“Mornin’, Professor Hanafusa,” he said. He had a faint New England accent and, under it, what might have been an even fainter Italian one. Or maybe Feyrouz was imagining that.
“Good morning, Tony.” She grudged even that brief reply. She had to get up into the stacks as fast as she could.
But the janitor, blast him, felt like chatting. “Wonderful day, ain’t it?” he said. “Now we know we got company out there. That’s really somethin’, know what I mean?”
“It sure is.” Feyrouz made herself stop, made herself smile, made herself nod. You had to behave like a human being with the people who worked for you unless you wanted them to talk about you behind your back. The world wouldn’t end—she didn’t suppose it would, anyhow—if she checked things in a couple of thousandths, not right now.
Though she did her best not to be rude, some of her urgency must have got through to him. “Don’t want to keep you or nothin’,” he said, and went off with his broom and his rolling trash can. He didn’t move very fast; Feyrouz couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a janitor in a hurry. As long as he was chinning with her, he didn’t have to do any actual work.
At the elevators, she poked the UP panel with an impatient forefinger. She didn’t have to wait any more—a door slid open. She went inside. The door closed behind her. This was the fourth generation of elevators in the building. They were far safer than the originals, and used less than half as much energy. Similar improvements had gone into the AC and the lighting and the fire-suppression systems.
On the top floor was a room with special air-conditioning, fire suppression, and surveillance even by current standards. The Beinecke as a whole housed and protected rare books and manuscripts, as its name said it did. That room housed and protected the rarest of the rare. The DNA sniffer above the latch put the one on Feyrouz’s apartment door to shame.
She knew just where in the room the manuscript she wanted lived. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t have been likely to name her cat Wilfrid. The Voynich Manuscript wasn’t very big: no more than twenty-five centimeters by seventeen. Scholars had been certain for centuries that its parchment cover wasn’t the one it had originally worn.
They’d also been certain its 234 surviving pages (some—no one knew how many—were missing) dated from the early fifteenth century. Studies of bookbinding techniques and radioactive dating of vellum and ink led to the same conclusion.
And there certainty ended, sloppy dead on the floor. Many of the manuscript’s pages pictured plants—plants portrayed nowhere else, plants resembling nothing people had ever seen anywhere else. The writing that presumably explained the illustrations was in an unknown tongue; the script itself also had no known duplicate.
The Voynich Manuscript—named for Wilfrid Michael Voynich, a twentieth-century owner and researcher—came to the Beinecke in 1969 as a donation from the man who’d bought it from the man who’d inherited it from Voynich’s widow. It had been a curiosity, a mystery, for hundreds of years before that. It still was. Plenty of people claimed to have solved the mystery of its script. Nobody’d done so in a way that satisfied scholars.
Feyrouz carried a pair of thin white cotton gloves in her belt pouch so she could handle delicate manuscripts without harming them. She put on the gloves before taking the Voynich Manuscript from the shelf and carrying it to a carrel. Eight hundred years separated her from the unknown author and artist, who’d almost certainly created the manuscript in northern Italy. She turned the pages gently and carefully.
Her breath caught. There were the blue flowery things with the golden oval centers. A couple of paragraphs’ worth of incomprehensible text dodged past and among their stems. When she went a page farther, she came to the maybe-pitcher plant, again with something in that unknown script written alongside it. Above and to the right of the flower (?) with the candy-cane stalk was the number 35, in ordinary Arabic numerals. Most of the pages were numbered. Those numbers, with a few Latin-alphabet words probably not by the original creator, were the only decipherable bits in the manuscript.
All of which meant… what? What could it mean but that whoever’d made the Voynich Manuscript had somehow known what plants on Faraday, forty light-years from Earth, were like? How was that possible? With the manuscript around eight centuries old, was it possible at all?
“The idea’s insane,” Feyrouz said—again, where no one could hear her, though surveillance cameras in this secure room might pick up the words.
It might have been insane, but all other possibilities struck her as crazier yet. The photos sent back from Faraday didn’t just kind of look like the illustrations in the manuscript. The illustrations were what a good artist—not a great one, but good, plenty good—would have turned out if he or she had been painting from those photos.
And the pool or spa or whatever it was looked like the pictures of such things the artist had also included in the manuscript. There were several pages with such illustrations. In them, though, the pools had been full of water and were populated by rather chunky naked women. Or maybe they weren’t women, or not exactly women. Maybe they were the friends or family the artist had left behind.
“Maybe my brain needs reprogramming,” Feyrouz muttered. But she didn’t think so. She also didn’t think she’d be the only person asking those questions for long. Someone else familiar with the Voynich Manuscript would make the same associations she had—would very likely not just make them but spread them all over the infosphere.
Someone might well have started doing that already. Feyrouz didn’t fret about it. The wild urge to be first wasn’t a social disease she’d ever caught. Page by page, she went through the manuscript. The astrological diagrams, if that was what they were, had never made any Earthly sense. Would they in the context of Faraday’s sky and the other planets in the TRAPPIST-1 system? Again, she had no idea, but the question seemed worth asking.
The door to the special room clicked open. The small rumble of plastic wheels on carpet told Feyrouz it was a janitor making rounds. Probably Tony Loquasto; no one else from the custodial staff would be authorized to come in here. She hadn’t known he was, but it made sense. Even with no academic rank, he was as trusted, as reliable, an employee as the Beinecke boasted. And, while air filters ensured that the special room didn’t get dusty in a hurry, it did get dusty.
Thanks to the noise from those wheels, Feyrouz kept an ear on where Tony was going. Somehow, she wasn’t completely astonished when he turned down the aisle that led to the shelf where the Voynich Manuscript usually perched. She also wasn’t astonished when the noise stopped right about there. She hadn’t expected the janitor to know about the manuscript, but one never knew, did one?
She closed the volume, stood, and carried it back to its beige-painted metal case. Sure enough, there stood Tony, doing a not quite good enough job of pretending to dust.
“Hello,” she said. “Were you looking for this?” She held up the Voynich Manuscript.
He did a not quite good enough job of pretending he had no idea what she was talking about. Then he must have realized it wasn’t quite good enough, because he chuckled and shrugged and nodded. “As a matter of fact, Professor Hanafusa, I was.”
“Have you looked at it before?” Feyrouz asked, her voice a bit tight. If he’d pored over images from it on the infosphere, that was one thing. If he’d got not just eyeprints but perhaps greasy fingerprints on the actual, irreplaceable physical book, that was something else again.