Mo backs away from the machines. Her face is a white mask under the overhead strip lighting. "Why are you showing me this?"
"The patterns are in the next room." I follow her out into the corridor and take her by the elbow, gently steering toward the third chamber-where the real Archive begins. It's a plain-looking room, full of the sort of file drawers you find in architects' offices-very shallow, very wide, designed to hold huge, flat blueprints. I pull the top drawer of the nearest cabinet out and show her. "Look. Seen anything like this before?" It's very fine parchment inscribed with what looks like a collision between a mandala, a pentagram, and a circuit diagram, drawn in bluish ink. At the front and left, a neat box-out in engineering script details the content of the blueprint. If I didn't know what it was meant to be, or what the parchment was made of, I'd think it was quite pretty. I take care not to touch the thing.
"It's-yes." She traces one of the curves with a fingertip, carefully holding it an inch above the inscription. "No, it wasn't this one. But it's similar."
"There are several thousand more like this in here," I say, studying her expression. "I'd like to see if we can identify the one you saw on the wall?" She nods, uneasily. "We don't have to do it right now," I admit. "If you would rather we took a breather there's a cafè upstairs where we can have a cup of coffee and relax a bit first-"
"No." She pauses for a moment. "Let's get it over and done with." She glances over her shoulder and shudders slightly. "I don't want to stay down here any longer than I have to."
ABOUT TWO HOURS LATER, WHILE MO IS HALFWAY through the contents of drawer number fifty-two, my pager goes off. I scrabble at the waistband of my jeans in a momentary panic then pull the thing out. One of the news-greppers I left running on the network servers back home has paged me: in its constant trawl through the wire feeds it's come across something interesting. KILLING IN ROTTERDAM, it says, followed by a reference number.
"Got to go upstairs," I say, "think you'll be okay here for twenty minutes?"
Mo looks at me with eyes like bruises. "I'll take you up on that coffee break if you don't mind."
"Not at all. Not having much luck?"
"Nothing so far." She yawns, catches herself, and shakes her head. "My attention span is going. Oh God, coffee. I never realised it was possible to be horrified and bored out of your skin at the same time."
I refrain from calling her on the unintentional pun; instead I make a note of where she's got up to-at this rate we could be here for another week, unless we get lucky-and slide the drawer shut. "Okay. Time out."
The coffee shop is upstairs, attached to the museum shop; it's all whitewash and neat little tables and there's a stand with patisseries on it next to the counter. All very gezelig. A row of cheap PCs along one wall offer Internet access for the compulsives who can't kick their habit for a day of high culture. I home in on one and begin the tedious process of logging into one of the Laundry's servers by way of three firewalls, two passwords, an encrypted tunnel, and an S/Key challenge. At the end of the day I'm onto a machine that isn't exactly trusted-the Laundry will not allow classified servers to be connected on the net, by any arrangement of wires or wishful thinking-but that happens to run my news trawler. Which, after all, is fishing in the shallow waters of Reuters and UPI, rather than the oceanic chasm of state secrets.
So what made my pager go off? While Mo is drinking a mug full of mocha and contemplating the museum's catalogue of forthcoming attractions, I find myself reading an interesting article from the AP wire service. DOUBLE KILLING IN ROTTERDAM (AP): Two bodies discovered near a burned-out shipping container in the port appear to be victims of a brutal gangland-style slaying. Blood daubed on the container, victims-ah, a correlation with a restricted information source, something sucked out of the Police National Computer and not available in the usual wire service bulletin. One victim is a known neo-Nazi, the other an Iraqi national, both shot with the same gun. Is that all? I wonder, and go clickety-click, sending out a brief email asking where was the shipping container sent from and where was it bound for because you never know…
I shake my head. The article dinged my search filter's "phone home" bell by accumulating little keyword matches until it passed a threshold, not because it's obviously important. But something nags at the back of my mind: there's seawater nearby, graffiti in blood on the wall, an Iraqi connection. Why Rotterdam? Well, it's one of the main container-port gateways into Europe, that's for starters. For seconds, it's less than fifty kilometres away.
There's no other real news. I log out and leave the terminal; time to drink a coffee and get back to work.
I look up from the report I'm reading. "Are you sure?"
"Certain." I stand up and walk over. She's leaning over an open drawer and her arms are tense as wires. I think she'd be shaking if she wasn't holding herself still and stiff. I look over her shoulder. The drawing is a geometry curve all right. Actually, I've seen ones like this before. The aborted summoning Dr. Vohlman demonstrated in front of the class that day-was it only a few weeks ago?-looked quite similar. But that one was designed to open a constrained information channel to one of the infernal realms. I can't quite see where this one is directed, at least not without taking it home and studying it with the aid of a protractor and a calculator, but a quick glance tells me it's more than a simple speakerphone to hell.
Here we see a differential that declares a function of tau, the rate of change of time with distance along one of the Planck dimensions. There we see an admonition that this circuit is not to be completed without a cage around it. (A good thing the notation we use, and that of the Ahnenerbe, is derived from the same source, or I wouldn't be able to figure it out.) This formula looks surprisingly modern, it's some sort of curve through the complex number plane-each point along it is a different Julia set. And that is where the human sacrifice is wired into the diagram by its eyeballs while still alive, for maximum bandwidth-
I blank for a second, flashing on the evil elegance of the design. "Are you sure this is it?" I mumble.
"Of course I'm sure!" Mo snaps at me. "Do you think I'd-" She stops. Takes a deep breath. Mutters something quietly to herself, then: "What is it?"
"I'm not 100 percent certain," I say, carefully placing the notepad I was reading from down on my chair and moving to one side so I can inspect the diagram from a different angle, "but it looks like a resonator map. A circuit designed to tune in on another universe. This one is similar to our own, in fact it's astonishingly close by; the energy barrier you have to tunnel through to reach it is high enough that nothing less than a human sacrifice will do."