“And you’re going to stay in touch how?” Arelyn asked.
“You can always reach my ship, Whiro, on your handpad, as long as we aren’t in jump. Otherwise . . .” Fergus dug in his pocket and pulled out a tiny circular disk. “My friend Maison originally made these and thought it would be retro to call them ‘pagers.’ Anything particularly sensitive, use it. It’s slower because it bounces its packets around a lot to avoid being traceable, but it’s heavily encrypted and the most secure thing I’ve got. Our friend Ignatio and Whiro are connected as well.”
Arelyn took one and stood up. “Great. I’m going back to bed for a few more hours; I don’t know how you people ever manage to function this hellishly early, but I don’t think it speaks well of any of you. You got something to give me, Fergus?”
“What? Oh, right,” Fergus said, and handed her the fragment. “It’s—”
“Dangerous, precious, important, yeah, I got it,” she said. “Mari, you going to come pack?”
“Already done,” Mari said, and kicked her bag. “I didn’t want to wake you.”
Arelyn shrugged and left.
“She’s in a mood because she’s worried, and because she likes plans and details, and predictable sequences of actions and outcomes. Also, she isn’t lying when she says she never gets up this early,” Mari said. “To be honest, she’s just kind of always grumpy but usually in a more charming way. I’ve arranged a ride on a small freighter heading to Crossroads, leaving late tonight. Arelyn was going to drive me back to Ares Two, but it’s out of her way; her next delivery run is in the opposite direction and not until tomorrow. You got a buggy here and can give me a lift?”
“Sure,” Fergus said. “Arelyn won’t get mad at me?”
“Naw, she’ll be happy to not have to make the drive,” Mari said. “She’s already mad at me for not staying on Mars, but I can’t. Gotta get back to the family. You know how Aunt Mauda worries about everything.”
“I remember,” Fergus said. “I’ll see if I can’t figure out how to bring some snacks for the road. We can ask Goom and have a culinary mystery adventure.”
“Don’t ye go being an arse to Goom,” Isla warned.
“I wouldn’t!” Fergus protested.
Mari chuckled. “I like that you have a sister,” she said. “It keeps you on your toes and makes you slightly less of a thoughtless jerk.”
“Don’t count on it,” he grumbled.
* * *
—
They took a public shuttle up to the Ares Orbital Station, Fergus’s paranoia about being spotted lost in both the completely-packed car and his competing desire to not quite let go of Mari yet.
They mostly talked inconsequential gossip about happenings back in Cernee and the adjustments both to life within the Wheel Collective and to the aftermath of the near-coup that had ripped so much apart. Isla already knew some of what had happened there from him, but Mari told it more bluntly and from a new perspective, so she listened raptly and asked only a few, astute questions. By the time they’d docked at the orbital to let Mari off to catch her freighter, Fergus found himself missing the whole Vahn family, Harcourt and his crew, and even the Governor and Ms. Ili, neither of which he figured missed him in the slightest.
It was odd, layering that on top of also missing his Shipyard friends. For someone who had felt for most of his life as if the only place he missed was a place that never had or could exist, it was disconcerting to have so many strings suddenly tugging gently on him, and more so that none felt unwelcome.
Mari promised she’d pass on his warm regards to her many aunts and cousins, and then she too was gone, another friendship reeling out a thin strand of connection across the galaxy.
You have this web now, like it or not, wise or not, he reminded himself, as he undocked the shuttle. Isla just has you out here. Don’t forget that.
Ignatio greeted them just inside the airlock. “Vergus, your cat!” ey announced, and held out one of eir legs, where there was a thick patch of sodden, clumpy fur. “It put its tongue on me while I was asleeping!”
“That means he likes you,” Isla said.
Ignatio blinked all eir eyes. “I do not have to lick it back, though?”
“No, you don’t have to,” Fergus said. “If you try it, though, let me know how it goes. In the meanwhile, you don’t happen to know anything about a mysterious librarian cabal, do you?”
“You should ask Theo,” Ignatio said, to Fergus’s surprise. Theo was one of the founders of the Shipyard, an expert in robotics and fabrication technologies, but not someone Fergus tended to associate with anything as old-fashioned as libraries.
He said as much, and Ignatio bobbed eir head impatiently. “Libraries are many things, many forms, yes? It is curated information, and there is nothing that does not rely on information. Some of your time, you think too much in little boxes.”
“Whiro, what’s local consensus time back in the Shipyard?”
“Approximately 19:00,” Whiro answered.
“Okay. Could you please send a fast message back to Theo and tell him we got a weird bit of info with a catalog number, coordinates, and the line ‘Information is Never Lost,’ and see if he has any idea what it might be about?”
“Done,” Whiro said.
“Great!” Ignatio exclaimed, as they headed toward the bridge. “Now what are we doing?”
“Going back to Earth,” Fergus said.
“To find the next piece?” Ignatio asked.
“I have no idea. I guess we’ll find out when we get there,” Fergus said. He looked back to see Isla following, lost in thought. “You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Thinking about the signal thing again. I probably should have taken more hands-on engineering courses.”
“It is the ideas that are hard,” Ignatio said, “but we still have some time. A little time. Little, little, tiny time. But some, yes?”
“Oh, you’re a great help,” Isla said.
Ignatio grinned. “Vergus also says so, many times!”
* * *
—
Theo’s reply came back the next morning just as Whiro was sliding into their assigned parking berth in Earth orbit. He had changed his beard color from a dark blue to a brighter cobalt since last Fergus had seen him, and was standing in the Shipyard’s garden ring with his bonsai clippers in one hand and a large beer stein in the other. “The Alexandrians,” he said. “Named after an ancient Earth library that burned down. They’re a distributed, covert group whose mission is to see that no knowledge is ever lost to humanity again. Noura did some really high-level mindsystem work for them about fifteen years ago. That’s confidential, by the way. Anyhow, I don’t know much more specifically about their operation. I’m curious how you got their attention, but I figure you’ll tell us when you can. In the meanwhile, if you happen to have seen my nice carbon-steel bonsai shears last time you were here, I’ve been looking everywhere for them, and it’s like they just vanished into thin air, along with a half-dozen other odds and ends that have suddenly gone missing. It’s like an invisible thief—well, I’m rambling, just let me know if you have any other questions. Theo out.”
Fergus coughed. “Whiro?” he asked.
“Yes, Mr. Ferguson?” the ship replied.
“How goes the questing?”
“Satisfactorily,” Whiro said.
Fergus grinned as Isla gave him a funny look. “Mind if I borrow a shuttle?”
“No, of course not,” Whiro said.
“Excellent,” Fergus said. “Isla? You coming?”
“Aye,” she said, putting on a thick accent, “ah wouldna miss it.”
“I am also coming,” Ignatio said. “I have curiosities about these Librarians.”
Port Albuquerque in the Southwest Territories was the closest to their destination, but it had been bombe
d flat during one of the last cross-border raids of the Arizonan White Army of Christ sixty years previously, just before that group finally chewed itself to pieces on its own hate. The recently rebuilt replacement had been funded, and was still run, directly by the Alliance’s EarthPort Division.
His respectful paranoia of the Alliance having served him well so far, he gave silent thanks to the Shipmakers for their extensive set of clearances and took Whiro’s shuttle down through early-dawn yellow-blue skies to a city-owned shuttleport outside Santa Fe, to the north.
Like most municipal shuttleports, Santa Fe was largely automated, and Fergus rented a podcar from a port kiosk under his Angus Ainsley alias without the booth attendant ever breaking rhythm with his snoring.
Fergus loaded the podcar up with water and some minor gear. The windows were heavily tinted for UV and heat reflection, which meant Ignatio would be a dim silhouette from the outside, and not the instant curiosity ey had been in Scotland. And if anyone does look too closely, Fergus thought, they’ll just think I’ve got a mop propped up in the back.
As Isla got in the back with her handpad, Fergus climbed in next to Ignatio and pulled the door down, then glanced over at his friend.
“You are making odd eye-looks at me, Vergus,” Ignatio said.
Fergus shrugged. “Just wondering how you’d look in a trench coat and big Stetson hat,” he said, “and if anywhere sells cowboy boots in fives.”
“Yeehaw,” Ignatio said, and Fergus laughed in surprise. “Now we gettee up?”
“Now we gettee up,” Fergus confirmed, and set the car to head out of the shuttleport onto the main autoway south toward Albuquerque.
What he knew of the North American Southwest wasn’t much, but he wasn’t prepared for the idea that a place on Earth could look so much less like the parts of Earth he knew and so much more like Mars. Even the few scattered, low, squared-off houses they passed could have been an outlying Martian town, if not for their lack of air domes. The road itself wasn’t much less bumpy than Martian ones, either, though the autocar dampened the worst of it as it dutifully followed the beacon plates embedded periodically in the pavement. Portions of the road where it crossed flat areas between the occasional small rocky rise had protective screens to cut down on dust storms, though for the moment, they had an expansive view of an impossibly wide, blue sky.
Unlike Mars, there were occasional trees here. They dotted the hillsides like some errant giant with a pocketful of them had scattered them to the wind and let them roll away. For every dark green blob clinging miraculously to life, there were at least as many bare, silvery, skeletal remains of those that had succumbed to the centuries-long drought.
Isla had given up on her handpad and was watching out the window. “It’s more like Mars than Scotland, isn’t it?” she said.
“I was just thinking that,” Fergus said. “More history. And more gravity.”
“Ah, the gravity. It makes me tired,” Ignatio said. “Are we there yet?”
“Soon,” Fergus said. “Assuming there is a ‘there’ to get to. Otherwise, this has been one colossal waste of time.”
They passed a few other autocars going the other way, all neatly and perfectly spaced. Only when they reached the turnoff road and left the autoway did the podcar—after five separate warning screens—let him take control. It popped up a sixth screen and a loud screeching alarm when he tried to take the left side of the road. “Old habit,” he said, as he moved back to the right and tried not to be apprehensive about it. “Stupid arbitrary rules.”
The pines thickened and grew taller and more assertive, no longer the crouched-over dense balls from the open, rolling land. There were fewer and fewer dead, and sure enough, a few kilometers along, Fergus spotted one of the too-symmetrical bright yellow artificial trees that, he knew, was riddled with holes filled with an arsenal of chemical, biological, and electronic lures for the invasive insects that had obliterated vast swaths of forest across all but the most northern reaches of North America. He opened his mouth to point it out, since both Isla and Ignatio would find it technologically interesting, but then realized he was too embarrassed. Look at this clever tiny fix we made for the planet we nearly killed.
In any event, both were staring out the window at the passing scenery already. Ignatio was bouncing lightly up and down in eir seat in excitement. “I saw a fur thing!” ey shouted, eir head crashing into the podcar roof. “It bouncy-ran away!”
“A squirrel,” Isla said. “Good to know something lives here.”
The road was in ill repair, and Fergus was glad of the freedom to be able to steer around the worst of the potholes. Signs on the sides of the road appeared occasionally, warning them not to stray off the road except in designated areas, due to the possibility of remaining unexploded ordinance from the Arizonan war. Now and then, they passed a hiking trail marked as safe, with the names of the volunteers who had risked—or paid with—their lives to clear it.
“Are we there yet?” Ignatio asked again.
“How often do you go places with em?” Isla asked in irritation.
“Maybe not infrequently enough,” Fergus said. “We should be there in about fifteen more minutes, unless the road gets worse.”
The road, though, having reached some perfect equilibrium on the cusp between passable and unpassable, seemed content to stay there and let anyone who dared swerve and rattle their way up it. On their left, an ancient stone wall embedded with the glittering bottoms of old glass bottles emerged briefly from the roadside scrub, then faded away out of view again. Then they were past that and nearing the coordinates given in the mystery message, where the satellites had denied the existence of anything other than more trees.
There was a shop. It was built of the same squat, squarish adobe as most of the houses they had seen, logs stretching out overhead above the front door to provide some limited relief from the sun. Fergus pulled the podcar over into the dirt and gravel drive, in the shade of a large pine.
santo’s, the sign read. Under it, in smaller letters, was curiosities and inconveniences for commendable sums.
“Inconveniences sound just like my thing,” Fergus said. “You two want to wait in the car while I check it out?”
“Oh, no, I am not missing this,” Isla said, and got out of the podcar.
“I am uncertain,” Ignatio said. “I would like some curiouses, but not any inconveniences. Please proceed while I decide, and if there is also murdering or calamity or raisins, you will yell right away, yes?”
Fergus nodded, and got out of the podcar. He stretched, getting a good look at the place as he soaked in the heat and the harsh buzzing of insects in the dried grasses all around them, before he walked forward, Isla on his heels, and opened the door to the jangle of bells.
Inside, it looked as if someone had dumped the entire contents of an antique store, a junkyard, and someone’s basement inside, and given the owner ten minutes, tops, to put any sort of order to it.
“Wow,” Isla said. “Even Uncle Rory’s shed is neater than this place.”
Fergus threaded his way between things piled on rickety chairs and stacks of old books and dishes, porcelain doll heads and twenty-third-century baby hoversaucers, all while ducking to avoid the innumerable pots and pans and cutlery and wind chimes hanging from the creosoted ceiling beams. Isla stared around in disbelief. Somewhere deep within the clutter, a cat yowled, which was followed by a muffled crash. He hoped the cat compensated the owner handsomely in dead rats for whatever inevitable carnage it caused, roaming through so many piles of breakables.
“Avalanche!” someone yelled, and Fergus froze, fearing the worst, but none of the stacks around him subsided and collapsed on top of him. Instead, a skinny, long, pure white cat appeared as if from out of nowhere and brushed past his leg to go jump up onto a counter at the back of the store, behind which stood a man with a deeply tan, weathered face
and thin black beard, in a bright red tank top. The man reached over to pet the cat, the movement halting and unsteady, and Fergus could now see a line of blue lights on assistive tech modules half-buried in the skin of the man’s arm and neck.
The man was watching Fergus and Isla with bored curiosity, and Fergus’s gaze didn’t go unnoticed. “Behind on my software updates,” the man said, and laughed. “By about nine years. You shopping for anything in particular, or just browsing?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” Fergus said. “Uh, you don’t have any sort of, you know, cataloging system for your stuff? Or weird, broken pieces of something metal lying around?”
“Have you looked around? Might be some weird, broken stuff hiding under all the other weird, broken stuff.” The man gestured expansively around him and laughed again, but his expression had gone deadly serious.
Fergus sighed. “We got an odd message about librarians.”
The man picked up a blue-and-yellow enamel pot and slammed it hard on the counter. “Of course you did,” he said. “No one ever comes in here to buy my things, help me put cat food in the dish or food on my own plate, oh, no, it’s always you people. My late partner was the librarian, not me, and carrying all this on after him was not in our vows.”
“Um,” Fergus said. “I’m sorry, I wasn’t trying—”
The bells hanging on the door behind him clattered and rang again, and the man behind the counter stopped midway to banging the pot again.
“A curious!” the familiar, booming alien baritone declared. Fergus half-turned, and Ignatio was standing inside the doorway, holding up a lizard sculpture made out of rusted metal, a few hardy flecks of paint still clinging to it.
“So, how much for that, Mr. Santo?” Fergus asked.
“Just Santo is fine. You got Territory scrip?”
“Is Atlantic States okay?”
The Scavenger Door Page 11