Vigiant (20 page)

Standing back by the elevator door, Tic quietly gazed at the cityscape. He had good stillness—no slouching, no, fidgets, no sighs. Presence in the present.

I had plenty of time to watch him. (More devil-be-damned waiting.) Oolom elevators climb slug-slowly... only as fast as you can glide up a lazy air thermal. Their elevators go down a lot faster, matching the typical airspeed of an Oolom in landing descent.

This particular elevator had no lights of its own—just the glow of the stars and the dried-pea moon. From below came the subdued spill of streetlamps. There was also the glittery flicker of crocus-flies, already out of hibernation and flashing their tiny mating beacons: hoping to do the dance and get eggs laid before predators woke for spring... just as I hoped this clump-hole of an elevator would reach our stop before the blessed cream-blossoms opened next month...

In the twinkling quiet, Tic asked, "What did the Peacock Tail feel like?"

He hadn't moved from that perfect stillness. Just a soft-voiced question in the dark.

"I never touched whatever it was," I told him. "It didn't come that close to me."

"Not physically," Tic said. "What did it feel like emotionally?"

I shook my head, not knowing what he wanted to hear. "My emotions were running on a different track at the time: scared out of my skin that I'd get my face burned off."

"Even so," Tic said, "the Peacock was something new and surprising. The instant you saw it, didn't you have a reaction? 'Dear-dear, more trouble'... or maybe, 'Hurrah, I'm saved.' "

"Does it make a difference?" I asked.

"One never knows. What does the elevator feel like to you?"

"Like an elevator!"

"Just a mindless machine?"

I gave him a sour look. "Don't tell me the elevator is smart like the windows."

Tic smiled. "You still remember the windows?"

"Sure."

"Then Xé likes you. Even if you insist on playing obtuse. What does the elevator feel like?"

"It's tired," I answered, saying the first thing that came into my mind. "Feeling cruel overworked. In the old days, it had nearly nothing to do—the Ooloms didn't use it much. But now that we've got three human proctors..."

Four.

"Sorry, four counting me, so now that we've got four human proctors..."

I stopped. Tic's mouth hadn't moved; so who said
Four?

The world-soul?

The elevator?

"Yipe," I said. "Yipe, yipe, yipe."

"It's a stimulating world once you hear the machines." Tic had a smug dollop of I-told-you-so in his voice. "If you insist on challenging the metaphors, an elevator can't really feel tired, of course. It's just due for maintenance... since it
does
have to work harder carrying you lead-weight humans several trips a day rather than delicately light Ooloms a few times a year. But when the elevator reports it's wearing out, the world-soul represents that as being tired... at least in the minds of those who are properly attuned."

I groaned. "I'm picking up sob stories from an elevator."

"No. The world-soul is projecting information in a form you can easily grasp. Would you prefer a deluge of cold performance statistics? We're both animals, Smallwood: social animals with abundant brain space evolved for analyzing emotions, and a scanty pittance for analyzing numbers. The world-soul likes to present data in a form our brains are best equipped to understand—that the elevator is deplorably fatigued from lugging around you human lardasses."

Who're you calling a lardass, bone-boy?
I came close to growling that. But for all I knew, Tic might ask the elevator what
it
thought... and I did not want to have this blasted machine tell me,
Just between us, Faye, you
could
stand to lose a few kilos...

Time to change the subject. I said, "Why'd you ask how the Peacock Tail felt? Do you think it's tied up with the world-soul too?"

"No. Mere curiosity." Tic looked out over the city. "These days, I pick up emotions everywhere. Not just from machines, but from truly inanimate things. Rocks. Trees. Running water. I can actually feel..." He stopped, shook his head.
"Tico.
I anthropomorphize everything. Except people, of course. Even my poor beleaguered brain can't anthropomorphize them."

He lapsed into silence. One of his hands gently stroked the elevator wall.

When the doors opened on the sixth floor (finally!), I stepped into the narrow area that circled the elevator shaft—a wretched excuse for a foyer providing access to the four offices at this level. The entrance to Chappalar's old office was already gliding open. Tic must have called ahead with his link-seed.

"I've left things as they were," Tic muttered as we went inside. "Tradition—you know."

That was grin-worthy. Ooloms
never
redecorated when they took over someone else's property, especially if the previous owner had died. It might have been a religious thing, but I doubt it—whenever the subject came up with humans around, Ooloms got a sheep-guilty look. Not like true believers with devout moral objections to change; more like people who were just too lazy to renovate.

Whatever the excuse, they didn't take things down, they didn't move things around, they didn't modernize, repaint, or refurbish. Furniture stayed where it was till it literally fell apart... and even then, the inhabitants might step over the broken pieces for years unless circumstances forced them to buy a replacement. (By "circumstances" I mean when they ran out of places to sit.) I've visited Oolom homes with dozens of painted portraits on the wall, all unknown strangers—pictures left by former owners, generations old and never removed.

So it didn't surprise me Chappalar's office hadn't changed. The desk slanted at the same angle toward the door. The racks of file packets still tilted ten degrees off level. The water-filled crystal wind chimes dangled in their usual halfhearted glumness above the window. ("Oh... should we tinkle now? Is it really necessary? Bother...")

The room contained everything that had always been here... except Chappalar himself. Enough to give you the weeps, if you let yourself dwell on it.

"So what should we do?" I said, too bright-voiced and twice as brisk. "Where do we start?"

Tic stared at me hard for a moment, then answered, "I've already scanned Chappalar's on-line files for references to Maya." My mouth was open before I could stop myself, nigh-on asking how he'd scanned the files when I only mentioned Maya's name a few minutes ago; but with a single flick of his link-seed, Tic could have set the world-soul to searching while we rode up the elevator. "So," he continued, "all we have left is checking the off-line packets."

Which was pure donkeywork—not the sort of thing I could dump on a master proctor while Dainty Miss Probationary sat back and watched. I had to do my share... meaning I had to choose between the terror of reading the packets by link-seed, or the cowardice of loading the files into a mechanical reader.

No. If I nellied out and used the reader, Tic would ask, "Stick or bag?"

"I'll take half the files," I told him. "You take the rest."

He nodded, his face bland. It cranked me off that he didn't say, "Thank you," or "Bully for you, getting past the fear." Then again, I would have got just as cranked off if he'd said any such patronizing thing.

Not one for consistency, our Faye.

Tic and I divided the files into two equal stacks, then carried them to Chappalar's desk. The desktop had five loading slots spaced across its surface; I waited for Tic to choose one, then took the one farthest from his. Childish; especially since Tic didn't notice. His face already had a distant emptiness as he fed in the first packet.

Fumbling to catch up, I popped the top packet from my stack into the input slot. The reader whished softly as it removed the file's outer jacket and slipped out the strand of bubble chips inside; through the glass viewport, I could see the bubbles meshing into place around the access drum, like a necklace of thumb-sized diamonds laid onto black velvet. Hydraulics pumped up activation enzymes, and the diamonds grew soft and gloopy, mushy as frog eggs—liquid information, melding into the reader's data flow, coming on-line.

Anytime now,
I told myself. Nothing stopping me from accessing what the file contained.

Deep breath.

World-soul, attend. Search file for occurrences of the name "Maya" or close homologues.

I didn't have to specify which file, which input port—all those things would be tagged onto the transmission by my subconscious. For that matter, I didn't have to sub-vocalize an explicit command... any more than I had to say, "Arm, lift up," when I reached for a beer. The unspoken impulse was enough; my link-seed understood what I wanted the moment I wanted it, and had dashed off a request to the datasphere long before I spoke the words in my mind.

A second passed. Then I found myself pushing the eject button, watching the bubble chips harden back to diamonds and the packet closing around them. There'd been no sensation of the world-soul "speaking" to me, telling me the file didn't mention Maya; I just knew the file contained nothing relevant, as surely as I knew the colors of my spouses' eyes.

Knowing without the experience of learning. Spooky.

Three more packets. Loading them, rejecting them, with no intelligible moment of transition between wondering whether a file referred to Maya and the certainty that it didn't. Out of morbid curiosity, I tried to doubt that I'd scanned the files at all. The doubt wouldn't come; my brain was dead certain it knew the files were clean, even though I had no idea what the chips actually contained.

Creepy. Goosepimply. Enough that when I reached the fifth packet I took a moment to read the outside label, just so I'd know what my brain was looking at.

The tag said archaeology liaison bureau. Chappalar once mentioned he scrutinized archaeological activities for the whole planet—easy work, because the "bureau" was actually a single man working out of a fiddly-dick office just down the street from us. Whenever the Heritage Board on New Earth authorized an exploration of Demoth's ruins, our archaeology liaison was supposed to handle local arrangements (transportation, accommodation, and so on).

Not that the Heritage Board had authorized a single dig during my lifetime. As I've said, the board wrote off our planet long ago. So the bureau man collected his pay and spent his time teaching oboe lessons to local teens; he played with a woodwind quintet and was supposedly quite good. (If it's not a contradiction to use "oboe" and "good" in the same sentence.)

Every year, Chappalar submitted a suggestion to the Speaker-General's office, recommending the liaison job be dissolved or folded in with some other department. Every year, the SGO replied that the Technocracy had rejected the idea. The Heritage Board bureaucrats demanded we have someone standing ready in case they ever favored Demoth with their assy-brassy attention... and the SGO decided each year not to fight the Technocracy over a single man's salary.

I loaded the archaeology file and watched it congeal into the reader. When it was spooled up for access, I psyched myself to deliver another request to the world-soul... and found the answer was already in my mind.

The file contained a letter signed "Maya Cuttack, Ph.D." What did the letter say? I knew that too, as if I'd memorized the message decades ago as junior-school rotework.

Dear Proctor Chappalar,

I trust it is not improper to ask for help from the Vigil—as an offworlder, I do not know what is considered appropriate on Demoth—but I am having trouble with one of your local officials, and I understand you act as a kind of ombudsman who can cut through red tape.

I am an archaeologist from Mirabile and am trying to launch an excavation in the interior of Great St. Caspian. The area contains abandoned mines dating back more than two thousand years before the Oolom colonization, and I should very much like to determine which race or races were active on Demoth at that time.

Unfortunately, my intended excavation site is owned by a company named Rustico Nickel... and while company officials are not opposed to my work, they say they cannot grant permission for me to dig unless I get an official archaeology permit.

(No surprise. Any digging on mine-owned land had to satisfy a slew of safety regulations—like requiring the company to install industrial-grade emergency equipment and establish a comprehensive risk-management program. If Rustico let Maya stick a single shovel in the soil, they'd have to pay for all those things to keep the Mines Commission happy. Very expensive. Rustico could only dodge the safety costs if Maya's dig was an officially recognized archaeology project; and that meant a license from the Heritage Board.)

Unfortunately, my request for an excavation permit has fallen on deaf ears in Demoth's Archaeology Liaison Bureau. The man there says he cannot issue licenses himself—that is a matter for the Technocracy's Heritage Board. But the Heritage Board will not issue a license until it receives something called a Statement of Non-Opposition from the Demoth government... which the Archaeology Liaison Officer says he cannot give without some ridiculous background check that I am expected to pay for out of my own pocket.

Help! Is there anything you can do to make an underfunded scientist's life easier?

Yours in hope

Maya Cuttack, Ph.D.

c/o The Henry Smallwood Guest Home

Sallysweet River

"Ouch," I said. "Have you ever had that feeling of someone walking on your grave?" The Henry Smallwood Guest Home was a manor lodge built on the old muddy site of the Circus—a place to house the worshipfully respectful Oolom tourists who flocked to pay tribute to Dads's memory. If you looked at it one way, I shouldn't be surprised an offplanet archaeologist had set up residence at the guest home; it was the closest thing to a hotel in the whole underpopulated interior of Great St. Caspian.