He hesitated. Then he nodded. “The pictures, you know, they’re pictures of plants and stuff from, ah, Faraday.”
“You saw that, too?” she said.
`”Yeah, I did.” Tony Loquasto nodded again. “Which ones made you spot it, you don’t mind my asking?”
She still had the gloves on. She opened the Voynich Manuscript and pointed out the plants. “This one… and this one. I saw them on a news projection this morning, and naturally I recognized them.”
“Thank you,” Loquasto said, which baffled her. Then he nodded one more time. “The hadadband and the potta, hey? Yeah, them are a couple what stand out from the crowd, like.”
“The which and the what?” Feyrouz was baffled again. “Do you mean the plants? Why do you call them that?”
He sighed. By the look on his face, he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. Since he hadn’t, though, he needed to answer. “Why? On account of those’re their names.”
“They are? In what language?” Feyrouz didn’t call him a nut right out loud. But no one had ever deciphered the Voynich Manuscript. Plenty of people had claimed they’d done it, but none of the claims held water.
She might not have called him a nut, but he knew what she meant. “I don’t think I better talk about it no more,” he said. “You’ll send for the boys in the white coats with the straitjacket and the butterfly nets.”
Not many people would have had the slightest notion of what he was talking about. Feyrouz had never heard anybody use the idiom he came out with, but she’d run across it in print once or twice—she enjoyed old books. “No, I won’t,” she promised, raising her hand as if taking an oath. “You’re the best janitor the Beinecke could have, and you don’t have to be sane to do the job. Maybe being crazy even helps.”
He grunted laughter. “Boy, you got that right, Professor!” he said. But he kept quiet after that for some little while. “You really mean it? ’Cause what I got to say, I know it’ll sound screwy to you.”
“There’s nothing about the Voynich Manuscript that doesn’t sound screwy,” Feyrouz said. “So go ahead. What’s your take on it?”
“I don’t got no take on it,” the janitor said. “I wrote the damn thing, that’s all.”
Feyrouz giggled. She knew she shouldn’t have; a second later she pulled her face straight. But it was too late. She could tell right away. And when she said, “Did you?”, she knew she sounded like someone humoring a real nutjob. That careful neutrality in her voice meant the same thing the giggle did.
“See? I told ya ya wouldn’t believe me,” Tony Loquasto said without heat. “But I did, yeah.”
“Um, how is that possible?” Feyrouz asked. “It was eight hundred years ago, after all.”
“We don’t die as quick as you. Rocked me back pretty hard when I seen how quick you people peg out,” Loquasto said. “We sent a starship here. Something musta gone wrong. Don’t ask me what. I was in cold sleep—the travel time wasn’t to sneeze at, even for us. When I woke up, the emergency pod’d already kicked free. All I could do was ride it down, so I did. I landed in Italy, like you’d guess. Learned the language, wrote the book when I could afford to. Best I could do to remember what the old place was like, y’know?”
“Why haven’t there been more starships from Faraday, then?” Feyrouz did her resolute best to stay reasonable.
“Probably on account of we had ourselves a big old no-holds-barred war,” Loquasto answered, his voice bleak. “Almost happened here a time or three. You guys’ve been lucky. I bet we weren’t.”
“It could be.” Again, Feyrouz kept her voice neutral. He was one of those rational-sounding lunatics. She almost wanted to believe him. But that would mean believing he’d been on Earth since around 1400 and on Faraday for who could guess how long before that. Occam’s Razor said—shouted—he was a fruitcake. She tried another question: “When did you come to America?”
“In—lemme think—1893, that’s when,” the janitor said. “I hoped it’d be better, and I guess it was. And after the Beinecke got the manuscript, I figured I oughta keep an eye on it. I been here since… I guess it was 1980-something when they hired me. I been sweepin’ up ever since, even if I had to change my handle and my style every so often to keep folks from gettin’ snoopy, like.”
He still sounded rational. She was tempted once more to believe him. Vic Loquasto, from almost a century and a half earlier, had looked just like Tony now except for the haircut and the mustache and the funny old-time clothes. But if you started believing in a nearly immortal refugee from another planet, wouldn’t the boys with the butterfly nets and the straitjacket come for you next? And wouldn’t you need coming for?
She held out the Voynich Manuscript to Tony. “Do you still want this?” she asked.
“Nah, that’s okay, Professor Hanafusa. I’ll just go back to making my rounds. Gotta keep things neat, right?” The janitor turned his wheeled trash barrel around and headed for the door. He opened it and went through. It clicked shut behind him.
Feyrouz didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath till she let it out in a long sigh. She put the Voynich Manuscript back on the shelf. So small, so nondescript—and so very, very strange on the inside. Shaking her head, she started back to her office.
Her administrative assistant jumped out of his chair—he almost jumped out of his skin—when she walked in. “Great God in the circuit diagram!” he exclaimed. “Where have you been?”
“What’s the matter, Paulo?” she asked, blinking. He was usually the calmest thing on two legs. That was part of what made him good at his job.
Not now. He gaped at her, goggle-eyed. “Check your messages. Check the news first, though. What have you been doing this past hour?”
“Research,” she said, which even had the added virtue of being true. She walked into her sanctum and closed the door after her, something she hardly ever did. Only then did she address the air: “News, please!” On a hunch, she added, “Space news.”
A headline appeared in the air in front of her: FARADAY CRAWLER DESTROYED! SEE SHOCKING IMAGES! Her nod, shaky though it was, meant she wanted to see the images, whether they were shocking or not.
The infosphere obliged. The first photo didn’t seem particularly shocking, not to begin with. It was a shot of what might have been the base of a statue. If there’d ever been a statue on top of it, though, that was long gone. As bases sometimes will, this one had an inscription carved into it, commemorating what it didn’t hold any more.
Feyrouz couldn’t read the inscription, of course. She wouldn’t have expected to be able to, not in a million years. But she could recognize its script. She hadn’t expected that, either, though later she supposed she should have. It was a cleaned-up, formal-looking version of the writing that filled the parchment leaves of the Voynich Manuscript.
The next picture, which was also the last, showed a naked blonde woman carrying a big rock. No—a second look told Feyrouz it wasn’t a rock: it was a chunk of concrete, with rusty rebar stubs sticking out of it here and there.
The woman was dirty and muscular, and slightly on the chunky side—like the women in the pools in the manuscript and, now that Feyrouz thought about it, quite a bit like Tony Loquasto himself. She didn’t think about it long. The way the woman was staring in the direction of the crawler didn’t exactly require one to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out why it stopped transmitting right after that.
Probably on account of we had ourselves a big old no-holds-barred war. The janitor’s words echoed in Feyrouz’s head. So did other, older ones from Thomas Hobbbes, about the life of man in a state of nature: …solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. If that blonde woman didn’t epitomize them, Feyrouz couldn’t imagine what would.