“Oh,” he said dryly, “and what was it then, hmm?”
Without meaning to, I found my gaze drifting upward. “It was, uh, the demon internet software that I’m afraid I and my friend, um, accidentally invoked.”
Gantry lit his pipe and sent out a cloud of smoke.
“Yes, I had gathered that. And what on earth possessed you—so to speak—to poke around in the dark storage when I’d just given you more than enough material for years of study?”
I met his gaze again. “It was my idea,” I said. “Call it—excess of zeal. I got the idea before you gave me the papers, of course, but even after that I thought we might as well go through with it I’m afraid I was—rather blinded by the lust for knowledge.”
“And by another kind of lust, I shouldn’t wonder.”
Gantry said. “This
There seemed no point in denying it, so I didn’t.
“All right,” he said. He jabbed his pipe-stem at me, thumbed the stubble on his chin, and gnawed at his lower lip for a moment. “All right. First of all, let me say that the University administration has a job to do which is different from the self-administration of the academic community. It has to maintain the physical fabric of the place, and its supplies and services and so forth, and with the best will in the world I can’t interfere with any measures of investigation
“Yes, of course.”
Tine. Well… as to any academic repercussions, there I can speak up for you, I can… refrain from volunteering information about how the demonic outbreak took place. But I can’t lie on your behalf, old chap. I’ll do my best for you, because I think it would be a shame to throw away someone with so much promise over what, as you say, was excess of scholarly zeal. Very understandable temptation, and all that. Some of the Senatus might well think to themselves, ‘Been there, done that—young once myself—fingers burnt—learned his lesson—say no more about it,’ and all that sort of thing.”
I relaxed a little on the hard chair. I’d been fiddling with a cigarette for a while, unsure if I had permission to smoke; Gantry leaned over with his lighter, absently almost taking my eyebrows off with its kerosene flare.
“Thank you.”
“However,” he went on, leaning back in his own chair, “there are some wider issues.” He waved his pipe about, vaguely indicating the surrounding shelves of hard-won knowledge. “We British are beginning to get the hang of this civilisation game. When the Romans left, there wasn’t a public library or a flush toilet or a decent road or a postman to be seen for a thousand years. When the American empire fell, I think we can honestly say we did a damn sight better, and indeed better than most. We lost the electronic libraries, of course, and a great deal of knowledge, but the infrastructure of civilisation pulled through the troubled times reasonably intact. In some respects, even improved. A great deal of that we owe to the very fact that the electronic records were lost—and along with them the chains of usury and rent, and the other… dark powers which held the world in what they even then had the gall to call ‘The Net.’ ”
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
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
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 level: 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
