"Not much," he agreed. "But listen to me. I'll make a deal with you. I'll give you the info on Ray Roberts and I won't tell Gore about Anarch Peak's body being in your vitarium's possession. Sebastian won't know that you told me."
"Told both of you," Lotta amended. "That librarian, too."
He continued, "My deal. Do you want to hear it?"
"Yes." She listened obediently.
Plunging into it, he said hoarsely, "Could you spread any of your love in my direction?"
She laughed. With malice-free delight. And that _really_ mystified him; now he hadn't the foggiest idea of where he stood or what--if anything--he had achieved. He felt depressed; somehow, despite her girlishness, her inexperience, she was controlling the conversation.
"What does _that_ mean?" she asked.
It means, he thought, going to bed with me. But he said, "We could meet like this from time to time. See each other; you know. Go out, maybe during the day. I can get my shift changed."
"You mean while Sebastian is down at the store."
"Yes." He nodded.
To his incredulity, she began to cry; tears ran down her cheeks and she made no effort to stifle them; she cried like a child.
"What's the matter?" he demanded, reflexively getting out a handkerchief and dabbing at her eyes.
Lotta said chokingly, "I was right; I do have to go back to the Library. Food." She stood up, gathered her pen and paper and purse, moved away from the table. "You don't know," she said, more calmly, "what you've done to me. Between you and Seb; both of you. Making me go back there for a second time today. I know what's going to happen; I know this time I'll meet that Mrs. McGuire; I would have before if you hadn't helped me to find Mr. Appleford."
"You can find him again. You know where his office is; go there, where we were before, where I took you."
"No." She shook her head drearily. "It won't work out that way; he'll be out to sogum or finished for the day."
He watched her depart, unable to think of anything to say, feeling totally futile. He thought, she's right; I am sending her off to face that. Something and someone she can't face. Between us, between Sebastian Hermes and me, we did it; he could have gone; I could have given her the info. But he didn't go and I wouldn't tell her without something in return. God, he thought; and hated himself. What have I done?
And I say I love her, he thought. And so does Sebastian; he "loves" her, too.
He stood watching until she was out of sight, and then he went quickly to the payphone on the far side of the sogum palace; he looked up the Library's number and dialed it.
"People's Topical Library."
"Let me talk to Doug Appleford."
"I'm sorry," the switchboard girl said. "Mr. Appleford has left for the day. Shall I connect you with Mrs. McGuire?"
He hung up.
Glancing up from the manuscript she had been reading, Mrs. Mavis McGuire saw a frightened-looking young woman with long dark hair standing in front of her desk. Irritated by the interruption, she said, "Yes? What do you want?"
"I'd like what info you have on Mr. Ray Roberts." The girl's face was waxen, without color, and she spoke mechanically.
"'The info we have on Mr. Ray Roberts," Mrs. McGuire said mockingly. "I see. And it's now--" She glanced at her wristwatch. "Five-thirty. Half an hour before closing. And you want me to gather all the sources together for you. Just hand them to you, all assembled and in order. So all you have to do is sit down and read them over."
"Yes," the girl said faintly, her lips barely moving.
"Miss," Mrs. McGuire said, "do you know who I am and what my job is? I'm Chief Librarian of the Library; I have a staff of almost one hundred employees, any one of whom could help you--if you had come here earlier in the day."
The girl whispered, "They said to ask you. The people at the main desk. I asked for Mr. Appleford but he's gone. He helped me before."
"Are you from the City of Los Angeles? From any civic body?"
"No. I'm from the Flask of Hermes Vitarium."
Mrs. McGuire said harshly, "Is Mr. Roberts dead?"
"I--don't think so. Maybe I better go." The girl turned away from the desk, hunching her shoulders together, drawing herself together like a sick, crippled bird. "I'm sorry..." Her voice trailed off.
"Just a minute." Mavis McGuire beckoned her back. "Turn around and face me. _Somebody_ sent you; your vitarium sent you. Legally, you have the right to use the Library as a reference source. You have a perfect right to search for info here. Come into the inner office; follow me." She stood up, briskly led the way through two outer offices, to her most private quarters. At her own desk she pressed one of the many buttons on her intercom system and said, "I'd appreciate it if one of the Erads who's free could come down here for a few minutes. Thank you." She turned, then, to confront the girl. I am not letting this person out of here, Mavis McGuire said to herself, until I find out why she's been sent by her vitarium to get info on Ray Roberts.
And if I can't get the information from her, the Erad can.
8
Matter itself (apart from the forms it receives) is likewise invisible and even indefinable.
--Erigena
In the work area of the Flask of Hermes Vitarium, Dr. Sign listened intently with a stethoscope placed on the unimpressive dark chest of the body of the Anarch Thomas Peak.
"Anything?" Sebastian asked. He felt extremely tense.
"Not so far. But at this stage it frequently comes and goes; this is critical, this period. All the components have migrated back into place and resumed the capacity to function, but the--" Sign gestured. "Wait. Maybe I've got it." He glanced at the instruments which mechanically registered pulse, respiration and cephalic activity; all traced and blipped unwavering lines.
"A body's a body," Bob Lindy said dispassionately; he showed by his expression the dim view he took of all this. "A deader is dead, whether he's the Anarch or not, and whether he's five minutes or five centuries away from rebirth."
Reading from a slip of paper, Sebastian said aloud, "Sic igitur magni quoque circum moenia mundi. Expugnata dabunt labem putresque ruinas.' Those last are the key words:'putresque ruinas.'"
"What's that from?" Dr. Sign asked.
"The monument. I copied it off. The epitaph for him." He gestured at the body.
"My Latin isn't much good outside medical terminology," Dr. Sign said, "but I can pick up on the terms putrify and ruin. But he doesn't look it, does he?" He, Lindy and Sebastian viewed the body for a short time in silence. Small as it was it looked complete, ready for life. What's keeping it, Sebastian wondered, from resuming life?
Father Faine said, "No single thing abides; but all things flow. Fragment to fragment clings--the things thus grow until we know and name them. By degrees they melt, and are no more the things we know.'"
"What's that?" Sebastian asked him; he had yet to hear rhymed couplets from the Bible.
"A translation of the first quatrain of the Anarch's epitaph. It's a poem of Titus Lucretius Carus--Lucretius who wrote _De Rerum Natura_. Didn't you recognize it, Seb?"
"No," he admitted.
"Maybe," Lindy said caustically, "if you recite it backward, he'll return to life; maybe that's how you're supposed to handle this." He turned his hostility directly on Sebastian. "I don't like trying to bring a corpse back to life; it's completely different from hearing a live person who's trapped underground in the box, and hauling him up."