The spirit manifesting itself in the access screen turned its nearsighted gaze on me. “How may I serve you, child of Adam given four hours of unlimited access to the files of the Thomas Brothers?”
I told it the same thing I’d told Brother Vahan: “I want to go through births, birth defects, healings, and exorcisms within a five-mile radius of the Devonshire dump, first for the year ending exactly ten years ago and then for the year ending today.” Humans can handle approximate data; with spirits you have to spell out every word and make sure you’ve crossed your t’s and dotted your i’s (and even your j’s).
“I shall gather the data you require. Please wait,” the spirit said. The screen went blank.
In the beginning was the Word, and Word was with God, and the Word was God. Yes, I know that’s Brother Vahan’s theology, not mine. It’s a lot older than Christianity, for that matter. In Old Kingdom Egypt, the god Ptah was seen as both the tongue of the primeval god Atum and as the instrument through which Atum created the material world. Of course thought is the instrument through which we perceive and influence the Other Side; without it, we’d be as blind to magic as any dumb animals.
But John 1:1 and its variants in other creeds are also the basis of modern information theory. Because words partake of the divine, they manifest themselves in the spiritual world as well as in our own. Properly directed—ensorceled, if you will—spirits can gather, read, manipulate, and move the essence of words without ever having to handle the physical documents on which they appear. If the Greek and Roman mages had known that trick, their world could have been drowning in information, just as we are now.
I didn’t have to wait long; as I’d expected, Brother Vahan used only the best and most thoroughly trained spirits. Ghostly images of documents began flashing onto the access screen, one after another—records from ten years ago. “Hold on!” I said after a few seconds.
The spirit appeared. “I obey your instructions, child of Adam,” it said, as if daring me to deny it.
“I know, I know,” I told it; the last thing I wanted was to get the heart of the access system mad at me. “I don’t need to look at every individual report, though. Let me have the numbers in each category for the two periods. When I know what those are, I’ll examine specific documents. That way, I’ll be able to see forest and trees both.”
The spirit looked out at me over the tops of its spectral spectacles. “You should have no difficulty in maintaining your mental view of both categories,” it said reprovingly. That’s easy for someone on the Other Side to say, but I have the usual limits of flesh and blood. I just stared back at the spirit. If it kept acting uppity, I’d sic Brother Vahan on it. After a last sniff, it said, “It shall be as you desire.”
One by one, the numbers came up on the screen. The Thomas Brothers certainly did have a well-drilled scriptorium spirit; the creature wrote so its figures ran the right way for me to read them. It hardly needed to have bothered. I’m so used to mirror-image writing that I read it as well as the other kind. Maybe learning Hebrew helped get my eyes used to moving from right to left.
When the final figure faded from view, I looked down at the notes I’d jotted. Births were up in the most recent year as opposed to ten years ago; St. Ferdinand’s Valley keeps filling up. Blocks of flats have replaced a lot of what used to be single-family homes. We aren’t as crowded as New Jorvik, and I don’t think we ever will be, but Angels City is losing the small-town atmosphere it kept for a while even after it became a big city.
The rate of healings hadn’t changed significantly over the past ten years. “Spirit,” I said, and waited until it appeared in the access screen. Then I played a hunch: “Please break out for me by type the healings for both periods I’m interested in.”
“One moment,” it said.
When they came up, the data weren’t dramatic. I hadn’t expected them to be, not when the overall frequency had stayed pretty much constant. But the increased incidence of elf-shot within the pool of healings was suggestive. Elves tend to be drawn to areas with high concentrations of sorcery. If the Devonshire dump were as clean as it was supposed to be, there shouldn’t have been that many elves running around loose shooting their little arrows into people. Elf-arrows aren’t like the ones Cupid looses, after all.
Exorcisms were up, too. I asked the access spirit for sample reports for each period. I wasn’t after statistical elegance, not yet, just a feel for what was going on. I got the impression that the spirits who’d needed banishing this past year were a nastier bunch, and did more damage before they were expelled, than had been true in the earlier sample.
But the numbers that really leaped off the page at me were the birth defects. Between ten years ago and this past year, they’d almost tripled. I whistled softly under my breath, then called for the scriptorium spirit again. When it reappeared, I said, “May I please have a listing of birth defects by type for each of my two periods?”
“One moment,” the spirit said again. The screen went blank. Then the spirit started writing on it. The first set of data it gave me was for the earlier period. Things there looked pretty normal. A few cases of second sight, a changeling whose condition was diagnosed earlier enough to give her remediation and a good chance at living a nearly normal life: nothing at all out of the ordinary.
When the birth defect information for the year just past came up on the ground glass, I almost fell off my chair. In that year alone, the area around the Devonshire dump had seen three vampires, two lycanthropes, and three cases of apsychia: human babies born without any soul at all. That’s a truly dreadful defect, one neither priests nor physicians can do a thing about. The poor kids grow up, grow old, die, and they’re gone. Forever. Makes me shudder just to think about it.
Three cases of apsychia in one year in a circle with a five-mile radius… I shuddered again. Apsychia just doesn’t happen except when something unhallowed is leaking into the environment. You might not see three cases of apsychia in a year even in a place like eastern Frankia, where the toxic spells both sides flung around in the First Sorcerous War still poison the ground after three quarters of a century.
I finished writing up my notes, then told the spirit, “Thank you. You’ve been most helpful. May I ask one more favor of you?”
“That depends on what it is.”
“Of course,” I said quickly. “Just this: if anyone but brother Vahan tries to learn what I’ve been doing here, don’t tell, him, her, or it.” Scriptorium spirits, by their nature, have very literal minds; I wanted to make sure I covered both genders and both Sides.
The spirit considered, then nodded. “I would honor such a request from a monk of the Thomas Brothers, and am instructed to treat you as one for the duration Brother Vahan specified. Let it be as you say, then.”
I didn’t know how well the spirit would stand up under serious interrogation, but I wasn’t too worried about that. Shows how much I knew, doesn’t it? I guess I’m naive, but I thought the automatic anathema that falls on anyone who tampers with Church property would be plenty to keep snoops at arm’s length. I’m no Christian, but I wouldn’t have wanted an organization with a two-thousand-year track record of potent access to the Other Side down on me.
Of course, the veneration of Mammon goes back a lot farther than two thousand years.
I stopped by Brother Vahan’s office on the way out so I could thank him for his help, too. He looked up from whatever he was working on—none of my business—and said two words: “That bad?”
He couldn’t possibly have picked that up by magic. Along with the standard government-issue charms, I wear a set of my own made for me by a rabbi who’s an expert in kabbalistics and other means of navigating on the Other Side. So I knew I was shielded. But abbots operate in this world, too. Even if he couldn’t read my mind, he must have read my face.