Nova Ploetsk is one of the largest ports in Argos, a vast lenticular structure the upper surface of which projects just above the surface like a gigantic hydrozoan. Below it, tentacular hydrothermal power tubes dangle below the thermocline and extend their nozzles into the twilight zone, sucking up cold waters from kilometers below to cool the heat exchangers from the solar turbines that power the city. Refinery units in tank farms nestling against the underside of the city filter the deep water for rare isotopes, while around it floats the shipyard, ready to carry the mineral wealth it extracts away to customers elsewhere on Shin-Tethys—and ultimately elsewhere in the solar system. It is, by halves: an ugly industrial port city focused on resource extraction and a fleshpot servicing the needs of the miners and prospectors who roam the vast laminar ranges beneath Argos. Ugly, bustling, brash, noisy . . . and nevertheless the destination to which my sib Ana decided to relocate, in order to pursue her studies.
“We thought perhaps you might be able to help us make sense of this,” said Serjeant Bull. He had sufficient grace to look apologetic.
“Well.” I looked around. “I hardly know where to begin!”
The upper reaches of Nova Ploetsk are air-filled and dry; there is a membrane, some distance below the waterline, below which many of the chambers and avenues are partially flooded for the convenience of the hydromorph population, who had adapted themselves to the life aquatic to a sufficient degree that they had difficulty with land-based locomotion—people like the constable watching us from a moon pool in the center of Ana’s living-room floor. The Serjeant and I traveled most of the way to the condominium where Ana had lived by vaporetto, for there were enough obligate land dwellers in the bigger cities to provide such a transport service with custom—but I digress. Ana’s apartment was one of a block catering to amphibia, with wet-and-dry levels and underwater entrances. From outside, they formed a double row of cylinders perhaps eight meters high and six in diameter, rising from the side of a canal.
The bottommost level of Ana’s apartment was a comfortably furnished lounge area surrounding the watery vestibule: We had to dive briefly into the undertunnel before we could enter. Luckily, despite my lack of gills, I was perfectly capable of submerging for the three minutes it took for the constable on duty to notice our arrival and open the hatch.
It was, I am sad to say, excessively spacious and furnished lavishly, in a manner most unbecoming for a scholar. I have communicated with Ana extensively over the years, both in writing and via imago dumps (like Andrea’s missive). She had never struck me as being particularly preoccupied with superficialities or hedonistic indulgence. In fact, my impression of her was one of an austere mind, at her happiest when contemplating a long-forgotten archive of primary research material or when setting out the terms of reference for a years-long research program. But this was not the apartment of a contemplative introvert! From the deep blue cultivated-seagrass carpet to the hand-carved coral furniture and the emotionally responsive lighting, the giant retina screen stretched around the walls, and the horribly expensive cast-iron spiral staircase leading up to the next level, nothing about this apartment hinted at an academic disposition.
Which might be an unfair and slighting judgment on my part, for the paraphernalia associated with our study of the historiography of accounting practices require no more physical tools than a retina to grid out our spreadsheets and, additionally, a storage and numbers mill that might be no bigger than my little finger; but ferrous furniture on a water world is a high-maintenance headache, and Ana did not strike me as the sort of person to prioritize interior-design aesthetics over practicality.
“It’s not like her,” I said after approximately six seconds. “Are you sure this was Ana Graulle-90’s apartment?” I knew the question was silly the moment the words left my mouth, but I had to ask.
“Ana Graulle-90 paid the rent here,” Serjeant Bull explained patiently and, I can’t help thinking, a little condescendingly. “She was routinely tracked entering and leaving—there’s a koban in the crescent upstream of here—and on many days she took the same vaporetto service we arrived by to the National Archives, where she was conducting research into the history of blue smoker strikes in the deep wilds. She paid the bills: electricity, gas, and flotation.”
“Oh.” I glanced at Constable Walrus, then past him (or her) at a crystal display case full of knickknacks: blown-glass statuettes that glowed with a lambent fire beneath carefully positioned overhead spotlights, a reproduction of an ancient inkstone calligraphy set, a scale model of a starship, a case full of tiny, highly polished metal spoons. At the center of the display nestled a huge bivalve shell lined with nacre, a pearl the size of my thumb cradled in its heart. (A gene-mod abalone, I later discovered, an aquatic animal from Old Earth, heavily modified to survive in the waters of Shin-Tethys, with a little care and attention—some invertebrates had been able to survive in the wild, making this one of the most successful attempts at exporting terrestrial biota to other planets, and the principal reason the Church of the Fragile had bothered dispatching a chapel to this system.) “This isn’t like her at all.” I walked across the grass (which had grown somewhat unkempt in the absence of a manicurist-in-residence) and paused at the foot of the stairs. “May I?”
Serjeant Bull nodded lugubriously. “Take your time.” A momentary pause. “Our forensic investigators finished recording here a year ago, but try not to damage or move anything unnecessarily.”
I went upstairs after a couple of false starts—it had been ages since I last essayed a staircase in full gravity, and I kept missing the treads—and thrust my head even deeper into the zone of alienation that my missing sib had cast like a spell across her residence.
Like the ground floor, the upstairs level was circular. One third of it was given over to sanitary and sleeping arrangements, with a table and an unnecessarily large bed taking pride of place. The rest was bare-floored, empty but for shelves occupying the entire height of the walls. The shelves were occupied by narrow boxes, perhaps five centimeters thick and thirty high; the narrow edges were outermost, scribbled on using a black marker. I pulled one of them out and examined it: It fell open in my hands, revealing that the outer panels concealed numerous internal sheets. I will confess it took me a while to recognize them as books. Books in the original meaning of the word, codices: stacks of flexible thin sheets covered in static impressions of writing—an archaic data-storage technology, heavy and unchanging—physically linked at one edge to provide sequential block-level access.
In all my years I don’t think I’d ever seen so many physical books in one place. In the depths of prehistory, Fragile scholars relied on them for data, back when humanity was confined to a single planet: But they don’t travel well. They’re stupidly massive, almost impossible to edit or update once they’ve been manufactured (thus making them prone to error and obsolescence), and we got out of the habit of “printing” them even before large numbers of our ancestors first began to explore the original solar system. Just what was Ana (assuming it was she) doing with such a hoard of junk?
I shook my head and did a quick calculation. Assuming twenty per shelf, ten shelves from floor to ceiling, sixteen stacks . . . there must be thousands here! Over a ton of them! “Ludicrous,” I mumbled to myself. Why were they here? And where had Ana gotten the things from in the first place? While books weren’t entirely preposterous on a planetary surface with a carbon-rich biosphere to supply the raw materials—although I had my doubts about their utility underwater—nobody in their right mind would want them aboard any kind of spacegoing vehicle.