He stood up and ambled along to a corner and leaned his elbow on a shelf. “What we have instead of the net is the tinkers.” He waved his hands again. “And telephony and telegraphy and libraries and so forth, of course, but that’s beside the point. The tinkers look after our computation, which even with the path of light most of us are… unwilling to do, because of what happened in the past, but are grateful there’s somebody to do it. This makes them… not quite a pariah people, but definitely a slightly stigmatised occupation. And that very stigma, you see, paradoxically ensures—or gives some assurance of—the purity of their product. It keeps the two paths, the light and the dark, separate. You see what I’m driving at?”
“No,” I said. “I’m afraid I don’t.”
“Oh.” He looked a little disappointed at my slowness on the uptake. “Well, not to put too fine a point on it, it’s one thing for scholars to risk their own bodies or souls with the dark storage. Not done, so to speak, but between you and me and the gatepost, it is done. It’s quite another for a tinker to do it. Could contaminate the seer-stones, y’see. Bad business.”
He stalked over and stared at me. The upshot, my friend, is that you had better get your tinker girlfriend back here with whatever she took, and get those file-folders you borrowed back here with it, if you want to have this episode overlooked. Clear?”
Yes, but—”
“No ‘buts’, Clovis. You don’t have much time. Get out and get back before anyone else notices, that’s the ticket.”
“I’ll do what I can,” I said, truthfully enough, and left.
As I hurried back to the lodging I kept trying to think what the hell we could do. I’d been hoping to hang on to the paper files for at least a week, which should give me enough time to see if there was anything of urgent significance in them. There was no way, however, that Menial could “return” whatever computer files she had managed to retrieve. She could pretend to delete them from her seer-stone’s memory, but I doubted if that would fool Gantry. He would want the stone itself, and she was most unlikely to give it to him.
The landlady let me in, because I’d left the outside door key with Menial. I gave her a forced smile and ran up the stairs, and knocked on the door of the room where I’d left Menial drowsing. No reply came, so I quietly opened the door.
Menial wasn’t there. Nor was anything that belonged to her. Nor were the two file-folders. I looked around, bewildered for a moment, and then remembered what Menial had said about photocopying the documents. I felt weak with relief. I gathered up my own gear, checked again that there was nothing of ours left in the room, and went downstairs.
“ Aye,” said the landlady, “the lassie went out a wee while after you did. She left the key with me.”
“Did she ask about photocopying shops around here?”
“No. But there’s only one, just around the corner. You cannae miss it.”
“Aw, thanks!”
I rushed out again and along the street and around the corner. The shop was there, sure enough, but Merrial wasn’t. Nobody answering to her—fairly unmistakable—description had called.
I wandered down Great Western Road in a sort of daze, and stopped at the parapet of the bridge over the Kelvin. The other bridge, which we’d crossed on the tram, was a few hundred metres upstream; the ruins of an Underground station, boarded-off and covered with grim warnings, was on the far bank. The riverside fish restaurant, where we’d eaten last night, sent forth smells of deep-fried batter. The river swirled along, the ash of my anxious cigarette not disturbing the smallest of its ripples.
She could not have just gone off with the goods; I was loyal enough to her to be confident in her loyalty to me, and did not even consider—except momentarily, hypothetically—that she’d simply used me to get at the information she sought. The most drastic remaining possibility was that she had somehow been got at herself, and had left under some urgent summons, or duress. But the landlady would surely have noticed any such thing, so it couldn’t have happened in the lodging.
Between there and the copy-shop, then. I formed a wild scheme of pacing the pavement, searching for a clue; of questioning passers-by. It seemed melodramatic.
More likely by far, I told myself, was that she’d simply gone somewhere for some reason of her own. She had her own return ticket She’d expect me to have the sense to meet her at the station. I could picture us laughing over the misunderstanding, even if some frantic calls would have to be made to Gantry.
Or even, she could have gone to another copy-shop!
A militiaman strolled past, his glance registering me casually. I stayed where I was until he was out of sight, well aware that heading off at once would only look odd; and also aware that staring with a worried expression over a parapet at a twenty-metre drop into a river might make the least suspicious militiaman interested.
By then, naturally, I was wondering if she’d been arrested, for unauthorised access to the University, necromancy, or just on general principles; but then again, if she had been, it was not my worry on anything but a personal leveclass="underline" as a tinker, she’d have access to a good lawyer, just as much as I would, as a scholar.
So the end of my agitated thinking, and a look at my watch, which showed that the time was a quarter past ten, was to decide to go to the station and wait for her.
The train was due to leave at eleven-twenty. At five past eleven I put down my empty coffee-cup, stubbed out my cigarette and strode over to the public telegraph. There I tapped out a message: GANTRY UNIV HIST INST REGRET DELAY IN FILE RETURN STOP WILL CALL FROM CARRON STOP RESPECTS CLOVIS.
I was on the point of hitting the transmit key when I smelled die scent and sweat of Menial behind me. Then she leaned past my cheek and said, in a warm, amused voice, “Very loyal of you, to him and to me.”
I turned and grabbed her in my arms. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Just fire off that message,” she said. “I’ll tell you on the train.” She was grinning at me, and I felt all worries fade as I hugged her properly, then stepped back to hold her shoulder at arm’s length as though to make doubly sure she was there. Her poke looked even larger and heavier than before.
“You’ve got the paper files?”
Yes,” she said, hefting the bag. “Come on.”
I transmitted the message, and we dashed hand in hand down the platform. The train wasn’t heavily used, and we found a compartment—half a carriage—to ourselves and swung down on to the seats and faced each other across the table, laughing.
“Well,” I said. “Tell me about it. You had me a wee bit worried, I have to admit.”
She curled her fingers across the back of my hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I thought it seemed like a good idea to disappear. That way, if Gantry or anyone else leaned on you to give the files or the, you know, other files back, you could honesdy say you couldn’t, you really wouldn’t know where I was and would look genuinely flummoxed, say if they went so far as to come back to our room with you.”
“Oh, right. I was genuinely flummoxed, I’ll give you that. But if anyone was with me they could have made the same guess as I did, and come to the station.”