Fassin looked at her. “He’d probably have got round to one of those after he’d done what he considered the proper cataloguing — getting everything down in some non-volatile form that can be read without intervening machinery.”
“Our Dweller friends do seem to be remarkably purist about such things.”
“When you live as long as they do, future-proofing becomes an obsession.”
“Perhaps that is their curse. The Quick must endure the frustration of living in a universe with what seems like an annoyingly slow speed limit and the Slow must suffer the frenetic pace of change around them, resulting in a sort of exaggerated entropy.”
Fassin had been floating slowly closer to Hatherence. He tipped to make it clear that he was looking at her as he came to a stop a couple of metres from her. The glowing biostrips on the shelves painted soft lime stripes across the little gascraft. “You all right in there, colonel?” he asked. “I realise it’s very hot and pressured down here.” — Colonel, do you think we are wasting our time here?
“I am fine. Yourself?” — Very hard to say. There is so much still here, so much to be looked at.
“Also fine. Feeling very rested.” — That’s my point. We could be made to waste a lot of time here, looking for something that has already been removed.
“I understand slow-time will have that effect.” — That is a thought. I had the odd impression, from dust marks and so on, understand, that many of the shelves have recently been filled, or refilled. And many of the works seem to make no sense given what I’ve understood of Valseir’s subjects of study. Seemed most strange. Though, if all this is a sort of slow-trap for you and me, then that begins to make sense. But what else can we do? Where else is there to go?
“I’ll have to talk to the Sage again,” Fassin said. “There are many things I’d like to ask him.” — Whereas in fact I’ll do everything I can to avoid talking to the old bore again. We have to get word out to any legitimate scholars who did take works from here, see if any of them have the catalogues, or anything else. There are two dozen separate libraries here; even if they’re only half-full we could be searching them for decades.
“He is a most interesting and wise character.” — Many tens of millions of works, and if most are unsorted, all are. I’ll signal to the Poaflias, have them put out word to the relevant scholars. Who might be trying to put obstacles in our way so?
“Indeed he is.” — I don’t know.
“Well, I think I shall continue to search the shelves for a while. Will you join me?” — Will you?
“Why not?”
They drifted to different but nearby stacks, snicked holocrystal books out of their motion-proof shelves, and read.
“His study?” Nuern asked. A fringe flick indicated a glance at Livilido. They were afloat at table. The two Primes had invited Fassin and Hatherence to a semi-formal dinner in the house’s ovaloid dining room, a great, dim, echoing space strung vertically with enormous sets of carbon ropes, all splayed, separated into smaller and smaller cords and fibres and threads and filaments and then each thin strand minutely and multiply knotted. It was like being inside some colossal, frayed net.
Jundriance was still deep in slow-time and would not be joining them. Special food had been prepared that was suitable for the colonel. She ingested it via a sort of gaslock on the side of her esuit. Fassin, contained and sustained within the arrow-craft, was really only here to watch.
“Yes,” he said. “Where do you think it might be?”
“I thought that Library One was his study,” Nuern said, selecting a helping of something glowing dull blue from the central carousel, and then spinning the serving dish slowly towards his dining companions.
“Me too,” Livilido said. He looked at Fassin. “Why, was there another one? Has a bit dropped off the place?”
Fassin had taken a look round all the library spheres. Library One had always been Valseir’s formal study, where he received fellow scholars and other people, but it hadn’t been his real study, his den, his private space. Very few people were allowed in there. Fassin had felt flattered in the extreme to be invited to enter the nestlike nook that Valseir had made for himself inside the stretch of disused CloudTunnel tube which the rest of the house had been anchored to the last time Fassin had been here, centuries earlier. Library One still looked as it always had, minus a few thousand book-crystals and a big cylindrical low-temperature storage device in which Valseir had kept paper and plastic books. It certainly didn’t look as though the room had become Valseir’s proper study in the interim. And now it appeared as though these people didn’t even know he’d had a more private den in the first place.
“I thought he had another study,” Fassin said. “Didn’t he keep a house in… what city was it? Guldrenk?”
“Ah! Of course,” Nuern said. “That would be it.”
· Colonel, these guys know nothing.
· I had been coming to the same conclusion.
Library Twenty-One (Cincturia\Clouders\Miscellania) had a conceit, a Dweller equivalent of a door made from a bookcase. Valseir had shown it to Fassin after the human had stayed with him for an extended period after their first meeting. It led, inward at first, towards the centre of the cluster of library spheres, through a short passage to a gap between two more of the outer spheres, then into the open gas. The joke — a hidden door, a secret passage — was that the various Cincturia were the outsiders of the galactic community, and the particular bookcase hiding the secret passage was categorised “Escapees’.
After their meal, Fassin gave the impression of shutting himself away in the library for some late-night shelf-scanning. Instead he screened up the house’s system statements and looked back to just after the time of Valseir’s yachting accident and alleged death. He did something unusual, something barely legal by Mercatorial standards and usually pointless on Nasqueron; he speeded up, letting the gascraft’s legal-max computers and his own subtly altered nervous system rev to their combined data-processing limit. It still took nearly half an hour, but he found what he was looking for: the point, a dozen days after Valseir’s accident, when the house recorded a rerouting of power and ventilation plumbing. Its altimeter had registered a wobble, too — a brief blip upwards, then the start of the long, slow descent that was continuing even now.
Then Fassin had to work out where the CloudTunnel segment might be now. It would be beyond the start of the shear zone, past where the whole atmospheric band moved as a single vast mass, down into the semi-liquid Depths. These moved much more slowly than the gas above, the transition levels great turbidly elastic seas being dragged along as though reluctantly after the jet-stream whirl of atmosphere above.
It was all dead reckoning. By the Dweller way of judging such things, the atmosphere was static and the Depths — not to mention the remainder of Ulubis system, the stars and indeed the rest of the universe — moved. With only notionally fixed reference points, finding anything in the Depths was notoriously difficult. After two hundred years the section of CloudTunnel could be anywhere; it might have sunk beyond feasible reach, been broken up or even drifted to the Zone edge and been pulled into another Belt entirely, either north or south. The only thing working in Fassin’s favour was that the length of tube he was looking for was relatively large. Completely losing something forty-plus metres in diameter and eighty klicks long wasn’t that easy, even in Nasqueron. Still, he was relying on the CloudTunnel retaining the usual profile of buoyancy-decay.