together, as Fiore bumbles along huffing and puffing to keep up in his wake. "I say, I say!" Fiore calls. "Please"
The Bishop pushes the library door open, then pauses. His eyes are a very pale blue, with slightly yellowish whites, and his gaze is icily contemptuous. "You've fucked up before, Fiore," he hisses. "I do wish you'd keep your little masturbatory fantasies to yourself in future." Then he turns round to face me.
"Hello?" I force a smile.
He looks at me as if I'm a machine. "I am Bishop Yourdon. Please take me to the document repository."
"Ah, yes, certainly." I hurry out from behind the desk and wave him toward the back.
Fiore harrumphs and breathes heavily as he waddles after us, but Yourdon moves with bony grace, as if all his joints have been replaced with well-lubricated bearings. Something about him makes me shudder. The look he gave FioreI can't remember having seen such an expression of pure contempt on a human face in a very long time. I lead them to the room; the Grim Reaper stalking along behind me in angry silence, followed by a bumbling oleaginous toad.
I stand aside as we reach the reference section, and Fiore fumbles with his keys, visibly wilting under Yourdon's fuming gaze. He gets the door open and darts inside. Yourdon pauses, and fixes me with an ice-water stare. "We are not to be disturbed," he informs me, "for any reason whatsoever. Do you understand?"
I nod vigorously. "I, I'll be at the front desk if you need me." My teeth are nearly chattering. What is it with this guy? I've met misanthropes before, but Yourdon is something special.
Fiore and the Bishop hang out in the archive, doing whatever it is they do in there for almost three hours. At a couple of points I hear raised voices, Fiore's unctuous pleading followed by the Bishop hissing back at him like an angry snake. I sit behind the desk, forcing myself not to look over my shoulder every ten seconds, and try to read a book about the history of witch-hunts in preindustrial Europa and Merka. It contains disturbing echoes of what's going on here, communities fractured into mutually mistrustful factions that compete to denounce one another to greedy spiritual authorities drunk on temporal power. However, I find it hard to concentrate while the snake and the toad in the back room are making noises like they're trying to sting each other to death.
It's well into my normal lunch hour when Fiore and Yourdon surface. Fiore looks subdued and resentful. Yourdon appears to be in a better mood, but if this is his good humor, I'd hate to see him when he's angry. When he smiles he looks like a skull someone's stretched a sheet of skin over, colorless lips peeling back from yellowing teeth in a grin completely bereft of amusement. "You'd better get back to work then," he calls to Fiore as he strides past my desk without so much as a nod in my direction. "You've got a lot of lost headway to make up." Then he barges out through the front door as the long black limousine cruises round the edge of the block, ready to convey its master back to his usual haunts.
A few minutes later Fiore bumbles past me with a sullen glare. "I'll be round tomorrow," he mutters, then stomps out the door. No limousinefor the Priest, who staggers off on foot in the noonday heat. My, how the mighty are fallen!
I watch him until he's out of sight, then walk over and flip the sign on the door to CLOSED. Then I lock up and take a deep breath. I wasn't expecting this to happen today, but it's too good an opportunity to miss. I go fetch my bag from the staff room, then head for the repository.
It's time for the moment of truth. Less than a hundred seconds after Fiore left the building, I slide the laboriously copied key into the lock. My heart is pounding as I turn it. For a moment it refuses to budge, but I jiggle itthe teeth aren't quite engaging with the pinsand something falls into position and it squeals slightly and gives way. I push the door wide, then reach for the light switch.
I'm in a small room with no windows, no chairs, no tables, one bare electric bulb dangling on a wire from the ceiling, bookshelves on three walls, and a trapdoor in the middle of the floor.
"What is this shit?" I ask aloud, looking round.
There are box files on all the shelves, masses of box files. But there are no titles on the spines of the boxes, just serial numbers. Everything's dusty except the trapdoor, which has been opened recently. I inhale, then nearly go cross-eyed trying not to sneeze. If this is Fiore's idea of housekeeping, it's no wonder Yourdon was pissed at him.
I look at the nearest shelf and pull down one of the files at random. There's a button catch and I open it to find it's full of paper, yellowing sheets of the stuff, machine-smooth, columns of hexadecimal numbers printed in rows of dumb ink. There's a sequence number at the top of each sheet, and it takes me a few seconds to figure out what I'm looking at. It's a serialized mind map, what the ancients would have called a "hex dump." Pages and pages of it. The box file probably holds about five hundred sheets. If all the others I see contain more of this stuff, then I'm probably looking at about a hundred thousand sheets, each containing maybe ten thousand characters. Whatever is stored in this incredibly inefficient serial medium, it isn't very bigabout the same size as a small mammal's genome, maybe, once you squeeze out all the redundant exons. It's three or four orders of magnitude too small to be a map of a human being.
I shake my head and put the box file back. From the level of dust on top of it, it hasn't been touched for quite a time. I don't know what this stuff is, but it isn't what Fiore and Yourdon came here to look at. Which leaves the trapdoor.
I bend down and grab the brass ring, then lift. The wooden slab hinges up at the back, and I see a flight of steps leading down. They're carpeted, and there are wooden handrails to either side. Okay, so there's a secret basement under the library, I tell myself, trying not to giggle with fear. What have I been working on top of?
Of course I go downstairs. After what Fiore did to Phil and Esther, I'm probably dead if they find me in the repository. Taking the next step is a logical progression, nothing more.
The steps go down into twilight, but they don't go down very far. The floor is three meters below the trapdoor, and there's a light switch on the rail at the bottom. I flick it and glance around.
Guess what? I'm not in the dark ages anymore.
If I was still in the dark ages, this would be a musty basement with brick walls and wooden lath ceiling, or maybe poured concrete and steel beams. They weren't big on structural diamond back then, and their floors didn't grow zebrastripe fur, and they used short-lived electrical bulbs instead of surfacing their ceilings with fluorescent paint. There's a very retro-looking lounger in a mode that I'm sure went out of fashion some time between the end of the Oort colonial era and the first of the conservationista republics, and some weird black-resin chairs that look like the skeletons of insects, if insects grew four meters tall and supported themselves with endoskeletons. Hmm. I glance over my shoulder. Yes, if Yourdon and Fiore were having a knockdown shouting match in here with the hatch open, I might just about have heard it at the front desk.