by Tom Holt
A taxi went by, its yellow light off but no passenger inside. Mr Gogerty frowned. The taxi slowed to a halt and reversed, annoying a great many road users in the process, until its passenger door was level with Mr Gogerty’s outstretched hand. By the time it got there, its FOR HIRE light was glowing.
“Where to?” the driver asked in a mildly bewildered voice.
Mr Gogerty gave him the address and the taxi moved off. For the first five minutes of the ride Mr Gogerty sat perfectly still and quiet. Then he took his phone out again, and used it to access the Net (the other Net, the one that was old when Merlin was resitting S-level geomancy). He called up the text of Schliemann and Chang, read it twice, then switched off.
Yes, he said to himself, but this case is different. I don’t think I’ll be able to do the job I’m being paid for unless I find out at least a few basic facts about Mr Huos’ interesting past, and if that means a bit of pure research along the way, then so be it. And if I don’t, I’ll have to call him up and say I’m sorry but I haven’t got a clue how to proceed – no clues, no leads; it could be anywhere. True, strictly speaking he ought to explain all that to the client before he went poking about in the obscurities of his backstory; but he knew Mr Huos pretty well by now. A busy man. Wouldn’t want to be bothered with details every five minutes.
Oddly enough, the traffic lights were green all the way, so it wasn’t long before Mr Gogerty reached his destination. As he barged through the revolving door and crossed the marble-tiled lobby to the security desk, he thought, One little paper can’t do anybody any harm. After all, only the trade’ll ever read it, and we’re broad-minded, God knows.
(Yes, he added, as the guard checked his security pass, but our corporate morality doesn’t really bear inspection and we tend to have about as many scruples as a bomb. Also, we’re quite fond of money, and blackmail can be a lucrative sideline.)
The fifth floor of the building (it has no number, but the postmen seem to be able to find it all right) houses the Paul Carpenter Memorial Library. Founded by his enemies to commemorate the centenary of one of the trade’s most eminent practitioners (founded before he was born, as it happened; that was a story that cropped up in exam questions nearly every year), the Carpenter Library’s collection encompassed every aspect of the profession, both applied and theoretical. It was Mr Gogerty’s spiritual home, the place he’d dreamed of seeing ever since he’d first heard of it, as a boy growing up in the backstreets of Port of Spain. Now he came here most days, used it as an office, a resource, a washroom and cafeteria, occasionally as a hotel room, but the thrill that went with pushing open the great bronze-faced cedar doors and walking into the main reading room was still as electric as ever. It was where Mr Gogerty sincerely hoped he’d go when he died, assuming he’d been very, very good.
He knew exactly where to look for what he needed. Most of the Carpenter’s books were still paper, usually with leather or vellum bindings (for insulation); attempts to store them on microfiche or digitally tended to result in an explosion and a shower of sparks visible from planetary orbit. Van Spee and Viswanath’s Manual of Transdimensional Displacement (the 1831 edition, with the addenda and the charming period illustrations) was still the standard work, and one of Mr Gogerty’s favourite reads. There was only one copy in existence, in this reality at least, and here he was taking it down from the shelf, blowing off the dust as though breathing into his lover’s ear, opening it at the index…
If you have enjoyed this book… No, gone too far. He turned back a few pages and ran his finger down the nearside column until he came to Tshkinvall (Georgia). He found the entry, which was short and to the point. Then he closed the book and laid it down carefully on the desk in front of him.
It was possible, then. The thought both elated and chilled him. Dragunov’s experiments in 1803 had achieved a really quite similar result, albeit in reverse. But there had to be a cause – rephrase that, shorn of teleological implications. There had to have been an originating event, whether deliberate or accidental. Figure that out. He shook his head. That’d be like trying to find the end of a circle. If you had the cause, sorry, the event, you could trace the consequences, as Dragunov had done. Piece of cake, A-level stuff, and in any case, outside of a classroom why would you ever want to? But the other way round…
He tried to find an appropriate visual image. All right, what about a bottle? A great big bottle with a narrow neck and mouth. Fine. Pouring water out of the bottle. Easy. Pouring the water back in again, blindfolded, particularly if you don’t happen to have a funnel…
Nice, but in the end unhelpful. Far more to it than that. Dragunov himself had tried it in 1804, and they flooded the resulting crater and used it for yacht races.
Frustrating. He leaned back in his chair, eyes closed, drawing on the library like a battery. What did that mean, in practical terms, as far as finding Mr Huos’ missing ring was concerned? Well, it meant he had no starting point, because he couldn’t ascertain where the ring had come from in the first place, and without that he could only make an educated guess as to what it actually did. No matter. If he couldn’t solve the puzzle by starting at the beginning, the next logical place to try was at the end; which, in this case –
(The really disturbing thing, of course, was that no matter what they do to it, the chemicals they pump in, the filtration systems they instal, the water of Dragunov’s lake resolutely stays white…)
– meant the site of a vanished dry cleaners in, where was it again, Clevedon Road, where, if he was lucky, he might be able to pick up traces of coherent sub-atomic resonances which might just possibly allow him to extrapolate where the dry cleaners was now.
Or he could look in the Yellow Pages.
The thought made him grin. Stranger things had happened, and Schliemann and Chang had speculated, in a footnote deleted from all printed copies of their work except the Dutch book club edition, about what happened to all the data that got wiped in transfer. Information, they’d argued, can’t simply disappear, just as matter can’t just cease to exist. Instead, it turns into something else or goes somewhere, just as burned wood becomes smoke and carbon. Admittedly, they went on to hypothesise that all the data lost when your hard drive crashes eventually drifts back, like volcanic ash, in the form of spam e-mails, and that was presumably the point at which their editors (with the exception of the Dutch) had lost patience and started scrabbling for the blue pencil. Maybe, though, there was a nugget of truth poking out of the drivel. At any rate, it couldn’t hurt to look. Besides, he admitted to himself, it’d be an excuse for a trip to the Stack.
Like most of the profession’s libraries, the Carpenter had solved its storage problems by expanding into the useful, though rather disreputable, dimension known to the trade as Van Spee Space (named after the megalomaniac genius who’d first encountered it). Neither parallel nor tangential, Van Spee Space bears roughly the same relation to the Einsteinian continuum as the personal injury lawyers who advertise on daytime TV bear to the mainstream legal profession. It’s there, lots of people use it and nothing can be done about it right now, not for want of trying, but it’s best not to harp on about it when talking to respectable scientists, for fear of causing offence. Properly engineered and installed, with all the appropriate safeguards in place, a Van Spee enclave allows a property owner to double, triple, quadruple his floor space regardless of location, with no disturbance or inconvenience to adjoining properties. The enclave can be accessed by a conventional door, and (since the existence of Van Spee Space isn’t recognised under British law) it’s not subject to council tax, planning law, building regulations, listed buildings approval or environmental legislation. You can have a thousand-acre country estate in your one-room flat, complete with skyscraper blocks, a rave venue, an artillery firing range and a nuclear power station, and nobody can stop you or charge you a penny. The downside, of course, is cost. There are only three registered Van Spee installers in the industrialised West, and their charges reflect
the complexity of the work, the difficulty and danger of handling the lethally unstable materials involved, the years of training and hands-on experience and, of course, their limitless greed. All in all, it’d be cheaper to buy a large island and pay the inhabitants handsomely to relocate. The trustees of the Carpenter were able to afford a Van Spee enclave because Zauberwerke AG generously provided the materials and labour at cost.
They used the space to store books, at least one copy of every book ever written for or about the profession. Note the word ever; in Van Spee space, the concept of flexitime takes root and blossoms like an orchid in a hothouse. Sections 9 to 999,999,999 are where they store the books that haven’t been written yet. It goes without saying that nobody’s allowed anywhere near them, at least until realtime catches up with them, but, as the trustees put it, it’s nice to know they’re there. The telephone directories are in Section 4, next to Gardening.
It can take several hours to get at the Yellow Pages in Section 4, depending on whether there’s a crane available. As it happened, Mr Gogerty had once done a substantial favour for one of the crane drivers, so the usual rules didn’t apply to him.
“Thanks, George,” he shouted, as the crane’s massive hydraulic arm gently lowered the book into its reinforced steel cradle, disconnected its bearing chains and slid back along the gleaming rails into its siding. “I can manage from here.”
Turning those thin, flimsy yellow pages calls for specialised equipment, since each leaf measures ten metres by six, and the book is almost as thick as it’s wide. Mr Gogerty clambered into the cab, settled himself in the seat, turned the power on and started manipulating levers. The letters of the alphabet were helpfully stencilled onto the gate of the main selector panel. He slid the lever up into D for dry cleaners, and waited as the huge machine purred smoothly into action.
“D selected” appeared on the LCD panel in front of him. “Input search criteria.”
He typed in “Clevedon Road, 1900–2009” and hit the red starter button. A motorised winch started to wind, ratchets clattered. The process always made him think of raising a drawbridge, with the added complication that the bridge was only 0.04 millimetres thick. He reached in his pocket, found his palmtop and occupied himself usefully for the next twenty minutes going over his recent invoices.
A bell sounded to tell him the search was complete. He looked up. A laser pointer was picking out a spot on the page raised sail-like in front of him. He climbed out of the cab and into the cherry-picker box mounted on a telescopic arm, which would lift him up close enough to read his selected entry. He closed the safety bar behind him and carefully guided the joystick. The box lifted off the ground and up into the air. Just as well he didn’t suffer from vertigo.
Two minutes to get there. He stopped the box and put the brake on, then leaned forward until his nose was almost touching the point on the page where the red laser spot glowed like a bullet wound. He took out his pocket magnifier and read,
“SpeediKleen Dry Cleaners, 77 Clevedon Road.”
And that was it: no postcode, no date and (significant omission in context) no phone number. Still, at least he had a name. SpeediKleen. He guided the box back to ground level, hopped back into the cab and engaged the cross-reference drive.
There were 1,825 entries for SpeediKleen in the dry cleaning section. He hit the copy button, which sent a camera drone buzzing away to photograph the relevant entries. “Time estimate, 6 hours.” He glanced at his watch and decided he’d go away and come back.
Progress. Well, maybe. “Cheers, George,” he called out. “I’ve left the keys in, OK?” A grunt by way of reply, which was more than he usually got; George must be in a good mood today. He left the annexe and walked slowly back along the corridor to the main library. As always, he was sure he felt a slight tremor as he crossed from Van Spee into realspace, though that wasn’t supposed to happen, then across the Great Hall, left then right and into the coffee shop.
“A latte, an apple Danish and a fast forward, please,” he said to the sad-looking man behind the counter, who murmured, “Coming right up,” and disappeared through the beaded curtain into the back room. He came back about two minutes later with the coffee and the Danish, and a small white plastic alarm clock.
“Six hours, please,” Mr Gogerty said.
The sad man nodded and turned a dial on the back of the clock, then put it on a tray with the rest of Mr Gogerty’s order. “Cash?” he asked. “Or on the tab?”
“The tab, thanks, Mike.”
“You’re welcome.”
Mr Gogerty found a table in the corner, put down the tray, looked round – nobody else in the coffee shop, good – and sat down. Fast forwards weren’t really his style – a waste, he couldn’t help thinking, and human life is so very short. But right now his impatience was getting the better of his will to live sequentially, and besides Mr Huos paid him by the hour. First, though, he drank the coffee and ate half the Danish. Only then did he tap the bright red button on the top of the clock, whose arms immediately started to move. Mr Gogerty checked his watch: 11:35 a.m.
Nobody really knows why they sell the fast forwards in the coffee shop. The likeliest theory is that it’s a quiet, peaceful place with a pleasant, low-stress atmosphere, where your body can slump motionless for six hours or so while your consciousness skips the tedium and suspense of waiting around. Further, or alternatively, it’s perfectly normal to see someone huddle for ages over one cup of coffee in a coffee shop. Cynics maintain that the chief librarian doesn’t like having fast forwarders in the reading room, because he reckons they make the place look untidy.
At 5:35 p.m., Mr Gogerty sat bolt upright, opened his eyes, blinked twice and reached for the other half of his Danish. Fast forwarding always left him hungry and with a sour taste in his mouth, like falling asleep on a train. He took his time making his way down to the Stack, where a fat Manila envelope was sitting waiting for him at the enquiries desk, with an invoice laid on top of it like a bride’s nightgown on her pillow. He paid by card – his Banco De Los Muertos Neutronium card, the highest credit limit in the multiverse, just about covered it – signed the invoice and retired to the Club Room.
He liked the Club Room, though not for the reason that made it so hugely popular – it’s the duly accredited Victorian embassy and, just as the French embassy is legally French territory, in the eyes of the law it’s firmly situated in 1897 (linked to the rest of the building by a Van Spee conduit), which makes it the only public lounge area in London where you can smoke. Mr Gogerty liked the deep leather armchairs and the oak panelling. He ordered a whisky and soda, paid for it with one of the genuine Victorian shillings he always kept by him for that express purpose, opened his envelope and hooked out a massive wad of printout.
He was less than a third of the way through when the bell rang, warning him that the club would be closing in five minutes. He scrabbled in his pocket, found his packet of Slow-Me-Downs and took enough for three hours. The last thing he needed was a break in his concentration.
The special merit of the Carpenter copy of the Yellow Pages is that it lists businesses whether they ask it to or not: every commercial enterprise conducted in the United Kingdom since 1880, listed with addresses, phone numbers where applicable, names of proprietors and dates. SpeediKleen, it seemed, had been pretty well everywhere over the past ten years, from Liskeard to Wick, but it had never stayed in the same place for more than forty-eight hours. It had to be the same business, because the proprietors were the same, George and Eileen Williams. Sure enough, they’d been in business at 77 Clevedon Road on the relevant date; after that, they’d gone to Derby. The most recent entry – today, in fact – was 108 Commercial Road, Bexhill.
He glanced at his watch, then took out his mobile. No reply. Closed for the night and, come morning, they could be anywhere. Still, the Yellow Pages would find them, and if he got here bright and early, he’d have a whole day to track them down. He allowed himself a gentle smirk as he crammed the
printouts back in the envelope, just as his last Slow-Me-Down wore off and he slid painlessly back into real time. Two minutes till the bar closed. He ordered another whisky and soda and knocked it back in one, then left the library, summoned a taxi and went home.
That night, the Paul Carpenter Memorial Library burned to the ground.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The daily commute is a joyful thing. In our secular society it’s taken the place of morning prayers: a time to meditate, reflect, get one’s head together, to consider the challenges and opportunities of the day ahead and decide how best to engage with them for the greater good of oneself and others.
Or something like that. In the bus scrum someone grazed his heel down the side of Polly’s ankle, laddering her tights and delaminating her skin – but he muttered, “Sorry,” so that was all right. The Tube escalator had broken down, so she got some healthy exercise. One handle of her shoulder bag gave way, spilling her possessions onto the pavement like a Medici flinging gold to the masses in the piazza. All good fun.
She was two minutes late at the office, something which, she felt sure, hadn’t escaped the notice of Reception, who didn’t like her very much. The phone was ringing when she reached her desk. She flopped into her chair, grabbed the receiver and snapped, “Yes?”
“Huos here. Can you spare me a minute?”
The boss. Wonderful. She made a sort of gabbling noise. Mr Huos thanked her and rang off before she had a chance to ask whether he was coming to visit her or whether she should make a pilgrimage to the Presence. She closed her eyes. At least, she thought, she didn’t have a hangover.
Three minutes later there was a knock at her door. She squeaked, and there was Mr Huos. She had no idea whether she was supposed to stand up, like at school, or stay sitting. She compromised by leaning forward, lifting her bum three inches off the seat and sitting down again.