To get into Con-U, I pass through two metal detectors and an X-ray machine and then I am patted down by a security guard named Barry. My bag, jacket, wallet, and pocket change are all confiscated. Barry checks for knives, scalpels, picks, awls, scissors, brushes, and cotton swabs. He checks the length of my nails, then makes me pull on pink latex gloves. Finally, he puts me in a white Tyvek jumpsuit with elastic at the wrists and built-in booties for my shoes. When I emerge into the dry, immaculate air of the storage facility, I am a man made perfectly inert: I cannot chip, scratch, fade, corrode, or react with any physical substance in the known universe. I guess I could still lick something. I’m surprised Barry didn’t tape my mouth shut.
Cheryl meets me in a narrow hallway, harshly lit by overhead fluorescents, in front of a door with the words ACCESSION/DEACCESSION stenciled on it in tall black letters. They look like they want to say REACTOR CORE.
“Welcome to Nevada, hon!” She waves and smiles a wide smile that makes her cheeks bunch up. “Awful nice to see a new face out here.” Cheryl is a middle-aged woman with frizzy black hair. She’s wearing a green cardigan with a neat zigzag pattern and dusty blue mom-jeans — no Tyvek suit for her. Her Con-U badge hangs on a lanyard around her neck, and the photo on the badge looks ten years younger.
“Okay, hon. The intermuseum loan form is here.” She hands me a crinkly sheet of pale green paper. “And this is the checkout manifest.” Another paper, this one yellow. “And you’ll have to sign this one.” It’s pink. Cheryl takes a long breath. Her brow furrows, and she says, “Now, listen, hon. Your institution isn’t nationally accredited, so we can’t do the pick and pack for you. Against the rules.”
“Pick and pack?”
“Sorry about that.” She hands me a previous-generation iPad wrapped in a tire-tread rubber casing. “But here’s a map. We have these neat pads now.” She smiles.
The iPad shows a tiny hallway (she pokes at it with her finger—“See, we’re right here”) that runs out into a gigantic rectangle, which is blank. “And that’s the facility, through there.” She lifts her arm, which jangles with bracelets, and points down the hallway toward wide double doors.
One of the forms — the yellow one — tells me the Gerritszoon punches are on shelf ZULU-2591. “So where do I find that?”
“Honestly, hon, it’s hard to say,” Cheryl says. “You’ll see.”
The Con-U storage facility is the most amazing space I have ever seen. Keep in mind that I recently worked at a vertical bookstore and have even more recently visited a secret subterranean library. Keep in mind, also, that I saw the Sistine Chapel when I was a kid, and, as part of science camp, I got to visit a particle accelerator. This warehouse has them all beat.
The ceiling hangs high above, ribbed like an airplane hangar. The floor is a maze of tall metal shelves loaded with boxes, canisters, containers, and bins. Simple enough. But the shelves — the shelves are all moving.
For a moment I feel sick, because my vision is swimming. The whole facility is writhing like a bucket of worms; it’s that same overlapping, hard-to-follow motion. The shelves are all mounted on fat rubber tires, and they know how to use them. They move in tight, controlled bursts, then break into smooth sprints through channels of open floor. They pause and politely wait for one another; they team up and form long caravans. It’s uncanny. It’s totally “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”
So the iPad’s map is blank because the facility is rearranging itself in real-time.
The space is dark, with no lights overhead, but each shelf has a small orange lamp mounted on top, flashing and rotating. The lamps cast strange spinning shadows as the shelves make their complex migrations. The air is dry — really dry. I lick my lips.
A shelf carrying a rack of tall spears and lances comes whizzing past me. Then it takes a sharp turn — the lances rattle — and I see that it’s bound for wide doors on the far wall. There, cool blue light spills into the darkness, and a team in Tyvek lifts boxes off the shelves, checks them against clipboards, then carries them out of sight. Shelves line up like schoolchildren, fidgeting and jostling; then, when the white-suits are done, they scoot away and merge back into the maze.
Here, in the most advanced off-site storage facility serving the historical entertainment sector anywhere west of the Mississippi, you don’t find the artifacts. The artifacts find you.
The iPad blinks at me, now showing a blue dot labeled ZULU-2591 near the center of the floor. Okay, that’s helpful. It must be a transponder tag. Or a magic spell.
There’s a thick yellow line painted on the floor in front of me. I edge one toe across, and the shelves nearby all swerve and recoil. That’s good. They know I’m here.
So then I push slowly into the maelstrom. Some shelves don’t slow down, but bend their trajectories to coast just behind or just ahead of me. I walk evenly, taking slow, deliberate steps. As they migrate around me, the shelves make a parade of wonders. There are huge urns glazed in blue and gold, strapped down and packed with foam; wide glass cylinders full of brown formaldehyde, tentacles inside dimly visible and undulating; slabs of crystal poking out of rough black rock glowing green in the darkness. One shelf holds a single oil painting, six feet talclass="underline" a portrait of a scowling merchant prince with a skinny mustache. His eyes seem to follow me as the painting curves out of sight.
I wonder if Mat’s miniature city — well, now Mat and Ashley’s — will end up on shelves like these one day. Will they strap it in sideways? Or will they carefully dismantle it and store all the buildings separately, each one wrapped in gauze? Will the shelves drift apart and go their separate ways? Will Matropolis spread out through the facility like so much stardust? So many people dream of getting something into a museum … is this what they have in mind?
The outer perimeter of the facility is like a highway; this must be where all the popular artifacts hang out. But as I follow the iPad and make my way toward the center of the floor, things slow down. Here, there are racks of wicker masks, tea sets packed in foam peanuts, thick metal panels crusted with dry barnacles. Here, there’s an airplane propeller and a three-piece suit. Here, things are weirder.
It’s not all shelves, either. There are rolling vaults — huge metal boxes set up on tank treads. Some of them crawl slowly forward; some sit in place. All of them have complicated locks and glinting black cameras perched on top. One has a bright biohazard warning splashed across the front; I make a wide path around it.
Suddenly there’s a hydraulic snap and one of the vaults heaves to life. It jerks forward, orange lamps flashing. I jump out of the way, and it trundles through the spot where I just stood. The shelves all move and make room as the vault begins its journey, slowly, toward the wide doors.
It occurs to me that if I’m flattened here, no one will find me for a while.
There’s a flicker of motion. The part of my brain that is devoted to the detection of other human beings (and especially muggers, murderers, and enemy ninjas) lights up like one of the orange lamps. There’s a person coming through the darkness. Hamster-mode: engage. Somebody’s running right at me, coming fast, and he looks like Corvina. I whirl to face him, put my hands up in front of me, and yelclass="underline" “Ah!”