But she didn’t have time to deal with any of that now. As Paulo’d warned her, a huge tsunami of messages had swamped her in-box. Some were from obvious nuts, some from Voynich Manuscript enthusiasts who might not be nuts, some from scientists who might be nuts, some from government officials and clergyfolk who were surely going nuts. She had to sort through them all to figure out which ones she needed to answer as soon as she could, which could wait, and which could be erased without answering.
Lunch? She never got the chance. A video crew interviewed her for two thousandths—the most time she could spare—for the infosphere. Fame and notoriety were the last things she wanted. She never would have gone into library science had she wanted them. Want them or not, she had them now.
It slid toward 7.08. Quitting time? She wouldn’t get the chance for that, either. Maybe Paulo or somebody could bring her food and coffee, lots more coffee. She feared she’d end up sleeping in the office tonight, leaning back in the chair with her feet on the desk.
Thinking of quitting time did make her remember Tony Loquasto. She called his phone code. He didn’t answer, which surprised her. Bonkers or not, Tony was nothing if not reliable. She left a message, asking him to call her back. When he didn’t, she called the general custodial code.
She got the number two custodian, who said, “He left this morning, Professor Hanafusa. Didn’t you know? Said he had a family emergency. I bet he did, too—he looked big-time green around the gills, if you know what I mean.”
“Thanks, Olga.” Feyrouz disconnected and went back through her messages to see if she’d overlooked one from Loquasto. She didn’t find one, and she didn’t think she would have scrubbed one from him. In the madness today, though, she couldn’t be sure.
Just then, she got a call from the governor of Connecticut. She had to deal with that, and it made her forget about the errant custodian for a while. And the urgent calls and messages kept pouring in. By the time 9.58—2300 in the old system—rolled around, she was fielding queries from early risers in Europe. She gave it another couple of hundredths, then said the hell with everything, shut down her messaging, and headed for home. Wilfrid deserved that much, didn’t he?
It was dark and quiet, except for fire engines screaming like lost souls off in the distance. She had to wait at the stop longer than usual; buses didn’t run so often once it got late. And she wished she had a stunner in her pouch as she walked to her building down poorly lit streets. She got there without trouble, and breathed a small sigh of relief after the security door let her in.
Wilfrid wanted to know where the hell she’d been and why he was out of cat food. She fed him and petted him and took care of the fish, all more or less on automatic pilot. Then she said, “News.”
“Big fire in West Haven,” the infosphere announced; the AI must have known she would have heard the klaxons on her way back.
“Show me. Tell me,” Feyrouz instructed. Sure enough, it was a big fire: a house that, to judge by the ones nearby, would have stood there since the twentieth century. It wasn’t standing any more. By the enthusiasm with which it burned, whoever lived there might have used it to store acetone or mineral oil.
No sooner had that thought crossed her mind than the voice-over said, “Public Information Officer Horowitz says the flames’ fierceness makes arson not just possible but probable. The residence, which has belonged to the Loquasto family since at least the 1980s, is of course a total loss. Heat and smoke have prevented firefighters from gaining entry. At this point in time, we simply have no way of knowing whether anyone was trapped in the house when fire engulfed it. Emergency calls were placed by neighbors.”
“Moses, Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad!” Feyrouz exclaimed. She tried Tony Loquasto’s phone code again. This time, she didn’t get invited to leave a message. An antique artificial voice—you could tell it was computerized, a dead giveaway that it was antique—informed her that that code was not currently in service.
She did some more swearing. What was it trying to tell her? Did the phone system already know Tony was dead, even if the rest of the infosphere didn’t? Or had he canceled the code himself? The police would be able to find out about that, but she couldn’t.
Had he torched his own house? Why would anyone do such an insane thing? His family’d lived there forever. The voice-over’d said so. You wouldn’t all of a sudden turn two and a half centuries of life to smoke and ash, would you?
Not unless you were covering your tracks, she thought with wintry clarity. But where would he run? His name and all the data the infosphere had soaked up about him would warn if he tried to get a plane ticket or rent a car or probably even take a bus, though you could still feed some buses cash. Surveillance cameras scanned almost every square centimeter.
People still talked about living off the grid. They talked about it, but very few did it. The grid had grown tighter and tighter year by year, decade by decade. These days, hardly anything slipped through it.
Feyrouz was getting ready for bed when she stopped short, her mouth still all foamy with toothpaste. Suppose Tony Loquasto wasn’t nuts. Suppose he’d come to Earth from Faraday eight hundred years ago, maybe longer. Suppose years, decades, even centuries weren’t that big a deal to him. Wouldn’t he have something up his sleeve, something this oh-so-up-to-date twenty-third century might not know anything about?
She laughed at herself, finished brushing, and went to sleep. She’d be tired and grouchy in the morning as things were. The way she was getting silly now said she really needed to grab what rest she could.
A West Haven police lieutenant waited for her outside the Beinecke when she got there. Mandela Jeter wanted to hear everything she could tell him about Tony Loquasto. She didn’t hide anything. It wouldn’t have done any good anyway, as she knew. She called up the video from the secure room and let Jeter listen to the custodian claiming to be an alien.
“Wow!” the police officer said, shaking his head in bemusement. “He had a glitch in his firmware, didn’t he?”
“Plainly, there’s a connection between Faraday and the Voynich Manuscript,” Feyrouz said. “If you want me to think that connection includes our janitor…” She shook her head, too.
“I hear you.” Jeter spiraled a finger by his ear. “Well, we’ll run him down pretty soon, I bet. There’s nobody in what’s left of the old house—we know that now.”
“Oh-huh.” Feyrouz had learned as much over breakfast. “When you do find him, would I be able to talk with him?”
“I can’t promise, but I don’t see why not.” The lieutenant whistled between his teeth. “I don’t know what I figured you’d tell me, but aliens from another planet wasn’t it. Can’t wait to see the captain’s face when I drop this on her.” Away he went, leaving Feyrouz to get on with the rest of the craziness of her day.
But they didn’t run Tony Loquasto down, not pretty soon and not later, either. Feyrouz wondered about him till she retired at eighty-eight, and, in fact, till she died at 107—a good age, if not a great one. Every so often, she’d put on white gloves and flip through the Voynich Manuscript. It never told her anything she didn’t already know. Her best guess was that it never would.
About the Author
The author of many science fiction and fantasy novels, including The Guns of the South, the “World War” series, and The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump, Harry Turtledove lives in Los Angeles with his wife, novelist Laura Frankos, and their four daughters. You can sign up for email updates here.