Michael Flynn - On the Razor’s Edge

Then he is through the wall.

He pulls out the ceramic block and attaches a piton and line to the back side. He wriggles feetfirst through the space thus opened and hunts with his boots for a step or platform. Finding one, he drops the short distance to it and then pulls the block back into the space he had chipped it from.

Only then does he turn and using his black lamp and goggles view the space into which he has crawled.

Donovan gasped awake at his dining table. “The steam tunnels!” he cried.

A waiter appeared by his side. “Is something wrong, snor? ”

“No,” Donovan said. “No. Do you have food served on steam tables?”

“Oh, yes, snor. We have steamed perch and sturgeon.”

“I’ll have some of that.”

The waiter hurried off to do as bid, and Donovan rose and approached the rails along the lip of the gorge. The old steam tunnels, once used to heat the buildings in the center city. He remembered now. They had been abandoned in place centuries earlier, when microwave-beamed power had been rediscovered and ancient technologies had replaced technologies more ancient still. No one knew they were there—except the Pedant, who knew everything.

Thanks, Donovan. But I didn’t know I knew.

“The memories were suppressed.”

You can’t delete memories. You can only erase the markers that flag them. But memories are holographic and eventually can be recalled “sideways.”

Oh, wonderful, said the Sleuth. Another lecture on how Pedant’s mind works. Or in this case did not.

Don’t be harsh with him, said the young man in the chlamys.

Besides, added the young girl in the chiton, it was better for us that we did not remember earlier.

“We haven’t remembered enough, anyway,” the Fudir pointed out. “The idea is not how to get out, but how to get in. We need to remember where those tunnels exited.”

Somewhere along the river, obviously.

Sure, Sleuthy, but where? We can’t have our little expedition poking around up and down the riverfront. Might have some impact on the surprise factor.

I have a question. Who suppressed those memories?

The Names?

Not the Names. Had they known to do so, they would have already known the way out. And if the Names knew, Gidula would have known—and then what point the secret to inveigle.

Silky! said the Sleuth. You’re becoming logical. The answer is as logical as the question. We did it to ourselves!

“We…,” said Donovan. “Which ‘we’ would that be?”

His mind fell silent. There had once been a tenth Donovan, but he had gone insane and the others had combined to extinguish him. From time to time, he wondered which aspect of the espionage art that particular persona had been. Ruthlessness, perhaps. An agent needed ruthlessness to kill for expediency, or commit suicide when cornered. It had been the part of man that craved death.

The waiter pushed the steam table over and Donovan selected some choice slices, thanked the waiter, and watched him go. “That was you, Inner Child, wasn’t it? Calling for the steam table.”

«Someone may have heard us say “steam tunnels,” so I sowed doubts with a plausible locution.»

Do you really think someone might be listening?

Ahh, the Kid always thinks someone might be listening.

“I hate fish,” grumbled Donovan.

The Archives of Zãddigah were housed in a building called the Miwellion, dedicated by a minor descendant to a major ancestor who in his day had brought the entire Northern Mark under his sway. Built in a style known locally as Late Imperial and elsewhere not at all, it sported great fluted columns and floating roofs. The live attendant—an old monkey-faced fellow wearing something much like a bathrobe over a plain tunic—blinked astonishment when Donovan strode into the building and confronted him at the desk in the foyer.

The foyer was both narrow and tall, a cylinder, and featured a hemi-dome decorated with holomurals of the great men and women of ancient Terra. The three-dimensional quality of the mural made the dome seem to float in the farthest recesses of the sky. Embedded in the depths of the whirling figures, on the very bottom layer of the hologram, an elderly man with unruly white hair extended his finger to bring all of space and time into being. Evidently, the god Einstein. Across the dome from him, the dark god Maxwell hurled lightning bolts that roiled space and time into superluminal tubes. Overtop of these primeval acts floated more mundane heroes: slaughtering big game, building the first fire, pushing a crude canoe into the sea … There were mud-brick cities, marble temples and palaces, and steel laboratories, explorers setting foot on strange shores and on stranger worlds. The whole was in constant motion so that images deeper in the mural could be glimpsed through the parting clouds of later ones overlain atop them.

Donovan wondered why the lobby was not full of people, come for no other reason than to crane their necks at this wonder. But the attendant only shrugged when asked. “Guess everyone seen ’em already.” He continued to regard his visitor with tight, beady eyes.

“I’ve come here to do some research,” Donovan told him—and he could feel the warm glow of the Pedant rubbing his hands.

“Research,” the attendant said in a voice indicating the novelty of the concept. “You can look at most our holdings on the mong, y’know.”

Donovan resisted sarcasm. “I don’t wish to look at most of your holdings, but at the rest. I have already searched the jandak mong, and those searches led me here—to examine items not remotely available.”

There is no sigh more lingering and heartfelt than that of a man required to do his job. The wizened creature seemed to shrug within his robe. “And what subjects are those, snor? ” he asked. “Be aware. There are some that require Nominal permission to view, and these inquiries are noted, logged, and reported.”

Donovan already knew from the public mong that the interdict included pretty much everything dealing with Commonwealth times. “I am but a poor zhingo shun from Old Eighty-two. I search-again through old materials in hope of finding a new understanding.”

Eyebrows arched. “Meaning no disrespect, snor , but what could you possibly learn from them that hasn’t already been learned? The great ’uns of the past…” A vague gesture took in the dome above. “… have already said everything so perfectly there’s nothing more left for the likes of you.”

Maybe so,said the Pedant, but there are ofttimes benefits from saying the same thing in a different way, just as one may better appreciate the sight of the Go-Gates by viewing them from different angles.

The attendant remained unconvinced but escorted him to a room that bore sigils in the ancient Murkanglais proclaiming it a “research room.” This amused the Fudir no end, but he did not translate it into “search-again” for the skeptical attendant.

That worthy unlocked a drawer in the wall and handed him a pair of gloves, showed him the commands to copy or scribe selected images or documents, then, with an air of having exhausted himself, withdrew to resume his guardianship of the entrance.

The Pedant was in his milieu. He spent an hour scanning the indicia for anything that seemed relevant to his curiosity and discovered almost immediately that, while there were hundreds of files under the now-expired time lock of the Gran Publicamericana and seven still sequestered under the Audorithadesh Ympriales, there was nothing in the off-line Archive flagged with the Seal of the Great Names.